In September, after Louisiana and a quick-trip again to try for Maryland stripers, we go to Oregon to fish for steelhead on the Deschutes. We have a bit more than a month between Louisiana and Oregon, and I’ve decided there are no two places in this country further apart, if not quite physically then in most other ways that matter. Even the Oregon names, Oregon, Portland, Deschutes, ring different than Louisiana names: Louisiana, Vieux Carre, Atchafalaya.
Eugene. Acadiana.
The Deschutes is a lovely river, I’ve seen it. But its name calls out for a gesundheit. It’s not just the brutality of the names though that make Oregon different from Louisiana. Oregon is liberal, eccentric, and whatever its history may be it seems to have no great effect on its present. Louisiana is none of those things, except of course for eccentric. In Oregon you can legally smoke pot and legally commit suicide. In Oregon you drink pinot noir or pinot gris and craft beer, or maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon. In Louisiana you try to drink yourself to death with drive-through daiquiris and sticky sweet hurricanes in to-go cups from Pat O’Brien’s and complex mildly bitter Sazeracs. Interestingly, based on CDC data, Louisiana ranks only 17th among states for rates of heavy drinking among adults, Oregon unexpectedly ranks higher than Louisiana at 16th. I suspect all those tea-totalin’ Baptists in north Louisiana keep it from achieving its proper place as number one, and all those winery owners boost Oregon.
Maybe I’m wrong and they’re not really different. Maybe we’ve all blended into the same thing. But can you imagine if Duck Dynasty had been made in Oregon? It would be Portlandia. And vice versa.
Evermann, Barton Warren and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska, , 1907, plate 38, Steelhead Trout
On driving trips we used to play a game naming the natural color of cars. The natural color of a car is the color of the wild car before its domestication. The natural color of a 1980s Ford Crown Vic is brown. The natural color of a BMW five series is blue, a Honda Accord is silver, and a 1970s F-150 pickup is red. It’s a fun game, because there are so many cars where the answer strikes everyone playing as obvious.
We picked the Deschutes for steelhead because it’s the natural color of Oregon fish. What else could we fish for? Where else could we fish? Some states don’t have a natural color of fish: Florida and Alaska have too many colors to pick just one. Texas doesn’t really have a natural color of fish, unless it’s channel cat and they’re hard to get to take a fly. I’ve fished in Oregon before, for trout on the McKenzie out of a McKenzie boat, and even though we caught fish it was somehow unsatisfactory. I think it was unsatisfactory because we fished the wrong color of fish. In Maryland you gotta fish stripers in the Chesapeake. In Louisiana you gotta fish redfish in the coastal marsh. In Oregon you gotta fish for chromers–I think that’s what they call them –on the Deschutes. Everywhere else a chromer is a stocked trout. In Oregon it seems to be the wildest of trout.
I suspect in Oregon the natural color of fish is steelhead, not because there aren’t other perfectly good targets. There are plenty of perfectly decent rivers in Oregon and miles of coastline, but I suspect it’s steelhead because in Oregon steelheading is at least in part about the style of the thing. Could you fox hunt without red jackets and stirrup cups? I reckon, but it ain’t quite the thing. It ain’t quite the thing to fish for steelhead out of a drift boat with a 9 ft 7 wt and nymphs under a bobber, even though that apparently is the best way to actually catch steelhead. It’s just not done. You have to cast gaudy flies with a 13 foot spey rod that’s good for not much else. You have to use impossibly named incomprehensible line and leader combinations. It’s not just a thing to be done, it’s a thing to be done in the right way.
It seems to me that spey casting is popular in Oregon not because it’s the best way to catch fish but because it’s fun to do in and of itself, and even more fun to do in and of itself while mildly stoned. This is what happens to a perfectly good sport when you legalize marijuana.
There is certainly fly fishing in Louisiana, but talk to most of the Louisiana fly guides and you begin to suspect that there’s not much purity in the heartland of the spoon fly. “I was after a record fish, so I had five rods set up and I’d hook one fish and if it didn’t seem big enough I’d hand it off to the guide and he’d bring it in while I took one of the other rods to cast again.” I heard someone say that about fishing to a school of bull reds in the Louisiana marsh. In Oregon the discussion seems to be about how many days one casts from dawn to dusk before one actually catches a fish. They don’t actually wear red jackets though. At least I hope so. I don’t own a red jacket.
Meanwhile we keep trying to fish Galveston. Kris caught a bit of redfish Saturday morning blind-casting in Green Lake mud. I put down some tailing redfish. I’d forgotten how skittish redfish could be on a flat on a still summer day.
That’s Kris’s fish. I only photobombed.