Big John

A fallen tree lay across the Situk River in Alaska, half the trunk above the surface, its branches raking the rushing water, the other half below. Big John pulled hard on the oars to slow his cataraft from sliding into the deadly strainer. He needed to make a decision quickly. He could try to float over the submerged section of the tree and risk getting hung up. Or he could sharply turn the cataraft sideways and clear the tree completely. The thought of flipping sideways and falling into the icy water set him and he decided to shoot for the submerged half. 

It would be all or nothing — ganbatte, as the Japanese call it.

In Alaska, everything is bigger, bears and moose, and the danger deadly, but Big John’s confidence would never waver, not here, not ever. He floated past the downed tree and was already spying the next spot where steelhead migrating from the ocean could be taken with his rod and reel. He’d come all this way from the San Francisco Bay Area with a few close friends and was intent on being the top fisherman on this year’s trip, whatever that meant. 

He found a promising slot and beached his cataraft on the far bank. There were still patches of snow on the ground and his body had a deep chill, which made him shiver. He wore waders, a warm jacket, cotton shirt, thermal underwear, wool socks, and still he could not feel his feet. But when Big John hooked a fish on his first cast in the slot, he suddenly felt warm again. He fished more than a half-dozen holes this day, catching and releasing more steelhead than he could recall without his fish counter. Alone on the last frontier, he began to whistle and sing about raindrops falling on his head. Crying’s not for me.

The Situk River ran full of fish, and Big John could feel the backs of them bumping his cataraft in the darkness.

The sun was going down on this first day of a two-day float. Big John took out his flashlight from the saddle bag to search for the pullout where he would spend the night inside a decrepit cabin. To miss the pullout would be a mistake. He turned on the flashlight now and again to check for a sandy bank that marked the pullout and listened intently to the water for signs of trouble, like fallen trees and big boulders. But there were none, and the Situk River ran full of fish, and Big John could feel the backs of them bumping his cataraft in the darkness. He was calm when others would be anxious.

Then Big John spotted the pullout, landed on the sandy bank, and tied his cataraft to a tree for the night. He didn’t climb the hill to the cabin but waited for his friends, his flashlight a beacon to guide their way. Always have your friend’s back more than your own, he told me. One by one, they landed at the sandy bank and tied off their catarafts like horses. There was Rick and Paul and then his best friend, the Old Fisherman, who was almost always the first one out, the last to come in, his fish counter high in the double digits. 

They climbed the hill together.

At the cabin, the foursome went about their work, firing up the portable heater, preparing dinner, reloading fishing vests, their familiarity with each other meant few words were spoken. Some smoked cigars and drank whiskey. Soon the little cabin filled with the snores of tired men. Did Big John dream? I don’t know. Perhaps he dreamt of fishing: a shared cabin near the Mattole River for winter-run steelhead; a black bear stalking a hillside at the Eel River campsite; a bonfire started by the Old Fisherman and Little John, blazing away only a stone’s throw from the Trinity River; a riffle made of steelhead that had been trapped in the Kalama River after Mount St. Helens erupted; and always of a Dodge blue van chasing adventure and finding it. 

The blue van had ranged hundreds of thousands of miles searching for steelhead but also carrying Big John, his wife and four children to Yellowstone, Little Big Horn, Snake River, Crater Lake, Grand Canyon and other wild places. His wife enjoyed most of all reading books while lying on a homemade bed inside the blue van, which he had built out of wooden boards and stitched cushions. Big John was known for his hot temper and lifelong passion for fast cars, winning drag races in his youth, so it was strange to see him overcome with melancholy when, finally, a tow truck hauled his blue van away.

When Big John woke, the Old Fisherman was already in his waders and raring to go. Rick and Paul were gearing up quickly in a silent race. Big John never rushed for anything. He knew it was going to take all day to fish and float to the river’s mouth where, with any luck, there would be a school of spirited steelhead just in on the evening tide. It would be here where Big John, with his fiercely competitive nature, would make his bid for top rod. He owed much to the spirit of competition. It was competition that drove him to start his own company. It was competition that he instilled in his children. It was competition, or just plain stubbornness, that helped him survive among people who reminded him daily they didn’t want japs in their communities.

The days would grow darker, his health would fade, his beloved wife would pass away.

