On the Passing of Bob Proudman

Like a lot of folks, I always assumed that the smoking aftermath of a nuclear holocaust would lift to reveal only a couple living things: the cucarachas, and of course Proudman. As it happens, Bob retained his proclivity for surprise right down to the bitter end.

The great warrior monk of the Appalachians is no more, and we are all impoverished for it.

I got to know Bob in the early 90’s when I was the Caretaker of the Scott Farm, the Appalachian Trail’s Middle Atlantic Crew Headquarters. We also bumped into each other in the course of various trail club activities (I’m a founding member of the Cumberland Valley Club) and we spent some quality time in the woods together, including an epic trip to Mount Rainier. We didn’t bump into each other often, but we were friends and enjoyed each other’s company.

Some of you don’t know who the hell Bob Proudman was. Enlightening you will be no mean feat, but I’ll try.

Bob was an employee of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, (formerly the Appalachian Trail Conference, a place he fit into much more comfortably). He arrived in Harpers Ferry in 1979 after 7 years as the Supervisor of Trails for the Appalachian Mountain Club in the storied White Mountains of New Hampshire (he started as an AMC crew member in 1965). His skills at building and maintaining foot paths in ferociously difficult terrain were legendary, rivalled by his ability to run trail crews, work with volunteers, and manage projects. He literally wrote the book on the subject…Appalachian Trail Design, Construction, and Maintenance with Bill Birchard and Mike Dawson. If you’ve ever hiked on any part of the AT, you’ve benefited from Bob’s handiwork, expertise and experience.

Larger than life is cliché, but there are clichés in the lexicon for a reason.

The first thing you noticed about Bob was a magnetic physicality. He was not overly tall or especially statuesque but when he walked in a room, everybody turned and looked. He was solid, strong, and graceful in the way that mountaineers are. He came by it honestly. In Laura and Guy Waterman’s Yankee Rock and Ice A History of Climbing in the Northeastern United States first published in 1993, Bob’s name pops up in a variety of places. In the late 60’s and 70’s he put up a number of winter first-ascents in the Whites and on Mount Katahdin that seemed suicidal at the time (and still do to most of us). Much of this was done solo, in part because he was usually the only person nutty enough to try it, and with equipment that would be considered archaic today.

Dark, craggy, and blessed with a growling baritone, he was a mesmerizing conversationalist. He had a deep philosophical/spiritual bent (the only Presbyterian/Buddhist I personally ever bumped into) and was possibly the best-read person I ever knew, so he always had a lot of interesting things to say. In his dealings with family and friends he was reflexively kind and solicitous of people’s feelings, but he could also be as blunt as a ballbat, something I sort of liked. He was a passionate and effective champion for wild places. Indeed the Bigelow Range in Maine would likely be a very different and diminished place without his bull-headed and effective advocacy.

He had an abiding love of mountains. He had an abiding love of a bunch of stuff.

One day I was sitting across a picnic table from him, when out of the blue he exhaled a cloud of nasty cigar smoke and growled

“You know, I’m really a creature of excess…it’s kind of a problem…”

“Well no shit Bob!”

He loved his kids and family and friends beyond measure.

He liked to drink and eat. He liked women. He liked brutal, epic hikes and climbs in abominable weather. He liked to laugh and make others laugh and had an affinity for the lowest of low-brow humor. He liked a challenge. He liked to play music and sing. He liked to sleep. He liked tobacco. He liked the comradery of volunteers and trail crews. He liked sports. He liked writing and reading. He liked to stick up for people and causes. He liked to think and meditate. He liked rocks and sharp, well-maintained trail tools. He liked to be helpful. He liked mischief. And so on…

Often, moderation was not in him…

At his wake I remarked to two friends that the real shame of his absence was his inability to attend the event. We all agreed it was likely he would have drunk too much, delivered a loud, masterful and moving self-eulogy, made a spectacle of himself in various ways, and would have had to be spirited away and stuffed in a car to keep him out of any real trouble.

Bob’s angel was beautiful, and soared above the crags on great white wings, his devil had horns, a tail and a pitchfork. Neither was ever very far away.

