Thursday evening, I made my version of my grandma's beef stew*, left it to simmer and headed east into the foothills for the PED hatch. PEDs (Pale Evening Duns) are blonde mayflies about an inch long from tip to tail with bright abdomens, the colors of which are the subject of much debate among the hard core locals - the stragglers - who, well after dark, trudge up the hill under the Parks Bar Bridge, most nights to the only car still parked there besides mine, with pictures and stories and intel. Occasionally, while I'm effusing or commiserating or debating with one of these hardy souls, fresh off the river, from the lawn chairs or grill of an overnighting RV or camper, one or two day trippers will angle over, hoping to glean some info or to hold forth with their own generally under-inflated narratives but, strangely, never with pictures.
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Around quarter to seven I found a spot among the fifteen or twenty assorted vehicles parked under the bridge and down both sides of the road to the west. I got out and opened the door for the dog. Looking down to the river, I could see six or seven guys flogging the water on both sides of the bridge, having driven hundreds of miles to, essentially, fish the parking lot.
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I've only ever had one real fishing buddy. She's in music school back east now so fishing has gone back to being what it was before; a solitary pursuit. Seeing another fisherman on any stream I fished used to ruin my whole day. Those were the younger times of long hikes to remote drainages, skirting crumbly cliffs and wading dicey rapids in pursuit of the local knowledge in the form of a creel full of wild, ten-inch fish for dinner. In those days I used to drive over this bridge on the way to those more pristine, lesser-known places knowing, with the zealot's cross-eyed certainty, that it was too close to town to be any good.
Now any guidebook on the great western waters will have a chapter on the Lower Yuba. It's a classic freestone tailwater and even though, until the last half of the nineteenth century, most of its stones rested in the mountainsides east of Nevada City, about forty miles upstream, and most of its water is the outflow from the salmon and steelhead blocking Englebright Dam, about two miles up from the bridge, it still reads as a natural wonder. The water is usually as clear as vodka, and the river bottom features all of the bright and dark variations of granite, for which its alpine upper forks have been beloved by generations of hikers and skinnydippers. In these lower foothills, though, cottonwoods soften the banks, bare purple and orange in the winter, lush and green in late spring when they suddenly drop an underlayment of snowy white down, six inches deep, onto the sand and stones they shade.
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The Lower Yuba's population of wild rainbow trout is also celebrated ad nauseum in all the current trade literature. These March afternoons, they have sex on their minds as much as food and you can often tell by the color of a rise whether a fish is a dusky golden male or a bright silver female.I am happy walking the trail past all the trout tourists fishing the wrong spots in the wrong directions; happy that almost none of them will ever see one. It's not their failure and frustration I take pleasure in. The Yuba is notoriously difficult to fish well. Only very specific techniques and patterns work there and even they only work at certain times.
Years ago, I taught golf. I gave it up only partly because I got a fat writing gig and had to travel. I probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway because of, well, certain white people, and their incredible sense of entitlement to possess skills they haven't earned. Golf and fly-fishing share this demographic as well as an almost identical potential for self-delusion. It's easy to totally suck but be convinced that excellence is just around the corner. That all one needs is "a couple of tweaks" or "some inside dope" and you'll be breaking par or killing it on the river like the homies. The truth is that a shit foundation is worse than nothing to build on. In the immortal words of Ben Hogan, "The secret is in the dirt". I get skunked all the time on the Yuba. Unless you're in a drift boat covering miles of water and dragging multiple nymphs, some days you'll never see or feel a fish and never have a clue what they're eating. Chatting up the locals on a stream that's kicking your ass is never a bad idea. But, instead of trying to act like the reincarnation of E.C. Powell**, just admit you had a rough day and ask for help. Invariably, in my experience, when you do that any decent local will try to set you up.
The move, though, if you're planning a first trip to the Yuba and only have a day or two, and you can raise the dough from your party, is to get into a drift boat with a good guide. There's a kid named Ryan Johnston out of Chico. Hired him when my old fishing buddy and her boyfriend were out last summer. He put us on A TON of fish nymphing down three miles of river below the bridge through midday into the afternoon and we still had time to drive to Grass Valley for pasties and a movie, then drive back to the bridge to hike in and throw dries in the evening. On an afternoon booking, he will teach you what, where and how to present both wet and dry flies to these picky fish and his remarkable stream-of-consciousness verbal ejaculations at the slightest twitch of an indicator will keep you in stitches all day.
