Joe Baker
Boiling Springs, Pa.
First Day of School
Tucked back off a blind curve on the two lane road that leads millions of visitors through Yellowstone National Park is something the Park Service doesn’t like folks to know about. It’s hidden below a hilltop in a sagebrush flat and is completely invisible from the road. It’s accessed by a gravel drive with a very small “Authorized Personnel Only” sign. I don’t know what it’s like today, but in the early 1980’s, when I worked a summer in the Park, just down that gravel drive was a slum, actually a vast collection of decrepit trailers, baking in the open sun. This is where Yellowstone’s army of mostly young and horribly underpaid seasonal employees was quartered. The senior, and therefore privileged, employees got the trailers. Those further down the food chain stayed in the bunkhouse, near the back of the slum. That’s where I was assigned.
When I arrived in the middle of a Saturday morning, all the other residents were working or away, and there was no one to show me around, so I explored on my own. The bunkhouse was a relatively new building, rectangular and of frame construction, covered with unpainted pressure treated plywood siding, and from the outside, indistinguishable from a garage or utility shed. Most of the inside was divided into about a dozen 8 by 8 foot cubicles, separated from each other by plywood dividers that were about 7 feet high, leaving a gap of a foot between the floor and the bottom of the divider and about two feet between the ceiling and the top of the divider. A shower curtain served as a door. They were, in other words, like large toilet stalls. Each contained a clothes rack, a plywood chest of drawers, and a single bed: period. I found an unoccupied cell, moved in, and continued my reconnaissance.
The bathroom featured a large, undivided shower room, with multiple shower heads protruding from the wall. In an adjoining room was a line of sinks, each with a mirror above it. Behind the sinks was a row of toilets with dividers but no doors. Clearly neither comfort nor privacy was much of a concern. The kitchen was also communal, with several counters and sinks and electric ranges lining two of the walls. A third wall was lined with refrigerators, and there was a large Formica dining table with a dozen chairs around it in the middle of the kitchen. A fly tying vice was clamped to the table, and in its jaws was a flawlessly tied deer hair grasshopper. I brought in my small bag of groceries; milk, juice, some fruit and cheese and bread, and opened one of the fridges to see if there was room in it for
my things. It contained only two items. There was a dead adult bobcat in a large clear plastic bag that had apparently been field dressed, but was otherwise entire, occupying the upper shelf. On the bottom shelf was another large clear plastic bag containing no less than ten pounds of marijuana. I shut the door immediately. …………………………………………………………………………………………………
Teachers
That evening I met my roommates. There was Scott, a pleasant if a little vacuous laborer in his early 20’s and a serious Christian and basketball gym rat, in that order. Then there were Hoppy and Bobby X.
Hoppy was responsible for the bobcat. He was a park sanitation technician, a Connecticut Yankee and a military veteran in his early 30’s, wiry, bearded, with intense blue eyes softened with an easy grin and a laugh like a hyena. He’d spotted the dead critter along the road as he clung to his garbage truck during the early morning rounds in the Mammoth area. He’d collected it as a possible, and inexhaustible, source of mottled brown fur, almost perfect for Hare’s Ear nymphs. He caped the carcass at the table while I ate dinner, and salted the hide. He tied all of his own flies, and did some commercial orders as well. He built his own rods up from blanks. His leaders were hand tied to his own formulas, and his only waders were an old pair of cutoffs and tennis shoes. He didn’t own a car.
Bobby X, as anyone will tell you, was a piece of work. A big, loud, burly, profane blue-collar escapee from Detroit, he is, to this day, something of a legend in certain circles of the Paradise Valley country. A few months before accepting his current job as a heavy equipment operator at the Park, his doctor told him that he faced certain death if he didn’t stop drinking. He did, cold turkey. However, the doctor had said nothing about dope. Like Hoppy, Bobby was a consummate flyfisher, but that’s where the similarities ended. He matched Hoppy’s careful penny-pinching homespun approach to angling with a breathtaking disregard for money, at least as far as fishing was concerned.
