Can you believe that?

Fall.  Senior year of college.  Fall break.  A week dismissed from academia.  Read: go do something awesome with your best buddies.

Five of you lash two canoes to two station wagon roofs and head for a deep lake, at the northwestern end of which sits a campsite that one has been to before.  The supplies are, to use the word that you adopted then for its cliché, absurdity and appropriateness, “fratty”: twice as much bacon and eggs and potatoes as is necessary, a large bag of Cajun trail mix, other various bars and backpacking foods and two glass gallon jugs of Carlo Rossi wine, which has come to be one of several signature drinks of the college fishing club, of which you are all very, very important members of.

The second night around the campfire.  The remaining jug is passed around, and around, and around, until its location and existence is forgotten.  And then, disaster.  Where is the Carlo?!

How can you lose, misplace a glass gallon jug of wine in a 20’ wide circle?  Did it walk off, to take a piss in the bushes and forget its way back?  Did it evaporate, the same way the last two days did?  Did someone hide it, as a joke, and then have their memory of its location disappear like all the answers to the midterms you all just took?  Was it burned?  Five stumbling, mumbling, jumbling college kids, on top of the world, cannot find the wine, and it is a serious problem.

One guy looks in the tent.  One guy looks in the canoes.  One guy looks so far away from the campfire that it’s a joke.  One guy doesn’t get up, just looks behind his stump seat.

The last, the one sitting only a few feet from the lake’s edge, yells.  Everyone looks.  Reaching into the lake, as if grabbing a fresh born baby, as if landing a giant trout, as if pulling a piece of bacon that fell into the fire and that shouldn’t have, as if finding a single piece of agate on a gravel bar a quarter-mile long, he has the jug of wine in both hands and raises it above his head, yelling, “I got it!!”  By some absurd chance, the jug has rolled and fallen into the lake in just the perfect way that the opening landed perfectly downward so that the air inside the jug has held the wine inside, lake water creating a seal preventing any from draining.  No one can remember how much was in it when it was lost, but there is enough left that it’s enough for the rest of the night and also just the most recent of countless, tiny but unbelievable events that happened that make this trip story-worthy.

Your hangover the next day makes you wish, slightly, that you never found the jug again.  But, what a story.  Can you believe that?

We had the bugs on the wall dying.

A plan is hatched: meet up, drive there, go fishing. 

“You wanna?”

“Yea, let’s.”

“Cool, I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

Las Vegas, an unsuspecting hub for outdoor recreation, especially fly fishing.  The drive to Lee’s Ferry is only four and a half hours from there though; an easy shot for two old friends.  The Strip in the rearview, a glowing dome in the middle of the middle of desert, as you speed away.  Remember the last time we were there?  Barely.

A motel room awaits you and a late night arrival is expected, so when you get there before you think you would, it seems early.  Too excited and wound up to sleep.  The old friend has an old reel that’s really loud.  The two of you wind a new fly line onto the old spool and it echoes off the motel room walls.  You both cringe and giggle as you do this, because you can imagine what it sounds like in the neighboring rooms, but hey, you gotta do it now, you can’t do it in the morning.

Rod pieces are put together, reels are screwed onto reel seats, fly lines are strung, leaders are looped, even flies are tied on.  Packs are packed, water bottles are filled, articles are placed neatly and precisely by the door, so you won’t forget, even though you wouldn’t.  It’ll save you four minutes in the morning and since you only have 12 hours to fish, you do it now at – what time is it?  You need to sleep.

Alarms awake.  Disorientation.  Sit up and stare at each other from your motel Queen beds.  Let’s go!  Quick!  Get to the car!  Don’t let the others get there before us! 

A long day on the river.  Then, back to the motel in time to watch the sun go down from your patio.  Après-fishing.  Each moment more than the last.

It’s barely dark and you’re beat.  Tomorrow you will do it again.  In bed, sipping whiskey, watching bad television.  In the morning, you’re told that you fell asleep mid-conversation.

