Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis by Howell Raines

Author:Howell Raines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

23

Flying Out of the Mountains

The Jesuits complicated the final week of our family fly-fishing vacation. Jeffrey, as I mentioned, was all set to go to Colorado State, a relaxed institution where they seemed more interested in his casting and canoeing ability than his grades. But late in the summer, Loyola University in New Orleans, which had been his first choice, sent word that it would take him. The problem was that Jeffrey was required to be in New Orleans in the middle of the week we planned to spend at the most remote guest ranch in Wyoming, a place reachable only by single-engine plane or a ride of several hours over a bone-jarring dirt road.

I urged Jeffrey to stick to his original plan, both because I thought he would be happy in Colorado and because I worried about his readiness for the academic rigors of a strict Roman Catholic institution. At eighteen, Jeffrey was an accomplished guitarist who had already spent a fair amount of time in the back-alley jazz clubs of New Orleans, hence his devotion to the city. He was much better read than I had been at his age. But his grades and study habits had broken the heart of every teacher he met. The Jesuits, I warned him, ran a strict liberal arts curriculum that required a kind of diligence he had always avoided.

“You don’t know anything about the Jesuit order,” I told him. “They’re not playing. These are the people who conquered Central America.”

“Don’t worry, Dad,” he said. “I can handle them.”

“They’re going to love you,” I said.

So it came to pass that we chartered a plane to come one August morning and pick up Jeffrey at a rocky airstrip high in the Gros Ventre Mountains. He and I fished together on the day before his departure. We abandoned our usual practice of splitting up and fishing different sections of the stream. Instead, we stayed together and took turns on the best pools as we moved up the narrow canyon of soft red rock that brings the Gros Ventre down from its headwaters above Ouzel Falls.

Although we had the stream to ourselves, we failed to move a trout. I wanted Jeff to make a memorable catch on what was, in a sense, the last fishing trip of his boyhood. When we came out of the canyon into the big meadow below Ouzel Falls, I quit fishing altogether and let him take all the good water. Finally, where the river had cut a deep narrow channel into the face of a grassy bank, Jeffrey hooked a fish, and it was memorable enough for our purposes, running wildly upstream with the speed and zeal of a bonefish.

The day was going fast, and in the cool afternoon, we hiked on up to Ouzel Falls, which is not a vertical waterfall, but rather a place where the river descends at a sixty-degree angle down a long slide of smooth rock. We tried for the brook trout that live in the plunge pool at the foot at the falls, and perhaps we caught a few.

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