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It was late and I had to tie on a leader so I didn't stop to watch any water on the way upstream. From the top of the first red dirt rise, I could see that there was nobody on the river for a good half-mile: More happiness. The dog walked ahead on the well-worn trail past the lone fig tree, over the black slabs, past the rock walls, across the driftwood bridge, through the cottonwood chute and onto the rockbar just below the slick I was going to fish. Feeling in my vest pocket for the the thin wheel of 5x leader, I started to look around. The blonde mayflies were everywhere and out in the water at the downstream end of the slick, a couple of fish rose to take them. Then, a couple more, then a couple more. The river is maybe a hundred yards wide there and as I reached the edge and spun off four arm lengths of leader, fish were rising from one bank to the other. This was going to be good. I cut the leader and started tying it to my floating line.
That's when I saw him.
On the other side of river and ten yards upstream, stumbling out of the cottonwoods - brand new neoprene waders (it was 85 in the shade and the river was running really low), spools of leader, assorted hemostats, clippers, boxes, and fly indexes hanging everywhere, some silly Australian looking hat, huge polarized bifocals and a wading staff - was a non-native fisherman and he he was going to cross the river right there.
"How you doing?" I shouted. "Hey there's a better spot to cross downstream! It's at the big ninety-degree bend to the right, about half a mile down!"
Not slowing down, he tromped into the water.
"Seriously!" I yelled, "You'll know it because there are six guys standing out there in the middle of the river in water up to their knees!"
"No!" he said, "I'm going to cross here!"
"I really wish you wouldn't!" I said, "It's really easy down there. Swear to God!" I'm not sure why I invoked the deity there. I'm not religious and for all I knew, he wasn't either - for emphasis, possibly.
"No!" he repeated, "I'm going to cross here!"
"Seriously?" At this, he started stomping downstream toward the tail of the slick where all the fish were rising.
"Bro, do me a favor then and cross upstream of me, ok?", I offered.
"No!" he said, "when you're fly fishing, you cross downstream of people because they fish upstream! Everybody knows that!" and with that he looped around and walked though the smooth, boily water just above the downstream riffle which, just seconds ago, had been full of rising fish.
"You poor dumb bastard, what part of L.A. are you from?" That isn't the last thing I said. It's just the last thing I remember saying. The instantaneous transition from near bliss to blind rage had been to much for my once-proud mind. I smelled burning metal. My eyesockets got sweaty. If he had come close enough, I could have bashed in his head with a rock. I stared at him as he climbed out of the water, now thirty yards downstream, finished tying on my leader and sat down. I had a stress hangover. My head hurt. My heart was pounding in my ears.
I washed my face, splashed some water on the back of my neck, tied on a fly and waited, watching the water, to see if the fish would resume feeding. Eventually, they started rising again, all across the river. I waded out. It was starting to get dark.
I have never caught a fish on the Lower Yuba casting upstream. The water's too clear and the fish are too smart for that. They sense the leader hitting the water over their heads and that's it. You have no shot. I cast across, did a flip mend upstream and let the fly drift down ahead of the leader. A fish rolled - golden - a big male. I set the hook and felt him through the rod. Heavy throbs. "Ten seconds", I said to myself, "just keep him on for ten seconds". Then I felt a slippy kind of event and he was gone. It didn't feel like he broke me off or spit the hook. It felt, weird.
It was then that I realized why he'd come. Any old hand at anything will tell you that the lessons never stop, no matter how many decades you have in. Thursday's might have seemed trivial in another context, but even then as I smiled and committed it to memory, I knew it wouldn't be forgotten.
Never tie a nail knot angry.
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* Very similar to Emeril's but substituting a healthy sprinkling of curry for the paprika and cayenne in the dry rub and adding a small can of tomato soup after pouring the stock over the meat and veggies.
**My Grandfather fished with E.C. when he had his shop on C Street in Marysville and had him build rods for himself, my uncle and my dad. He always said E.C. could catch fish between your legs. And yes, looking at that sentence all these years later does make me a little curious about what kind of trout they were after up there.
