It's autumn on the river and you've got the whole day

In Avery, two men who spent the morning spin casting in the upper river lean against the counter of the store along the highway and wait to pay for a 12-pack of light beer as they mull the day.

I walk across the blacktop that used to be railroad tracks when this was a train town to see Dan Mottern at his Idaho Fly Fishing Company.

An aluminum ladder leans against the big sign along the pavement because autumn is the time to catch up on chores after the tourists are gone.

He isn’t here, his wife, Beth, says. Gone scouting for elk.

The sky looks a little like rain.

Beth whips me up some coffee and says it’s on the house. There’s time for that too in the fall, coffee and talking. The edges of the river froze last week, she says. Fraggle ice crackled from a mile away.

A hunter and year round resident who lives a block up the street isn’t home, but the banner that tells of his sentiments when it comes to Idaho’s wolves is tacked to a wood pile in front of his place. He’s probably in a draw somewhere, glassing a hillside.

I drive upriver passing the haunts where during past summers friends and I took in the scenery, watched with a muted exuberance bugs tumble from the river or into it. There are places where we spied swirls of trout tails in the translucent green, or where we wriggled into overly-tight and still-wet waders or out of them, tying knots, sipping longnecks, tanned, rain scarred or drowsy from a day casting and securing footholds on slippery rocks.

The places are empty now in fall betraying a solemnity that nudges distance and time. It says you’re on your own and be glad about it.

I stop not far above the Upper Landing and nose the car into a guard rail, crack the trunk and start the ritual of dressing for the task at hand. I scold myself for leaving the long johns in another tote in another vehicle. I pull on the Simms and stuff the tails of my sweatshirt inside. My stocking cap is an official Seattle Seahawks booster hat. My wading shoes are ones I retired a few years ago, but felt compelled to dig out again from the woodshed.

“These’ll do.”

There is a rod to assemble, line to thread and a leader to mend before getting to the heart of the matter: Dry or wet? Bead head or siliconed elk hair?

No one else is out here.

This is the solitary season. Not even a log truck, just gray overcast with infrequent splashes of autumn sunlight that smile on the moving water and disappear.

Upstream the river narrows and moves heavily through a chute, but on the far side a shaft of water paints a rock before tailing into a side channel.

A cutthroat feeds there away from all that movement and miasma.

See it?

You talk to yourself.

The fish comes up to the surface like old ivory, sips and turns its body full profile showing the red along its pectoral fins and then disappears.

It is a hard cast and a very short float before the current between here and there stretches your line and pulls the fly unnaturally. Mending won’t help. Just belly your line upstream and hope for the best.

I crawl down the riprap to the river and find a boulder to stand on and cast first upstream.

I lengthen the cast and snag the knapweed behind me, drop my rod and crawl back up the bank to loosen my hook. I lasso an elderberry bush on a cross cast and snap off my fly.

Tying on a smoke colored stimulator, I take stock.

This is how it works and why people sometimes say fly fishing is akin, in general, to life:

You breath.

You forget about the frayed or broken things. You let your heartbeat count cadence, and distance fall away.

It is what Musashi called no-thing-ness. You know what you know. Let your senses seize the day. Take yourself out of the picture. Do what’s in you. And don’t worry about it. There’s nothing to lose or gain here that’s in your power to lose or gain.

I catch a 14-inch red-sided trout, and on my next cast another larger fish that sloshes as if the river is made of heavy water.

I can’t reach the roller on the other side across the current by the rock and decide to wade.

My old boots are light and their soles stick to the strata. The river nudges against my chest and for a moment might crest my waders before I push through the deepest part and face upstream toward the spot where the fish quietly slurps.

I slip closer, as water swirls behind me.

I wait and breath, unhook the fly from a guide, pull line that has become stiff as cold licorice.

The elk hair wings are pressed high and with my cold fingers I flare the hackle.

I have one cast.

I know this.

I false cast over the current and then turn and let the line spool out. The fly drops into the water that rolls around the rock and when the trout takes it I see a dimple and set the hook because I look into the reflection of the sky and can’t be sure, but he is there.

The cutthroat heads down first into the black that has become a cold press against my legs. I nudge it from under what looks from this distance like a sharp rock and then the fish turns toward the current and runs into it, pulling line from my reel in steady throbs that force me to consider the blood knot I tied.

The knot holds and I begin to use the rod’s back to gentle the trout from the strong stuff.

The line is cable taut and I lift the rod tip.

The fish’s head breaches the surface before nosing down and under.

In a while I have the cutt on top, then in my hand as we breath.

I measure its length against my rod and look in its eyes. Yellow eyes like a bird, red sides, barely spotted.

“That’s a pure strain cutthroat, c’mon,” someone downriver who spent decades up here told me years ago and I have little cause to argue the point.

I unhook the stimulator from the jaw and lower the fish into the water.

It’s autumn and I have another 20 miles of river to fish before I turn back downstream and hit the holes I missed.

I pick my way back across the river and carefully up the bank where I strap the rod under the wiper on the windshield.

There is no one else fishing and I’ve got the whole day.

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Ralph Bartholdt is a writer at the Coeur d’Alene Press where he covers cops, courts and the outdoors. He can be reached at rbartholdt@cdapress.com