The Ruse | by J. D. Anderson

 

Plateaus above timberline drained down talus slopes and rugged tarns, through boulder-lined lakes and steep, forested canyons.  The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness was lifeblood for our hometown, Red Lodge, just seventy miles from Yellowstone Park.  North of town, long, low-lying benches of prairie grass, sage brush, and cattle and sheep land folded into rolling foothills, where Rock Creek, the Stillwater, Rosebud and Clark’s Fork found the Yellowstone River.  In this isolated transition between prairie and mountains, my family existed through the ruse of reuse—or it existed through us in a strange medley of shapes, imitations, and home-spun philosophy.  

Beneath tall cottonwoods in our horse pasture, Dad once suspended from ropes and springs a spent fifty-five gallon anti-freeze barrel, which he wrapped with a bull rope showing his four kids how to use as a bucking barrel—training for the annual Little Britches Rodeo.   Above, the painted tree fort made of barn and garage wood leftovers served as both grandstands and an announcer’s booth.

A broken bicycle, an old porch bench, and spare conduit were one day welded into a pony cart and painted glossy black.  When our Welch pony named Penny was trained to pull us, I steered her to the KOA Campground across Highway 212 and charged tourists fifty cents for guided rides.      

At the city dump one winter afternoon, I watched Dad salvage the rusty hood of a Nash, a breed of car long since defunct on the scrap heap of his own adolescence.  When he tossed it in the back of the pickup it didn’t look like the sled it would soon become.  Later that winter, he sat us four kids on the hood, pulling us behind various vehicles—first our horse named Early Times, then the Willy’s Jeep he refurbished with a plywood roof and doors, and finally the Ski-Doo, which one day skipped me across the Red Lodge Golf Course like I’d been hit from a wayward 1 iron.       

 Even some of the names of the places came from reuse, as in our town itself, named from a Crow Indian tradition of decorating tepees with nearby red clay.  Our life along Rock Creek made the twin arts of mimicry and reuse irresistible.  My father, who could sell anyone anything, sold his children the story of both.

With ownership of the local Gambles Hardware buttering our family bread, Mom and Dad had little time away from the store, but faithfully taught their older children to teach the younger ones in their shared love of the land.   At the front of the line usually stood Mike, their second child, but first son.  As the youngest of the four fourth-generation Montanans, I puppy-dogged behind the rest, eager for crumbs of streamside counsel.    

Ten o’clock to two o’clock, more wrist than elbow.  Pause slightly at two, building energy in the loop.  These are the words I etched in my mind as I learned to cast a fly rod, imagining the hands of a giant clock on shore facing my right shoulder.  A dry fly cast poorly slapped the water like an empty frying pan.  The perfect one floated the fly down first, gentle as a cottonwood tuft. The roll-cast was used for tight situations with a tree or a cliff at my back, the double-haul for longer distances, as on high mountain lakes.   

The secret to tying a strong blood knot for attaching tippet to fly-line leader, Mike demonstrated, rested in my spit, which lessened friction, keeping the line strong while pulling the knot snug.  Hooks snagged in appendages (like the one Mike lodged in my index finger after he tripped across my pole running for a another hole as I tied-on a fly) were removed by first pushing the tip and barb through—beyond the bend, if necessary—poking the hook out of the skin at another point.  Here a pair of side cutters could easily clip off the barb, freeing up the hook to be pulled back through the first protrusion.  This worked surprisingly well, unless the gape of the hook was too narrow, or the fly deemed too invaluable to sacrifice, which then might require a trip to the emergency room.  

While Mom fought off exasperation from endless meals and mountains of laundry, Mike taught me the importance of muddy banks when hunting for worms, and how sometimes the best fishing holes were accessed only by slogging through spring swamps, regardless of what it did to my school jeans.

I don’t recall ever having asked Mike to teach me how to tie flies.  One day he just decided that I needed to learn.  Not that he was wrong.  I did want to learn.  I just didn’t know it.  There on the basement bench, a world of fuzz, thread and messy animal scraps became ordered, trimmed and finely placed.  

In the depths of winter the sun would set over the mountains just after four o’clock.  After dinner, I stood tippy-toed beneath a warm bench light, watching how pinched guard hairs could be separated from the finer, blurry mass below, each part having its own purpose and intent, their canvas the sharp-tipped wire I could still feel under the skin of my forefinger.  Order evolved from fragments and disorder, as feathers, hair and fur fell from the tapered jaws of a vice holding the best parts snug.  When tied well, every quill, fiber, and thread presented itself as something entirely different.  

Mike called my first fly The Barnyard—a wooly mammoth of a lure imitating an ailing minnow.  Tail hair from Early Times cinched down a knot of lamb’s wool, chicken feathers, goose down, and a lock of my own bangs—the found poem a spinoff of from the grassy patch next to corral.  Curiously, the work found its home in Mike’s fly box until one late August evening that year on Rock Creek when he landed a fourteen-inch brown with it.  I wanted my fly back.

