time for her to get worried. I said no, not yet, lying through my teeth. It was all so muddy and uncertain, but getting deeper day by day. And then there came on the calendar a fishing trip, long planned. Three other McKenzie Flyfisher friends and I were to take my father's motor home to the Klamath River below the John C. Boyle Dam to meet with the Klamath Country Flyfishers in a joint outing. The motor home, brought down from Seattle a month before, sat extpectantly in the driveway. "You aren't seriously thinking of going fishing, are you", x-wife#1 asked. "You can hardly walk. What if something were to happen. You'll be miles from nowhere." "You aren't seriously still thinking of going," my fishing friends asked, and they didn't really understand the gravity of the situation, only that something was wrong. In the end I went because there was really no medical reason not to, and I wanted, if only for a day or two, to break the mental pattern of passively watching myself deteriorate. And it might be my last chance. We drove the motor home to K. Falls on a friday night after work, I talking my turn at the wheel with the rest. Up to that point my arms seemed unaffected, and with power brakes I could still stop the vehicle. At 1 AM we were on the famous Klamath Baja, a fabled one-track dirt road that wound down the river canyon toward the California border. An hour of inching along the basalt track got us 10 miles and we came to the camping point, a park-like isthmus of Ponderosa and open grass with the river swinging around three sides. A collection of dark cars and pickups evidenced our sleeping clubmates. None of us had ever fished the Klamath before, but we had heard stories. The next morning at first light people stirred and disappeared up and down river. I caught myself staring at the ceiling worrying, so I got up, dressed in waders, and struggled down to the water. The Klamath below the Boyle Dam is a schizophrenic river. When the Dam is generating power the river rages at bank-full level, frothy and peaty brown with minimal visibility. When the powerhouse shuts down, the river drops to half volume and clears, leaving wide, exposed gravel bars and banks like a low tide on the ocean. Obviously, the fishing changes dramatically, level to level. This morning the water was high. I eased myself down the bank into the water on a shallow bar, knowing my legs could not handle any depth. I didn't have the faintest idea where the fish might be. Had it been the McKenzie and raining we would have written it off as unfishable, but this was a daily phenomenon on the Klamath. Having few options, I put on a caddis pupa pattern and experimented,
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