There I was again: strapped to the gills in warm clothing, a rigged 4 wt fly rod, a hip pack full of flies and tippet and cheap handwarmers that don’t actually work but provide at least a slight bit of hope. Hope. Hope is something that I am drowning in this winter. I hope we get some good snowpack in the mountains or else we are in for a heck of a fire season. Hope that the infant coming in April won’t put too much of a damper on my creek hoppin’. And hope that I will catch something other than a cold out on the river today.
The Kootenai is high. The creeks are still a bit blown out. The lakes have some ice on them, but not enough for me to want to go sit on them for a while and listen to the clean snaps of the ice shifting, wondering which one would be the one that leads me to a cold bath. But I had a bit of time to get out on the water after a dental appointment and casting a small fly into some high, cold water is what I was going to do. I just didn’t want another day of chuck and duck fishing with big streamers, and Deep Creek was sounding good.
Don’t worry though, I was following regulations. From December 1st to the Friday before Memorial day weekend, it is catch and release in Deep Creek and that is all I was planning, if I caught something of course. When I arrived at the mouth, Deep Creek was iced over: thin ice, but ice nonetheless. But there still was hope. There is an outfall tucked away near the mouth of Deep Creek (and before anyone yells at me for spot burning, just trust me. Everyone knows about this place), and the flowing water from it had left a good ten foot by twenty five foot or so run of flowing, unfrozen water. I tied on one of my favorite summer dries, a #14 Hudson Caddis, and a smile grew on my face. However, the smile quickly faded when I tied on three and a half feet on to the hook and added on a #22 midge nymph under it. I don’t mind catching fish. Some might say I enjoy it. But I just don’t have nearly as much enjoyment with subsurface fishing as I do watching a fish slurp a dry from the top of the water. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Hope: it’s what I had. Other than a slight discoloration to the water, it was a deep hole with running water that I knew was kicking out all sorts of bits and pieces for trout to choose from. However, it just wasn’t in the cards for me. Many roll casts and perfect drifts covering every square inch of the makeshift inland polynia. Hope had betrayed me. Not even a nibble for my little midge, no movement to make it seem like anything was alive. But maybe the day was not about catching a fish, even though it was all I have been craving.
No, the day was for something else. It was a day to be at the creek. The crashing of melting, vertical ice chunks along with the whip-pang of the creek ice cracking in the occasional rays of winter sun were the only interruptions to the peace. The water was flowing in front of me from the open to under an inch deep layer of ice and back out again into the Kootenai river. The birds, though quiet, were there. A large quantity of pine siskens and juncos were in the melted ice-laden red osier dogwood, and after walking down to the dock at the Mouth for a quick peek at what was going on, I watched groups of mergansers dive for food.
If it had been a long, snowy winter, it was the type of day that would have made me think that spring was right around the corner. But with how our winter is going, that typically joyous and happy thought rather had a tinge of dread to it. Without the snowpack in the mountains, the Moyie would start to run hot even sooner in the year than it did last year and the last thing those trout need is another summer in a warm, shallow river. Like mentioned before, the fire season could be bad if we don’t get a good, slow melting snowpack in the mountains or a heavy rainfall this spring. Yet, the biggest thing I worry about is the yellowjacket and hornet situation.
Two years ago, my son Olaf and I were fishing up a popular creek mid-July and we had some good luck. Rainbow after rainbow, up and down all the holes I had spent time fishing in even twenty-five years ago. But in the back of my head was a request from my mother. She had a wonderful wrought iron dragon doorknocker and had requested a nice, gnarled piece of wood to hang it on. On our way back down the creek towards the car, I saw the perfect piece. Sticking out from the ground was a busted piece from an old redcedar that looked rather recent and wouldn’t take much to pull out from the dirt and the duff. I told my son to stay on the trail and I wandered over to the log, put my hands around it, and pulled. What looked recent must have been rather old as the rotted wood slid from the bottom half that I could only describe as similar to the de-gloving scene from Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. The moment I held it in my hand and saw the swarm of yellowjackets emerge from the middle felt like a million years. In reality, it was less than a second that I turned around and yelled, “run!” to my son and off we went. When my wife counted the stings at home, it was easily a blow out: Dad-21, Olaf-0. The next day, on another creek, I ended up stepping into a wasp nest under the duff. Luckily I made off with only one sting, and thankfully it wasn’t a bald-faced hornet. Being deathly allergic to those, that would have not been a great drive home.
Yet, last year, I am sure as many of you folks in North Idaho noticed, the wasp and hornet situation was not bad at all. I could bring out food at the creekside and not be bothered the whole day most times I was out. But if this winter continues, we may be heading into a total Bee-pocalypse. Let’s hope not.
But, hope is a rushing river; a dynamic force of human nature that ebbs and flows, roars past your feet before you know it and doesn’t stop even when you think it should. Trust me, I am not a depressed person but it’s true. We put hope into everything we do, and we are disappointed when those things don’t happen. But hope is what drives us forward in whatever life demands of us and it keeps us going. So whatever you do, never stop hoping, never stop dreaming, never stop thinking that you can do all the things you want to do. Honestly, in the current climate of humanity, hope is all we got.
Tight lines out there, friends.