Bobby did some guiding out of a few of the famous flyshops in West Yellowstone and Livingston, and to that end he owned a Mackenzie boat. If you’re unfamiliar with Mac boats, you’re missing something. Descended from in-shore coastal fishing dories, they combine the dory’s wide flare with a pronounced rocker fore and aft and a flat bottom. Mac’s are the perfect river boat, maneuverable, high floating, and graceful beyond description; like a curled willow leaf. They are also outrageously expensive. Bob towed his five grand boat and $1500 trailer behind a $200 gray Chevy van he affectionately named “the Gem”. “The Gem” lacked a muffler and front bumper. It had rust holes you could see the road through, and sat on four absolutely bald tires. Bobby kept three or four more bald tires, already mounted on rims, in the back, to deal with the inevitable blowouts. Most disconcerting was the steering box, which barely worked. You could recognize “the Gem” at great distances, even without the Mac boat, by its tendency to veer between the narrow lanes of Yellowstone’s mountainous, crowded, and curving roads. It was easily the shabbiest and most dangerous vehicle I’ve ever been in, and Bobby’s clients, who included one of the Hunt brothers and a US Senator, got to ride in it too!
To accompany the boat, Bobby had bought two 9 ½ foot, six weight, Winston graphite rods, fitted with Hardy reels, and top shelf lines he replaced annually. They cost him between two and three hundred dollars each in 1982, just for the rods. While he was a solid and accomplished fly tier, Bobby bought all of his flies, dozens of dozens, from Blue Ribbon, Dan Bailey’s, and other shops that featured locally tied patterns. He used store-bought leaders, owned the best chest waders and vest, and whenever anything wore or sprung a leak, he pitched it. Since he worked as a seasonal maintenance man and part-time guide when I knew him, this meant he supported his fishing and reefer habits and little else. He lived on Wonder bread, peanut butter, bologna, and twinkies. He had pulled a couple of his own teeth rather than have them filled or repaired by a dentist.
Bobby and Hoppy would sit around the table in the kitchen of the bunkhouse most evenings, Hoppy tying flies and sipping a beer, Bobby chain-smoking doobies, and they would argue. “I seen fish take the knots in them home made leaders you like so damned much as midges. They just make cheap, dumb bastards like you miss fish!” “Come on Bobby, how often does that happen? I spent less money on leaders in the last ten years than you did last month, asshole!”
…and so on.
I had just arrived and barely knew these guys, and I was the proud owner of a home made fiberglass fly rod I’d built myself. I had taken this summer job because I wanted to become a good fisherman, and by listening to these two I knew a couple things. First, despite the griping, these guys fished together every chance they got, and we’re close friends. Also, despite the differences in approach, these guys regularly caught more and bigger fish than anyone else I’d ever met. Clearly, if I kept my mouth shut, and paid attention, I might learn something.
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School Daze
What happened during most of that Yellowstone June and July is now more than 30 years in my past. As the mountain summer came on, Bobby and Hoppy passed along lessons, and I became a competent angler mostly by watching rather than listening (neither of them was college prof material). The lessons come back every time I’m on the water, but the specific memories have now faded to uncertain fragments. Still, there are moments that stand out…
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“My peter’s longer than those dinks yer catchin up there boy.”
But Hoppy would fish anywhere, for anything, so one fine June evening he came along. The standard approach to these creeks, or at least mine, was working upstream with smallish, hairwing dry flies. I proudly stepped right up to the bank of the little stream with Hoppy still rigging his rod, made a cast, and caught a small brookie. I caught a few more as Hoppy continued to carefully select a fly and deliberately tie it on. He calmly walked upstream past me, one of his evil-smelling home made cigarettes dangling from his lips, and took up a position some 50 yards upstream of me. I walked up and watched him. When he made his first cast, there was the solid “sploosh” of a heavily weighted nymph, something I had never even considered using on these tiny creeks.