The long day added to the fish counter, maybe three steelhead at the Confluence Hole, one or two at every other stop. At last they arrived at the Tidewater Hole, a long stretch of blue-ribbon water near the mouth of the river. The sun was still up and Big John had on his polarized glasses and he looked into the water and that’s when he saw it — a dark mass of torpedo shapes moving as one heartbeat. 

His eyes widened, hands trembled, and he made his first cast.

All the men lost fish after fish after fish, their reels dumping line, clickers sounding like a buzz roll on a snare drum, and hooks failing to hold porpoising steelhead. Even the Old Fisherman could not add to his fish counter. These were the hottest fish Big John had ever seen, and he thought, if only I could land one.

The sun was now dipping below the treetops. Not much time left. The days would grow darker, his health would fade, his beloved wife would pass away. But now was the moment, right now was the moment to live, to be alive, and a leviathan took his offering and he set the hook as hard as he could. The great fish ran upstream. It leaped out of the water, a silhouette in the setting sun, turned and charged, its life force seemingly limitless. Yet the hook stayed pinned and Big John held on. 

The light was nearly gone and the weight of the fish grew heavier. Exhaustion had crept into his soul, as his wife used to say. But he would not quit this fish. This time would be different. It would be all or nothing. The fish’s will broke and it came to him and he landed it on the bank, this bank and shoal of time. Big John, the strong one, struggled to lift the steelhead and show his friends, but his smile meant more to them. 

And the Old Fisherman hugged him.

Two Dogs

Inside a cramped trailer along the Fall River, old Two Dogs began whelping five pups from the young bitch. He had raised the temperature to 75 degrees and sweated as he worked. One came out backward and he had to turn it to save it. But there were no dinks, which meant no drownings, and he was grateful.

All the pups had the black-and-white markings of a border collie save a big red female. The young bitch mother did her part, too. She chewed the cords, ate the placenta and licked each pup clean. The pups pulled at her teats and her milk dropped.

“This is the way it should be,” Two Dogs said as he stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “A perfect whelping.”

He had come to the Fall River to sit quietly in his boat, tie the right flies and present them to rainbow trout lazily feeding in the spring creek. The young bitch wasn’t supposed to birth the pups for another week, but Two Dogs’s life seldom went to plan.

Two Dogs hadn’t slept since the whelping began sometime in the early evening. He was intent on watching the young bitch care for her pups. She was panting hard and anxious and he feared she might panic and cast her motherly instincts aside. But the young bitch gently stepped around her pups and made sure each got their fill. At one point, without thinking, she flashed her fangs at Two Dogs for coming too close to one of the pups. He grinned and nodded. Everything was working.

The trailer had become as hot as a sauna, or so it seemed, and Two Dogs longed to open the window and let in the cool night air but knew the pups needed the warmth of a natural den. Hours passed, and he lost track of time. With the pups asleep, his mind drifted to his pram and to the slow-moving river just outside. He imagined dimples on the water, fish rising in the warmth of a spring evening.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the young buck along the river …

Two Dogs was waiting patiently ever since the birds had alighted on the trees — harbingers of the hatch — and after carefully positioning his pram just above the run. It began like a dream within a dream. A cloud of green drakes appearing, birds swooping and feasting, swirling rainbows, and the sun low on the horizon. Fish after fish took his fly. He could not recall how many he caught and released or lost or their size. All he could remember was the moment and how happy he felt in it.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the young buck along the river, silent and still after spotting Two Dogs in his pram with his border collie, Blu, standing rigid at the bow. Blu and the buck were staring at each other intently, their bodies seemingly frozen in recorded time. And so Two Dogs began to maneuver the pram toward the buck, slowly, slowly, with hardly a sound, and dog and deer creeping closer and closer, halfway across the river, and closer still, and, now, noses only a few feet apart and still locked in. Then after a time the buck moved off and Blu laid down and went to sleep. Animals exist in the wild places, Two Dogs thought, which people are not allowed to visit but only observe from afar.

He wandered to another time in his pram when he spent a whole summer day with hardly a fish. He could see them in the clear water through polarized glasses, in schools of a dozen or more, and for hours watched them sway in the slow current. At midday, he took off his shirt, laid down his rod and his body, and gazed upward at trees silhouetted against the sky, his left hand resting on Blu’s head. He could feel the warm summer sun on his face, spreading like a blanket over his chest and arms, warmer and warmer, hotter and the trailer heater thrumming and he opened his eyes.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, old Two Dogs won’t abandon you.”

