Where the Trout Are All as Long as Your Leg by John Gierach

Author:John Gierach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Of course tomorrow noon came and went, and then so did twelve-thirty, with Dave and me sitting on the front porch watching the dirt road for the cloud of dust that would indicate the approaching pickup. I remembered a time when AK Best and I were waiting in a fly-shop parking lot for a man who wanted to go to the South Platte River with us. We were supposed to leave at 5:00 A.M. At four minutes after, AK said, “Well, I guess he’s not coming,” and started the truck. I’m not quite that impatient, but two guys who are half an hour late to go fishing deserve to be left behind, that is, if the expedition can spare them.

“Can you find this place by yourself?” I asked Dave.

“I think so,” he said. Then he stared up into the sky for a few seconds and revised his opinion. “Sure. Hell yes I can find it.”

“What about permission?”

“All we can do is ask,” he said.

Why not? I wasn’t sure it was exactly “permission” that these two guys had in mind, anyway.

We did find the creek, miles down the third dirt road we tried, and at first I was unimpressed. It was fast, shallow, not much shade, not much holding water. It looked like it might have a handful of little brookies in it, at best.

“Is this the right one?” I asked.

“I think it gets better upstream,” Dave said.

More miles on a smaller dirt road. Then we passed a cattle guard with a sign on it saying, “NO TRESPASSING.” At precisely the point where the stream became private it started to look a lot better. There were more overhanging willows, deeper pools, longer runs, mats of aquatic vegetation.

A few more miles up the same road we came to another sign, a big one with red letters on a white field. It said that fishing was by permission only, that permission could be gotten by calling such-and-such a telephone number during certain hours, and that one should not go up to the ranch to ask to fish. We read it over carefully several times, as if we were looking for loopholes in the Ten Commandments.

We’d come a long way on unmarked back roads and figured the nearest pay telephone was no less than thirty miles back. So we drove on up. The stories notwithstanding, all the guy could do was say no.

The stream got prettier with every mile, looking more and more like a classic spring creek. It’s not, apparently, but I’m told the water chemistry is similar and it has that same slow-flowing, weedy, buggy, fishy look to it. There were no cars on the road, no fishermen in the water, just a big, wide valley with a brush-lined stream and hay fields lying out in the lazy afternoon sun.

The ranch house, barn, and outbuildings were at the back of the valley, on the last level piece of land a two-hour drive from town on a bad road. This is the kind of place you’d buy if you had all kinds of money and wanted to be left alone.

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