Tag: Flies

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Road Trip, Part 3, Rapid City, South Dakota, to Smith Falls State Park, Nebraska (48) June 18-21, 2025.

There aren’t a lot of lodging choices near Valentine, Nebraska. Valentine, population 2,633, is tucked away from bigger cities. It’s north of the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge, east of the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest, and south of South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation. Mission, South Dakota, population 1,156, is 32 miles north. The closest town to the east is Springview, population 242. Omaha is 304 miles east.

So we camped at Smith Falls State Park on the Niobara River. From Rapid City to the park was 219 miles, the shortest leg of our road trip. We crossed through the south unit of Badlands National Park and the Pine Ridge Reservation, including a stop at the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre. With a median household income of $36,424 and 49% of the residents below the poverty line, the Pine Ridge Reservation is as poor as America gets, and when we entered the reservation a sign suggested counting how many places on the reservation people could get jobs. I counted one, a National Park satellite office. They didn’t appear to be hiring.

Badlands National Park

Wounded Knee is a solemn place.

Wounded Knee Cemetery

I don’t remember why I picked Smith Falls State Park, and it turned out to be an odd choice. There is good fishing in Nebraska. In the south, where I-80 cuts across Nebraska from Omaha to Cheyenne, there are construction fill-ponds that parallel the interstate corridor. They’re developed and maintained for recreation, and from all reports are a great opportunity for fly fishing for bass.

We didn’t go there.

There are also reels of charming videos of trout bums catching tiny trout out of tiny streams in Nebraska grasslands. I am not a trout bum, but if you live in a van and have a three- or four-weight rod, there’s probably quality Nebraska fishing in memorably isolated landscapes. You just need to take the time to explore those landscapes.

We didn’t go there, either.

We had a two week road trip to fish three states. We had two days in Nebraska. In Wyoming and South Dakota we’d fished with guides, and like as not we’d have caught fish if we’d spent most of the day standing on our heads humming Cole Porter tunes. In Nebraska, we had to figure it out ourselves, so there was limitless opportunity for failure. To find fish we had to rely on studying maps and the Google and then wait until we got there to figure out if we’d picked wrong. And of course we’d picked wrong.

Through Google, I found DIY Fly Fishing’s guide to fly fishing in Nebraska. First on DIY’s Nebraska list was the Niobara River.

Niobara River, Smith Falls State Park, Nebraska.

Smith Falls State Park is on the Niobara, so I guess I figured yeah, that’ll work. There’s a river! There are some falls! We can fish! After our trip, after we got back home, I realized that the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission advises that the stretch of the Niobrara River supported for trout fishing–in other words it’s stocked–is above Box Butte Reservoir from the Wyoming border. Smith Falls is a long way on the wrong side of Box Butte Reservoir. Smith Falls is a nice place, a pleasant, lovely place, but it was the wrong place.

When we checked into the campground I told the young woman staffing the desk that I needed to catch a fish. “You’re in the wrong place,” she said. She was very young and I assumed would be of no help, but this was a country girl who knew her country, and she whipped out a brochure for Keller State Recreational Area, roughly 50 miles east, and started pointing out places in Keller to fish.

I did try to fish the Niobara at Smith Falls. It was water, so I figured there must be fish, but the river was hard to parse: it moved fast and lacked obvious structure except for the banks themselves. It was a fantastic tubing river. Had we floated downriver in a canoe and pounded the water at the banks with woolly buggers we’d like as not have caught something–I don’t know what but something . . .

For randomly wading in and tossing flies though, it was pretty difficult. The banks were so overgrown that the only place I could get into the river was at the canoe launch. I had a three weight trout spey rod, so I tied on a wet fly under a Pat’s rubber legs and made some random casts.

Spey rods were historically fished on Scottish salmon rivers, and are three or four feet longer than normal fly rods, which are already about nine feet. Depending on how well you cast them spey rods are either awkwardly long or elegantly long. With my casts they tend toward the awkward.