So he was not Mother Theresa.

In his defense I offer the commentary of my departed and very dear aunt, who on being told her husband was a handful responded, “Yeah, he’s not a saint, but you wouldn’t want to be married to a saint. Saints are hard to live with!”

I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately, and I return repeatedly to certain memories.

He and Bob Smith are running side by side at breakneck speed down the Scott Farm lawn after a sailing frisbee in a game of Ultimate. Mr Smith, the crew chief of the Mid-Atlantic trail crew is as strong as an ox, as is Proudman. They are full-out stride-for-stride, eyeing the floating disk, and beating the living shit out of each other with their forearms. They are also cackling like schoolboys. I don’t remember who came down with it.

I have just unloaded on Bob over the phone about a mean-spirited and obstinate trail volunteer who has been making a lot of other volunteers and ATC staff miserable. I called the guy an asshole and I meant it. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and a soft, deep rumble replied “I think he’s just unloved and unhappy. I feel sorry for him.”

Bob and I are sitting on a streamside boulder at Mount Ranier. He and two of my best friends have just spent the last four days successfully climbing the mountain via a particularly difficult route. Now back down and decompressing from the climb, I’ve just shown Bob how to fly cast, and I then hook and land a few small native rainbows from the steep little creek. I explain that these little fish are likely steelhead parr, and that they may find their way to the open Pacific, then back again to this same small creek. The connection these little fish have to the enormity of the ocean fascinates him, and he asks question on question about them. The questions continue through dinner and a few beers back at the campsite, his mind racing to tidewater with the steelhead, and then, in an instant and almost in mid-question, “Bivouac Bob” is sound asleep and snoring.

At Bob’s memorial service, there is a moment when roughly 15 or so men my age stand up and walk to the front of the church. One of them has a guitar. Their spokesman explains that they are all guys who worked on Bob’s trail crews in the White Mountains back in the 70’s. They look like weather-beaten old pirates. They never forgot their old mentor. They sing a heartfelt Tom Petty song for Bob, and I tear up. I’ve run crews of young folks my whole professional life, and I know how much this means.

The world seems depauperate and incomplete without him. The loss for his kids and his siblings and the rest of his family must be enormous and unfillable.

I am not a devout person; the hypothetical hereafter doesn’t resonate with me all that much. That said, maybe somewhere along the Franconia or Presidential ridgeline, or in the wild scree of the Mahoosucs or the Bigelows, in the lee of a rock in a big gale, perhaps he has found a quiet place to think and to watch, his goofy gap-toothed grin visible beneath a wool watchcap.

I would like that a lot.

Yallerhammer

Note: For reasons that will be obvious, I had to wait until my wonderful boss and dear old friend retired before I could publish this essay, which was written in 2004. A few things have changed in the Smokies since then.  There's less trouble with acid precipitation than there was, so the balsams are doing better, but it now appears climate change will do them in anyway.  Also, the little campground is busier now, but you can still usually get a tent site. The fish are still there, and I still won't tell you exactly where. Enjoy yourselves...

Joe Baker

Boiling Springs, Pa

Copyright, April 2004

Dressing

Thread: Primrose Silk

Hook: Wet Fly, 2 X Long, Heavy Wire

Body: Variable. Some versions are peacock herl; some are yellow silk or silk floss

Tail: Variable. Some with no tail, some with grouse or hen hackle fibers, some with red wool

Hackle: Short side (biot side) of a split primary feather from the Yellow Shafted Flicker, Palmered up the body.


This fly is illegal.

It employs the plumage of a protected, non-game bird, the Flicker or Yallerhammer, so common in the southern mountains. The dressing is native to the highland border country between North Carolina and Tennessee.

Prologue: Newport, Tennessee

The last light is just about gone now, but you can still make them out down there on the southeastern horizon. You can also feel them. The Smoky Mountains are big, and big mountains everywhere loom palpably. Blind folks know this.

