The Test

The top half of the yellow sun shimmered just above the low mountains to the east, throwing a lemon cast on the early morning light. Dew clung to the high weeds bordering the path, the air was hazy and still and the temperature had yet to begin its ascent to triple digits during the record July heat. I slid down a grassy bank into Silver Creek, waded gingerly upstream to what I deemed a promising spot in the narrow Idaho river and positioned myself just in front of cattails and willow bushes. I stood still in my waders, cradling my nine-foot fly rod.

Two other anglers and I were drawn to this stretch of the renowned trout stream by the morning hatch of gnat-like tricos that entice feeding rainbows and browns to the surface. The summer hatch attracts anglers from around the world. One fisherman in a blue shirt squatted on the outside of an upstream bend and the other waited downstream. Curiously enough, the downstream angler’s wife or girlfriend positioned herself behind him in a short skirt, the water topping out at knee-level.

The four of us made no sound and remained still as statues, afraid that the slightest ripple would alert the wary fish to our presence and jinx the fishing when the tricos swarm. We stared at the stream as if in a trance, listened to the whisper of the gentle current and waited for the arrival of the insects.

I thought of my annual November retreat with the Benedictine monks at St. Bernard’s Abby in Cullman, Alabama. I sometimes rise from bed early to join the monks as they lift their Gregorian chants in unison during Lauds after the sun rises. The black-robed monks pull cowls low over their heads, sit quietly and reverently behind the altar in the vaulted abbey church and wait for stain glass windows to refract the sunlight into a kaleidoscope of reds and blues on the church walls and floors before singing the ancient prayers.

Is it pretentious and hyperbolic to compare fishing to praying? Probably. Still, the silence, studiousness and patience of my fellow anglers during their pre-hatch vigil and the meditation-inducing torpor of the morning put me in a spiritual mind. Dire warnings about the difficulty of fishing Silver Creek and the ubiquitous paeans to the majesty of the stream convinced me I might need some divine help.

“There comes a time in the life journey of a fly fisher when the soul needs testing as much as the mind.” That’s the opening paragraph in an Idaho fishing book describing Silver Creek. I re-read the excerpts related to this stream in my motel room two nights earlier in Idaho Falls, the first stop in my angling trip through the state.

The book continues: “The skills of casting, reading water, fly selection, and presentation have been honed to fine edges……Place becomes as important as pounds. The combination of immaculate stream with fabled fish, awe-inspiring scenery and classic hatches commands the angler’s quest. Ultimately, it brings him to Silver Creek, Idaho’s quintessential river of dreams.”

Oh my God!

This pagan isn’t worthy of casting a fly in this holy water, this angling baptismal font. I might be struck by lightning simply for daring to dip my sinful foot in this Sistine Chapel of trout streams. I didn’t know the Jordan River flowed through the alfalfa fields and sage-brush plains of Sun Valley.

A clerk at the nearby Picabo Fly Anglers didn’t ease my apprehension when he sold me flies suitable for Silver Creek. He gravely recited a litany of “dos” and “don’ts” to be scrupulously followed if I had any chance of getting a bite on the river. These fish had seen a lot of anglers and were street-smart, quick to detect a mistake by an angling neophyte.

I was nearing the conclusion of my 37-day exploration of legendary trout streams in the West. Before arriving in Idaho, I sampled western flyfishing in all its rich variety. I dropped to my knees to sneak up to a stream just a few feet wide in a meadow in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico to toss ant patterns to easily spooked browns. I panted my way into and out of the 400-foot-deep Rio Grande gorge outside Taos. I cast hoppers next to cutbanks from a drift boat in the Gunnison River and waded in a sluggish creek that coiled through a giant ranch outside tiny Walden in northern Colorado. I drifted nymphs through a section of the North Platte River outside Casper, Wyoming, with the misfortune of having a Chamber of Commerce-inspired name — “The Miracle Mile.” When the trip was concluded, I had fished in four states and driven a Subaru laden with six rods ranging in size from three weight to seven weight, two wading staffs and three leaky waders more than 5,000 miles to and from my Mississippi home.

I envisioned the odyssey just after my 65th birthday forced me to confront an ugly and sobering truth: I have a limited number of remaining years when I possess the stamina, balance and strength to pick my way among the surging currents and slippery rocks of mountain streams. Hell, I may not have many years left at all. I’ve outlived two sisters, a brother and both parents. Barely six months earlier, my doctor telephoned on the eve of a fishing trip to the Tellico River to inform me that preliminary scans revealed cancer in both kidneys. Surgery took care of the cancer, but the diagnosis reminded me of my mortality.

If I didn’t drive the open roads of the Great American West and drink deeply of the fabled trout streams that gash the plains and tumble from mountains the following summer, I may never do it. I suspended my law practice to travel solo across country to pursue trout.