The extra length gives spey rods a big advantage: you can roll cast forward without a back cast, so your fly shouldn’t tangle in the brush behind you. I promptly started tangling in the brush behind me. Now if I had had a guide, the guide would have told me, Neil, you idiot, you’re laying the rod out horizontally behind you so the fly goes into the brush, but I had no guide. Three nights later it hit me: Neil, you idiot, you were laying your rod out horizontally behind you so the fly went into the brush.

Three nights later. I’m quick that way.

Guides are worth the money. If we’d had a guide, we wouldn’t have been at Smith Falls State Park. I got frustrated trying to fish the Niobara and went back to the campsite to play the guitar.

The next morning we drove to Keller State Recreational Area. At Keller there are five ponds, imaginatively named Ponds 1-5. The brochure said that Ponds 1-4 are warm water ponds with bass and sunfish, my kind of place, while Ponds 4 and 5 are seasonally stocked with trout. Bone Creek also cuts through the park, and is also stocked with trout.

Bone Creek, Keller State Park

Kris said she would birdwatch and didn’t fish. Each of the ponds was about the size of a city block, and a grandfather and grandkid fishing bait at Pond 3 told me that they had caught a bass, but the pond was weedless and oddly sterile. Nothing moved. Just looking at the pond I didn’t think that there was anything in it that was living. I worked my way down the east bank, stopping every few feet to throw out some casts, but nothing followed my fly. The one sunfish I hooked flipped off before I could land it.

At Pond 5, I dug out a random trout fly to cast while I watched the surface. There were tiny–very tiny–fish slaps out in the middle of the pond, and I watched a pod of 10-inch rainbows, maybe eight, drift through the shallows between the bank and a concrete water intake. I think they were desperate to find the exit. For me stocked trout ponds are unhappy places. The fish can’t reproduce and can’t survive past the first harsh weather, whether heat or cold. My heart wasn’t in it.

Pond 4 though was glorious, mucky, weedy, it looked like home. I tied on a small streamer and immediately started catching small bass on a line of weeds about 20 feet from the bank. Glorious scum! Glorious weeds! This was fishing I understood.

They were tiny bass, perhaps stocked but I thought more likely this year’s crop from the spring spawn. I was catching similar small bass at home near Houston, with maybe a month’s more growth. These fish were thrilling, not least because they were my Nebraska fish, but also because I thought that if I kept at it, casting along the same line down the length of the pond, maybe switching to a popper, I’d catch something respectable. Maybe I’d catch something as big as a pound. Then Kris called. She couldn’t find her car fob and couldn’t lock the car. It was hot. She and Roo the dog were bored. Come now.

I had my Nebraska fish. Kris and Roo were bored. That was all the fish we needed in Nebraska.

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Road Trip Part Two, Wyoming to South Dakota, June 15-18, 2025 (47)

It’s 346 miles from Thermopolis, Wyoming, to Rapid City, South Dakota, with detours for the Crazy Horse Monument and Mount Rushmore, and also for cheese enchiladas in Gillette, Wyoming.

The cheese enchiladas were at Los Compadres Mexican Restaurant, and they were perfectly decent Tex-Mex, that glorious bastardization of borderland Texas and Mexico that is a Texan’s comfort and joy and Diana Kennedy’s horror.1 It’s a commonplace that you should never trust Tex-Mex north of Dallas, which is actually too far north for my taste, but I liked the Los Compadres enchiladas, even as far north as Wyoming, and there was a patio where Roo could stand guard while we ate. I even got to practice my Spanish, at least as far as buen día.2

In South Dakota we fished two days in the Black Hills on Rapid Creek. We fished with David Gamet of Dakota Angler in Rapid City. David was great to fish with, younger than us, but not young enough that we felt like we were being bossed around by our children. He had grown up in the Black Hills, and there was no doubt about his bona fides.

There were rainbow trout and brown trout, but unlike in Wyoming, the browns and rainbows didn’t displace native cutthroat. One of the peculiarities of the Black Hills is their geographic isolation, with the prairies of South Dakota to the right and the prairies of Wyoming to the left, and without connecting trout rivers for trout to migrate. Illegal European immigrants3 had to bring in the trout, and before that there were none.

