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“Look, we know the story,” a man’s voice
proclaims, calm and almost friendly in tone. “We know what happened; hell,
we’ve even seen pictures,” he adds, pausing for a moment in obvious
hesitation. “So, where exactly did all this take place?”
He is rewarded with only silence as a response.
“Look, we’ll probably figure it out on our own anyway,” he
tries again, nodding to his compatriot hovering nearby. “Hank here’s been
all over that peninsula, and he already told me he thinks he recognizes a
few of those beaches in the photographs. You can help yourself by telling us
now.”
Silence continues to reign, and the man’s fury mounts.
“You know us,” he says, his voice whittled away to an almost indecent
pleading. “You know you can trust us.” The speaker’s eyes show signs of
watering as his words fail to prompt the slightest response. He suddenly
bangs his fist against the table in front of him, sets his jaw, and attempts
a final command. “Just tell me,” he blurts in agony. A hot white light
glares down at the sweating target, who again simply shrugs off the
entreaty.
“You tight-lipped bastard,” the man spits, driven to an
obvious rage. “I’ll find that stream if it’s the last thing I do.” Striding
for the door, he stops and swirls on his detainee, incensed. “And when I do,
I’m taking everybody there. Everybody. I’ll send bait fishermen by the
boatload. I’ll post a map and directions on the Internet. How do you like
that? It’ll be fished out in a week,” he finishes, storming from the room
with what little dignity he could scrounge, the beginnings of a smile edging
across his adversary’s face. For the time being, the secrets of another
steelhead stream have been saved.
Witnessed in countless scenes like the one above, the
ancient Sicilian code of omertà, introduced by the famously reticent Mafioso
of the past, lives again, only now it thrives not within walls of
institutional gray in some big-city police interview room, but in the back
rooms and across tying tables of fly shops all over the Pacific Northwest.
And perhaps more than anywhere else, a steelhead omertà lives in Alaska,
where the fish remain wild and the rivers run silently through the hurried
terrain, the best of them doubly blessed with fish of crimson and chrome and
the peace of an unknown name.
Anyone that’s been near flowing water understands the
fisherman’s desire to keep for himself the sweetest seams and the most
productive holding water. In Alaska the angling landscape is vast, with lots
of secluded lakes and remote rivers for the angler to ply his trade
unmolested by the masses. But there’s also Ship Creek and the Russian/Kenai
confluence and Ninilchik on Memorial Day and a host of other scenes
traumatic enough to induce nightmares in the hardiest of anglers. Steelhead
flyfishers, especially, understand—and fear—all that.
On occasion you might happen into conversation with an
unrepentant steelheader. If flyfishers seem partial to their passion, these
men are addicts. They come from all walks of life, with all manner of
checkered pasts, but each is united with one another in the quest for
freshwater’s noblest gamefish. They spend the rain and mud-sotted months of
Alaska’s spring as the vanguards of breakup, prospecting the first trickles
of water to peek through the ice for early-returning spring fish. Summer
usually finds them in the doldrums, when the rest of the state is in an
exultant uproar over the returning squadrons of salmon, but then in the
fall, when the wind whips up and the rains return and the occasional October
snowstorm lashes at the coasts, their spirits soar, as each incoming tide
whisks their prize inland once more.
But in all your steelheading conversations, almost never
will you hear words of any real detail. A region or perhaps the glossing
over of a watershed is the best you can expect. In very rare cases, the name
of a river itself may surface—as starkly different and out-of-place as a
chinook sipping dry flies—but only then if it is already deemed well known.
We’ve all heard of these rivers before, like the Situk or the Karluk, and
often as not, when we hear their names mentioned, it’s with some sort of
reverence to a long-lost and little-fished past. Beyond that, there’s almost
nothing, just a Sicilian wall of silence a thousand years old. Ask for the
location of some little Southeast gem or inquire as to the possibilities
along the Aleutian Chain and you’re as likely to lose a friend as you are to
garner any useful information.
It’s a vexing business, this chasing of steelhead. As if
sensing their power over us, they plan their returns for the least inviting
times of year, and still we come. They feed capriciously or not at all, and
still we spend days deliberating on the flies we carry. Steelhead fishing is
full of long, wet, cold hours of toil, often punctuated by crushing moments
of the darkest despair. More than once, a flyfisher must face the reality
that he may cast ten thousand more times without experiencing so much as a
tug ever again. But then, as both the readers of Joyce and dedicated
steelheaders know, the most difficult pleasures are the best kind. For
sometimes when we come, the stream is as welcoming as a pub on St. Patrick’s
Day. The water is gin clear, the river’s banks deserted, and dime-bright
steelhead are gathered thick, all willing to rise and gulp your Royal
Coachman. It’s these rarest of moments that bring the steelheader back to
his streams, braving the worst Mother Nature can throw his way, his rod in
hand, his flies selected, and his lips sealed.
—Troy Letherman
Editor
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