Trout Town

By Dave Ames

Jake Cruz, a decorated M.P., is back from Afghanistan with a war torn soul. Hardly an hour passes that he doesn't dream of swallowing his own weapon. The sole reason Jake has to put one foot in front of the other is a tear-stained letter he's promised to deliver to a person he's never met in a place he's never been-the jagged peaks of the Backbo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lodgepole Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822904309

Dave Ames

Dave Ames has written for many magazines and newspapers, including Big Sky Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Fly Fisherman. He is the award winning author of books including True Love and the Woolly Bugger, A Good Life Wasted or Twenty Years as a Fishing Guide, Dances with Sharks, and Me, My Cells, and I. He considers himself fortunate to have spent the better part of his life casting flies into the rivers, swamps and oceans of the world, thanks all the fish that made it possible, and resides in Montana.

Book preview

The One That Got Away

Skinny McCarthy, the only punk fly-fishing guide on the Apikuni River and maybe the solar system, cast a nervous eye toward the seething black and purple clouds looming to the west. Thunder rumbled, reverberating off the dark red canyon walls, and Merry Madison, an emerald-eyed pixie of a young woman, threw her head back as her rod dipped toward the water and screamed:

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my…GOD!

That's how hooking a four pound brown trout can make you feel.

Rod tip up, reminded Skinny. Then when he jumps…

The slab-sided trout gleamed as it arced through the filtered sunlight ahead of the storm, a golden torpedo silhouetted against the dark squall.

Oh my G-G-G…NO!

That's how the one that got away can make you feel.

Whether it be man, woman, or fish.

Big one, noted Skinny.

Merry's thin shoulders sagged, her eyes wide and crazed, hardly showing any iris at all around dilated pupils. They both looked to the west as a jagged flash of blue-white lightning seared through the black and purple clouds.

We should go, said Skinny. Ride out the storm under the bridge.

On this section of the Apikuni, the river meandered as it bounced back and forth against the hard red argillite of the canyon walls. The two-lane highway crossed the water on a pair of bridges, and, when on the river, parking the boat beneath a concrete bridge is about as safe a place as you’ll find to shelter from a thunderstorm. One of those bridges

was immediately downstream, because Skinny knew the forecast was for storms, and he’d planned it that way.

What he hadn’t planned on was Merry, who said:

No way, no way, no way.

Then she flicked the side of her head with her finger, looking bemused.

I’m talking in triplets? she said.

Skinny ran a fingertip along the rings in his upper ear, which were tingling, even though the visible lightning bolts were still a good ten miles away.

You sound surprised, he said.

Merry was already stripping in line to make another cast.

Kinda, she said, it only happens when I’m rea-lly excited.

Give a woman a fish and she eats it. Teach her how to catch fish and she will occasionally hop in your bed, and his heart thumped just that little bit faster as Skinny licked rain off his well-pierced lips.

One more, said Merry. Please, please, please…

Skinny was conflicted as Merry clutched his arm.

On the one hand, you don’t mess with lightning.

On the other hand, plenty of people have been hit by lightning and lived to tell the story. One guy Skinny had read about, a park ranger back east somewhere, maybe in the Smoky Mountains, had been struck by lightning seven times. Talk about a magnetic personality. The guy eventually took his own life at the age of seventy-two but, hell, that was probably just because he didn’t want to get hit again.

Plus, brown trout, especially the biggest ones, are like vampires. They prefer to feed at night. They’re primarily nocturnal, so, when they’re on the prowl during the daylight hours, you’re loath to leave. Bottom line: you don’t leave rising fish.

Plus, it wouldn’t last long.

The best things never do.

Trout, like all fish, have an internal gas-filled organ called a swim bladder which they use to control buoyancy. This swim bladder, even though trout live under the water, is sensitive to changes in air pressure in the same way as a balloon. Only fish know why, and they aren’t saying, but the slight changes in barometric pressure that accompany thunderstorms can, sometimes but not always, trigger voracious feeding frenzies that invariably flip off like a switch when the storm passes.

Plus, in the drizzle, there was a wet T-shirt to consider.

O.K. said Skinny, one more.

Standing on red and green rocks long since ground smooth by glacial flow, Merry and Skinny fished a gravel shelf off the edge of an island sprouting only the occasional willow. Caddis popped in the riffle and beyond. Everywhere you looked trout slashed at the emerging insects, some of them in water so shallow their dorsal fins flopped sideways in rainy air.

