I am the hot dog
trailers continuously emit their violent mechanical clanking lament
The now-too-common air travel rollercoaster began the night before my flight that was scheduled for 8am on Thursday the third. Around 8pm I was notified that I got the free upgrade. Awesome. I was pumped. I don’t fit in regular airplane seats very well. Then ten minutes later I got an alert that the flight was delayed an hour. I now had 26 minutes to make my connection in O'hare. I could do it, but it was going to be tight. Any additional delays, just a few minutes on the runway at O’Hare, would screw me. While doing my final packing for the trip I was now stressed out. I stubbed my toe hard while messing with a window AC unit to make sure our friends were comfortable when they visited on the 4th of July. I was sad I would miss them but glad that Jess would get to enjoy their company and celebrate her favorite holiday with them, one filled with nostalgia for her childhood and that’s an important ritual celebration for her, like watching Wimbledon, of the beginning of her too-short NY public school teacher summer break.
My nerves were frayed and I screamed “fuck!” when I stubbed my toe. Jess and our dog Fred endured my angst-filled preparations with patience and grace, Jess more than Fred. I felt guilty.
About half way through my stressful early morning drive to the airport the next morning in the dark I received an alert saying that my connecting flight was also delayed an hour. My first thought was how much I wanted to tell Jess - I’m going to make it! Feelings of relief and calm flooded my mind and quickly cascaded into profound feelings of love for Jess, my heart positively ached for her, my eyes welled up, I had a fantasy of hugging her with Fred squeezed between us, squirming and licking our faces. What a privilege to have these feelings about something so trivial as a fishing trip.
If only this were the whole story it would be poetic, in a way, but of course the flight was ultimately further delayed, all the way until 4pm, and I was now definitely going to miss my connection and American Airlines said they would rebook me on the 8am flight to Chicago the next day. I said “fuck you American Airlines, this isn’t my first rodeo, come hell or highwater I will be fishing at 6am tomorrow a long way from Buffalo” and I had some luck and I was able to get where I was going merely eleven hours late on a Delta flight through Detroit and Atlanta. Suck on that, air travel.
We were fishing a river in the intermountain west that tumbles out of the high mountains and then meanders slowly through a long, narrow, and relatively flat valley filled with sage brush and scrubby willows before eventually running out into the broad high desert. Old river channels form boggy sloughs and the mosquitos are bad without the wind. The river feels like a spring creek with a sandy bottom and aquatic vegetation. The forest service road that parallels the river is rugged, covered in washboard and worse - littered with what Ben calls “baby heads” - half exposed round rocks over which trailers continuously emit their violent mechanical clanking lament, threatening to throw license plates, snap winch post welds, and bend axles. The boat launches are low, sandy spots on the river banks accessed by rutted two-tracks.
We fished at nearly 8000’ in elevation and the weather was variable to say the least - high-30s in the morning and mid-70s in the afternoon. On the first day it rained on and off in the morning and we watched dark storm clouds slowly fill the horizon completely to the south and southwest, the towering cauliflower thunderheads pulled dark grey anvils northward and then we could see the lightning in the distance and hear the sound of rolling thunder and then the sharp edge of the storm seemed to rush across the landscape and it was suddenly upon us and bolts of lightning zig zagged in vivid detail to the valley floor less than a mile to the south as we counted one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand and the thunder cracked a loud, staccato, ratcheting unfolding, ringing our ears. We anchored the boat, scrambled up the low bank, and huddled under some thick bushes against a swale with our backs to the storm just in time. The sky darkened and the wind blew hard and sheets of rain lashed the earth, lightning and thunder raked the sky, it got cold and Brooks found a little hollow in the ground and shimmied into it trying to be the lowest thing on the landscape, an inch or two below the shortest scraggle of nearby sagebrush.
The wind died to nothing after the storm and eventually the sky cleared and the sun instantly warmed us and dried us out. The moment it hit me full in the face I could tangibly sense the endorphins flooding my brain, relief and positivity washed over me, my skin felt like it was cooking under this radiation because it was. I asked Ben and Brooks if they had ever made a solar hot dog cooker out of a shoe box and tin foil as a kid and Ben looked up and angled his face to catch the sun and said slowly, dramatically, “I am the hot dog.”
The fishing improved along with our mood after the storm. A few gray drakes started popping along with several other smaller mayflies. Fish started rising and they started eating our flies. We blind fished the grassy undercut banks with parachute Adams, as tight to the grass as possible. Often a cast would land in the grass and you’d have to drag the fly out before establishing a drift. On one of these types of presentations, after I’d pulled the fly onto the water and as it was skittering downstream as I mended to establish a drift, a nice brown trout came out of the water and crashed downward on the fly with a flourish. A few minutes later it sounded like something heavy was dropped in the river as Ben came tight to a bigger brown in the same manner. A while after that Ben spotted a big fish rising tight to the brushy bank on the other side of the river and he pushed us over and Brooks made a great cast timing the fish’s regular feeding and the fish came up and ate a real bug and then immediately ate Brook’s fly - the magical, gluttonous double eat - and he stuck it and it was the biggest fish of the trip for our boat.
