Grande Moments on a River Ronde
By Seth Norman
February, 2003
Greg’s stopped bleeding, pretty much; but even though I’ve apologized sincerely and often, each time trying not to laugh at the wad of something pasted to his forehead, he still seems a tad cranky to me. I mean, how often can someone mutter “I can’t believe you did that!” and “This better not scar” without dimming an otherwise festive fishing mood?
Never mind. A fat raft drifting southeast Washington’s Grande Ronde River—rocking down runs, tripping through riffles, trembling with possibilities—is hardly the place to fret about injuries that closer to civilization could be resolved by a suture or two. Not when we can watch a muscled run turn to eddy beneath basalt cliffs rising hundreds of vertical feet, or grassy slopes terraced by rocky benches where we see herds of deer and bighorn sheep patrolled from above by a golden eagle. And when it comes to facing adversity, for that matter, shouldn’t the trials of the steelhead that lured us here provide awesome examples of grit?
True grit: During good years, upwards of 8,000 or more of these anadromous rainbow trout migrate into this remote Columbia River tributary. Survivors of Orca encounters in Puget Sound, they steal past sea lions guarding the lower river gates, swim 250 miles east, southeast, east again, upstream through the Gorge, then turn right at the Columbia’s confluence with the Snake. From there they bend northeast again, then bend back south-southeast a tad, navigating past four dams in the next 130 miles. They hang another right again into the Grande Ronde, now forging west up the canyon.
About half of those fish halt in the Washington side of the river. The rest continue into Oregon, more or less south again, where some ascend the Wallowa and Blue Mountains—climbing 4,000 feet over another 100 miles.
Le Grande Ronde indeed.
Certainly I’m inspired by this trek. As for Greg…at least now he suffers in silence, which cannot be said for his absurdly large Labrador: Moose’s whines join with the peeps of his five tormentors, a family of otters, playing a bass line to their acappella chorus. I try to ignore him and them, hauling hard on a nine-foot fly rod, flinging a pair of pink puffballs well upstream. I pray as the gay rig flies though the air that the balls won’t rotate in flight like some tiny foam and feather bolo—Christ, the tangle.
They don’t, this time, but plummet through slate-colored water toward a garden of emerald boulders edged by gray-green shadows. The light changes: the eggs vanish, replaced by the reflection of towering basalt cliffs limned by a pale blue sky. I raise the rod to maintain tension, trying to focus only on the tick-beat-tick I feel through cork rings even as Moose plants a paw on my foot.
Fishing takes concentration.
Those puffs: Obese salmon egg patterns, they are—“flies” more or less—each bigger around than a quarter and constructed from frothy synthetic gauze. One’s tied on point at the end of my line, the other on an eight-inch dropper of 12-pound Maxima monofilament. Between them is pinched a longer row of large split shots than I’ve seen studding a fly-fishing leader.
Pretty, it ain’t. Worse yet, anything close to conventional casting—the elegant play of a tapered line loading a light bow of carbon, the dance of tension, timing and power—simply isn’t possible. Instead, what can be done—must be, to launch a lure—is a “chuck-and-duck” throw. It’s as subtle as the sledgehammer blow it resembles, but a lot more difficult to control, genuinely dangerous to the caster and anything else nearby.
Just ask Greg.
“This better not scar,” he growls again.
“Oh, I doubt it will,” I answer confidently, noting to myself that the crusted brown welt between his eyes is, at least, symmetrical. Then I wonder if, on closer examination, I’d find that each big split shot made its own indent on impact. If that wouldn’t look very Maori. “And it’s not like you were planning a second career as a male model.”
Greg fixes me with a surprisingly foul look.
“You are?”
More chirps. Moose moans. I’d favor him with a butt scratch, save that his left rear thigh is already quivering so violently it looks like a ferret trapped in a yellow tubesock. The rest of his body vibrates with equally antic energy, just as desperately contained, save for amber eyes locked in a stare as fixed as Polaris. I mean riveted on five bright-eyed heads bobbing a couple of oar-lengths off our port pontoon.
That’s about where they’ve been for the last quarter mile, at least. Ever since they spotted poor Moose from a mudslide they’d compacted beside a bleached log grotto. Instantly and en masse they began this cruel pursuit, porpoising alongside, teasing and taunting him with “Chirrs!” and peeps while dancing a water samba sensuous enough to provoke a petit mal in anything with canines.
Even I want to jump in after them, which is why I laugh, finally, and say “It’s only my opinion, Greg…but I think every otter family should have a Lab for a pet.”
