Trout Lake Report: Callibaetis Watch

It's evening, and you're back. You just like the idea of throwing out a Callibaetis dry and seeing what happens. It's so much better than TV.

On the way across the lake you throw a muddler. Right on the margin of the reeds, in very skinny water, you get a take by a fat, healthy Rainbow.

That's an encouraging sign. Maybe the season of the muddler is coming back. But you're here for the Callibaetis.

First, though, you're curious about the Damselator. So is a hefty Rainbow.

Soon it's time for the Callibaetis, and they show up right on schedule.

The first fish to come to a Callibaetis dry is a Brown, small but all Brown in its pissed off attitude at being caught. The Brown Train chugs on.

You have a Zen moment as you become one with the evening lake in the digital display. But you do notice that double rise down near your fly.

So you put the camera away and proceed to catch that fish.

You wait for a general uprising by the fish, but they are content to wait for another day. So you must do the same.

Thinking About the Methow

Usually when I think about the Methow I'm thinking about fishing the Methow River. Now, after the tragic circumstances in the Methow Valley this summer, that's the last thing on my mind.

First, the Carlton Complex fire was centered in the Methow, destroying some 300 homes. The fire is almost contained, but now recent rains and thunderstorms over the burn area are precipitating mudslides and washouts. In just the past few days 10 more homes have been destroyed by mudslides in the Methow Valley.

That certainly puts fishing in the proper perspective.

Trout Lake Report: The Brown Train

You think it's the right thing to do. You go back to the cool waters of the inlet. It's good for the fish. It's good for you.

There are some small fish rising where the current spreads out. You drop a Damselator here and there, letting it drift, expecting to catch another bait fish for a Brown.

Instead, when the Damselator is sucked under, you come up on the Brown itself. Another lovely fish.

Thank you again, Damselator.

Then you settle down to catching bait fish.

And enjoying the sky, and the light. The big fire nearby is 95% contained, and the smoke, and the resulting white-out, is gone.

The Callibaetis are back at dusk. You tie on a Callibaetis pattern and hope another Brown, or a hefty Rainbow or two, may come cruising by.

Instead you catch a few more little tiny guys. You actually enjoy their acrobatic flips and over-the-top explosions on the fly.

You get one take that for a moment feels like a good fish. At least it's more than 6 inches long. It deserves a photo.

Time to head in, but you'll be back. You'll ride the Brown train as far as it goes.

Happy Birthday, Annie Proulx

This woman can flat out write. You may want to go where she can take you.

As this piece from The Writer's Almanac points out, she started out writing about fishing and hunting.

It's the birthday of Annie Proulx, (books by this author) born Edna Annie Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut (1935). As a young woman, she lived in Vermont, published a small newspaper, and supported herself writing how-to books about things like apple cider and fence-building. Some of her early stories were about hunting and fishing, since she was passionate about those pursuits; the only outlet for them was men's outdoor magazines, though, and the editors made her publish them as E.A. Proulx, believing men wouldn't read them if they knew a woman had written them. "The ones who suggested it were from a small Vermont publication," she told Paris Review, "and I got back this awful letter, full of bad spelling and clumsy syntax, suggesting that I should change my name to initials. Very tiresome." She put up with it for a while, but then started writing as "E. Annie" and then "Annie."

She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News, and to win fame and notoriety for her short story Brokeback Mountain. The Shipping News is well worth a read, but I recommend you begin with her early work.

Her first novel, Postcards, received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It's the story of a homeless man for whom the length and breadth of the West becomes the only home he knows.

Then dig into her short stories. This is my favorite collection, stories about real-life Wyoming. This is funny, gritty, heartbreaking, cowboy boots-on-the-ground, hands-in-the-dirt writing. It includes Brokeback Mountain.

The writing is so spare and clean that you feel stripped down to the essential core after reading it. Here's a quote from Close Range:

“You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country--indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky--provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut...
...Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.” 

Finally, here is some wisdom for writers from Annie Proulx:

“What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.” 

For a New York Times piece about Proulx from 1994 after she had won the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, click HERE.

For the Wikipedia entry on Proulx, click HERE.

"Summer's Elegy" by Howard Nemerov

                                                            "End of Summer" by Brett James Smith

Day after day, day after still day,

The summer has begun to pass away.
Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,
And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.
The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,
And the meadowlark's house is cut down.

The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,
The swallows sit in rows along the wires.
Berry and grape appear among the flowers
Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,
And cricket now begins to hum the hours
Remaining to the passion's slow procession
Down from the high place and the golden session
Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.
A failing light, no longer numinous,
Now frames the long and solemn afternoons
Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.
We reach the place unripe, and made to know
As with a sudden knowledge that we go
Away forever, all hope of return
Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-
ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound
Of apples dropping on the dry ground.

"Summer's Elegy" by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems. © The University of Chicago Press, 1981. 

Trout Lake Report: Cool, Wet, and Beautiful

Scouting the south end. Enjoyable but still slow. Tried muddlers and other dries unsuccessfully. Trolling finally brings results.