There are now trout in New Zealand and South Africa, India, Tasmania, and Australia, none of which held trout until the English came with their craze for trout fishing. All of those trout were invasive species brought along as part of the English diaspora–I’m thinking that anyone of English heritage (or Scots or Irish) shouldn’t complain too loudly about immigration. Just follow the trout. And the pheasants. And you can add South Dakota to the list of places where neither trout nor pheasants were but now are.

Having myself inherited the English craze for fly fishing, the Black Hills are a delightful place to fish for trout. The water is too small for drift boats, so you have to work a bit, but for small water the trout seemed uniformly decent-sized–not as big as Wyoming, but close enough, and in memory growing ever larger. Rapid Creek is shallow riffles punctuated by deep holes, and the challenge is to find water deep enough to hold fish, and then cast from a place where the trout can’t see you.

But you need to see the trout. We would sneak up on the deeper, greener water, peer into the pool while David said there, there, look there . . . And then if I was lucky I would see a fish, and then another, and then another, no more than a darker space in the deeper water, holding in place while I watched until it would gently drift a few inches to one side or the other to feed.

Looking at the photos, I’m surprised again at how shallow the water was. In the deepest pools it might have been waste deep. It made the discovery of such good fish so startling. Honestly though, even without the excuse of a fly rod, it was fun just to walk into the water. There is something so childlike about it, like petting a dog, riding a bicycle, watching a cloud . . . In the movie, A River Runs Through It, in the last scene, the old man is on the river threading a fly onto the leader, and you know exactly what he is thinking–this is me, after all that history, I am still the child whose father believed in the Presbyterian God and fly fishing, and it’s not memory, at least not merely memory. While standing in the water that old man knows that at least somewhere inside he is still that child.

Because David knew the water so well fishing with him felt like cheating–he knew where the holes were already, and would lead us from place to place, often circling around the stream to approach as stealthily as possible. It’s another commonplace that if you can see the trout they can see you, too, and that seeing you will put them down. David picked our flies, of course–what do we know of trout flies?–but it was basically the same trico nymph formulation that we had used in Wyoming. Like Wyoming, we were told the bigger surface hatches of larger mayflies happened in May, not June, and that May was when we could expect to successfully fish dry flies. Now mind, I’m still not convinced that hatches exist, and that they’re not a ruse to dupe gullible Texans, but I would love to fish dry flies with David during a Black Hills mayfly hatch. I might even catch a fish.

We fished a full day the first day and a half day the second. The second day we considered fishing Spearfish Creek in Spearfish Canyon, but stuck to a different part of Rapid Creek because it was a long drive to Spearfish. We were fishing through the morning into the heart of the day both days, but on our full day we quit early because of the water temperature. It’s hard to catch fish once the water approaches 70°, and the lower oxygenation of warm water makes it hard for the trout to survive if they’re caught. This was June, and I had planned the trip for when I thought the water would still be cold. Maybe we’re just more conscious of water temperatures than we used to be, or maybe water keeps getting warmer earlier and earlier.

One of our favorite discoveries was the Driftless Region, the geological anomaly where Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin come together, and where for some reason the glaciers failed to flatten the landscape. The Driftless is on roughly the same longitude as the Black Hills, and a few hundred miles east. It’s surrounded by farmland, not mountains. Like the Black Hills, the trout streams are small, and both places involve walking and wading, not boats. The fish that we caught in the Driftless were smaller.

But both places, the Driftless and the Black Hills, have pretty, manageable water. They are similar sized regions open for exploration, and both have trout. I am not much of a trout fisherman, but trout are such great fish for a fly rod. While we fished in South Dakota, I kept comparing the Driftless and the Black Hills, and I finally decided that I liked fishing in South Dakota and the Driftless as much as any of the places I’ve fished.

I will say that while the scenery probably has the edge in the Black Hills, the cheese is better in Wisconsin.

