Waiting for a table at the liveliest restaurant in downtown Port Angeles, the full sun still bleating overhead at the dinner hour in the Pacific Northwest, we crossed 1st Street and meandered through Port Book and News until our silverware was set or our tummies pleaded to find quicker sustenance. After all, we had hiked in Olympic that day to the Elwha River Dam, site of one of the most famous and glorious (and few) dam removals in the United States.
Steve Duda’s River Songs soon caught my eye in their expansive section of “local nature / hiking / fishing / birds / wildflowers / everything that is good and wonderful in this world.”
Duda’s writing had escaped me until now. The subtitle he gives this one is Moments of Wild Wonder in Flyfishing. Well I certainly like wild and wonder and flyfishing, but the siren song of a hot meal and a cold beer soon called, and so we sauntered back across the street for our table. Shamefully, I bought the book on Amazon when I returned home (though I did buy it used on there).
Duda writes with heart and deftness. He could’ve slid nicely into Abbey’s monkey wrench gang. The gang member with the fly rod and the endless fish stories. Not stories about size or fight, but stories of marvel and reverence. After all, who knew carp in the Columbia River basin could be so compelling? “A carp’s initial run is like a logging truck chugging down a steep grade.” (18) Yes, you read that correctly oh worshipper of all things trout on a dry fly. Carp.
He details a Yakima River afternoon which turns Shakespearean after a cliff swallow, as excitable as the trout during a caddis hatch, gulps down an elk hair imitation in midair and dances on the end of the line for its delicate life. “Untethered from gravity, swallows belong neither to the earth, the air, or the water, but exists as something between the elements–a magical filament that binds them together.” (29)
Tales too of Patagonian trout and Seattle salmon runs, of rattlesnake encounters and campground tooth extractions. “Are you seriously telling me you want to pull a tooth out of my skull in the Bitterroot Flat Campground in the middle of nowhere? What are you going to use, 20-pound test and a pair of fishing pliers? How am I supposed to fish tomorrow with a molar-sized hole in my head?” (63)
Duda is equal storyteller as fly fisherman, though I’m sure he’d prefer a nice trout over a good essay. He makes it down to California and the Klamath and the very recently removed Iron Gate Dam. Like the monkey wrenchers, he’d be in favor of blowing the whole damn thing up and lighting off a few Roman candles as a final middle finger. “Iron Gate Dam is not beautiful. It looks like most dams–gurgling black froth, attended to by seagulls and decorated with pipes and pumps and heavy machinery, seeping the smell of ozone and diesel.” (117) But the steelhead in the river are damn beautiful and Duda’s Cal Trout companion has the keenest of steelhead senses which tingle whenever he sees a pool that may hold the lunkers.
Later, the author heads into the Montana wilderness on horseback to Golden Trout Lake to catch its namesake. Native only to the Kern River drainage in the Sierras, they made their way from hook to bucket to far away alpine lakes and streams. “Thanks to even more bucket biology, fish from the Cottonwood eventually made their way into the area’s mountain lakes. They were so popular, in fact, that golden-trout eggs soon became a hot item. A shipment of six hundred of these eggs made it to Montana and, eventually, Golden Trout Lake.” (141)
Duda’s tales cast a spell over me, possibly because it was January and my mind needed a few pages to shake itself loose from the doldrums to warmer days with rising trout and beers waiting back at the truck. In his anecdote, These Waders Have Been Drinking, he discusses “capping,” a concept of hijinks I was unfamiliar with.
“While you are running your mouth about some fatty you may or may not have roped, I will creep toward your waders. I will drop that bottle cap into those waders and give them a shake to ensure that the cap falls to the lowest reaches of the bootie–all the way down into the toes. In the morning you will be talking shit around the fire as you gear up. You will pull on your waders and, after everything has been tucked in and strapped down, you will feel that bottle cap. I will be secreted away, watching for the look on your face, the one that flashes first anger then submission.” (129)
Duda, a fly fisherman through and through, can out-fish and out-tale the best of ‘em. His River Songs is well worth a listen.