Flycasting, at least good flycasting, is graceful. The exception to the rule is casting a big, heavy stonefly nymph with three or four splitshot pinched on the leader. Even the best caster looks like a drunk slinging a chunk of logging chain around with a rig like that. But grace can come unlooked for and in odd places. Instantly Hoppy’s rod tip was elevated far overhead, his left hand sweeping smoothly back and removing all the slack from the line. From the rod tip to the unseen fly bouncing along the bottom, the line formed a nearly straight line, the rod tip leading the nymph downstream. Hoppy’s thin frame adopted the hunched, nearly motionless, very tense yet very relaxed concentration of a heron. He was backlit by the evening sun, and cut the most graceful figure imaginable. You could tell something special was about to happen.
He led the nymph past a small logjam, and for no apparent reason set the hook. His rod bucked over and started throbbing, and expressionless, he quickly netted a brook trout an honest foot long and as fat as a football. I had, as yet, not seen a trout half that big in this creek. He admired the muscular fish for a moment, marked its length on his net handle, then slipped it back in the creek. Hoppy looked up at me, blew out a cloud of smoke, and grinned:
“You got a tape measure on ya? I don’t really wanna see that shitbird’s nasty little pecker but I think it’s best to be prepared!”
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We are drifting along the Yellowstone, still high and dirty with snowmelt, and we are under attack by
The river is nearly a quarter mile wide here, and at first glance, a more or less uniform undulating surface. Bobby is screaming at me like a drill sergeant. “There, you jackass, right into that soft spot below the rock, didn’t you see that!? Are you friggin blind? There, cast behind that log! Jesus Christ, can’t you cast 60 feet? What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Bobby is working his ass off to put me into the best spots, but I’m so ignorant that I don’t even understand what he’s doing, and can’t cast well enough to take advantage of his brilliant boatsmanship. To rub salt in the wound, Hoppy is just killing them back there in the stern; one big brown after another. I finally sit down to tease out a horrible snarl my lousy casting has put in my leader, while Bobby continues to heap the abuse on, and Hoppy continues his clinic. To hide my frustration, I keep my head down and concentrate on the knot. Bobby’s voice, louder and more serious than before, get’s my full attention.
“Fuck that leader, put your pfd on.”
Ahead of us the river forms a bright line on the near horizon, then disappears. I can hear the muffled roar of rapids, and I recognize the cliffs on river left. Yankee Jim Canyon! We are about to float into Class IV white water on a huge river swollen with snowmelt. I’ve never been in a rapid this big before. I put on my life vest then sneak a look behind me. This is what I see.
Bobby, all 5’10 240 pounds of him, is seated on the bench, the handles of the sweeps engulfed in his huge brown paws, his mouth curled in a savage and joyous grin, and his gaze fixed on the situation ahead. He does not have his life jacket on, and despite his years on the rivers of Montana and Idaho, he does not know how to swim. He is dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt, river shorts, and old sneakers. On his head is an enormous straw sombrero with tiny blue bells affixed to the brim at regular intervals, a souvenir of some madcap adventure south of the border. A pair of $150.00 polarized sunglasses shade his eyes, complete with a leather nose cover and side shades. Smoldering in the corner of his mouth is a joint that took four rolling papers and a quarter ounce of strong pot to produce. Bobby is chuckling to himself and spinning the sweeps around in the oarlocks in anticipation of the upcoming mayhem, like a confident fighter shadow boxing before the opening bell. The sky is huge and blue with big puffy white cumulus clouds, and the roaring of the wind and water join in one voice at the lip of the rapids.
I am pretty sure we are all going to die.
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When we got to the lake, my jaw dropped open. Some of the largest trout I’d ever seen in my life, rainbows and cuts, were darting here and there after something or other.
“Whatr’ they takin Hoppy?”
“Dunno. They’re not rising, so it’s probably scuds and stuff. Try this.”
Hoppy handed me a fly about size 12, with a hare’s ear body, ribbed with copper wire, and with a wispy soft hackle collar; pretty simple.
“What should I do with this?”
“Well, just pitch it on in there and noodle it around, idiot!”