When the morning light broke, Two Dogs felt confident he could finally take a few minutes away from the pups. He stood up. The young bitch sounded a low whine, jumped off the bed, and laid her body across the door.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, old Two Dogs won’t abandon you,” he said. “Go back and check on your pups, and we can both go out for some air.”

The young bitch understood and took stock of the sleeping pups. Then she followed him out the trailer and into the crisp morning breeze flowing through the Cascades. Two Dogs set out a chair on the river bank, filled his briar pipe with mildly sweet tobacco, the young bitch laying beside him, her eyes never leaving him, and they took in the sunrise together through puffs of smoke.

“Many men go fishing all of their
lives without knowing that it
is not fish they are after.”

Henry David Thoreau

The Fisherman

The small cataraft bounced in the choppy waters of the Trinity River as the old man with a ponytail stared intently into the shadows along the bank, hoping to spot torpedo shapes in the depths. The steelhead, with noses pointed upstream, had followed the great schools of salmon more than a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean to feed on eggs laid in the redds and to spawn themselves.

The old man had been after them his whole life.

He spun the cataraft against the current and pulled strongly with both oars, as he neared a turn along an imposing rock wall. Above the wall was the road and below, rushing water lapped into a deep run. The two tubes of the cataraft, which looked like giant bananas, rolled back and toward the sandy shore opposite the wall. In one of the saddle bags was a rain jacket and extra fishing gear; in the other, rice balls with sour plums, fish cake and bottled water. He planned to have his lunch here at “The Wall” (also known as the “Jap Hole” among locals), one of the best spots along the five-mile float for holding steelhead in the fall.

The old man had fished this hole hundreds of times since the early 1970s. He knew it well and saw that the water was high now and with a bit of color from the rains last week but still good enough to fish. He saw friendly faces, too, as he ate his lunch in quiet among the red and yellow leaves of the trees and familiar birds. His longtime fishing friend hooked his last steelhead here before cancer caught up with him in 2000. In the following year, a dozen of the old man’s disciples came to the Trinity River to catch and release wild steelhead in his friend’s memory.

The old man bowed to the fish.

So the old man baited his hook with a berry — salmon eggs wrapped in silk — tapped the free-line button on a classic Johnson reel and cast out into the moving green water.

The hit came on the fifth cast at the 10 o’clock position, not fast and sharp like a trout but heavy. The old man bowed to the fish. Steelhead around these parts often mouth bait and let it go on the first pass, he once told me, mimicking the mouthing motion with his hand. That’s why you must give the fish time and some line to mull it over, he said. But the eggs are rapturous, irresistible, ancient. And then the second pull.

The old man yanked the rod back and to the side, where it abruptly stopped, hooking the fish in the corner of the mouth. He could feel the full weight of the fish and the slow swaying of its tail.

For the first few seconds fish and fisherman hardly moved, as if in a silent greeting. Then the old man flipped the clicker-switch on the reel, which acted as a kind of drag, and turned the corked butt to the fish creating a bow in the top part of the graphite fly-rod. The pressure sent the fish slicing toward the surface and into the air. The old man bowed again, releasing line pressure as the fish whipped its tail to and fro, trying to throw the hook or cut the line with its teeth.

The fish made a half-dozen bursts as the old man played the angles and kept a bow in the rod. It’s a matter of pressure, he said, just enough to make the fish work for its freedom yet not too much or else the fish will be lost forever. But the fish is crafty, sometimes charging the fisherman, turning and diving into nearby snags.

He lingered at “The Wall” for a moment …

The old man worked the fish for fifteen minutes before beaching it. The 27-inch steelhead had the pointed top jaw of a buck, his scales silvery, which the old man referred to as “chrome,” meaning the fish hadn’t been in the river for very long. The old man removed the hook with a pair of needle nose pliers, briefly took stock and let it go. He lingered at “The Wall” for a moment, as the wind picked up bringing a chill into the valley. For some reason, he didn’t want to stay and pushed the cataraft back into the current and floated away.

He died in January of 2005, after a risky surgery proved to be just that, and three months shy of his annual pilgrimage to the Situk River in Alaska, which he called, “the best steelhead fishery in the world.” I shook his hand two days before the ill-fated surgery, and he told me to keep writing. Tougher men wept upon hearing the news of the great naturalist and fisherman Takenori “Tak” Tsuchiya’s death. An English translation of a famous haiku poem by Basho Matsuo graced the casket:

Spring departs.
Birds cry
Fishes’ eyes are filled with tears

Basho Matsuo