Tag: Gear

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Oregon Packing List I

We didn’t take many clothes to Oregon, and that was just about right.  Ok, we may have taken a few too many layers of polypropylene, and I took a pair of shorts I never wore, but here’s the most important thing you need to know about Portland: You can wear your nylon fishing pants into any restaurant in the City and fit right in. If the only clean shirt you have left for that elegant tasting menu restaurant s a mid-weight Patagonia underlayer pullover, it’s ok. It’s stylish. Stylish. One pair of Keene sandals, my running shoes, and a pair of wading boots would take me anyplace in the state unless I needed some other kind of technical sports shoes. Hiking boots, skiing boots, cycling cleats; those I might need. I wouldn’t need a dressier pair of shoes.

Oregon is an outdoorsy milieu. There are as many Subarus in Portland as there are F150s in Houston. There are a lot of Subarus.

Unlike New Orleans, I didn’t take a blazer, and unlike New Orleans I didn’t need one. I did worry that in a Nike town my New Balance running shoes might not be quite the thing, but Portland folk seem pretty tolerant.

The homeless like Portland, at least in the summer, but I don’t think it’s because they don’t need a blazer. Our first morning I took an early-morning run around the river. There were colonies of the young and ragged sleeping in doorways and camped on the riverside. Someone told me that much of Portland homelessness is about heroin, but I also think it’s some about accomodation. Portland has long been particularly tolerant of  the homeless.

When we first got to Portland we went to Portland Fly Shop. Ok, that’s not true. We first went and ate Pacific Coast oysters at Olympia Oyster Bar. For Gulf Coasters, Oysters on the West Coast are high dollar, about $3 each, but happy hour oysters were half price. They didn’t serve Saltines with the oysters, and I’m not sure they understood the value of salt and lemon or a classic mignonette, but the bread was good. The oysters were good.

So we went to Portland Fly Shop after the oysters and met Jason Osborn, who had helped me buy my 7 weight Beulah Spey rod long distance. Kris finally committed to a Spey rod, a Beulah Onyx 6 weight, and we bought some sink tips and some leaders. Here, though, is the bizarre thing about steelhead fishing:

To fish for steelhead, you honest-to-God could fish for days with two flies, one wet and one streamer.

If there are no tugs by the end of the swing, one doesn’t agonize about whether the fly is the very thing, you take two more steps downriver and cast again.  Changing flies ain’t in it. “Jason,” we insisted, “sell us some flies.” I’d tied a good two dozen flies getting ready for Oregon: multiple fish tacos in many colors, steelhead coachmen, skaters, black things, brown things, orange things. . . Jason seemed baffled that I wanted more flies. He clearly thought we had plenty flies enough. We insisted. He sold us some, but his heart wasn’t in it.

We only changed flies when the spirit spoke to us, or when the light changed.  In the morning or when it was overcast, we cast wets three-quarters downstream on Skandi lines. When it was full sun we cast streamers 90 degrees straight across the river on Skagit lines.  Then we did the two-step (or the four-step). The idea was to cover water. Maybe people who know what they’re doing change flies, but for us, what’s the point? Within the realm of decent steelhead flies one fly was as good as any other.

I was told that the Clousers I brought weren’t in the realm of decent steelhead flies.  What fish doesn’t like a Clouser?

As to other stuff we didn’t need, we took a bunch of trout rods. When we arrived at Maupin and met Travis Johnson, I said that I was in Oregon to catch one fish. He looked concerned and asked if I’d brought a single-handed trout rod, I think in part because trout are easier to catch than steelhead and in part because he worried that my casting would be even less competent than it was. Because I’d caught a Chinook the first day, I never took my single-handed rods or trout flies out of the suitcase. My fish was caught and everything after was gravy.

I took along a better guitar than usual, a 1973 Kohno, because I would be sitting by the side of a river for a few days and that deserves a better guitar.  The Kohno is a bit beat up, but has a lovely tone. My hands though were a wreck.  They were sore, I guess from the rod, and cracked and bleeding from the dry weather and the water.  I worked a bit on the Sor Variations on a Theme from the Magic Flute. I was playing it early in the hotel the first morning–we were running two hours ahead of everybody else on the West Coast–and the person in the neighboring room banged on the wall.  I’d never had that happen before, but they banged on the wall in the middle of the fast 6th variation, so maybe the song was a bit raucous.  Maybe they just weren’t Sor fans.

We spent a long time in Powell’s Books, which is one of the great bookstores. I bought Tom Robbins for Washington and Seattle, which isn’t scheduled, and replaced my copy of Sometimes a Great Notion. Mostly I was reading Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom, getting ready for Mississippi.

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Fly Fish Oregon Done

Last Sunday we met our guide, Travis Johnson, at 4:30 in the morning, waders on, and got back to the hotel that night at 9:20. It was a long day. Most of our days in Oregon were long days. Up early, fish until lunch, nap for a few hours then fish again until dark. Long days.

