No Shortage of Good Days by John Gierach

Author:John Gierach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

12

ROAD TRIP

The price of gas that summer (at historic highs through most of July) sucked some of the glamour out of a thousand-mile road trip, but not so much that it didn’t still seem worth doing. So it wasn’t the smartest time to climb into a gas-hog V-8 pickup and set off across the Rocky Mountains, but that was the only one of our vehicles that would hold all three of us, plus our camping and fishing gear, and that had four-wheel-drive to negotiate some of the roads we’d probably end up on. It’s just that in these times—maybe in all times—living a good life takes a degree of dim-witted optimism, and some trips come with their own builtin moments that are too compelling to ignore or postpone. Ed Zern said, “The best time to go fishing is when you can.” John Steinbeck said, “You don’t take a trip; a trip takes you.”

The idea came up in the organic way these things do. We were idly talking about cutthroats one day when Doug, who has a real jones for cutts, recalled a little creek in western Wyoming that he fished with a friend twenty-some years ago when they were both new to fly fishing. Some of the finer details had gone out of focus over time, but he clearly remembered the name and location of a pretty little stream with Snake River cutthroats up to twelve and fourteen inches long where, as a beginner, he actually got into fish for the first time as opposed to hooking one now and then almost by accident.

When Doug and his friend bragged about their day at a fly shop in the next town, the guy behind the counter shrugged it off, saying something like, “I guess that’s okay if all you want is little fish.” It’s pointless to psychoanalyze your friends, but it occurred to me that this single incident could account for Doug’s abiding love of cutthroats as well as his disdain for the suspiciously Freudian cult of size among some fly fishers.

That story reminded Vince of another stream in the same corner of Wyoming that he and Doug had fished ten years ago on a whim. They’d just picked up Vince’s then-new drift boat in Idaho, and on the way back had stopped to kill a few hours wade-fishing a headwater stream. They didn’t have a lot of time because they had to meet me in Saratoga for the boat’s maiden voyage on the North Platte, but they caught so many nice trout that they had trouble pulling themselves away. Doug and I didn’t know each other well then, and on the drive south he worried about being late, but Vince said, “We were catching fish; John will understand.”

And then once a trip to the region was in the wind, a former guide, now boatbuilder, friend suggested another stream we should look at as long as we’d be in the area, and yet another friend—a former guide, now editor and filmmaker—added a few more names, and so on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.