  1. Diana Kennedy (1923-2022) was the leading authority writing in English on interior Mexican food, and wrote nine cookbooks which are as much anthropology as cookery. She famously despised Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex as foreign goop, but later writers properly consider them authentic borderland cuisines of greater Mexico. After his success with the Gulf of Mexico, President Trump will presumably redesignate Tex-Mex as Tex-American, and Ms. Kennedy will smile from heaven. ↩︎
  2. Writing this, I finally looked up the difference between buen día (which is singular, but that’s not the difference), and buenos días (which is plural, but that’s not the difference). “Buen día” is more formal and means “good day.” It can be used any time during the morning, afternoon, or evening. “Buenos días” literally means “good days,” but is used as “good morning.” It’s more common than buen día, but is only used in the morning. Buenos días for the morning, buenas tardes for the afternoon, and buenas noches for the evening and night. Buen día is for any occassion when the sun shines. ↩︎
  3. See the description of South Dakota. The US violated its 1868 treaty with the Sioux in 1874 by sending Custer to explore the Black Hills. After reports of gold leaked from the Custer expedition, the Black Hills were illegally flooded by prospectors with gold fever. The US then wrongfully took possession of the area in violation of its earlier treaty. See United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980). ↩︎

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Road Trip! Texas to Wyoming, June 9-15, 2025 (46).

We drove 3,783 miles through eight states. We spent $833 on gas. We fished in three states, and we caught fish in all three–well I did, anyway, Kris didn’t fish in Nebraska. We took our dog for protection.1

I love road trips. I let myself eat junk food on road trips.

We’ve taken lots of road trips. To fish we drove to all the states that surround Texas, to most of the next states over, and to all of the next states over from there except Arizona. We drove to North Carolina during Covid, and we drove to the Driftless Region at the junction of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We’ve seen a lifetime supply of corn, grass, pine trees, and gas stations. We did not drive to Alaska, which still seems an opportunity lost.

Our first food stop after leaving Houston was for burgers and onion rings at Bevos Drive-In, Vernon, Texas, 437 miles.2 You can usually find a good burger in most American towns. It may shorten your life, it may add to the methane load in the atmosphere, it may be inhumane, but it’s going to taste pretty great.

In Amarillo that evening (611 miles), we ate steak at the Big Texan Steak Ranch. Big Texan is that gaudy theme restaurant in Amarillo where, if you manage to eat the 72-ounce steak in an hour, then your meal is free.3 Big Texan is Route 66 incarnate. I ate there first 50-odd years ago, and once when our children were small, but I’ve never taken the 72-ounce challenge. It’s not the risk of failure but the certainty of after-dinner discomfort that’s daunting.

Our first fishing stop, Thermopolis, Wyoming, 1,439 miles, was a three days’ drive from Houston. I suppose we could have made Houston to Thermopolis in two days, but it would have been exhausting, and we wanted to see baseball in Denver. The Rockies have the worst record in the major leagues, and they didn’t disappoint. They led until the 9th inning when the Giants scored four runs.

Traffic in Denver was memorably frightening. Denver may be worse than Houston for traffic, though it’s probably a shade better than Naples or Mexico City. Coors Field, on the other hand, is a great place to watch baseball, even losing baseball, and this season it’s easy to get tickets.

The landscape from Denver to Thermopolis is about as full of empty as any place I’ve seen. I have in my head a notion of where trout are supposed to live, and it involves tumbling clear water, big hunks of granite, and plenty of trees. The water we fished in Wyoming was clear but not very tumbling. The rocks were mostly crumbly ancient sea sediment, not granite. For shade on the river there were no trees. We ate lunch under bridges.

We had rented an AirBnB outside of Thermopolis, a mile or so from the central business district. We arrived during a thunderstorm, and I was reasonably certain that the storm would blow us, the cabin, and the car on to Montana. It didn’t, and by the time we unloaded the car the storm had blown through. In the late day heat for the next two days there were also storms, big thunder, big wind, big rain, but it was for reasonably short durations. The rough weather never stuck around for long.

We fished with Wind River Canyon Whitewater and Fly Fishing on the Bighorn River, downstream after the Wind River passes through Wind River Canyon and becomes the Bighorn. We fished three days, and caught a lot of rainbow trout. We also caught a lot of brown trout. Neither the browns nor the rainbows are native, but they’ve driven out the native cutthroat. The browns and rainbows were still great fish.