The early afternoon storm the following day was not horizon to horizon. It appeared like the dark grey hull of an Executor-class Star Dreadnought flying slowly over the landscape - it was long and relatively narrow and triangular, menacing. There was less lightning, but there was rain and hail. The hail was confusing at first, one splash nearby, then another, then clunk, clunk, clunk on the raft. We pulled the boat over in nearly the same place we had the day before and Ben advocated standing up to make as small a target as possible. It hurt most when it hit a toe or finger knuckle. It was blueberry sized and Ben said that back at his house in similar geography that this was about as big as it ever got, “we don’t get the windshield smashing stuff like they do down in Denver.” Then, for a brief moment, the hail grew to grape-size and smashed into the raft floor. I met Ben’s eyes with significant concern and he joked about shutting himself in the dry box.
Like the day before the fishing got better after the storm. We were floating through a longish, straight section of river with some decent current and fish were rising tight to the grassy bank on river right. Brooks was slowing us down a little on the oars but we were running and gunning, sniping heads and blind casting tight to the bank. I saw a good fish eat just an inch from the grass and I had one chance to make a presentation and I actually pulled it off and the fish ate my parachute Adams and I didn’t rush the hookset and that was the nicest fish I caught on this trip.
We also caught some whitefish and Ben made the entire party put any and all that they landed into their pants. At the boat ramp at the end of the day after beaching the boats we waddled and sloshed into a circle and emptied our day's bounty onto the ground like a weird council of sloppy warlocks and the winner got to put all the fish in their pants for dinner. Ben was disqualified because he was keeping them in his Muck boots.
We fished a bit lower the next day and the start of the float had faster, rockier water and I caught a decent brown on a streamer right away. A second, larger brown followed it to the net like bass do. We had some OK fishing to risers but the best fish was caught by Ben searching the grassy banks blind. He had fished for maybe five minutes when he had a great brown eat his Bionic ant. Jeremy and I had searched similar banks for hours that day with nothing to show for it.
I’m almost always fishing streamers, and that’s a dumb way to fish - jerk baits are so much more effective and easier. But the best way to catch fish eating mayflies is definitely fly fishing, and it feels great to shrug off the yoke of a pretentious sort of imposter syndrome and do things “the right way.” I’ve done more dry fly fishing this year than I’ve done in a good while and it was awesome to cap it off with this textbook western dry fly fishing for big trout. It was an awesome trip. It was great to hangout with Ben, of course, the Super Networker, and to see Casey again, and to meet so many new, cool people and share a river with them. These particular mountains are rugged and stunning and I can’t wait to return.
On the day of my departure I woke up at 3:15am. My alarm was set for four. I don’t generally sleep very well, particularly before air travel, and I went to bed around 10:30pm on a belly full of giant brewpub hamburger topped with fried egg, avocado, bacon, and cheddar, served with a serious grip of tater tots. There were a few pints of porter squeezed in there, too. This porter was really good, exceptional, even, and I was pleasantly surprised. Turns out it won a GABF gold medal a while back. You can only really get porter at brewpubs anymore and that’s a shame but also maybe one of the few good reasons I have to go to brewpubs these days, as good a reason as any, I suppose.
This flight was on-time. It was departing at 7am and the airport was an hour and a half away on a remote two lane road through a mountain pass. I had to return the rental car and check a bag, so I wanted to give myself some extra time; I left the house at 4am. It looked like I would use eight or nine gallons of fuel in the rental car on this trip. If I didn’t fill it up for $3.39/gal before I returned it, I’d pay $6.39/gal for them to do it.
As I approached town from the south I passed an apparently open gas station at first light a little after 5am. I think it was open. The lights were on and I could probably just pay at the pump but I told myself - screw it, I’ll pay the $30 premium to have them fill it. I need to get to the airport. What if it’s super busy? What if there’s a wreck or construction? I could hit a moose or something. Then I passed another open gas station, and a third, and a sharp pang of guilt hit my stomach. What am I doing? Then a fourth gas station. I should just do it, it will take five minutes. Then a fifth on the way out of town just a few miles from the airport and I sailed passed it and the pit in my stomach tightened and I swallowed the guilt hard and said to myself through bared teeth “these are the fucking choices I’ve made.”
This airport is very small. And it was not busy at 5:30am. The after hours rental car key drop is close to everything else, but it didn’t matter. There was a woman from Enterprise standing where I parked and she said “leave the key on the dash” and that was that. I could actually see the check-in desk from where I parked. I have priority status so checking a bag took less than two minutes. There was nobody in line anyway. I also have TSA precheck and there was nobody in that line, either. It took longer to walk through the absurdly large square of empty maze-like slaughterhouse stanchions than to actually get through security. My gate was immediately through security. You could see it from security. I was standing at the empty gate about five minutes after getting out of the rental car.
I went to the one restaurant/bar/store in the airport and they didn’t have chapstick. I had lost my chapstick and I needed chapstick. I wrote “chapstick?” in the dust with my finger on the top of the little carousel rack of various toiletries. They would sell a lot of chapstick here what with all the sunburn and windburn. I bought a five dollar bottle of water and ordered a twenty dollar breakfast sandwich and stood with the receipt in my hand staring dumbly at the floor thinking about how it’s privilege, sure, but it’s also that I’m a high functioning weirdo with money to burn.