I am ensconced in a shabby, sterile motel room, decompressing from seven hours of white-knuckle driving on I-81 with a cold beer, and staring out the window at the mountains. I am supposed to drive to a professional conference in Nashville tomorrow, at least that is the lie I told my eminently decent and long-suffering boss. Instead I am detouring to the mountains for a couple days to see the spring, then resuming my trip to the conference. This is risky…I suppose I could get my ass fired. Risk gets harder as you age, and I’m now pushing 50, but time teaches other things beyond the fear of death and loss.

Here’s something I know, having earned the knowledge at the hands of my fair share of unlooked for trouble and amazing grace.

Even the most rock-solid and dependable certainties of all of our lives, the things we depend on and the assumptions that keep us going every day, are so much smoke. Every time we start the car, write a poem, fry eggs, attend a boring meeting, make love, feel the sun, hug our children, wash dishes, pet the dog, or laugh at an old friend’s yarn can be the last time ever, to be replaced by God knows what. The future, while open to conjecture and informed by probability, is profoundly unknowable, and of course the past is, well, just that. If there’s a game plan for a life lived well, it’s to remember to appreciate and feel the moment as it happens, while simultaneously not getting too uptight about where it’s all going or too mushy about how it used to be. The good life is right there on the bright, glittering edge, heedless of the cliffs on both sides. You just relax and you feel it, or you seize up and you fall.

Sometimes this requires guts.

Of course it’s just as true that I’m simply ready for a couple days of spring trout fishing after a brutal winter, and I don’t think I’ll get caught if I play hooky. So maybe I’m just an irresponsible bum hiding his indolence in the mud of some half-assed and simple-minded philosophy.

I mean, I wouldn’t want you to think I was shallow or something.

In either case, and irrespective of noble or base motivations, tomorrow will find me neglecting my professional duties, in a secluded cove that is said to harbor a very good trout stream. As I finish my beer, and the last gentle light of dusk fades, I try with all my heart to feel guilty and afraid, but I just can’t manage it. I fall asleep with a warm breeze blowing through the open window from the foot slopes of the mountains, carrying with it both the engine drone of the interstate and the perfume of wild azaleas.

The Heart of the Mountains

A roostertail of dust chases me over 16 miles of gravel road, the section beyond the “End State Maintenance” sign pretty damned bad. After almost two hours, the road improves somewhat on entering federal land, and I see the river for the first time. It’s bigger than I expected, eighty feet wide in spots, and lovely. There is a canopy of hardwoods and an understory of giant rhododendron that overhangs dark and delicious-looking water tight to the banks. On entering the campground, I find only 6 of the 30 or so tent sites occupied, so I select something nice and shady and private. In a few minutes the tent is up and coffee is made and I begin to gather a sense of my surroundings which are lush and handsome beyond description, but also troubled.

The Great Smoky Mountain ecosystem, a World Biosphere Reserve and the brooding, beating heart of southern Appalachia, is sick and maybe dying. On this glorious and bright day, it looks hale and hearty enough, but the cancer is in the air and the water, in the soil and clinging to the trees, gnawing away at the mountain’s lifeblood and her ancient bones. Acidic precipitation carried on the west wind from the coal fired generating plants and factories of the Midwest and South is slowly pickling the place. Organisms, plants and creatures that don’t belong here have invaded the mountains to the detriment of the natives. There are too damned many people who want to hike, or sightsee, or camp, or drive, or play hooky and fish here. The place was subjected to episodes of over hunting, logging, mining, and other consumptive activities in the last couple centuries from which it has yet to recover. If you look hard, and you know what to look for, there is death and decay visible within that lush riot of green. Like the music and folk tales endemic to this place, the mountains are full of trouble and sorrow.