The Bighorn is a moderate-sized river, not Missouri River-big, but too big to fish easily wading, and anyway Wyoming public access law is on the extreme side of landowner friendly. In Wyoming the adjoining landowner owns all rights to the river bed to midstream, so while you can float on the navigable water, you’re trespassing if you stand on the private riverbed. A drift boat is not only handy, but unless the river flows through public land, you can only fish from a boat. You can’t get out of your boat to pee without landowner permission.

There’s plenty of traffic on the Bighorn–the first day we launched with a kayaking church group, singing Shall We Gather at the River as they floated away.4 All day there was a procession of other kayakers, tubers, and other anglers in drift boats. The second day we launched below Thermopolis at Hot Springs State Park, and the river was considerably less crowded. The fishing was better, too, though apparently it’s usually better above Thermopolis.

I was pretty certain that we had arranged to fish the Wind River in the canyon when we booked the guides, but apparently I misunderstood, or the outfitter misunderstood what I was trying to say, and fishing Wind River Canyon wasn’t happening. The Wind River through the canyon is part of the Shoshone and Arapaho Wind River Reservation, and the outfitter is only permitted to fish two boats in the canyon a day. That was two boats other than our boat.

The canyon is famous for its fish, but so is the Bighorn below the canyon. There were plenty of healthy, 16- to 20-inch fish, and maybe even a few bigger–Kris says that these were the largest trout she’s caught. We fished with three different guides over the three days. I usually think it’s better to fish with the same guide, but the guides were good and it probably didn’t matter. We caught fish.

We mostly fished with tiny underwater trico nymphs5 under some sort of attractor fly and an indicator, but on the first day our guide found a single rising fish and switched me to a dry fly, a bit of white fluff that floated on the surface. I made the cast and the drift, and there is nothing like watching a good fish take a dry fly on the surface of a river. The current adds to the drama, the fish comes out of the water, and then everything is working towards failure until the fish is finally landed. Or lost. Or never hooked in the first place.

The second day we found a deep hole where rainbows were stacked and feeding. Kris was busy taking bird photos, so I didn’t have to trade off after each fish caught, and I pulled one good fish after another out of the river. I’m still surprised I didn’t find an excuse for us to stay there the rest of the day.

The third day I got tangled, and then I got tangled again, and then I got tangled some more. When I did manage to cast I had a few strikes, but would promptly lose each fish that struck. Finally, late in the day I caught an unremarkable rainbow. I was so grateful to catch that fish.

Even as great as the fishing was, I don’t think that I had managed my expectations for Wyoming. We had purposefully left Wyoming and Montana until the end–unlike say, New Jersey, which we’ve left to the end for no good reason. Unlike Montana, I had never fished in Wyoming before. Wyoming is famously good fishing, and it was good fishing. The Bighorn is a famously good river, and it was a mighty fine river. That said, it never felt like enough.

So we’ll go back to Wyoming. Not, I think, to Thermopolis, great as the fishing was. And maybe we’ll fish some without guides if Congress hasn’t sold all of our public land. I’d like to see the other side of the Wind River Range, and further south towards the Green before it flows into Utah. I’d like to go further north towards Yellowstone. In fact, when we fish Montana in September, we’ll spend a couple of nights in Wyoming, in Yellowstone at Old Faithful Inn. We’ll fish in Yellowstone for native cutthroat, and it still won’t be enough of Wyoming. There is so much of Wyoming to see, and with the Bighorn it feels like we barely got started.

Western Meadowlark

You know what I liked best though about fishing in Wyoming? It wasn’t the fishing, it was waking to the morning bird chorus, and listening to the songs of the Western Meadowlarks. I’ve never heard anything more beautiful.

I guess I’m finally old enough just to listen. Of course I’m also old enough to spend a day getting tangled, but I’ve been that for a long time.

