Many things about adulthood echo one’s childhood-it’s inescapable. Harlan Ellison once stated in an introduction to his collection Approaching Oblivion that “nothing we do as adults is wholly based on our adult reactions…your politics are either mirror images of your parents’ politics when you were a kid, or they’re rebellions against those politics”. And this corresponds directly with fishing for many people. I was raised spinning. It’s all we did with the late summer/early fall one-two punch that is an afternoon at Perkins Lake and an evening at Solomon Lake here in Boundary County; spin casting Rooster Tails from a canoe for stocker rainbows and mostly catching little but feisty bluegill. When I learned to fly fish from my best friend and next door neighbor’s father, Allen Chrisman, on the north fork of the Flathead outside of West Glacier, I came home with a new hobby, a love for a sport I was almost forced into when I was younger as my father was too withered and rickety to take me out hunting but he and I could see in his eyes a slight disappointment when I came home talking about my love for a different sect of the sport he dearly held close to his heart. Only slightly though as he enjoyed that I was still into the outdoors, but disappointed that I had a love for a style of fishing that he was not the biggest fan of nor was he able bodied enough to stand in a river and cast a fly rod around with me. He brought out an old handmade bamboo rod that my mother’s “only slightly crazy” uncle had made, and he passed it on to me. It isn’t the most beautiful rod, what with its missing eyelets, poor construction, and completely unfinished cork handle (one might say that it was not even started), but I understood that it was a passing of the torch from my father to me. But it was one with a nose down as he knew that my old Shimano, the one he gave me as a young boy and that I still use today, would be set aside for a click and pawl on a 3 weight that I pull beautiful native cutthroat all day on, and with a sigh from my father that I hear often from the clouds above, cutthroat that I inevitably let go and watch swim away to live another day.
And this brings me to a weekend from 2024. The drive on 95 around McArthur Lake was gorgeous just after dawn. The sun’s subtle reflection on the water as it lights up the North Idaho Selkirks. Mallards and geese in the shallows, and a rise or three creating ripples to break the smooth surface of the lake. I am at peace. That is until the phone rings and I answer it. My wife asks if I took the car seat out of our rear seat, and I catch a view of it in the rear-view mirror. An “I love you,” a sigh after I hang up, a turnaround and twenty five minutes later I had dropped it off and set out once again south towards St Maries for a visit with my childhood friend, Andrew Galloway, for what should be a bountiful weekend of fly fishing in the St Joe river in late July.
As I started my mental descent into the northern urban sprawl of modern day Hayden, I decided to head over to the new location of the Orvis store in Coeur d’Alene at Riverstone. The last time I visited the Orvis store here, it was about fifteen years ago with my father after we had dropped my mother off at the Silver Lake Mall. It was a humble shop in North CDA; small in stature and large in tackle. I always picked up two Adams and two of the most basic Elk Hair Caddis each time I went, and I remember that my dad would smile at my selections as he purchased nymphs and woolly buggers for his own collection. Now I was going to see how the new store looked and felt.
Or so I thought.
Arriving at the Riverstone location around 8:15 a.m., I pulled up to a lit up “Open” sign, and I placed the car in park and got out. A smile on my face and a skip to my step, I walked up to the door with my head held high and pulled. It’s stuck. I tried again and a sign catches my eye:
Hours:
Monday-Friday: 9:30-5:30
Saturday: 10:00-5:00
Sunday: Closed
A bit over an hour too early; an hour too long to stick around. I had a river waiting for me, and I had luckily tied a couple of Adams, Caddis, and ants during my free time the previous week. I should be set, I thought. And I continued on.
I made my way over the I-90 and went east towards the Montana border before cutting down onto Highway 3, a wonderfully windy road that meandered its way past Rose Lake, Killarney Lake, and the lower ends of the Coeur d’Alene and St Joe Rivers. By 10 a.m., I was rolling my way into St Maries, Idaho for the first time in years. The last time I had been in this neck of the woods was a fishing trip within the year after my last class at University of Idaho with an old friend of mine, Bradley Pakish. While I remember it not being the most fruitful day of fishing I’ve had in my life, I remember how the river felt. I remember the cold, clear water we stood in, watching the first rise to the hatches, hatches so diverse on a river that a spot you just fished on one long bend would have the cutthroat sipping midges out of the air and when that hole was fished out and you made your way back to the car to drive a half mile up or down towards a large caddis hatch happening when your feet hit the water again. The fishing was constantly evolving, fishing that kept a fisherman on his toes, and I was excited to get back to such an environment on this trip down.
I pulled off the road in downtown St Maries and walked into Blue Goose. I browsed the wares for a bit, looked at the somewhat measly fly collection they had with a furrowed brow, grabbed a pair of cheap-o polarized sunglasses and made my way to the front counter to hand the man the merchandise–a man who didn’t notice me or chose to ignore me while he finished reading an article in his copy of the Gazette. That is until I cleared my throat a bit, and he hobbled over and took my fiver dollar bill and scraps of change, handed me a receipt and went back to reading. A definitive codger, one who would talk about how the town and the river declined from yesteryear, and I would have rolled my eyes. That is until I hit the river myself.