So that’s what I did, and Hoppy did too. I tried to copy what he was doing, just tossing the fly out into the lake, and twitching and crawling it back to me. I didn’t catch anything. Meanwhile, Hoppy was right next to me, fishing the same kind of fly, and doing pretty much exactly what I was doing. He caught four fish in an hour. All of them were over 18 inches, and one of them was two feet long. These fish were so beefy and engorged with whatever they were wolfing down in that lake that they could barely jump. They were beautiful and enormous and I couldn’t catch them. It’s hard to express my frustration. I do know I was so pissed off I forgot about the grizzly bears.
I flogged the water with grim determination for a long time. Presently I heard a loud splash about thirty feet out, and looking toward the sound saw a substantial set of dissipating rings. Shortly thereafter, another fish came up in the same area. I made several casts toward the rings with the wet fly, with the same results I’d been having. I turned to ask Hoppy for an opinion, and found him already dressing a large deer hair hopper. After checking the knot, he looked at me.
“See that wind line?”
We were standing at the lake margin, directly in front of a gentle sagebrush-covered slope. Over the last couple hours, the wind had come up behind us. The slope created a wind shadow along the lake surface directly in front of us, but about 30 feet out, the wind contacted the lake creating a distinct edge of rippled water. Hoppy’s cast dropped his fly precisely on the wind line. A large mouth opened immediately below it and Hoppy was instantly fast to another good fish which he played and landed with dispatch.
Hoppy gave me a hopper. I knotted it on without much conviction. After all, I’d been copying his technique with the same pattern he’d been using all morning and had nothing to show for it but a sore arm. He offered limited advice.
“Cast high.”
So I did. To my surprise, the wind caught my loop and snapped my fly out, splatting it down just past the wind line. There followed an instantaneous and savage boil. I set the hook and there was a moment of ponderous and throbbing resistance, then the fly came free and sailed back at me. I doubled over like I’d been shot in the guts, and as I stared at the ground I heard Hoppy’s voice.
“Hmmm. Must’a been a big fuckin fish!”
I looked up to find him examining my fly. The hook was bent completely open.
As we hiked out to the car, I heard something very large crashing in the brush behind me not far from the trail. Hoppy ignored it. The hair on my neck stood up, and I whirled around expecting the worst, but I didn’t see anything at all.
I kept that fly, and I still have it.
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Bobby’s Sculpin
Hook: 4xlong Heavy Wire Streamer Hook, Size 6 to 2/0
Underbody: 10 to 20 wraps of heavy lead fuse wire
Body: Cream Wool Yarn
Wing: Double wide Rabbit Strip
Rib: Heavy Copper Wire
Head, Pectorals and Gills: Spun and Clipped Deer Hair
Bobby sat at Hoppy’s fly tying vice on one of the kitchen tables. His non-stop cussing and dope
“Now after you tie in, the lead goes on. You can’t use too much fuckin lead on this thing!”
“So Bob, how did you wind up out here?”
He didn’t answer right away. After the lead was wrapped he neatly tapered the thread ahead of it to eliminate any abrupt edges that would affect the appearance of the wool body.
“I got discharged from the army in 76 outta Fort Drum. I went home for awhile but there were no fuckin jobs, and I guess I just got a wild hair and got on the interstate pointed west. When I saw the Absarokas, I stopped. Now before you tie in the wool, you tie in your copper wire like this, see.”
“You still have family back in Michigan?”
“My mom and my sister. I think my dad’s around there somewhere, but who knows about that drunken motherfucker! Now I cut my own rabbit strips, cause you can’t buy em fat enough. A real sculpin is a big meaty thing. You have to taper the end to a point to tie it in, see?”
“I assume you learned how to fish back there when you were a kid, huh?”
“No, here. Now you have to lift the fur up off the skin and spiral the copper around the wing and under the body maybe three or four times to bind it down. Be sure to trim that wing off one hook gap past the bend or it’ll foul the hook.”