Cases in point are the balsams. An odd combination of altitude and latitude has allowed an idiosyncratic community of plants and animals to evolve in the Smokies. You are in the Deep South here, at the same latitude as Memphis or Charlotte, but the crest of the Smokies massif rises more than a mile above sea level, scratching at the bottom of the jet stream. This is a place where catalpas, magnolias and orchids proliferate in the hollows while the ridge crests a couple miles away collect many feet of snow in the winter. Miles of this great craggy crest are covered in balsam, or more correctly, Fraser Fir (Abies fraseri). The fir tree, symbol of the Canadian forest, extended a long finger of its range south along the Appalachian highlands during the Pleistocene. When the ice retreated some 12 millennia ago, the firs remained marooned on islands of high elevation, sustained by the thin cold of the mountain tops. Here they evolved into a distinct species that mantled in deepest green the shoulders and the hoary old heads of the great mountains of the Southeast. Clingman’s Dome, LeConte, Black Mountain, Grandfather Mountain; they were all crowned in balsam. They grew slowly in the bitter weather of the ridges, a tree hundreds of years old can look like a sapling, and formed dense thickets that were more or less impenetrable by anything bigger than a rabbit. It is a forest found nowhere else.

It is dying, and in many places it is already dead. It turns out Fraser Firs cannot tolerate acidic precipitation. To add to the stress from acidity, an invasive parasite, the Balsam Adelgid, is attacking the firs. So they are dying by the thousands, by the acres, by the square miles, their gray corpses rattling in the wind and pointing accusatory and skeletal fingers up into the guilty sky. From time to time there is talk in Washington about doing something to limit emissions from power plants and vehicles, and many good and worried people raise hell and try to eradicate the parasites, clean up the air, save the trees, but you know how that goes. In this world some kinds of green are more important than others, and so the firs die. I made my first visit down here in the early 1980’s when I was just a young man; I have made several visits since. When first I came here, the trees were fine. All of this death and dying has come during my own lifetime. I am witness to extinction.

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If you drive past the campground to the end of the road, the stream splits into two branches, accessible only on foot. The game involves picking your way through thickets, clambering over slippery rocks, casting, or trying to, through the branches, chance encounters with mosquitoes, blackflies, punkies, snakes, skunks and hornets, and the occasional nasty tumble into freezing water. The trout are usually small, always wild. It’s my favorite kind of fishing. I get out the daypack, and load up hip boots, my tackle and flies, drinking water, the camera, and soon I’m walking away from the car and the day and a half drive it took to get here. Instantly I am in Copeland’s Appalachian Spring. Big basswoods, oaks and hickories give way to rhododendron some ten feet high and below them, a carpet of Wake Robins. Songbirds of every description, warblers, Cardinals, a Carolina Wren, serenade me on my way. I run into one or two hikers, but by and large I have it to myself. After about an hour I stop, rig up, stash the pack in the woods and make that first tentative and anticipatory cast into a new stream.

The fly disappears in a little blip, and I am tight to a small trout. It’s a rainbow (Onchorhynchus gardnerii), and it has as much business here as a piranha. Rainbow trout are native to the Pacific slope of North America. They were introduced here in the 20th century, and in some places, they now occupy the top of the aquatic food chain in the Smokies. They have done this at the expense of the locals. The Smokies are historically one of the southernmost strongholds of the Brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), like the balsams an Ice Age holdover that did well in the mountains. The larger and more aggressive rainbows have, in many places, pushed the brookies way up the hollers, or extirpated them entirely. There is an effort to restore the brookies going on in the Smokies, but it’s going better in some drainages than in others. So it is that this chunky and very healthy little trout I hold in my palm can be viewed as a symbol of the world’s generally shitty condition, like the dead balsams on the ridge above. It strikes me that it could also be viewed as dinner, but I slip it back into the stream and let the little bastard live.

There is a small pocket of dark water just upstream, and I have to thread the cast under an overhanging branch to fish it. After a couple tries the fly lands where I want it and there is a flash of crimson and olive. A brookie! A nice, fat, 10 inch long brookie! A real prize in a stream this small, and a sign that the mountains may be hard pressed, but as yet remain defiant. The brookie (a “speck” down here) is just as healthy and feisty as that rainbow, and doesn’t appear ready for extirpation. He goes back in the water too, and I remain hopeful.