Greg is not amused. “Stay,” he says sternly to Moose, for about the 200th time. “Stay. Good boy.” Then, to me, fingering his head wad, “I can’t believe you did this.”
Organized disaster.
But here I am, miles and so many days ahead of myself. Years, even.
Ask the initiated: while fishing for steelhead is serious business, pursuing them with a fly rod is a form of worship for many. In fact, devotees so often proclaimed this angling’s “Quest for the Holy Grail” a Papal Bull now bans “this abuse of Sacred Metaphor,” and promises to excommunicate “the next disturbed person who describes a fishing pole as ‘The Longer Stronger Rod of Gawain.’ ”
That last part’s only rumor. However, if fly fishing is a “religion” for some, as another cliché has it, then traditional steelhead sects harbor our most stiff-shafted fundamentalists, those who are completely dedicated to protocols. Fishers must “swing” lures on a tight line, proceed downstream in a cast, step, step, step system, and confine themselves to feather or hair lures that, while looking like tiny birds, drab to gorgeous, are named after sunrises, popsicles, green-butted skunks and scores of other items seldom found on a salmonid’s menu. The attempt to actually mimic what a steelhead might eat—if said steelhead did eat while swimming up from the Pacific to spawn—is déclassé, even cheating. And when it comes to new techniques for presenting a fly, anything developed post-Eisenhower is apostasy.
That’s where these apostles lose me, I’m afraid. But I do admire them from a distance, share their admiration for a species that has come to symbolize Western water’s wildness, and send money to the conservation organizations they create. Grail or no, they are white knights, champions of a gallant species, and without them there’s little hope.
Finally. I also share an appreciation for the waters where steelhead are still found, our least tainted rivers and streams…and the most awe-inspiring.
This river I share with Greg, for example.
“So what do you know about the Grande Ronde?” asked the editor of a favorite fly-fishing magazine, not long before this trip, calling from my own latitude and a longitude as far away as the continent allows.
“What I hear. A good fall fishery for an ‘A’ run of steelhead. People say they take dry flies better there than anywhere.”
“Right. That’s what I hear too. So, what we’re looking for is a short destination piece, you know what I’m saying? Send somebody like you out to a new operation there, kind of an a la carte lodge-and-guide service. Thought you’d like that, the proletarian angle.”
Meaning: You’re the closest guy we’ve got, and We won’t pay much, which is, to be fair, only par for the course for fly-fishing magazines. Sure enough, said Ed mentions a figure that might cover gas for the drive, and three meals on the road—five, if I stick to 99-cent “Value” menus.
“I’ll need a photographer,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’ve told you. Put an idiot camera in my hand and that makes two of us.”
“Right. You have one in mind?”
“Maybe. But this is for—what—next October?”
“Actually, we were hoping next month.”
“Next…February? The Grande Ronde in February?”
“Well, you know, there’s supposed to be another, less well-known run that comes in then. Of course, that is high desert, I understand. I guess it could get pretty cold?”
“Only to the parts of you that don’t drop off.”
He laughs, then gently reminds me he’s calling from Maine.
“You can?”
“Absolutely,” says Greg, a photographer and a far better steelheader than I even aspire to become. “Just say when. In fact, I’m ready to leave right now. Right this goddamn minute.”
From the moment Greg answered the phone I’d had the impression my call had interrupted a…moment.
“I see. Does that mean things are?”
“Yeah. Where do we meet?”
Four weeks later.
It’s a nine-hour drive to the Grande Ronde, more or less straight through. I leave a ridge lined by towering firs and spruce, naked maples shadowing shallow patches of snow, the smell of ferns and wet loam. A murder of crows calls a faux farewell.
It’s years, in a way, or ages: born into desert, I do not return often or eagerly. And while high desert is softer and hotter than the land I knew there’s still an uncomfortable transition to country so open and aching. I compare the gray rock benches to mesas, the low scrub to cactus and mesquite, and then find myself trapped repeating Zane Grey’s favorite descriptive: “vermillion.”
It helps when a cool dusk dims the mountains. It helps to see Greg, though he looks tired when he smiles, and we are both pleased by our roast beef dinners at Bogan’s Oasis, heart and social center of the Grande Ronde—a first-rate source of comfort-food for companies of fishers and hunters. There we meet Dave Flynn, manager of Grande Ronde Outfitters, who we follow to a clean, warm cabin. We pour him a drink, a vice to compliment the fly tying vises Greg and I mount on coffee tables. As Dave leaves he urges us meet him very, very early for the next day’s float, down from the bridge near Bogan’s.