Try that one, said Skinny, pointing. Hurry.

What? shouted Merry. I can’t hear you. Because of the thunder.

There, Skinny shouted back, still pointing. In that line of foam.

Big fish on tiny dry flies are a fly-fisherman's wet dream. Plenty of obsessed anglers have spent their lives chasing trout and still never experienced a hatch quite like what Merry was seeing. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good: the rising wind straightened her forecast, and when the fly settled to the water, it practically dropped into the trout's mouth.

I got him, I got him, I got him, she screamed.

Rod tip high, reminded Skinny. Rod tip high.

This time Merry held fast against the fish, keeping the rod pointed toward the heavens, blue sparks shooting out from the graphite just above the cork handle, the bend in the rod acting as a shock absorber against any sudden lunges the trout might make. The trout jumped once, twice, and then Merry was gaining line.

Skinny's mind, his job done for the moment, went walkabout.

Merry.

A fly rod in her hands, the T-shirt gone nearly transparent, a big fish on, the lightning…he’d had dreams that weren’t that good. Skinny smiled into the teeth of the coming storm, absently scratching at the hair standing up on his arm, finally thinking:

Blue Sparks?

He yanked the rod away from Merry, broke off the fish.

What the absolute hell? screamed Merry.

Skinny threw the still sparking rod down on the sandy beach.

Run, he screamed back, grabbing her arm. Run.

Lightning comes in several flavors, but the type we’re most familiar with begins with updrafts from warm air pushing against a moisture-

laden white and puffy cumulus cloud. The water vapor in the cloud rises into the cooler air above, the cloud transforms into a towering black cumulonimbus, and eventually the water vapor freezes in the upper atmosphere as it rises.

Then, apparently, in a way that is not completely understood, all those zillions of frozen vapor particles jostling together in a supercooled environment create a negative electrical charge. The potential energy in this electrical charge is on the order of a billion volts, which is more than enough to cook your goose, since only a hundred-and-ten volts is plenty enough to burn your toast.

Carrying on with the not completely understood, that negative electric potential energy in the cloud seeks a way out by creating a stepped leader, which is essentially an ionized pathway that is about the diameter of your thumb and zigs and zags outward in fifty yard segments. You can think of it as somewhat like a wire, a wire that's insulated by the nonconductive air around it, a wire that can be dozens or even hundreds of miles long, a wire that forms pretty much instantaneously, an invisible wire created from the very air itself that provides the path through which lightning flows.

Meanwhile, down on the earth or up in another cloud, as the negatively charged stepped leader approaches, an area of positively charged electrical potential is reaching out to do a meet-and-greet with an electrical streamer of its own. On the earth, the tallest objects in a given vicinity tend to have the highest positive electrical potential. This is why trees, church steeples, and mountain tops tend to be frequent sites of lightning strikes and, yes, on a flat river even a fly rod held high to prevent a fish from breaking off can be enough to become an object of electrical desire.

When the negative stepped leader from the cloud meets the positive streamer from a tree or a fly rod the circuit is complete. A billion volts of invisible electrons flow through the ionized channel from the cloud to the ground, triggering a return flow of electromagnetic radiation from the ground to the cloud that manifests as visible light we call lightning. In only a few milliseconds this bounce-back of invisible electrons and visible light can repeat itself several times, and flowing electricity causes heat.

In those same few milliseconds the air within the ionized channel of the lightning tube has now become about four times hotter than the sun. It's unimaginably hot. Think of it as the Big Bang, only smaller. That hot air wants to expand, but it heated up so quickly it hasn’t had time to expand gradually, so it goes all at once: KABOOM.

This explosion of expanding air creates sound waves which we hear as thunder, but for the first ten yards or so the effect is that of a pure shock wave, a literal wall of energy. Skinny and Merry, who had only just begun to run, were knocked flat on their faces by the shock wave in a blinding flash of blue-white light.

Skinny, blinking away the spots in his eyes, twisted his neck, which seemed to be working just fine, and looked over at Merry, who was smiling back.

Are you alright? he shouted over the storm.

Merry, her cheek on the gravel, her eyes wild as the wind, shouted back:

Best second date…EVER.

Skinny took a deep breath, choking on the ozone, and grinned weakly.