I proceed upstream for the next couple hours, fishing about a half mile of little pools and pockets and catching a mess of rainbows and brookies, all healthy and wild. In due course the sun starts getting low on the horizon, and I start back down the valley, reclaim my pack and make for the trailhead. When I arrive at the car, which is parked in a clearing, I find three other cars nearby, with folks standing around with binoculars and cameras, staring and pointing across the meadow. I look in the indicated direction and there, big as life, is a herd of fifteen or twenty elk.

Elk (Cervus canadensis) were common here but were extirpated from the Smokies ecosystem in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the last couple years, they’ve been reintroduced in places from a herd in Kentucky and from the Rockies. The jury is still out on their long term survival, but there are newborns in this herd, and the adults seem fat and happy. The evening sun is still warm, there are elk back in the Smokies, and maybe things will be OK. I hang around and watch until it’s almost dark.

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How one views what’s happening to the Smokies depends entirely on perspective. We are the current apex of evolving life on this planet, and we understand the world on our own terms, but how important we are in the big picture is debatable. Beneath the water, as Norman McLean knew, are the rocks, and under the rocks are the words. On the little river I fished today, those words come from the stony heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Their words are neither lament nor eulogy. The mountains rose 250 million years ago, and they aren’t going anywhere soon. They murmured up at me from beneath the rocks and the water all afternoon, and amid mutterings of balsams and rainbow trout and the return of the elk, they drove home a terrifying point. Failing any change in our collective behavior, in the end our kind will create so much waste and extract so many resources that we’ll simply poison or starve ourselves. When we do, far up the steepest most forgotten holler, below a trickle of icy water and moss, the mountains iron heart will still beat steadily long after our demise is complete. The ruthlessly Darwinian centuries will pass, trees and animals of other kinds will evolve and live here, and eventually the mountains will forget we were ever there.

It’s not the Smokies that are in trouble, it’s us.

Dinner

Daylight in the nearly deserted campground comes on the song of a Hermit Thrush, the little gray bird (an LGB to experienced birders) who’s sweet descending scale sounds like he’s in a tunnel. I breakfast alone, far from the half dozen other occupied campsites, and marvel at the contrasts of this place. The vast expanse of the Smokies, including both the National Park and the surrounding National Forest lands, the primitive condition of some of the road and trail network, and the absence of even foot trails in some entire drainages, guarantee real solitude if that’s what you’re looking for. On the other hand, Great Smoky Mountains National Park gets something like nine million visits annually; the most visited American National Park. Almost all of those people travel the main road over Newfound Gap and up to Clingman's Dome, stay in the large campgrounds, wander the tourist traps of Gatlinburg, and hike on the Appalachian Trail. This can lead to some unimaginably shocking situations.

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Back in 1981 when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail, I came through the Smokies in mid-March. There were 40 inches of snow packed onto the mountain crest, where the AT is located. During the six days it took me to traverse the park, it rained more or less torrentially for four of them, producing ice, flooding, and unbelievably miserable hiking conditions. Despite the rigors of the season, the AT was full of people including other through-hikers, day hikers and folks out for a few days. Backcountry camping was, and remains to this day, restricted to established sites and shelters. There is a series of mortared native stone camping shelters along the AT’s route in the Smokies. Built in the Depression by the CCC, they feature inside fireplaces with chimneys, tin roofs, and two tiers of bunks. They’re lovely, functional examples of backwoods architecture, and havens for generations of hikers seeking shelter from the often wild weather of the mountaintops. Thanks to the depredations of the park’s infamously bold black bears, which are inured to people and have sometimes been fed by tourists, some of the shelters featured cyclone fence gates 8 feet tall with several strands of barbed wire on top. Sometimes the bears came in the moonlight and rattled the gates while the hikers shouted imprecations and stared bug-eyed and terrified at the intruders; a sort of inverse zoo.

I have a vivid memory of one shelter, within an easy day’s walk of the road crossing at Newfound Gap. At that time park regulations specified “cat sanitation” at all backcountry campsites and shelters. This means digging a small hole in the ground for human waste and covering things up with soil when the task is complete. Of course, 40 inches of icy snowpack precludes this possibility. This shelter was, therefore, the epicenter of a circular minefield of poop, toilet paper, and other appalling things that began feet from the shelter and extended outward some 200 yards. For me the final straw came at the source of potable water at this shelter, a nearby perennial spring. As I squatted by the spring filling my water bottle I chanced to gaze across the small depression the spring had formed in the ground and found myself at eye level with, and no more than six feet away from, something extremely unpleasant.