I make a mess, tying flies. Greg chides me about this, which is not the same as, say, nagging. Also his longish romance is going south—or wherever her parents live—and is it even reasonable to hope one can make a living writing about what’s really important about fly fishing? Because if the last few years are what it’s all about…
Older than Greg, I’m “familiar” to similar trials: and if not wiser, and certainly fatter, grayer, I’m willing to listen, and qualified to facilitate conversations with a sympathetic bottle. I also grasp the idea of “projection.”
“Seriously,” he says, “you spread stuff out everywhere! You’re not going to leave that marabou on the rug, are you? What would your wife say?”
“I don’t really know. But whatever it is, she says a lot, and loudly.”
Greg laughs.
During the prime time fishing season between September and November, anglers have plenty of company on the Grande Ronde’s more easily accessed runs. A boat helps, but while some of the longer drifts see less pressure, you won’t get lonely. All autumn it’s a mix of fly folks and the conventional tackle tribes.
“A lot of people say the Grande Ronde’s the best dry fly steelhead fishery in the West,” Dave reminds us over coffee bright and too early. “In the fall.”
Our guide shares that opinion: Warren Morris is a gentleman of warmth and good manners who’s been pulling a driftboat on the river for years, fishing traditional flies and techniques. He’s also candid: “I put my fly rod away about the end of November,” he says, “so do you mind if I ask how come you fellows decided to visit this time of year?”
Greg and I wonder about that soon enough. Time and again, during the drift from Bogan’s to Shoemaker, Morris off-loads us on the wade-able side of runs that in today’s heavy flow require extraordinary casts—the rivers almost 1,000 cubic feet a second higher than he likes—usually beyond our reach. In places where we stand knee-deep in swift current he insists “You’d be bone dry here in October.” Getting flies down on the swing is just as problematic, even with high-density lines and cone-head or barbell-eyed flies.
Compounding our frustration: the fish are in the river. All day long we see gear guys hitting them hard. Turns out that to a guy with shrimp or nightcrawlers, Our Holy Grail is a cup.
A long day, that makes, but full enough for me, less so for edgy Greg, who clearly could use a ferocious battle to distract him. I wish him one while we watch raptors ride updrafts, waiting to stoop; a herd of deer water, then another herd, of bighorn sheep, way off in the distance. And, after months spent beneath the clouds of a coastal winter, I soak up rays of a surprisingly warm sun. As for the fish—their absence—I fall back on the mantra: “That’s steelheading.”
Or not.
Dave’s boat catches up with us at the last run before our pullout. He and a pair of sports have landed one fish among the three of them. Five minutes later, comes a raft full of four fishers. They’ve hooked 25 steelhead so far, and “landed about a dozen.”
What?
They’re guides out of Ennis, Montana on a busman’s holiday, staying at a new lodge that was once the elk hunting base for John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival. As it happens that’s where we’re scheduled to spend this night.
They adopt us. Out of pity: they feed us hamburgers, break out a bottle of Crown Royal, set us down at vises to tie huge pink puff balls and leaders rigged with long rows of large split shot.
“It’s an ugly system, but it works,” says Eric Shores, who offers to row us on a drift the next day, this time from Cougar Creek to Bogan’s.
Call it cozy, with three fishers and a Moose in the raft. And we do spend most of our time on the water, instead of wading in it, dredging runs from three feet to nine feet deep. Casting is, as described, a brutal procedure: haul your rig from the bottom, land your backcast behind you to water load, then hurl it upstream, halting the rod high enough to drive the shots down. Let the rig sink deep without allowing too much slack. Lift your rod as the flies and weight tumble toward you. By the time these are directly across current from your position there ought be no fly line at all on the water—just leader—and you’d better be feeling the bottom. Keep tapping by dropping the rod tip as you follow the drift downstream. If your rig stops when it shouldn’t, or your rod suddenly takes a bend, set up with a downstream pull.
Like writing, it’s harder than it sounds. But Greg gets the hang of it right away. In fact, he lands five while Eric and I hook zip.
And it’s purely coincidence—I’m quite serious—that it’s after the fifth I clock Greg with a cast. An accident, I swear. In my whole life as a fly fisher I’ve never injured anybody but myself, not once impaled or bonked a single partner, innocent pedestrian, or jet skier (though I try). The truth is that I don’t even realize Greg’s been weight-whacked, split-shotted upside the head, until he starts making a bloody mess of things. Even then, I’ve no idea I played a part until the glazed look leaves his eyes, say five minutes later, when he starts in with his “I can’t believe you did that,” litany and “This better not leave a scar.”