Back at the bench I wondered where we found all the materials for the other flies: the fur, patches of hair, napes of feathers.  When the truth was revealed—that they were the very hides we’d chased and killed for food, or found as road-kill along the bloody barrows of southern Montana highways—a burning wad of split shot sank through my throat.  It all came together.  Dad baiting a trap with venison scraps in the bottom of Bear Creek.  The tail of a deer curing in the rafters in the garage.  Fine scissors brought to the front room to a mounted brown bear rug with head and eyes still full of life, jaws permanently agape to fit my whole fist.   Rabbit, pheasant, moose, elk.  In outfoxing creatures on land to outfox others in the water, our basement fly-tying palette had become a microcosm of Crow country.  

Our siblinghood fostered natural (sometimes brutal) competition.  While other brothers competed with smacked balls caught in dusty leather mits above raked dirt and mowed grass, or beneath woven baskets hung on rims above the squeak and bounce of gymnasium wood, Mike’s preferred venue was at the ends of leader in the gurgle and slosh of eddies, or beneath over-hung banks smoothed to glass from snowmelt.  Here, in life-giving and life-taking forces—forces able to fill his dinner plate as quick as they could fill his waders—Mike found his home field advantage.  

If he stood on one side of the stream spotting a hole on the opposite side, the rapids, undertows and slippery bedrock only lured him across to cast above the hole, allowing for the best, most natural drift possible.   That the hole wasn’t any better than the one he just left didn’t matter.  It was another opportunity, often one just below where my line sat slack in the water, and no one would beat him to it.

At what point fishing became more than fishing to Mike, I am not sure.  It eventually so consumed him that the question of whom was fishing for what became a question of what was fishing for whom.  Was it Mike nymphing the river bottom and tail water deep into the dark, or was the undertow behind boulders and the gaps in front of log jams trolling for my own big brother as he worked their hidden recesses?  

While adulthood wedged distance between us, it never lessened Mike’s authority on fishing.  Late-September one year as I was in school in Bozeman, he called me out of the blue.  Wanted to go chase steelhead on the North Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho.  

“Two runs a year up there.  One in the spring, one in the fall.  My friends down in Lewiston tell me this fall has been one of the best in decades.  So I booked a cabin along the shore in Sloop for mid-October.  You in?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Bring your son and whatever gear you think you’ll need.  But don’t forget these four things.  Write this down.  Ready?  Beer. Number four long hooks.  Rubber surgical tubing.  And an old extension cord.”  

I didn’t bother asking for details.  He had a plan for the catch and I wasn’t about to bring it into question.  

He drove from Salt Lake City with his son Christian, who was eight; I drove from Bozeman with Daniel, nine.  If the weather wouldn’t cooperate or the steelhead didn’t bite, at least it would be a memorable getaway for the cousins.

We planned for a 4 o’clock rendezvous at the cabin in Sloop.  The snow fell heavy and wet, turning the road along the deep, forested canyon into gravelly slush. Thinking we were early, Daniel and I pulled up at 3:30 to find Mike and Christian already unloading their gear.  After shouted greetings and warm hugs, Mike pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward his pickup bed and asked Daniel to fetch a large white cooler resting on his tailgate.  

He added, “You might want to look inside there before you lift it up, in case it’s too heavy.”  

Daniel took a peek, leapt back with a yelp, and slammed the lid back shut.  When the laughs subsided, Daniel and I learned that they had arrived an hour earlier.   Mike’s 32-inch steelhead on ice had already crowned the weekend.  

Be smart, patient and don’t ask.  As his kid bro, I learned early about the hush-hush of snagging a hunk of Mike’s wisdom, especially nuggets that he didn’t necessarily want me to know.  Ride the drift of his own world with him, nonchalantly mending the line of conversation through the riffle of my question.  As in fly-fishing itself, presentation was everything.

So I waited.  A few beers after dinner, before a captive audience at the cabin’s fireplace hearth, the question came as predicted.

“Want me to show you the trick?”

“Mmmm.  You’re probably exhausted.  Long drive today.”

He opened his tackle box and pulled from the top tray a tri-loop swivel, a chunk of rubber surgical tubing, a two-inch chunk of rolled lead snipped from a spool, and a frayed extension cord stripped of its insulation exposing  its tiny strands of copper wire.  

“Looks like the cord has seen a better day,” I said.

“Not really, if you think about it.  You bring yours?”

“Yep.  It’s in my pickup.  Suppose I should start in on those dishes.”

“Look. You first tie the end of your line to one of these swivel loops. Got it?”

“Got it.  Hey, did you bring any dish soap?”

“Then, insert the second loop inside the surgical tubing, which I call a rubber snubber, and secure it by wrapping on a strand of that wire.”

“Nice looking tackle box.  Where’d you get that thing?”

“Still with me here?”

“Yea, I’m still listening.  Keep going.  Want another beer?”

