Redwoods, Rain, and Steelhead

A week now between the river and me, I have visions of redwood giants stretching toward the winter sky, a transparent flow carving through gorges on its way down the mountain and toward the sea, the constant unfurling of my fly line and its gentle swing in the current.
I hatched a plan this fall to use my paternity leave to go on a fishing trip with my father and brother. All of us are trout fishermen, and since moving to California I had heard anglers whispering to each other about steelhead, some shaking their head, apparently having quit the pursuit. A friend – one of these people I do not understand who has dropped trout and fly fishing for heavy tackle on the ocean – spoke of the illness that people get in the pursuit of steelhead. He spoke of “steelhead camp,” in which burly woodsmen spend a month or more camping out in the boonies trying to shoot an elk and bag a winter chromer. “Chrome heads,” he called them.
The nickname, the illness, the promise of fishing new wild rivers, and the potential fulfillment of living for a while in the pages of The River Why had me intrigued. I bought an expensive coffee-table book on the sport, The Complete Steelheader, by the young chrome aficionado and skilled writer James Larison.
I had a few months to read this technical text, which I plugged through each morning before work in the hour between six and seven, with my five-month-old hopping away next to me in his Rainforest Jumparoo™. As I think back, these were in fact ideal conditions for the escapism that is reading about fishing and sitting at the vice when you live hours from a river.
I tied big flies after work – popsicles, green-butted skunks, egg-sucking leeches in black and purple, glo-bugs, lifters, and steelhead shrimp. I eventually succeeded in filling a box with these gorgeous flies, and I dreamt about the opportunity to throw a tuck cast, mend once, and make contact with my swinging streamer until I felt the tap, tap of a winter steely. I imagined hauling in a ten-pound buck, a 12-pound hen, an 18-pound, sea lice-covered lunker fresh from the ocean.
The question of where to go consumed surprisingly little of my time. I have a fishing atlas that details the rivers of northern California; it made clear that there is no shortage of water in the northern reaches of the state. I wanted big trees, moss, wild edible fungus, and Sasquatch. Many rivers fit this profile. I figured the steelhead would follow.
A week before the trip, an unusual front hit the coast. Towering cumulonimbus clouds poured inches of rain. Lightning and thunder charged every afternoon with an excitement rare for the Bay Area. We have stratus clouds here, most often in the form of fog, or nothing at all. It’s an El Niño year, and the dominant currents in the Pacific have turned, bringing warm water from the south rather than the usual frigid stuff from Alaska. I watched the water levels climb each day and our options shrink.
The Eel was blown, and the Metole, so were the Russian, the Navarro, Redwood Creek, even the Klamath. The Mad would be marginally fishable. Only one coastal river promised to be clear – the thickest into Bigfoot country, the northernmost, the longest wild river in California – the Smith. The atlas showed extensive camping and a long section of fishable water. According to the local fly-shop’s “man on the water,” the fish were in.
The day finally arrived when my father and brother were to fly in, from Chicago and Durango, respectively. Dad is an insurance salesman, currently out of work, relatively new to fly fishing but a lifelong fisherman. We sent each other fishy text-messages for a month before the trip: “im gonna catch more fish than u,” “dont forget the night crawlers,” or simply “stoked?!” They remain in the backlog of my cell phone, electronic reminders of the fever that engulfs the expectant fisherman and harbingers of the campfire razzing sessions to come.
My brother is a guide at an upscale Alaskan lodge that costs fishermen nine thousand dollars per week. Each day he wakes before the sun to a gourmet breakfast, loads up an Otter floatplane and flies to a slice of untrammeled wilderness in pursuit of aggressive rainbows and oversized dolly vardens. The most difficult part of his job is avoiding the fish he does not want his clients to catch, namely, the salmon that at most times make Jesus’ feat of walking on water seem like no big thing.
He uses mice for the lemming “hatch” and an occasional strung-out leech. The guides’ favorite “fly” in those parts is a plastic bead painted with one of Revlon’s many elegant polishes, pegged to the line with a short section of 200-lb. monofilament, made lethal by a hook strung two inches below the delicious-looking egg. Fish takes, indicator dances, you snag ‘em. One could argue that it’s not snagging when the fish eats; however, in my short trial of this technique I caught one fish in the eye and another in the stomach.
Four hours after picking up my brother at the San Francisco airport, we woke to begin the drive. Torrential rain thudded against the canoe strapped to the roof of my rig. It seemed that the sun would never rise in the stormy darkness and increasingly unlikely that the fishing would be any good once we reached our destination seven hours north.
The ramshackle remains of the logging industry, the places people lived and worked, weigh heavy on Humboldt County. Cast under a sullen winter sky, the area felt like broken dreams. Brother and I invented a game to pass the time in which one of us would point to a rundown trailer and the other would make the throaty sound of a missile reaching its target.
We passed Eureka, Arcata, Klamath, and were finally amongst the moss-draped forest giants, plodding along the coast highway with booming surf to our left, Tsunami Warning Zone signs posted along the lowest sections of road. Each and every river, heralded by its bridge and small green signpost, was thick with clay sediment, pushing out on its banks as it rushed seaward.