Sometime thereafter the otters see Moose, and follow us downstream. He surrenders at last, leaping flat out just as Greg grabs his collar and a roll of skin, dragging Greg so far across the pontoon that I lunge for his collar, catching just a little bit of skin and…
We spend a lot of time laughing after that.
Greg lands a sixth steelhead soon. An hour later I hookup from the bank, fishing not pink puffs, but a red string leech on a swing.
The fish comes to hand in a moment the sun turns golden, glowing on umber cliffs and amber grasses, turning the buck’s flanks into an iridescent symphony of scarlet and silver and colors with names I’ve never learned. Vermillion, maybe.
The man on the Ronde. Smackdown with a leech.
That’s steelheading, I remember.
The next morning is our last. Greg and I rise early into bitter cold. We fish an hour, wading from shore, then return to the empty lodge where Greg cooks up antelope steaks he brought with him, and eggs, toast—like that—all of which we eat even before my fingers have thawed enough to feel the fork.
Later, I can’t recall who’s idea it was to tap the Old Crow while the day so very, very young, while waiting for Dave to pick us up. Greg has his own wild ideas, but common sense suggests it was the doing of somebody who’d suffered a recent head wound.
After that we sit on deck, bundled up and blowing steam, smiling while watching five bighorn ewes graze a sienna slope, then tiptoe their way across a rocky outcropping. Frost sparks in the sun and I wonder if sheep watch their front hooves in dicey spots, as I would, and if so, what about the pair in back?
“You know, Greg,” I say, sighing with the right measure of wistful inflection, “I don’t see bighorns often enough. I really don’t.”
“Well, hell, you lived in Oakland until last year. How many bighorns you expect to see there?”
“Fewer every year, that’s for sure.”
“What?”
“Are you sure,” I ask, pointing up the hillside, “you can’t get a picture of those ladies? Not even with that 300-millimeter lens?”
Greg shakes his head.
“No chance. Maybe a documentary shot, as in, ‘I saw sheep, lots of sheep.’ Nothing a publisher could use.”
“Pity.”
“Speaking of which…you think you got what you need?”
I shrug. “That depends. I mean, I hate to side with the purists, but… I’m not quite sure what we’ve been doing qualifies as fly fishing.”
Greg laughs. “I don’t know. On the other hand, it was fun to try once.”
And once is probably enough. “Well, I’ll tell this much. We got lucky this morning.”
“Lucky?” We didn’t get a bump. Besides that, my waders are still frozen and my testicles clink when I walk.”
“Really? I thought you were just jingling nickels. But never mind…what I’m saying is that every winter steelheading article needs a passage about awful weather, right? It’s part of the formula, the bit about ‘line freezin in the guides.’ So, with temps in the 60s every day …”
“You were in trouble.”
“Well… maybe. Until this morning.” I nod. “Although I did jot down one possibility. How’s this: ‘We found ice in our guides that night. Or as much as melts off cubes when Crown Royale’s poured into a tumbler.”
Greg moans.
“Hey,” I say loftily, “if writing were easy, easy people would write.”
The question remains, however, if Greg got what he needed.
September 2006
“The Grande Ronde again. This time in October. With dry flies, I hope.”
“Count me in, one way or another,” says Greg, that first time I call, then twice again in the following weeks. But late in September I can’t reach him, but get a message on my machine…He’ll explain later.
It’s the same river and canyon I find, though the canyon’s brushed with bright reds and warm golds. The steelhead won’t take dries for anybody, but they take.
I call him when I return. “So?” I say without preamble.
“Oh, man. I would have. You know I would have. But Becky’s still laid up, and Tate, God, she’s just crawling all over. I mean, she’s just so perfect—”
Greg’s wife, his new daughter. He can’t see me, but I’m grinning.
“Plus there’s this piece I’m doing, and the editorial stuff for the magazine—”
I laugh.
“What? You know I would have.”
“I do. I’m just remembering…life’s a little different yes? Than the last time round?”
“I’d say so.” Suddenly he laughs, too. “Yea, I’d say that. In fact…it’s so much better I can’t believe it. I really can’t.”
I let that sit a minute. He laughs again, differently this time.
“I still have that scar, you know.”
“Scar? A scar?”
“The scar! I can’t believe you just—”
I’ve noticed Greg’s still kind of…excitable… about that subject.
Seth Norman lives in Bellingham, Washington. He is a regular contributor to Fly Rod & Reel and California Fly Fisher. If you don’t own the book, Meanderings of a Fly Fisherman, get it. Thanks to Seth for sharing this great story with us. No thanks to Seth for the scar.