We spent the next three nights at a riverside camp on a trip put together by Louis Cahill of Gink & Gasoline, through Jeff Hickman’s Fish the Swing.  I’d signed up for the camp on a whim, because steelhead was the right color of fish for Oregon, and there was a personal invitation, addressed to occupant, in my emails. Kris was a bit startled that I’d signed her up for a group camping trip on a river with a latrine tent and no blow drier, but I swear I told her first. I think I told her first.

The food was great, and the company great. Hickman wasn’t there, but there were two boats of three anglers each and two guides, Barrett Ames and Curtis Ciszek, and Curtis’s good dog, Rowlf. And no one is nicer than Louis Cahill. The weather wasn’t the bitter cold we’d expected north of the Mason-Dixon after Labor Day, though people did make fun of our expedition wear. Who says four layers are too many for 60 degrees? That’s damned cold.

I learned two Spey casts, more or less, the double Spey and the snap-T. By the end of the week every 10th cast or so was ok, and every 20th cast I might shoot three or four feet of line.  Spey casting, mastered. I was only frustrated at that point, as opposed to deeply frustrated, or even exasperated.  Kris was pretty much exasperated, but she hung in, and got more casting instruction than is really good for anyone. She might have been happier (and just as effective) if the guides had left her alone to flail away, but she was game, and mostly patient.

The first day with Travis Johnson was upriver, south of Maupin.  Oregon has a split personality, with east of the Cascades dry, and the lush west landscaped by rain and the ocean. Technically on the Deschutes we were in Central Oregon, but it was east enough. When I first saw the east side, mostly treeless, pristine, arid, it looked enough like my childhood home to be familiar. It was comfortable.

As I said, the first day we fished a bit upriver, south of Maupin, which if you let that sink in is all wrong. Like the desert in the east, the Deschutes runs north, the wrong way. Upriver south, downriver north. Forest west, desert east. The lower Deschutes is north. No wonder Oregon has such a peculiar reputation.

Johnson is the reigning world champion Spey-caster, but he may also be the reigning world champion talker. From dark to dark he had a constant stream of great stories and strong opinions ranging from Ireland to Maupin and back again. Johnson somehow managed to weave the Northern Ireland prime minister into instructions on drift. It was almost as spectacular as the scenery.

Oregon has a peculiar history. In the decades after Lewis & Clark, the relatively new United States pushed expansion into Oregon to keep the British out. Britain and the States agreed on a 49th parallel border in 1846, and the Canadian border from Washington to North Dakota is artificially straight, designed by treaty not geography. Settlers came from New England and the old Ohio Territory, and the existing residents, the Yakima and Nez Perce and Umpqua, the lot of them, were killed, pushed out, or confined. Oregon was re-settled by white people. It wasn’t just any white people, either.  It was pretty universally British Isle-descended white people,

Interestingly, Wisconsin was settled at about the same time by the same Yankees, but with the addition of Germans, Norwegians, and other such foreign folk. The conflict in Wisconsin between Catholic beer-drinking Germans and Protestant temperance-pledging Yankees was defining, but I’m pretty sure the beer drinkers won.  Oregon, on the other hand, remained relatively isolated until World War II, the automobile, and television changed everything.  It’s still 87% white though (as is Wisconsin, interestingly enough). Oregon’s greatest novel (and one of our greatest novels), Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, constantly riffs on its characters’ casual racism. They must have brought it with them over the Oregon Trail, because the Oregon population is still only 2 percent African American, less than 2 percent Native American, and less than 5 percent Asian. White people.

Where we camped and fished on the lower Deschutes (that’s the north end of the river; keep up), there had been a 70,000-acre fire in July that had destroyed the grass-cover and most of the river trees.  Without ground cover there was lots of dust when the wind blew, and by midday every day the wind was blowing. If it ever rains hard, there’ll be erosion and dirty water, but big rain doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. It was a prairie fire, and by next year the grass should be back.

Because it’s spring fed, the river flow is apparently pretty constant, season to season, year to year. The river is big, fast, and hard wading, horizontal rock-climbing, and neither of us could have done it without wading staffs and Patagonia river crampons. The river crampons worked, and the one morning we tried without them, with only studs in rubber soles, was scary. Notwithstanding their generally excellent performance and the Patagonia hype, when river crampons get caked with ash and dirt river crampons are not ultralight.

I caught a jack Chinook the first day, and three redsides rainbows over the next couple of days, and finally a steelhead on the third.  The small jack, three pounds maybe, was a bit like a Gulf Coast speckled trout. It was nice to see it, it was nice to get the Oregon fish out of the way, but after a bit of a flurry it seemed resigned to being caught. The redsides were pretty, wild, and genetically pure, and one was about 20 inches which I was told was about as big as they get. They were a bit overpowered by the 7 weight Spey rod though. The final steelhead was a hatchery fish with a clipped adipose fin, but it was big, 24 or 25 inches I’d guess, and it was every bit as hard to land as billed. Not many things are as good as billed.

Kris got a nice redside and some other things, a tiny pikeminnow and a sucker, so all in all it was a fine week. Oregon’s done.