six inches up from the handle, and 51 heads turned around to see a very live and very large steelhead screaming down the trickle leading from that little hole of water, wholly exposed in the inch deep flow, fifty feet behind and between the assembled mass of fishermen, into the river,cleanly breaking the leader, with my fly in it's mouth. As God and fifty others were my witness. No one said a word. When I could finally move, and think, and talk, I really wasn't all that mad, except for the rod. I had, after all, hooked a winter steelhead, on a fly. Well, sort of. The whole line of cold and skunked drift fishermen just turned back to the river, cast once or twice more to save face, but within three minutes they had all left, muttering, broken. One lesson in existentialism is enough for one day. The second event, just to prove that the first wasn't a fluke, occured the next summer. My "source" of fishing information gave me a hot tip. "The Toutle is full of salmon". (Ed note: this was 20 years before Mt St. Helens turned the Toutle into a steaming vocanic cauldron and all it's fish bouillabaise) "How do you catch salmon with a fly?" "I don't know. I think you use steelhead flies or something like that". That was enough for me. That evening I was in the family pickup and camper heading down I-5 for the Toutle, somewhere down south. The fact I was heading into unknown territory, literally and technique-wise didn't worry me at all. I was in love. I had just returned from a two week solo tour of the west in the camper "to see the Grand Canyon". That the real object of my trip was a certain young female who happened to be working at the North Rim Lodge escaped my father's questioning, although he was mightily puzzled why I would want to go somewhere that was 5,000 feet ABOVE the nearest water and fishing. But she had fallen from her horse while we were riding, wrenched her bad knee, and had to go home to Salt Lake City for maybe an operation. I had wandered back northwest by way of Utah, and, well, met her parents and Mormonism head on, and our relationship was, well, unrequitted. Kids were slower to the requitting in those days. So, my mind was not really on the fishing. I found the Toutle in the late afternoon and located a place beside the river to park the camper for the night. So I went fishing. But what I really was doing was composing in my mind one of those long, heart-rending love letters with the intention of transferring it to the typewriter I had brought in the truck and mailing it to Utah the next day.
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