“You learned to fish here?! Man you’ve only been here…”
“Five years. It was pretty much all I did besides drink. I liked it, ya know. I could just be outside, alone, and casting…I had some shit to deal with. It helped. Now most people try to spin hair in bunches that are too big and they wind up with a fuckin rats nest. You wanna use small bunches, maybe two matchsticks in diameter, like this.”
The hair spun into a perfect, smooth halo, and Bob began adding more bunches in front of the first, packing them tight with his fingernails. He worked methodically, not in a blur but with the concentrated efficiency that makes great tiers capable of producing a dozen or more an hour. Presently he looked up.
“I was married for three years when I got here. Local gal I met at the Wanigan down by Chico.” He snipped off another bunch of hair.
“What happened?”
After spinning the last bunch of hair, and packing it tight against those behind it, he formed a neat thread head behind the hook eye, and whip finished it with his index and middle fingers. He spoke with his head down, looking at the fly as he added a drop of lacquer.
“Most people don’t leave enough room for the head. A crowded head is the mark of a shitty fly.”
He looked up at me. “I drank too fuckin much.”
Bob produced a single edged razor blade, and magically began to transform the globe of spun hair into the distinctive, shovel-shaped head of a sculpin minnow, complete with flaring pectoral fins and protruding gills. As the stubble rained down on the table top and the floor, the sculpin sprang to life in Bobby’s hands.
“So Bob, what are you gonna do after layoff this fall?”
Bobby tossed the sculpin onto the table in front of me and stood up and stretched. He walked toward the door.
“Keep that and fish it with a split shot right on the nose. And be careful you don’t bury the Goddamned thing in your head with one of those shitty casts of yours.”
He stopped halfway out the door, looking at his shoes. “I don’t know what I’ll do this winter. Maybe they’ll keep me here long enough to collect unemployment. I might do some wiring for a guy up in Bozeman who owns some apartments, or I might do some post and pole logging over by Livingston if the snow’s not too bad. Whatever I do, I ain’t going back to Michigan. I ain’t never going back to Michigan.”
With that he went out to watch the sunset.
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It took us almost three weeks of planning to arrange our work schedules, but the August day we’d earmarked for the big float finally arrived. We ran my car up to Livingston and came back to Emigrant to launch. Hoppy, Bobby and I were on the water by 6:30 AM. We had a big cooler with cold drinks and sandwiches, reports of great fishing conditions, and a huge blue sky.
I had about 8 weeks of practice under my belt at this point, and one of Bob’s big Winston rods in my hands. I could now put large flies, including weighted nymphs and streamers, more or less on the money out to 60 feet, and a little further if I had the wind with me. More importantly, I could recognize some of the places that held trout; I was learning to read the river. I tried to play it cool up there in the bow, but the truth is I was trembling like an anxious bird dog waiting to make that first cast.
The first couple hours were pretty slow. We anchored at a couple different riffles, and ran nymphs through some good looking places and caught a number of whitefish and a few modest trout. There were also some fish rising to tiny Tricorithedes mayflies, and Hoppy showed me how to fish for them. I managed a couple strikes, but the flies were hard for me to see, and I was late with my strikes. About mid-morning the wind came up.
We rounded a bend in the river, and looking west we saw the damndest thing. A rancher was running a mower in his irrigated hay meadow, and along the edge of the river abutting his pasturage, we could make out what looked like a series of small explosions at the water’s edge. We drifted closer, and with diminishing distance came understanding. As the gang mowers passed over the pasture, great clouds of grasshoppers were flung skyward with the hay. The wind caught them and blew them into the river. The trout had discovered this, and were lined up along the bank hammering them as they hit the water, literally blowing small spouts of water into the air. Bob had me knot a large Gartside Hopper (one of his favorite patterns) to a heavy 9 foot leader. He instructed me to keep my casts low and fast, since I was casting into the breeze, and to try to actually overshoot the fish and drop the fly into the fringe of grass along the bank. I did as instructed with my first cast. Bob reached forward for my left hand, the one holding the line, and jerked it backward. The fly leapt from the bank and splatted onto the water, and I was into a big rainbow trout right away! Following shouted and profane instructions from both of my shipmates, I guided the fish to the boat and Bob netted it for me. It was, by about a foot, the largest fish I’d ever landed.