“You plug the opposite end of the snubber with a chunk of rolled lead, which sends the line to the river bottom, but should you get snagged the weight can still fall free from the tubing.”

“So you won’t lose your whole rigging.  Wow.”

“Ingenious, huh?”  

“Daniel.  You brush your teeth, yet?”

“Now, hack off fifteen inches of leader or so, and tie it to the final swivel loop.”

“Fifteen inches.  Got it.  Here’s some toothpaste, son.”

“Tie your fly on to the other end of the leader, and there you have it.”

“Bring any whiskey?”

“See how that works?  The fly sinks into the channel, but stays up just off the bottom, right where they’re running now.”

“I suppose a good stone fly pattern might work well, huh.”

“Or one of these.  Size four.  You bring your hooks, too?”

He held up something resembling a flapper’s hat for Mardi Gras.  The hook was strung with a dazzling array of rainbow garland, puffy black chenille, long, lusty marabou feathers, and wide silver ribbing.  Off the hook’s bend streamed a black soft-plastic jig tail sparkling like teen eye-liner.  

He lifted the top tray out and pulled out four other colors of chenille, marabou, and jig tails.  “Mix and match.  I tie them together at streamside, in case I hear they’re hitting on a particular color.  Before I tie the hook on, though—and this is key, you listening?”

“I’m listening, just stoking the fire a bit.”

“Before I tie the hook to the other end of the leader, I thread on one of these.”

From a shiny, bulging baggy he pulled a steely-sized floating chrome ball with a hole drilled through its middle.  He wedged the ball tight against the hook’s eye as a head to the lure.

“Extra stimulator action for the dark and deep, but keeping everything buoyant and free.”  He looked out the window to the river in the dark.  “Best of both worlds, really.”

After breakfast in the morning, I raided Mike’s tackle box and fixed the drift rig onto my rod.  Making sure he was watching, I walked out of the cabin, crossed the slushy road and dropped down into the white riverbank.   In a deep hole a few feet from shore, I tossed in the get up and studied its action in the drift.  It shimmered and pulsated even in the morning grey, a floating belly dancer opening her plume of marabou and flash, then narrowing it again in a titillating ballet, the weight-trick rattling the boogie along the riffle.   I reeled in and casted out further, watching how it bounced through the deep channel.   

“Guides to the sky.”  Mike shouted from the road, holding his coffee and cigarette.

“What?  Is it going to snow again?”  I asked.

“Keep the rod tip up, line guides to the sky.  At first they’re curious, just nibbling, like they’re priming their noses in the reflection of the chrome ball, or something.  When you least expect it, WHAM!  But if keep your rod tip up, guides to the sky, holding your line like you’re bait fishing, it sends every tiny vibration down the rod to your hands, like am electric current.  Soon you can tell a legit strike from the slightest rock tug.”  

 I’d never fished for steelhead before, but figured I now had everything needed for this trip. The morning’s tutorial resulted in both of us filling our steelhead tags that weekend, each keeping two on ice for the ride home and releasing the rest.  Daniel and Christian even reeled in a couple.  Staying true to form, Mike caught twice as many as I did—six more than my six, none of which matched his first.  

On the late-night drive back to Bozeman, as my son snoozed against the door, I thought about the few strands remaining on the old brown extension cord behind my seat.   I wondered if learning reuse early was what led me to where I prefer to drink anything cold from a Mason jar—whether out of nostalgia, comfort, or some sense of conservation.  Was this also why I’ve been known to turn a plastic sandwich bag inside out to wash and use again?

 And maybe this is why I love to fish that run of the Gallatin where parts of old rusted cars were once carefully staged to reinforce the bank.  I couldn’t think of a better place for those parts.  As ugly as it looked, it actually did the trick.  The bank was still intact, the hole below still deadly, and I still returned there to find my fill.  I doubt that Mom, Dad, or even Mike, ever intended to teach me such appreciation.  They just instilled it by being true to who they were.  

Late last spring I packed out of the Black Hills of South Dakota a sun-bleached elk shed antler—the smallest five-point I’d ever seen, which fit well on the passenger’s floor board in my pickup.  It wound up on the bench in my garden shed for a while, until one hot summer day when I decided to resurrect its spirit with stain (only I had no stain to speak of).  That’s when I spotted underneath the bench a small pan of rank, black ooze complete with a few drowned hornets and house flies.  The pan had apparently gone untouched since I left it there when I last changed the lawn mower oil.  

I remember as a young adult giving no thought to tossing that kind of waste in the ally.  It helps keep the dust down, for one thing.  But now my home sits one block from my favorite local fishery, Spearfish Creek, which makes me no more eager to toss the rank, black ooze into the ally than to pour a gallon of gasoline down my throat.  So I congratulated myself for finally discovering its other use.   When I finished giving back the ghostly antler the deep brown of the eye of the bull it once knew, I didn’t care that it smelled like the floor drain of a repair shop.  I’d come by that sort of thing honestly.