There are too Goddamned many people in some parts of the Smokies, and that was true more than 20 years ago. I’ve stayed away from those places since that first horrible encounter, but I assume it’s even worse now.

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Thanks to the primitive road access and the lack of amenities, it’s not like that in this campground. In fact, based on evidence like the abundant down, dry firewood lying around, the lightly used foot trails, and the pristine fishing, I doubt this place is ever crowded. Solitude and adventure are still available in the Smokies for those willing to do a little extra work. Having done my part and endured the drive in, I now plan to reap my reward with a second day of trout fishing, this time in the lower river, below the campground.

I park the car near the site of an old mountain farmstead a couple miles below the campground, and donning hip boots and vest, wander down to the stream. It’s very different down here; much bigger, less steep. Even here, next to a road, there is no discernable fisherman’s path along the stream. I roll over a few rocks and collect a sample of aquatic insects to see what they might be eating. My little seine net is full of stonefly nymphs of the family Perlidae. Some are large and some tiny, but all are at least partly a rich bright yellow in color. This explains something about the regional suite of artificial fly patterns traditionally employed in the Tennessee river valley. The Tellico Nymph, the Yellow Sally, the Golden Stone, and the legendary Yallerhammer, all feature a mottled yellow color scheme. Not surprisingly, they all work well down here, and less well in other parts of the world where the yellow stoneflies are less common.

I tie on a smallish yellow and brown wetfly of my own design and begin to ply the new water. Before long there is a terrific strike and the rod bends against a little bulldog of a fish that dives toward the bottom of the river and shakes his head with vigor. I’m sure it’s a brown trout before I ever see it based on this furious tenacity, and I’m right. He’s maybe ten inches long, football-shaped, a mixture of butternut and chocolate and silver and crimson; as handsome a fish as you will ever see, and like the rainbow, a native of foreign shores. Browns (Salmo trutta) are the native salmonids of the old world, and their original range includes most of Europe and much of Asia and even North Africa. They have a reputation for being wary of anglers, for growing to large size, and for a highly combative and predatory demeanor. I once caught a big one who disgorged a whole field mouse as I was trying to unhook him. Also, like rainbows, they were widely introduced in Eastern North America, and they are similarly reviled for displacing the native brookies. That said, the lower river proves to contain a mix of browns, rainbows and brook trout, all of which came to the yellow wet fly. All three varieties run a little larger in size in this part of the stream. Some of the browns and rainbows are a foot long. I forget about dire environmental threats and the grim future prospects for humanity, and just start having a hellofa good time. By about noon, the fishing slows, so I start to walk back to the car through a patch of damp, streamside woods. I begin to notice a familiar and appealing aroma rising from beneath my feet and squat down for a closer look. Ramps (Allium tricoccum)! The fiercely pungent and unimaginably tasty little wild leeks of Appalachia; they’re all over the place! I am instantly transported back some 23 years to the steep slopes of the Roan Mountain.

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I’m 24 again, and I am climbing steadily, my head down and an enormous pack settled on my broad young back. The Catawba Rhododendron for which the Highlands of Roan are famous are in full glorious flower, but I don’t notice. I’m just a month into my long hike but I’ve already learned one of the first rules of the experienced backpacker: if you want to enjoy the scenery stop walking and enjoy it, otherwise keep your eyes on the two feet of trail in front of you or you’ll fall over something. I don’t even see the guy until he says “Howdy!”.

My head pops up and I slam on the brakes. Standing no more than three feet away to the side of the trail is a bearded man in his 30’s. He is dressed in overalls, work boots, a t-shirt and a ball cap advertising a brand of bull semen (a product that, at that time, I had no idea was commercially available). He has a burlap sack about a quarter full of something in his right hand. He has a large caliber revolver protruding from the front pocket of his overalls. He bears an unfortunate resemblance to one of the characters in the film Deliverance. There is nobody else around, and I am scared shitless.