  1. Roo is a mostly chihuahua rescue who as a puppy seven years ago showed up collarless and chipless on our daughter’s front porch. Kris took her to the vet, nursed her through heartworms, and she’s been with us since. She is an excellent travel companion, and is reasonably well socialized for a mostly chihuahua. She did bark at the lady in the Kansas toll booth. ↩︎
  2. I lived in Vernon, Texas, for my first 17 years, and Bevo’s was owned by my cousin James. They have the world’s best cheeseburger. Bevo is the name of the mascot at the University of Texas, but my cousin James didn’t go to the University of Texas, or as far as I know to any university at all, so I’m not sure why he picked the UT theme. Still, hook ’em. ↩︎
  3. There is a livestream of the Big Texan 72-ounce steak challenge. It’s oddly mesmerizing to watch. If you do the challenge, remember that in addition to the steak you have to eat the baked potato, shrimp cocktail, salad, and bread. ↩︎
  4. Not really, but they should have. ↩︎
  5. Tricos are a tiny mayfly, Tricorythodes. Trico nymphs are the nymph phase of the trico mayfly’s life cycle. Trico hatches are common in summer, and bigger mayflies apparently hatch earlier: May is a great time for bigger mayflies. Since we were in Wyoming in June, this was a variant of the common guide explanation that we should have been here last week. ↩︎

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Rainbows! Brookies! Pickerel! Pickerel? The Wild Swift River, Massachusetts, April 10-11, 2025 (45)

The lower Swift River is a tailwater, so it has some advantages over wild rivers. The upper forks were dammed in the 1930s for Quabbin Reservoir, and the part of the Swift that we fished flows out of the dam below the lake. Flows are reasonably constant and uniformly cold, which encourages lots of healthy trout. Whether it’s the middle of winter or the middle of August, the water temperatures near the dam on the Swift are likely to be somewhere below 60° and above 30°,1 and the flow will be moderate. If you combine that cold water and steady flow with lots of bugs, it’s trout heaven.

Below Quabbin Reservoir the Swift is only 24 miles long.2 It runs down from Winsor Dam to join the Chicopee River, which then joins the Connecticut,3 which then flows to the Atlantic. Quabbin Reservoir provides drinking water supply, not electricity generation, so water releases don’t increase when Boston turns on its lights.

At least theoretically, free-flowing rivers are wilder, more natural, more authentic, but some of my best days fishing were on tailwaters, and when I’m trying to land a fish it’s hard to focus on the difference. In the South and the Southwest, most well-known trout rivers are tailwaters. South of the Mason-Dixon, only tailwaters are usually cold enough for trout. The Green in Utah is a tailwater. The White in Arkansas, the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry,4 the San Juan in New Mexico, and the Holston in Tennessee are all tailwaters. We’ve also fished for trout in tailwaters in Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Constant cold water, with lots of bugs, that’s the ticket. In all of those places there may be great fishing on free-flowing rivers, but it’s likely not for trout.

Currently there’s a backlash against dams. It’s impossible to build a major new dam, and there’s been a rash of much-heralded dam removals in recent years. Dams can cost more to maintain than the value of any electricity produced, they reduce access to historic spawning grounds for Pacific and Atlantic salmon and other less glamorous fish, and water evaporates and impoundments silt up so that reservoirs fail at their task of water storage. Neglected dams are also dangerous for folks down-river.

Non-native fish pose similar emotional qualms as tailwaters, whether the fish were last stocked one week or 100 years ago. In the Swift, there are brook trout, rainbow trout, and brown trout, but only the brook trout are native to New England. One of the reasons for the Swift’s popularity in Massachusetts–and it’s the most popular freshwater fly-fishing water in Massachusetts–is that it produces large native brook trout, and large brook trout are no longer easy to come by in their native range. Most places the brookies have been pushed out by non-native rainbows and browns. The rainbows are descendants of California stocks, the browns were brought over from Europe, and in the Swift both naturally reproduce and are still being stocked.

For me there is a resonance to catching a native brookie in Massachusetts that’s not there with an introduced rainbow, or a native cutthroat in New Mexico versus an introduced rainbow or brown. One supposes that catching a brown in Scotland feels more authentic than catching an Arkansas brown, and if anybody would like to fly me to Scotland I’d like to find out. Are there native browns in Greenland, or only arctic char? Is that why we want to annex Greenland, so that we’ll have someplace American to catch native browns?