EVER, he agreed.

They lay curled together, spooning on the sandy beach, pebbles poking up here and there, warm where their bodies touched, coiled against the pelting rain. Isolated storms cells falling off the Rocky Mountains can move at thirty or forty miles an hour; it wasn’t so long before blue sky was peeking through, and then their clothes were steaming as the clear hot sun beat down.

The storm was off to the east, still full of lightning, but moving fast in the other direction. It seemed safe enough, but then it had seemed safe enough before. Skinny cautiously sat up and looked at the place on the beach where the fly rod had been.

Lightning does strange and stranger things when it grounds out. It can melt a shoe, blast a hole in concrete, dig a trench as it follows a buried wire, or even leave no sign at all. In this case it left a fused impression of the fly rod in the pebbled sand. The graphite shaft was nowhere to be found, evidently vaporized, but the metal rod guides were still in place and upright, like little loopy gravestones.

The reel was modern art, barely recognizable, the swoosh of a drooping handle across gears jutting from melted plastic. Skinny picked it up and said:

Could have been us.

Merry did a little pirouette and threw her arms to the sun.

Gawd, she said. "I’m so horny?"

Wide-eyed and blinking, Merry seemed a little startled that she’d actually said it out loud but there's no surprise to it. If you want to feel really alive, try nearly dying. In the aftermath, briefly at least, it's like Mother Earth is letting you in on a secret, a one-time glimpse into the energies that surround us. Colors are more vivid, sounds more vibrant, tastes more intense, desires more primal.

I know just the place, Skinny replied.

Just the place was a secluded and sandy little beach in a cottonwood copse about a mile down where the canyon opened up at the top. He pushed on the oars as they floated downstream, goldfinches and red-winged blackbirds flittering through the olive leaves of the bank side bushes. The air was muggy and still as the sun worked what was left of the storm, and the sand on the beach was cool in the shade as Skinny set up a folding table and covered it with a red-and-white checked tablecloth.

Merry settled back into a big director's chair like she owned it and said:

Can I ask you something?

Skinny set down the cooler and said:

Sure you can.

It's going to sound really stupid.

So what?

Does it ever get to be too much out here? Like an overload? All this beauty. Seriously. All this nature. Drowning in it every freaking day. Or do you just get, you know, like—used to it?

It was a good question, and Skinny said:

Not yet.

Merry tilted her head way back, face up to the puffy white clouds.

There is nothing like this in the east, she said. You know that, don’t you?

Never been back east, said Skinny, but people seem to like it.

Then he held up a bottle in each hand and said:

Vino tinto or vino blanco?

Blanco, said Merry, blanco, blanco, blanco.

Guide lunches have gotten routinely fancy but this one was especially so. A chilled bottle of chardonnay in an ice bucket on the table, another in the cooler, a red on hold. And a bottle of Don Julio tequila to go with the salt and limes in case things got crazy. And what Merry had requested when he’d asked her what she wanted for lunch—crackers, soft and hard cheeses, prosciutto, maybe a peppered sausage, olives, apple slices, cherries, hummus, a baguette, you know, like that, just the usual.

Caviar? he’d joked.

And was sorry when she’d said:

Sure, why not.

But Skinny wasn’t sorry now.

They talked their way through the first bottle of wine, feeling each other out. Merry was telling how she’d just finished up an M.B.A., from one of those Ivy League colleges, the precise name of which Skinny promptly disremembered, because he generally thought of those schools as teeth from the same veneered mouth.

So what's next? he asked. Get a job?

Merry stared up at the clouds, just watching.

I might go to work for my father, she finally said. But now…it's complicated. You know, family.

Skinny, the black sheep in a long line of career cowhands, got that.

I do know, he replied. Tequila?

Even the birds stopped to listen when Merry laughed.

You read my mind, she said. I like that in a man.

Merry went back to looking at the sky, then pointed.

There, she said. There. That cloud? What do you see?

Did life get any better?

Maybe not, thought Skinny.

White, soft and puffy…what else could it be?

Boobs, he said.

Merry punched him in the arm.

That's a hedgehog, she said.

What's a hedgehog, wondered Skinny.

Oh, right, he said. Now I see it. Plain as day.

Merry didn’t miss a beat as she pulled up her T-shirt.

Now, she said, now what do you see?

