"Do You Have Fifty Bucks..."

August is past and now it's a week or so into September and there are a few early signs of the coming Fall. It’s the small changes that you notice when you’re out in it day after day. Every day or so the high is not so hot, the low just a bit cooler than the day before. The sun sets late still, but just a hair sooner. It’s angle in the sky not quite so straight up, a few more geese are seen in formation than a month ago. And the river is up some and cooler, too.

The Wall Tent set on the deck has proven to be quite deluxe. It’s set up perfectly. Two cots keep things up off the ground and when the morning comes the body is rested. A long bench lines the back wall. A square nose shovel and broom stand tall in the corner. But the best object of all is a blue camp table with a small green folding chair in front that’s situated just to the right of the tent opening. Various papers, a laptop, business cards, toothbrush and Coke bottle half full of water are atop the flat surface of the table. Stacked in a row at the back is a container of Pero, a box of sweetener, three day old newspaper, a blue speckled  coffee mug from a camp cooking set, a couple of books standing on end with a tooth brush and spoon shoved up against it all and occasionally the Coleman Stove, if things get dicey outside. A fly box of discarded flies lay open on the corner, with a few wooly buggers in various sizes and colors sitting in a pile.

When the outside world enters into life at the Ranch, this is the locus from which all things transpire. I’m able to contain it all at that spot. It’s a place to focus and to correspond with those who need some thing or when I need to reach out to complete a task to enable all of this to keep going. If only the caller on the other end could see this, a guy in wet waders sitting on a green camp chair, in front of a blue roll up table inside a Wall Tent, near the bank of a river on a small ranch in southeastern Idaho, who just a few short minutes before was casting to rising fish, he’d immediately hate his life. The thing is I seldom let on that I’m not sitting in my office behind a desk, not that there is anything inherently not right with that.

In the evening, after it’s too dark to do much, I sit in that chair at the table and work on things. By the light of the lantern, inside the Wall Tent, I’ve been able to empty a dozen fly boxes and sort and group various patterns collected over many years. The surprising thing is, I came across patterns that hadn’t seen the light of day in a decade or more. In the quite of night with Miles playing "Blue in Green" sweetly in the background, opening small boxes hidden away deep in the compartments of the bag, there held memories that unexpectedly gave rise to certain thoughts and recollections that had been lost. It caught me off guard.

Tucked inside an interior pocket of the bag were small boxes of glo bugs used on the Colorado River below Lee’s Ferry in the hay day, before the “Flush” that change everything for so long. There was the box of flies bought from Lynn Sessions in Twin Bridges where Miguel and I fished the Big Hole. The Chronimids and Annelids we used on the Madison below Quake with Gary Evans. This is the place and the time where Miguel and I spent “that” fall “that” year obsessed with catching fish. Then there was a singular Green Drake used on the back waters of Chester to cast to the rising rainbows one summer afternoon with a young Larry Tullis guiding out of Will Godfrey's shop in Island Park. Man, that one did me in. 

She and I dropped in Will’s shop and asked about the cost of a float. We were poor and just married, and I had fished the Henry’s Fork since I was sixteen. As a kid, I’d wade into the river in the Box Canyon and watch gentlemen of a certain age smoking thick stogies sitting in the front of the boat casting as the guide navigated the boat in and out of runs that held Box Canyon Rainbows.  Wading and working the pocket water in the canyon I watched as they drifted by. I thought, some day I'll be the guy casting effortlessly from the bow of a guided drift boat.

That day Will took pity on us. He called over to Larry Tullis, a quite shy kid and said, “Larry, you have client today?”. Larry shook his head, “No”. Will said, “These two need you to take them down to Chester this afternoon.” Larry said, “OK”. Will, then looked at us up and down and said, ‘Do you have Fifty bucks”. I looked at her, then back to Will and said, “I do”. “Larry’s got nothing to do, he’ll take you down”. And that he did.This was our first guided experience. She sat in the back of the boat, a wide brim hat secured by a scarf she tied under her chin and up and over the top to keep it in place. She had the look of the old actress in that Humphrey Bogart film about a boat floating down a river in Africa. It was classic.

Larry and I kept in touch and fished together a number of times on the Green.  I learned a lot from Larry that day.

That night I lay on the cot in the dark wondering where the time had gone.