I somehow manage a return “howdy”, and a conversation starts. He turns out to be friendly and polite, asking about the details of my journey to-date and expressing some interest in hiking the AT himself when he retires. He’s a farmer and auto mechanic in a small East Tennessee town not far away. We chat about the weather and the rhododendron and other wildflowers, then he reaches in the sack and extracts a generous fistful of some green stuff. The air is instantly redolent of onions and garlic.

“Would ye like some ramps?”

“Excuse me?”

He educates me in the ways of the ramp, telling me about festivals in their honor in Tennessee and West Virginia, complete with ramp queens, ramp eating contests and ramp sculpture. He shows me some growing just off the trail, explaining how to best harvest them. He tells me the little buggers are said to be curative for everything from colds to menstrual cramps to impotence. “I don’t rightly know if they’re actually good fer any of that stuff, but they sure is good eatin. Nothin better! Please take a mess with you!”

He turns out to be a great guy; decent, funny and knowledgeable. I put his gift under the top of my pack flap, and thank him profusely. That evening they would turn a pretty dreadful freeze-dried meal into something wonderful. Just before we part, I finally work up the nerve to ask him what the hell the hog leg in his pocket is for.

“That?! Well, that just sorta skeers away red ants and such!”

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So I shamelessly continue my lawless behavior and break the proscription against gathering plants on federal land by pulling me a nice mess of ramps from the woods along the trout stream. Lunch goes out of the cooler, and the ramps, sealed in a ziplock, go in. Following my lunch break, I drive further downstream to a different part of the river.

It proves tough. It’s even bigger and deeper down here, and my hip boots really limit how much water I can cover. Furthermore, the noonday sun puts the fish into a funk. Wild trout, like all wild animals, feel exposed to predators at mid day and sulk in deep water and dense cover. The morning’s hot action is followed by a very slow to dead afternoon. At about four I am ready to give up when I think I see something move. Over there, across the stream, tight to that sunken log and just below that overhanging branch: I might have seen a slight bulge or wink in the dark water. It’s hard to tell, but clearly worth a cast.

The spot is a big fish place. It has the precise combination of current and cover and access to deep

water required by an old and successful trout, maybe even a 14 incher in a stream like this. It takes three casts to finally hook a small dry fly under the branch and that bulge reappears. I stick him, and all hell breaks loose. A magnificent brown, way bigger than 14 inches, tailwalks and cartwheels in blind fury out of the dark water and into the fast current in mid stream. I am so shocked to see him that I just stand there like an idiot, and line begins to peel smoothly from my reel. He is boring hard downstream, and for the first time in three years, including two trips to Montana, I see the backing behind my 100 foot fly line. Finally I come to my senses, wade carefully to shore, and start jogging down the bank, gaining line back on my reel. When the fish and I arrive at the next big pool downstream I finally gain the upper hand and bring what proves to be a brown trout of 18 inches and nearly three pounds to hand. The stress of combat proves too much for the big guy, and I ruefully realize I’ve done him in and won’t be able to let him go. My sorrow disappears when I remember the ramps in the cooler. I deliver the coup de grace with the butt of my knife and eviscerate the fish, which I am already envisioning as a serious episode of culinary excess. His gut is packed full of yellow stone flies. I walk back to the car along the gravel road with the huge dripping trout hanging from my finger, secretly hoping someone drives by so I can brag, but nobody does.