Skinny licked the corner of his mouth and sighed.

Hedgehogs, he said. Big beautiful hedgehogs.

Merry laughed and laughed, her shirt still pulled up, pale and slightly sweaty skin glistening in the dappled sunlight filtering through the rough-barked cottonwood trees. Skinny leaned in for a nibble, his spiked yellow mohawk tickling Merry's collarbone, but not before activating an app on his cell phone that linked to certain aspects of his body jewelry.

Oh. MY. God…

Merry quivered, in a good way, and continued:

"Where in the name of all that's naughty did you get that?"

Trout Town, mumbled Skinny proudly. You can get them over the counter. My friends make them. They tell me it's repurposed hearing aid technology, along with a miniaturized cell phone buzzer. Crazy, right?

Unbelievable, moaned Merry. I mean-n-n…

Vibrating tongue studs: what won’t they think of next?

Right there…yes…yes-s-s…that's purrrr-fect.

Except perfection is a moving target. It can’t last because the universe is required to exact revenge in order to restore balance, and out on the river the roar of an outboard motor suddenly dropped in pitch as it revved down.

"Are they turning in here? said Merry. Now?"

Skinny tapped his phone to turn off the tongue stud—no sense in wasting valuable battery time—and leapt up.

No, he said fiercely, they’re not.

Skinny's antipathy to motorboats on trout rivers ran deep. In his opinion jet boats and their ilk are loud, smelly, and dangerous to non-motorized river traffic. Who among us will speak up for the last few bastions of peace and quiet? Skinny did, ardently and often. He was devout in his certainty that motors should be prohibited on at least some Montana rivers, including especially the relatively small Apikuni, but the Montana legislature did not agree, and this…this…

THIS is what happened.

A narrow band of shoreline willows blocked the immediate view of the river, and Skinny stalked toward the shore where his drift boat was pulled up and anchored. The boat was distinctive—painted up to resemble a shoreline of mixed willows and prairie grass, to blend in, because Skinny grabbed at any edge he could to get one up on those wily trout. The paint job looked like art because it was.

He’d traded guided fishing days in return for the custom paint job with one of the local artists and, on the boat, mink peered from the rocks while hummingbirds hovered in the sky. His beloved drift boat was rocking in the wash of the motorboat's wake as Skinny burst through the willows, took one look, and stopped dead in his sandals.

Ironman?

And the Hulk?

The Hulk was driving, standing behind the center console, and Iron Man was up front, braced in the bow. The Hulk was oddly small behind the rubber mask, but Iron Man was all bulging muscles, and pointing a gun with a barrel that looked big enough to take down a rhinoceros directly at Skinny's chest.

They found me, they found me, they found me!

Skinny looked over when Merry screamed, saw her peering out of the bushes.

Then he looked back down at his chest where he’d just been shot.

The river went grey, then black, then—nothing.

Nothing at all.

Fly or Die

Sitting in a hole waiting for something that might not happen is about as existential as it gets. The inevitable acceptance of pointlessness can stir the sleeping spirit of the inner philosopher in even the most ardent of pragmatists. Plus, they needed something to talk about, and Jake Cruz, his hair a muddy shade of blonde against the red shale, declared:

I think my Brown God could kick your Brown God's ass.

Buckskin Manyrobes, a Piegan Blackfoot, leaned against the dirt and rock wall with his fingers laced behind his worn felt Stetson as he replied:

Old Man against Quetzalcoatl? That poof. When Old Man got done with him there’d be nothing left but feathers, snake teeth, and a couple hunks of melted jade.

Jake, who was of both Norwegian and Aztec descent, said:

O.K. Tag team. I’ll throw in my mom's God—Odin.

Buckskin nodded in approval.

Old One-Eye, he said. A good Guy in a bar fight. Plus his Kid has a helluva hammer from what I hear. And Valkyries. But it's still not enough. Not against Old Man, who brought the First People. You’re going to need another God.

O.K., said Jake, Zeus.

Lightning is an excellent weapon and Buckskin again nodded approval.

Three against One, he said. Now it's getting to be a fair fight. Be good for the planet too. Dig up some fresh mountains when they wrestle, scratch out some new rivers when they claw, maybe tear down some golden towers.

It really would be something to see.

Probably sell it on pay-per-view, said Jake.

And then there's the merchandising, agreed Buckskin.

"Never have to