Crisis Antidote

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to split western hemlock. Especially a piece with knots and badly twisted grain that is still a bit green. But I have. Our remote Forest Service cabin in southeastern Alaska was pretty well-stocked with stubborn piles of it.

My hands, already marred by a different cabin I built in Western Montana, are hot feeling. It’s a familiar assault on my skin. I used to have pretty hard hands, calloused from full days of rowing all summer. But a few years back I took a corporate job, and my hands have started to resemble the inside hands of the dudes I work with.

Jim, who flew us in, is a very fine pilot. Not that I have many hours on seaplanes, but the approach to the lake we just landed on seemed like an expert maneuver. We took two trips to get here, and leaned into that luxury, bringing fresh meat, vegetables, pizza dough, and a seventy-pound pit bull named Gus. We won’t really be roughing it, but four nights in a 10 x 10 cabin with three other full-grown men is its own kind of hardship. I don’t know these guys well, but they all seem capable, pleasant, and serious about fishing. Besides Jim the pilot, there’s Evan and Eric. I met them a few months ago in a fly shop in Ketchikan.

When you’ve identified as a fly angler for as long as I have, many in your periphery see you as patient. Though I think I’m probably more stubborn than patient. They can sometimes masquerade as each other. Patience is letting things come to you. Stubborn is not stopping till you get them. One is tranquil, the other is exhausting.

In a week I’ll turn forty. Middle-age. I chose a large-ish piece of wood that had clearly been hacked at then abandoned. I figured I was stronger than whoever had last tried to split it small enough to fit into the stove. If not, I’m at least more stubborn. As I chopped, I started needing to shed layers, and a fog was rising off my sweater and wet-hair-littered forehead.

Some of the swings of the axe felt precise, strong, and hard, and still nothing would happen to the log. But little pieces of wood would chip off in the areas that had been hit repeatedly. Eventually, I just started chopping with a mindless repetition. Apathy mounting, I was a little surprised when a piece actually split. And that, of course, is just how it is to swing flies for steelhead. It’s so simple and easy when it works, but you don’t get to choose when it happens.

Everything is wet here. It is the wettest place in America. Truly. There are stretches of forest hundreds of feet above the river that are bogs; dark water in potholes intermixed with thick moss and chunks of wood that seem to be decaying in real time. The “Salmon Forest,” as the Tongass is called, is built that way. The anadromous cycle of decay creating life, the carcasses of coho, humpies, and pinks become fertilizer for ancient trees.

On the doorstep of forty you ask yourself questions like, Have I learned anything? The answer has to be yes, whether or not you’ve mastered a single thing. Every experience shapes your view of the world. Like that time I got arrested in South Carolina; that time I believed a business partner would do what he’d said he would; the handful of broken hearts; several brushes with death, including three totaled cars. They all nourished the roots of who I am today. Somewhere between punk kid and wise old man. I’m slightly better at catching steelhead than I used to be. Not really because I’m any better at fishing for them, though I may be, but because I now truly believe that I’ll eventually catch the next one.

Expert Maneuver

Evan nymphed, and landed the most fish. Eric, also a pilot, and ex-military, had an air of having seen things, and didn’t say much until the Rainiers kicked in.

I liked them both. Evan and I bonded quickly, mostly over steelhead, but also because we both seemed to be from the show-don’t-tell school of flyfishing.

Eric and I eventually bonded while walking back from fishing the inlet, well past dark. My phone was dead and my headlamp had stopped working, so I needed him. The path was like mucus. I almost skated back. Following the glow of his lamp while tripping over things in the dark was a reminder of how close you are to catastrophe when in the wild.

On the second night, I had a fever and sweated so profusely before passing out in a folded mess of NyQuil that there was a squeaky wet layer between the bottom of my foam sleeping pad and the wooden bunk. But also, Jim is from Florida and likes the room temperature at roughly 7,000 degrees.

There is an inaccurate belief in the Lower 48 that fishing in Alaska is just catching. On our trip, there was still plenty of fishing. Eventually, each of us landed a steelhead, but it was never easy or automatic. There is no hatchery steelhead program in the old Tongass, and that is one of the coolest things about it. Just wild, native fish working their way home to remote creeks.