Supper will be prepared on a wooden picnic table at the campsite with the simplest equipment; a pair of one burner camp stoves, a few pots and pans, a sharp knife and a wooden spoon. My field larder has all the necessary ingredients and a few well chosen condiments. I open a pre-dinner ale, and begin my preparations. A pot of water is set on to boil. In a fry pan, the ramps, washed and coarsely chopped, are sautéed in olive oil with a Portobello mushroom, some coarse salt, and black pepper. The aroma is indescribable. A splash of red wine is added when the ramps are almost transparent, and a handful of sun dried tomatoes goes in too. Very soon the tomatoes are plumped, the sauce is reduced and ready, and the pan is covered and set aside. The water is boiling now, and a quarter pound of linguini go into the pot with a teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of salt. The big trout comes out of the cooler, and I admire him, then realize I have a problem: my frypan is too small to accommodate him! I hate to cut him up, presentation is important even here, but I have no choice. I behead him, and cut him in two roughly equal sections that will just fit in the frypan. More olive oil, a crushed garlic clove, and a teaspoon of dried basil go into the pan and onto the stove. The two large pieces of fish are dipped in water and tossed into a plastic bag with some freshly grated Romano and some coarse corn meal. They sizzle and curl when they hit the hot oil. Six minutes a side and the crust is a golden brown and the firm flesh is falling away from the bones. Fresh lemon juice is squeezed on. The pasta is drained, the ramp sauce applied, the fish arranged around it, and a garnish of shaved Romano, lemon wedges and wild violets placed just so. It looks so damned good I photograph it. Here is a meal fit for a five star seduction: something that starts with footsies under the dinner table and meaningful gazes over the rims of glasses full of, say, a vintage Oregon Pinot Noir, and ends at dawn with songbirds and a gentle breeze. Alas, I am all alone. Next time maybe…

Of course I can’t finish it. I save half of everything for breakfast, and am still stuffed to the eyebrows. By the time it’s all cleaned up and put away it’s dusk. I kindle a fire, open my last beer, and pull out my harmonica to begin mental preparations for the trip to Nashville early tomorrow morning. A blues in E seems appropriate…

“ Went to town with a pistol and a hundred dollar bill,

Went to town with a pistol and a hundred dollar bill.

Had everything I needed just to get my dumb ass killed.”

“Hello”! I look behind me and a smallish fellow about my age is standing on the access road to my campsite. “My friends and I are here for a few days of fishing. We noticed that big trout you pulled out of your cooler and figured there was good story there somewhere. You feel like some company you’re more than welcome at our campfire.” I do feel like some company Goddammit.

There’s four of them, the guy who came by my campsite and his girlfriend, both from Kentucky, an older gent from Pennsylvania, and a quiet local fellow from the Tennessee side of the mountains, just outside of Gatlinburg. It turns out we all share interests in trout, art, writing, good single malt (which they seem to have a lot of) and split cane fly rods. I get to tell my fish story. They’ve been fishing this stream for years, so they have plenty of fish stories too. This could go on for awhile, but duty calls. I bug out at about 10:00, just as a variety of new bottles start to appear from their various vehicles. For just a few minutes, I sit quietly in my dark campsite and listen to the spring peepers, a whippoorwill, a Great Horned Owl far up the holler. I don’t really want to go to Nashville, but I can do it now. It’ll be OK. I’m just so happy I came here. I stand up, stretch, brush my teeth, and crawl in the tent.

Coda: Yallerhammer

I have breakfast eaten and everything stowed neatly in the car by 8:00AM. I decide to stop by my neighbors’ encampment on my way out to civilization. Only the local fellow is awake, sitting in a

folding recliner with a cup of coffee and copy of Huck Finn, enjoying the morning. I look over at last nights campsite which is littered with several empty bottles of expensive Port and a nearly empty fifth of Glenmorangie. I look back at my companion who observes “They won’t be up anytime soon, but I guess that’s sorta obvious.” We have coffee and we talk about Twain and the South and the Smokies. The subject of flies comes up and I give him a couple of the yellow wetflies that worked so well for me yesterday. From out of nowhere he pops the question.

“You ever see or fish a Yallerhammer?”

“Nope. I know what they’re supposed to look like, but I’ve never actually seen one.”

“That right?”

An hour and a half later I hit the interstate, my car caked with dust, and start the high-speed run across the state to Music City and my temporarily abandoned responsibilities. Tucked back in the corner of one of my fly wallets is a reminder of the great broad-shouldered mountains now receding in my rear view mirror. Precisely what that reminder is, along with the name and location of the stream where it was given to me, is, frankly, none of your fuckin business.