BY RALPH BARTHOLDT
I met them occasionally, winter evenings on the narrow mountain road, dragging a tamarack hooked to an old 4-wheel drive flatbed.
The sky was pink taffy hidden behind a black wall of fir.
It was cold outside, their driver-side window was always down and they would wave an arm covered with tattered flannel and black woolen underwear.
The huff of cigarette sparked and the smoke trailed for a quarter mile.
The drag mark of the twirling log reminded me of Makah pulling home a whale, but this was poaching plain and simple.
The motivation, of course, was that they were out of firewood and the winter showed no sign of easing.
I burned seven chord. Usually it’s three with the help of the oil heater, but the price of precious fuels rivaled that of topaz earrings, so I stuck with wood and burned every stick in my shed, even the cache going back 5 years.
I found an Orvis fly rod back there in a musty steel tube.
I hadn’t seen it, I guess, since the day I stacked the wood after mixing fishing and firewood gathering one fall day, perhaps, in 2003.
But there it was. Fine-tuned.
I’d thought of it occasionally, but too much reflection on one’s foibles leave a melancholy dressing on days that should be spent laughing, or learning, at least, so I left it at that.
When I dusted off the case, I unscrewed the holder and took a whiff:
Fine graphite. Wrapped in cloth, the number 5, 8-footer was bought at a yard sale in Missoula two decades ago for $15.
Gary LaFountaine was still writing and experimenting then, and so, I guess, was I.
It was a vintage rod to me and it meant a lot finding it.
Very nice.
None of this made the house any warmer.
The travels west didn’t either, but so what.
Long winters are, really, a welcome getaway from the blasé status quo of what we had experienced for a decade or more.
It gave the chance for old timers to spit snoose or grumble in their coffee cup and say, that Chrissakes, this is a normal winter, even though, as one confided, it really was more than that.
To ward off the dearth of firewood, or heat, or sanity, we went west.
We traveled to places that people who knew better advised we should perhaps wait a month to fish.
Rance at the High Desert Angler said they aren’t hanging in the north end of Lenore like they usually do, so don’t make the trip.
We did anyhow.
The guy at Roope's said the water in Crab is milk of magnesia but we tried tossing nymphs there with a listless reverie.
Rocky Ford is slow, slow, we were told.
No matter.
Under a sky that looked like a Flag Day poster with temperatures near freezing we skulked and snuck and vainly pulled white leeches and small green scuds through the murk where the trout anchored themselves to the bottom like holed-up U Boats.
In the evenings we soaked.
The man at the Soap Lake hostel didn’t know that we would run his precious pond water for 12 hours, draining it and again filling the bathtub like gypsies at the Regence.
We left muck from our wading shoes in his hallway.
We scratched his paint with our fly rod tips, left barbless hooks in his carpet and old leaders vined in his furniture like hops.
The two guys at the launch at Lenore told us how last year the Lahontans ringed their legs like aquatic cats in heat as they waded 3-foot shallows.
This year, however, there was just a lot of wind, they said, and they hadn’t caught a thing.
We walked from the highway to fish a peninsula we thought would shield our back casts from the gusts, and after five hours we each hooked one Lahontan this big.
Seriously.
This big.
She lost hers first.
Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! She said.
I played mine as if he was a big piece of driftwood while she waded to the beach, got the camera and waded back out to me.
"Why don’t you shoot with the sun at your back?" I said.
She moved slowly back out of the water and spooked my 27-inch beefeater. He rolled and then hung in the smelly brine like the Zeppelin as I watched and gulped, "No!"
And then, having successfully spit my hook, he swam away.
On shore in a backpack was a half bottle of Jacuzzi wine we had brought to toast the day’s catch. Kneeling in shrub that overlooked the alkaline lake, I drank to that fish and the other one, as the wind howled and the sun lay flat as a discarded car hood on the hillside, and we went back to the hotel to soak in the healing Soap Lake bath water we had paid extra for.
Then we returned to Idaho and the snow stacked to the windows, the heat bills and fear of exhausted firewood reserves.
She said we should try Montana.
She meant the rivers, for trout.
She was right, of course.
My pal in Butte lauds the nearby water with stories of brown trout rising to dry flies in February.
We will do that, soon.
This week I planted several fruit trees including a Carpathian walnut.Which reminded me of a story of trout caught with insects long ago somewhere in Eastern Europe.
I planted the tree thinking of it.
And of the snow in the surrounding mountains.
It hailed as I tamped the soil around the walnut tree with a muddy boot.
Carpathian, I thought, how exotic is that?
I breathed in the tale of casting to trout in some far-off stream in Slovakia and pulled my woolen hat over my ears and planned a trip east this time.
Closer east.
As in Rockies.
What the heck, I’m out of wood anyhow, but I have my old fly rod back.
And that counts for something.
Ralph Bartholdt (Skookum Features) is the editor of the St. Maries Gazette Record