I was thinking about this stuff on the Swift because for most knowledgeable fly fishers native fish in free-flowing rivers in wild places is the ideal. Getting ready for Massachusetts, I re-read Walden, in part because it’s an essential Massachusetts book and in part because I was looking for hints as to why the notion of wildness matters.5 The apparent threats to public land by the current Washington administration also had me thinking about wild places, and, weirdly enough, I was contemplating my own human frailty. I likely won’t be able to traipse off into wild places much longer, so to me their value increases as my opportunities decrease.

There are about 111.7 million acres of designated wilderness on American public land. That’s roughly the size of California, and more than half of our wilderness is in Alaska. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as land where the earth is “untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor . . .” Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society and the namesake of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, defined wilderness as a region “which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means[,] and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.”6

But rivers and saltwater and lakes are a little different than big tracts of wilderness. There are few big rivers that you can’t travel with a jetboat, and a lot of perfectly fishable rivers flow down by the golf course and then under the bridge. They are fishable when suburban and even urban. In rivers, though, you can capture a bit of wildness in the most mundane places. Fishing has taken me to plenty of truly wild places. I have flown into high mountain rivers, boated miles up rivers where there was no other mechanical access, ridden horses to mountain lakes in Argentina, fished in national parks in Cuba and the Everglades, and all of it with the weak and wholly unnecessary excuse that I wanted to catch fish. I have also now parked at an industrial park to walk down the improved running path to look for trout in the Swift River in Massachusetts, and I’ve done similar walks in thousands of other places. Was one experience better than the other? Was one more pure?

Well yeah, probably, but the water on the Swift is clear and clean. The approaches take a bit of effort, at least for an old man. The fish are beautiful, strong, and fat. When I’m playing a fish, I don’t really consider that I’m fishing behind a dam and not hundreds of miles from the nearest pavement.

Marshall wrote that we receive physical and psychological benefits from visiting wilderness: physical health from wilderness travel, mental independence from the challenge, satisfaction of an innate craving for adventure, and an opportunity for contemplation and repose not present in the daily business of busy lives.

We also receive intangible esthetic benefits. There is, he says, “the undisputed beauty of the primeval.” This is a constant theme of American writing, whether it’s about the magnificence of a great white whale or the quietly contemplative beauty of finning trout beneath a bridge. Emerson, a Massachusetts guy, suggests that it is in nature that we can strip away the distractions of our mundane world to fully engage with beauty.7

That other Concord, Massachusettian,8 Henry David Thoreau, does his mentor and friend Emerson proud. At different times I’ve thought that Walden was a mechanic’s discussion of housing costs, a gardener’s discussion on how to grow beans, or a surveyor’s discussion of the depth of a pond, but in his sidling way Thoreau suggests something more subtle, that only if we from time to time reduce to essentials can we we truly engage with what’s important.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Thoreau published Walden in Massachusetts in 1854, and that Charles F. Orvis opened his store in Vermont in 1856. One didn’t lead to the other, as far as I know Charles F. didn’t sell copies of Walden next to the dog beds, but they were, I think, a part of the same impulse. 1850s America was one of our most fractious times, loaded with national disputes verging on violence, not unlike today. Parts of the Northeast and New England were changing fast, from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, and both Walden and Orvis evidence a yearning for the natural world that was being lost. Bob Marshall (or John Muir, or Aldo Leopold, or Wendell Berry, or Gary Snyder) was still addressing that yearning for Eden well into the next century. The rest of us are still buying fly rods.

We fished two days on the Swift. It was a quick trip, one day flying to Hartford, Connecticut, then driving 50 miles to Palmer, Massachusetts, two days fishing, and then one day home. We fished with Matt Tempesta of Tempco Flyfishing, an Orvis-endorsed guide, and it was a joy. Matt is former career infantry, and he has that easy, confident, genial bearing that the best of ex-military have. He’s still a very young man, at least as I measure these things. He loves the Swift, and he seemed proud and delighted to show it to us.