Again, alarms.  As awake as you were when you arrived; it’s 26 hours later.  You realize you don’t have to meet your guide for two hours.  Spend the next 90 minutes pacing, chatting, puttering, packing, checking gear, re-packing, watching the clock, killing time in pre-dawn excitement as thick as when you met at the airport.  We fished for 20 hours over two days but it’s this one specific hour-and-a-half in the motel room, awake early because you went to bed early because you were beat because you stayed up late then got up early, waiting for the right time to go fishing, having a conversation that’s half-incoherent, half-profound, full-hysterical, that I remember most, even though I don’t really remember any of it.  We had the bugs on the wall dying.

It's 4:00 am and you're a hundred miles offshore.

It’s 4:00 am and you’re a hundred miles offshore.  You left the dock 14 hours ago, you and three of your best.  After a four hour run, you reached The Edge and your captain pulled back on the throttle for the first time since leaving the inlet.  Everyone stands up and stretches, relieving their bodies from the tensed, flexed positions you held for the run.  Four young men relieve themselves and then four beers are produced from the cooler, which looks like it’s about to be brought to a party that you all had attended in college only a few years prior.  Beer cans are touched, nods and smiles are passed, and cold, light beer is chugged.  Then the work begins.

Bait is prepped by two while the other two begin setting outriggers and placing rods in specific rod holders.  Soon, six rods are in.  Big, bright gold Penn Internationals reflect the setting sun.  The engines are again put into gear, this time at a slow, calculated pace.  You assume the positions – captain at the helm, first mate behind him, leaning against the bait prep table, and you and the remaining mate taking places alongside the cockpit - and you are fishing.

You troll until after dark, taking passes along a length of The Edge, and then call it for the evening.  Lines are reeled in, the Penns making their unmistakable, mechanical retrieve sounds.  The handles are as big as car door handles, and they fit your hand well.  A few more rounds of beer are consumed and without discussion, two guys take to massive bean bags for a few hours of restless sleep.  The air is warm and humid, but cooling fast.  The sleep is barely that.

You and the fourth guy sit next to each other in the cockpit, softly discussing the morning’s fishing to come, catching up on some of your recent fishing trips, and what you have been doing since the last time you saw each other, which was a week ago. 

An iPod is produced from a hatch, and plugged into the vessel’s stereo system.  Robert Earl Keen’s album “Gringo Honeymoon” is played in its entirety.  When the title track comes on, the boat goes quiet, and the two of you just listen.  You listen to every word as close as you ever have. 

It’s 4:00, a hundred miles offshore, but your mind has taken you to some western oasis in another time, where “a crusty caballero” plays “an old gut string guitar” and “sang like Marty Robbins could.”  You are fishing, with your best buddies.

You're Nine Years Old

You’re nine years old, on summer break.  You’re an only child living in a small town and you don’t have many friends around.  But you’ve bushwhacked to the river behind the house enough times that you know the way to a few deep holes and you just got your first fly rod and reel for Christmas, so a lot of your summer days are spent on the river, by yourself.  You can’t name any of the two dozen flies in your one fly box except the three that you tied: a Mickey Finn, a woolly bugger, and a hare’s ear nymph.  You tie on what you now know as a spent-wing wet fly, for no other reason than you haven’t ever tied it on; you don’t know where you got it.

You also don’t know about water levels and temperatures and how they affect a trout’s willingness to bite, so even though the water is low and warm, you just fish.  You make the boring roll casts your father showed you, but soon you’re trying to aerialize line and false cast, even though you don’t really know how to.  There are wind knots up and down your leader, but you don’t notice or don’t care.

You’ve been crashing around in the river for a while, not seeing any fish as per usual when, out of nowhere a trout that’s probably 8-inches but might as well be 30 chases your fly at the end of a retrieve.  As soon as it appeared, it is gone.  You repeat a curse you heard someone at school say, then look over your shoulder to see if anyone heard you.  You’re now as excited as you’ve been in weeks, and you can’t wait to tell Dad that you saw one.  Maybe you’ll tell him that you caught it.  You spend the next fifteen minutes casting to the same spot expecting, hoping, wishing with all your might that the fish will come back and take the fly.  It doesn’t.