And it was like that all day. We floated almost 25 miles of riverbank, stopping in especially productive areas to wet wade. God knows how many trout we caught. At one point Bobby was into an especially crocodilian brown, and the boat blew off the gravel bar where we’d beached her and she started to drift away. When I pointed this out to our skipper, he replied “Fuck that boat! This is a quality fish here!” I had to dive over the gunwale and drop the anchor to save us from being marooned. We all had several hopper flies simply disintegrate from repeated strikes and from fish rubbing them against the bottom in an effort to free themselves. The breeze blew warm, the sun glared, we whooped and laughed and hurled playful and derisive expletives at each other. It was, as Hoppy observed, “more fun than trash like us really deserved.” We didn’t get off the water until 9:30 in the evening.
I remember sitting in the bar at the Murray Hotel in Livingston that night, a little sun struck and wind burnt and drunk. I remember wondering if it would ever be quite like that again, and although I was only 26 years old, I think I knew that no life holds many days of that sort. So I savored it. As we began the hour long journey back to the bunkhouse at Midnight, I knew I had a pretty savage sunburn on my neck, arms and ears, and that I’d have to get up for work in a few hours, but I went to sleep smiling when I found my bunk. The smile has never completely left me.
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School’s Out
The shit sort of hit the fan on a Wednesday evening during the first week of September, two days
I think it was around 1:00 AM when I woke up. I could hear Bobby trying to talk quietly to someone. Even half awake a couple of conclusions were possible. First, he was shitfaced, possibly from booze although I could smell reefer, so who knows. Second, he was talking to a woman. I peeked around the corner of my cubicle to see Bob and a gal nearly his size stumble past on their way to his bunk. They were all over each other.
In a males-only bunkhouse with minimal privacy, this was a potentially serious situation. Bob’s cell was in the opposite corner of the bunkhouse from mine, but it was right next to Scott’s. In an effort to at least generate a veneer of privacy, Bob switched on his clock radio, which was tuned to a powerful AM Oldies station; the only station we could get up there. He turned it up pretty loud, and it helped, but only a little. Soon, Sam Cooke’s silver tones were mixed with the sounds of two large, drunk and overheated people engaged in sloppy and vigorous communion. This was too much for Scott. He bolted from his bunk and rushed into the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. From the kitchen’s relatively safe confines came the sound of Scott reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the very top of his lungs.
It was like this…
“oof, oof, oof…”
“Straight to my lover’s heart…”
“Who art in heaven…”
“Roll over toots and I’ll…”
"Thy kingdom come…”
"There’s danger of me loosing all of my happiness!”
“That’s it! Like that!”
“And let your arrow go,”
“As we forgive those who trespass against us…”
“Oh God! It’s so long…”
“…for me, only me!”
“…now and forever,
AMEN!”
…cacophony.
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The next morning, we cornered Bobby, his companion having somehow vanished, and read him the riot act. It got plenty loud and mean, but he didn’t have a leg to stand on. In the end it didn’t matter much anyway. When I got back to the bunkhouse from work Bobby’s stuff was gone. Hoppy told me that he’d heard Bob was running a ditch-witch near Old Faithful Lodge and somehow managed to cut through the main electrical cable leading to the facility. He fried the circuits on the ditch-witch, and damned near killed himself. The foreman smelled pot on Bob’s breath and fired him on the spot. I never even got to say goodbye. I never saw him again.
After my Friday layoff, I drove north down the Paradise Valley watching the Sandhill Cranes moving along the river on great slow wing beats. I had a week before I had to be back at grad school. Maybe I would go visit a buddy up in Bozeman, or just head back to Missoula to my subletted apartment and start moving back in. In the end, my car just seemed to automatically turn into the Mallard’s Rest access along the river near Livingston. I rigged up my rod and walked upstream to a good pool below a gravel bar I remembered from our float, and I fished until “can’t see.”
It just seemed like the right thing to do.