The first day we waded and walked, and from the bank Matt would study water looking for fish. In a lot of the upper river the fish were apparently hanging out in places where we weren’t. Much of our first day we walked the upper mile of the river, isolated from development by a wildlife management area, looking for fish more than fishing. It’s a fine way to fish, and a better way to get introduced to water, though I will note that they have ups and downs in Massachusetts that we don’t have on the Southeast Texas Coastal Plain. There were times during the day when it seemed to me that notwithstanding Bob Marshall, some mechanical uphill conveyance would be the very thing.

Kris outfished me again, and on the first day she caught a couple of rainbows at the Y–the famous Y–immediately below the dam.9 I caught nothing. For one reason or another I hadn’t cast a fly rod in months, and my cast, which is usually pretty good, was trash. Matt kept complimenting Kris’s cast and making suggestions for mine. I hate fly rods.

That night it snowed. It was April and it snowed. At home in Houston my tomatoes were well-along to producing fruit.

We fished the next day out of Matt’s raft in the lower river. I fished either a single nymph under an indicator or small streamers, but I never caught anything on a streamer. One of the remarkable things about the Swift is that over its short distance it continually changes, so that the narrow sections near the dam broaden and allow drift fishing. In some sense the Swift is several different rivers held together by the same water. I had better luck fishing from the boat, and on the second day caught a fine native brookie and a rainbow. Kris got the prize though, catching an unexpected pickerel. I had never seen one, and notwithstanding what Mr. Thoreau said,10 it’s an ugly fish, primeval and vicious, the smaller cousin of pike and muskie, a predator.

Matt had brought us a beer to end the day, and we stood by the launch and drank a bit. As I recall the scene, Matt was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, working on his tan. Kris and I were huddled together shivering. After a day in the wind on Massachusetts’ water, we were way out of our comfort zone. It would snow even more that night, and us poor Houstonians weren’t up for more cold. We left the last of the beer in the can, piled into the car, and turned on the heat. Then we turned up the heat. That was plenty enough wilderness for one day.

  1. The water is cold because it’s released from deep in the lake. The water temperature isn’t affected by air temperature. ↩︎
  2. Or 7. Or 31. Or 25. I’ve never found a consistent number for the length of the Swift below the dam. Somebody surely knows it, but I don’t. It’s short. The first mile below the dam is fly-fishing only. Or maybe it’s the first two miles. ↩︎
  3. 460 miles. For comparison, the Mississippi is 2,340 miles. The longest river that flows through Texas, the Rio Grande, is 1,896 miles. ↩︎
  4. The Glen Canyon Dam at Lee’s Ferry is the largest dam to ever be proposed for removal. It’s a stupid dam that loses about 6% of the Colorado River’s water to evaporation, and has always been controversial. It is great for recreation, and below the dam there’s a fine tailwater fishery. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang revolves around a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. It’s not going to get taken out any time soon, either through official channels or by The Monkey Wrench Gang, so you’ve still got plenty of time to go fish there. ↩︎
  5. (1854) I feel like I need to say that Walden is by Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago in an adult Spanish class I made a joke about Walden and the Louisianan sitting next to me didn’t know what it was. They do things different in Louisiana, and he clearly had never had Pat Miller for American Literature. He was a very handsome young man, and he was learning Spanish for his trips to bars in Mexico, but I thought he should also spend some time reading Walden. For some reason he was very proud that he’d never read Romeo and Juliet, and never would. ↩︎
  6. Bob Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness”, Scientific Monthly 30 (2), February 1930. ↩︎
  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836). I have read some Emerson, but find him archaic and almost unreadable. He always baffles me, so I may be making this up. ↩︎
  8. Massachusetter? Massachusatonian? ↩︎
  9. Fish stack up at the Y, but so do anglers. We fished there about an hour. We were there early on a Thursday work-day morning, and two people arrived while we fished and two more were arriving when we were leaving. The usual notions of fishing etiquette don’t work at the Y, and the anglers closely line the prime water without the usual regard for distance. That’s ok. I didn’t hook anybody. ↩︎
  10. Thoreau loved to fish, and he loved pickerel. I quoted Thoreau on pickerel before, but it bears repeating:
    “Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.” Walden, The Pond in Winter. I still reckon that they’re kinda ugly, but then I’ve never caught one. ↩︎