Seven hours into our drive, we passed through Crescent City and crossed the Smith River. A massive volume of topaz water wound its way around a forest-lined bend in the river. The water clarity was good, perhaps even excellent, and our desire to get out of the car increased tenfold.
“Time to slay,” I offered.
“Godeem,” said Brother (a nuanced version of “got him”).
“Oh, yeah,” chuckled Dad.
We still had to navigate the uncertainty of where we would camp for the next five days, and as we discussed our options once more, the rain began falling harder. We had agreed not to give in to the temptation of paying for a hotel room; there was major tarpaulin real estate in the back of the truck, and we planned to create a kind of tent city. The first place we tried to camp – a state park – was thirty-five dollars a night for tent camping, though, and the Fleabag Motor Lodge back in Crescent City was starting to feel a little more reasonable.
I refuse to lay down more than twenty bucks for a spot in the dirt, and I have been known to commit significant acts of subterfuge to secure a free campsite.
“That’s a bit out of our price range,” I told the ranger at the kiosk. He kindly suggested a county park up the road but still on the river, and we headed to what would soon be home sweet home. Sure, it had its drawbacks – no toilet paper and a loquacious right-wing campground host – but we had the place to ourselves. We had the tents and tarps up in no time. Less than an hour after arriving, we were chest-deep in the Smith River, swinging streamers for the elusive steelhead.
“Can I please see your fishing licenses?” we heard from behind us. “Actually, forget about it, you guys are fly fishing. You’re not going to catch anything.”
I have done a lot of fishing in my life and have spent a small fortune on fishing licenses, yet I have to say that I have only ever had my license checked once. The odds are not good of getting a ticket for fishing without a license, but I have to imagine that the odds are even worse of meeting a game warden who will not even bother to check your license because he thinks you are such a dumb ass.
“What’s wrong with fly fishing?” I asked in my most respectful what-seems-to-be-the-problem-officer tone.
“There’s no problem with it,” said he, “it’s just that these fish are hard to catch. Plunkers in boats spend all day on the river and only catch one. This river is lined with willows, so you can hardly get off a cast with that rod. And the water’s high. The fish are down deep. You can’t possibly get down to ‘em.”
After a light-hearted conversation lasting five or ten minutes in the pouring rain, he drove off into the fading light, and the three of us looked at each other from under the dripping brims of our caps.
“He’s a zip gunner,” my brother offered, “and he doesn’t want people to fish here, because it means he has to do his job.”
He had a point, but the whole episode made my boots feel a little heavier on the way back up the hill to camp. The rain fell hard that night, so much that it permeated the fabric of the tent and my brother and I were made to drape rain jackets over our sleeping bags.
It was only night one, but I was already getting a strong sense of how winter steelheading earns its brawny reputation. I was also getting a pretty good sense of the appeal of staying in an expensive lodge. Yet I refuse to accept the common perception that fly fishing is a rich man’s sport; profound experiences are available to all those willing to surrender themselves to the river. This rain was baptismal, it was the river coming to us. There was more experience available to us out here in the rain than to the guys in the comfort of the lodge. Or so we told ourselves on that sodden night.
My family saved up coins for a year in a giant translucent Coke bottle to pay for our first trip to Yellowstone, a sojourn meant to fulfill my brother’s and my shared dream of fly fishing a Western river. I have always felt like an underdog in the world of fly fishing, and therefore entitled to catch a hell of a lot more fish than the doctors, lawyers, and stock brokers on the river. I fish for the home team, the real people of the world, the Americans (said with a George W. Bush accent), the salt of the Earth.
We woke well before dawn to Dad’s clamorous attempt to light the lantern and make Joe. No alarm clock needed: we had the old man with us. No matter, we had a big day in front of us that would surely involve a few steelhead torpedoes (at least one a piece?).
Ha. We fished ten hours a day for three days in a row. We waded the banks and drifted the deeps. We swung bright flies deep and natural flies shallow, deep-drifted Glo-bugs and skated caddis flies. We tried sink-tip and floating line, split shot and indicators. After what were surely thousands of casts, I thought I had torn my rotator cuff - and all I had to show for my efforts were four pathetic smelt. One of the fish, I suppose, earned the venerable title of “half-pounder.” My brother had fared no better, and Dad had entirely blanked. We fished some of the most scenic water I have ever seen and the most exciting moment of the trip was when a fish broke Dad off immediately after it grabbed his bunny leech and left his arms flapping.
Flash forward two months to a bright spring morning in the oak-lined hill country approaching the Sierra Nevadas. I am alone now, brother and Dad far off, and I am headed to a far less venerable stretch of hatchery water below a gratuitous reservoir. A few men are setting up rod holders next to their lawn chairs and coolers in the dawn light. Cool dew drapes the ground. Steelhead inhabit this river but have no chance of reaching the sea. They are inland, day-trip chromers, but the best I can hope for in the three-quarters of a day I can afford one Saturday out of six. I swing an articulated black leech past a boulder and feel a jiggle, a take, and am into my first-ever steely. The fish hardly fights me; I strip him into shore – a beautiful ruddy buck that I hold up for the lure chucker just downstream. I laugh at this silly pursuit and am reminded once again how hardly at all this sport is about the numbers.