A tender song

WALDEN, Colo. – We came west, Zach and I.  To fly fish.

Zach at Don's Pond

Neither of us had done it before. I’d wanted to, ever since seeing the Robert Redford film “A River Runs Through It.”

For me the lure is the river. There’s little that can quiet the soul as quickly as the song of a river, running.

Conjure it now and your mind will hear a rush of sound.  But it is so much more delicate than that.

On this river, the Norris, the water moved swiftly as it tumbled from the mountains.  But then it reached a valley, where we stepped in to it for the first time. And there we heard a tuneful murmur of babbles, burbles and low drips, the octaves changing as it moved along shoreline, over rocks and through branches left by heavy rains or industrious beaver.

But I get ahead of myself.  That was Day 2 of the journey. First to Day 1.

Mike, Zach’s buddy and our guide, had taught us the basics of fly fishing the day before on a small mountain lake.  We were outside Walden, Colorado.  Remembering Thoreau, I had joked about the absence of a pond in or near this Walden.  In fact, this lake’s name was Don’s Pond.  And it seemed an ideal place to find solitude … though the bear dung all along its shores suggested it could get crowded and dangerous.

We would later move up to a second lake, Lost Creek, to continue our instruction.

We did well that first day, each catching our share of Rainbows ... marvelous trout with the signature swatches of reds and oranges along their sides.

Zach, left, and me at Lost Creek Lake.

We marveled, too, at our surroundings – Ansel Adams-like snapshots of tall aspens, dark-green pines, and skies the deepest blue with white, floating, cottonball clouds.  The mountains, distant, showed thin scars of snow still left from the winter. Even in July, it would be only a few months before the snows would mount again.

We learned quickly that fly fishing is an art.  A friend calls it a lifestyle.  It requires patience.  But it is, really, a dance with nature – in the air, above water, and below it, too.   There are basics … the proper way to hold the pole, to let out line, to swiftly move the arm and pole back, then power both forward so the fly sails in a gorgeous arc and alights softly upon the water.

Norman Maclean, the author of the original “River Runs Through It,” recalls his father’s stern view of the world, including his judgment that fly fishing was, in the end, an exercise of arm and pole that happened entirely between “10 and 2,” the numbers on a clock. 

A Presbyterian minister of Scottish descent, the elder Maclean saw it as a metaphor for living – a righteous life requires limits to be successful.

I won’t argue the merits of moral limits here.  But he certainly had fly fishing nailed.   Let your pole slip back to 3 and your fly snares a tree or scrub. Power it forward to 9 or 8 and your line will double up and go slack, your fly landing in embarrassment a few feet from shore.

To see it done well … well, it’s a visual feast, a ballet of motion and string, arm and pole that move, says Minister Maclean, like a metronome … “10-2, 10-2, 10-2” … until at last the fly sails forward and lightly lands.

And then the fish watch … and decide.

Got one! A Rainbow.

They did decide that day, and in our favor.

We released each fish as we caught it, so there’d be no trout on the dinner table tonight.  Instead, bone-tired, we went to the Antler Inn, one of just two eating spots in Walden.

Everything seems to come in twos in Walden, a town founded in 1889 and once called Sagebrush … two restaurants, two gas stations, two liquor stores.  I don’t remember any traffic lights.

Still, the food was good, and we rested well.

Tomorrow’s plan was simple: Begin in the valley, and, with our new skills, work our way up the Norris to its headwaters. 

Simple it was not. 

Next: A Gumby goes wading.

To see photographs of Day 1, click here.