Anything Can Happen
An angler shares their take on a day of fly fishing like no other in memory.
ILLUSTRATION BY DEREK DEYOUNG
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WHEN YOU MOVE TO MONTANA YOU GET A LOT OF QUESTIONS, ESPECIALLY “DO YOU FISH?” It’s Montana after all, and they imagine A River Runs Through It — that whole romance of western fly fishing — the solitary figure throwing out larger and larger loops of line in waning light on a sun-dappled western river. “I’d love to fish Montana,” they say, their voices trailing off.
It makes me sad, those wistful voices, those people longing for the fleeting chance of a lifetime. Because the thing is, I don’t fish the famous river that flows through my town, the one where boat after boat goes by all summer, filled with men in waders, casting with the urgency of people who only get a week or two off each year and who are determined to make the most of it. When I fish, I want to fish like a kid. I want that sense of suspended time, the sense that there’s nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do, and so you’re just going to throw your line back in there one more time and see if something might happen.
For instance, it’s evening and we’re camped by a pothole lake in the Russell Wildlife Refuge. There are two white pelicans fishing for their dinner over by the island, a crowd of noisy dabbling ducks in the rushes on the far side, and the surface is dappled with those little rings fish make when they come up to feed. I throw out a fly, and despite my best efforts, yell “I got one!” when the fierce little fish takes it. I fight it for a bit, then swing it up and out of the water, and in a movement as familiar to me as any from my childhood, I run my hand down to smooth the dorsal spines before taking out the hook. What I’ve caught on that pretty lake in the Russell isn’t a trout, it’s a bluegill — the bright spot of gold beneath its chin, the spiny dorsal fin, the aggressive fight. The familiar feel from those years of childhood, standing on a Wisconsin dock, catching the same little fish over and over. Bluegill and me, we go way back. That night, we cast flies while bats swooped over the water, catching bluegill and bass out of a warm weedy lake as light faded over the badlands of eastern Montana. Was it fishing? Of course, just not the kind the tourist board usually advertises.
For me, the magic comes from wading up some creek in my Chuck Taylors, a box of flies stuffed in the back pocket of a pair of shorts, hoping for a big lunker underneath an overhang, but happy to see what I can get. Sometimes it’s the surprise of a bluegill on a fly rod. Sometimes it’s a 6-inch trout, so small that to this transplanted Midwesterner it looks like the minnows our dads used for bait. Sometimes it’s a big old brown trout who’s been living under that log for years. You never know. That’s the fun of it. Because although living in Montana for most of us means that we don’t have much cash, and don’t go on real vacations, it also means that we’ve got the space to take off for a couple of days mid-week, throw our gear in the car and drive up some logging road, to explore a new corner of the state where we’ll find a creek, or a beaver pond, or even a stocked reservoir in the middle of nowhere, and where we’ll have the chance to throw in a line, to see what might happen.
  
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