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It takes 90 minutes to get
from our house at Varney Bridge in Montana's Madison Valley
to the Harriman Ranch in Idaho.
(Fishing.) Early one September morning it took me three
hours when I spotted a landscape near Cameron that I couldn't
take my eyes off. |
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| If you’re lucky, there
are places you go back to. Memories. Cribbage on the bank.
Talks in the tent with Frank. Elk steaks by Neal. Garden
pesto one night. A trip with Rob and a big rainbow that
takes an ant, freaks out, then does a tarpon imitation,
landing right on the bank. Tobey's ashes are a few meanders
downstream. |
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| A morning walk to the bridge
and I could see no trout. A head-gate had been replaced
upstream and the creek was off color. I was convinced
that whatever trout the herons and otters had left, the
silt had taken care of. But I’m wrong. Next morning
there’s a PMD hatch on the creek, and from the same
spot I count 27 trout moving from cover to take nymphs,
rising from the gravel to sip adults. It’s a new
day. |
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| There’s a town I like
called Pony. It’s not far but it’s off the
stretch to fishing and visiting friends and family, so
I don’t get there often. Last summer I made the
trip. It’s a great little town with old brick buildings
and green lawns and Main Street that turns into gravel
and heads way, way into the hills where you might see
moose in the beaver ponds or a fishing guide fly casting
in the middle of a field with two elderly clients watching
or, farther on, a mysterious stand of spruce along the
road. You stop, back up, and take another look. |
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| It’s early morning.
Tobey and I leave his home on the Mangles and Blackwater
and are driving upriver in the Buhler Valley on New Zealand’s
South Island going fishing. The Valley is indescribably
beautiful. I say Tobey, I’ve just got to stop and
take a photo. When I get back in the car, Tobey, who's
now in a wheelchair and half a year from death, says Davey,
we need to do that more often. I say What? And he says
Slow down. We're always trying to get to the next river. |
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| Last spring there were three
nests near our home in Montana. Great horned owls down
the road, osprey out the window to the west, and, off
the deck toward the river, bald eagles. For a week we
watched the adult eagles on the new nest in the big cottonwood.
One morning a car stops at the edge of the meadow, a guy
gets out, slips through the barbed wire, runs 150 yards
to the tree and stands under the nest shooting a roll
of film. The eagles left and we never saw them again. |
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