At this point I shot Andrew a message, and he replied immediately. I knew that he had some work meetings during the day, and he let me know that I could hang out at his house until he was done. Well, I was out of the house, out of the town, out of the county, and I have a three-year-old that I dearly loved, and missed, that has ears that are currently only for decoration and I really needed to get out to something that listened to me. Like the St Joe River. It was still early, and I needed to get a line or two tight. I went north out of town and turned off onto St Joe River Road. This road was a nostalgia trip for me. Winding, awe-inspiring views as far as I could see…once I got past the rows and rows of RVs, lifted flag-decorated trucks, and 40 year old men who looked as if they were 60. When I got up past Calder, it turned into Heaven, paradise, Jannah, Devas. A snaking stone river of riffles and flats and slurping cutthroats. Tall stands of white pine, ponderosa, cedar, firs. Seemingly endless vehicles that are there to float and not fish. But the floaters, that is something that will be brought up later. They get me thinking about the world in which we all live; a constant ebb and flow of changes such as the river I follow upwards through the hills. But as the world changes and gets uglier and meaner and more vicious (see: current United States meta for how we interact with each other), the river changes towards beauty. It remains the same in our eyes but the water that rolls past your ankles is somewhere far, far down the river within a minute. It makes one question the minutiae of everyday life away from the river, how we humans conduct ourselves whether face to face or through a phone screen. And it makes one wonder why we have lost our way as rivers ourselves. People change; they always do. I don’t like to admit it, but I am far different now at 35 than I was at 15, 23. Heck, even 34. I hope that I still have some of the same hint of humanity that projects from me that I did back then: youthfulness, eagerness to learn, a love for people to be shared with them in a chair or two under a tree and a bright, high sun. However, I can’t guarantee it. The philosophy that comes from fly fishing and considering one’s place in nature is ultimately unfounded nonsense to which the fisherman will soon realize that it is just, as the late John Gierach would put it, standing in a river and waving a stick.
The St Joe River, head to toe, is what one would call a great cutthroat river. What makes a great cutthroat river? Cutthroat, of course. There are plenty of them swimming around the winding cool waters of the North Idaho gem. And I was here to fish, not philosophize–at least not for the whole time.
Rolling my car through the twists and turns of the road, there were plenty of fishable but well-occupied lower river spots being fished. I find an old pullout I have used in the past without a car in sight. As I park, I remember why I originally found it unused years ago. The river flowed below me nearly 65 feet, and my traverse would be a nigh-cliff face with a few white pine roots that could be used as stairs, or some sort of lowering mechanism that my wife would use as evidence of why she should kill me if she saw me stumbling down it. But the water was beautiful there: a large bend upriver into nice riffles and a few deep pools that were definitely holding some fish. As I tumble-slid down the hill, making sure to keep my rod above the rest of me and hoping if anything breaks this early into the weekend that it is not my pretty little ancient 9 for 6 Orvis, I hit the bottom with only one scrape on my rear end.
Then comes the first cast. An important cast. Not only to establish how competent you will be with your fishing skill for the day, but to also have the possibility of that rare occurrence where the first cast, perfect or not, leads to an immediate eat by the first trout. Slightly tensed, overly excited, I pulled out the line in order to perform that perfect cast that I saw in my head. I wanted to hit the end of the bend and follow these riffles down to the first pool near the bank. I just knew something had to be in there. I had a gut feeling, a feeling that any fisherman, beginner to professional, has when they see such water. That, and I had seen a pretty nice trout come up from there to slurp a mayfly in the hatch currently going on. A couple dozen yards pulled and I shot the line up. Perfectly placed, and right where I wanted it to be. The fly, a size 20 Adams I had tied only a few days prior, lands precisely on top of the moving waters and the presentation is al bacio. And the next dozen or so after that felt pretty good too. Alas, no takes.
When a fly fisher is on the verge of a skunk, there are many things that they will do. Some might start aggressively casting to the riffle, hoping the slap of the fly on the end of their tippet will piss off a fish enough that they will take it out of annoyance. Another fisherman might start changing out flies every three casts because who knows what the fish might be rising to at this point. Some might be in denial, i.e. “no, it’s the fish that are wrong”. For me, I tend to throw on a basic pheasant tail nymph and plop it into some deep pool and start jigging from above. It’s a habit I have had since I was younger and my father was catching a heck of a lot more fish than me: jig for the bluegills. Some people might see this as too close to the edge of not fly fishing. Some people might see it as fly dapping, but with a nymph rather than a dry fly. Honestly, it really feels like a small step above putting a worm on a hook and just sitting there like a kid in some ‘60s John Wayne movie. For me, it’s nearly a guaranteed catch. If it’s not a trout, some pikeminnow, white fish, “trash fish” will take hold of the fly and I will be able to hold my head high and tell myself that I caught a fish today.
And I did. First came a 12-inch pikeminnow that was actually quite beautiful–for a pikeminnow, that is. That was before it coughed up half a crawdad onto my lap.
After letting the fish off the hook and back into the water,
the next two jigs provided me with my first St Joe Westslope cutty
in a long time. It was small, about 8 inches and it had a wound on its tail
that looked as if someone had snagged it with a hook at some point,
but it was native, it was handsome, it was what I had come down to catch.
Though, I still wanted a fish that would make my line run a bit. After releasing the fish, I received a message from Andrew telling me that he was nearly done. I climbed back up the cliff side with a good bit of effort, got into my Subaru, and stopped by the Calder Store bar for a can of Rainier before I went to meet with my childhood buddy for a wonderful weekend of fishing.
Continued in Part 2
Please forgive the author for his fish holding ability for the day.
Published by https://9b.news/on March 28th, 2025.