Another uncertainty also pushed me to head west, one that I didn’t disclose to friends surprised that I would undertake such a rash expedition after more than three decades of assiduously drafting wills, arguing before juries in rural Mississippi towns and writing legal briefs without a vacation longer than one week.

I wanted to test myself, to learn if I was an honest-to-goodness angler worthy of the title “fly fisherman.” I dedicated myself to fly fishing just 13 years earlier, a fraction of the time that true aficionados devote to the sport. Was I really any good at it? Yes, I catch dozens of bream when a full moon entices them to spawn in honeycomb beds in the back of coves in local lakes. I also manage a few rainbows on the White and Spring rivers in Arkansas, but those are stocked fish in so-called put-and-take tailwaters with a reputation for stupidity. What about wild trout forced, since birth, to hide from marauding hawks? Did I have what it takes to catch those wily fish? Could I read the eddies, seams and pockets on trout waters in the Rocky Mountains? Could I place a dry fly with the delicacy and accuracy needed to fool a trout? Did I know how to mend to achieve a drag-free drift? I wouldn’t know until I immersed myself in those western waters featured in glossy fishing magazines.

Somehow, I turned Silver Creek into the ultimate test of my fishing skills. Perhaps, it was because of the over-the-top description of the stream in the Idaho guidebook. Or, because I knew this stream had been nurtured to its current health under the leadership of Ernest Hemingway’s son, Jack, a World War II veteran so devoted to angling that he reputedly parachuted into France as part of D-Day with a flyrod strapped to his back. In my mind, an aura enveloped Silver Creek that dwarfed those of the other trout rivers that I fished on my trip, no matter their fame. If I could catch trout on this stream, I reasoned, I deserved to call myself a real angler. If not, well, I might be a pretender.

Fishing isn’t my first hobby that turned obsessive. Back in my late teens and early 20s, I lived on tennis courts, playing 20 hours a week during my college years. I didn’t care so much if I won matches. I just wanted to be good, a stylish player whom passersby stopped to watch for a moment. Then just as quickly as I picked up the game, I dropped it and haven’t played it in four decades. Why? I graduated from college and could no longer find decent players to challenge me and elevate my game. I played poorly on the rare occasions when I picked up a racket, cursed myself under my breath and decided I’d rather not play at all than play badly.

Would flyfishing go the way of tennis? Silver Creek might be a clue.

I knew it was going to be tough to plumb the complexities of Silver Creek as I stood in its waters in the early sunlight. I ultimately fished 17 streams during my western adventure and had been skunked more than once. Just the day before, I didn’t get a nibble on the Big Wood River just south of Ketchum. It could happen again.

The sun rose higher, the minutes moved slowly and still no tricos flew. Would the insects skip this one day when I’m present? Even if they did appear, would I have what it takes to convince a rainbow to chase my flies?

After a while, I noticed the upstream angler emerge a few feet from the bank and throw a gentle cast into the current. A handful of tricos flew in a zigzag pattern just beyond my face and a swarm hovered above the water on the far side of the creek. Feeding trout dimpled the surface.

The time had come for me to see what I was made of.

I took two more steps into the stream while stripping line from my reel. Tied to my line was a feathery fly designed to resemble tricos floating on the surface. The tiny fly was hardly more substantial than a dust mote circulating in a sunbeam flowing through the bedroom window.

The shrubs at my back prevented me from unfurling the line behind me preparatory to a conventional cast. Instead, I held the rod above my head, pointed it directly upward and flipped the line outward in my version of a roll-cast. Exploratory throws failed to reach the feeding lane in the main current near the opposite bank. I moved a few feet closer to the feeding fish, repeated the roll cast and finally achieved the desired distance.

I repeatedly drifted the fly through the narrow path where the trout broke the surface to slurp tricos. The water between me and the fly flowed more slowly than the current on which my fly floated and the fish fed. To compensate, I had to mend my line downstream so it would not drag the fly and cause it to float sluggishly. It wasn’t easy. More often than not, my mend pulled the fly closer to me and outside the feeding lane.

I cast time after time with no success. I glanced to my right when retrieving my line after a fruitless drift and noticed the man upstream was pulling in a trout. Over the next hour, the downstream angler netted three. I was still fishless and feeling defeated. Paranoia followed. Did the two anglers within eyesight notice that I had yet to get a bite and dismiss me as a newbie unworthy of this stream? Then a trout splashed at my fly without getting hooked. It happened three more times with the same result. I dared briefly to hope — but then those bites, frustrating as they were, stopped and my sense of inadequacy returned. I truly was out of my league on this legendary western stream, a southern angler who should be content with spawning bluegills in farm ponds or stocked rainbows in pseudo-trout streams.

As the sun arced toward its zenith and the hatch neared its completion, I sensed that time was running short and stolidly continued to cast. At the end of a drift as I lifted the line to cast again, a trout splashed at my fly. Finally and mercifully, the fish embedded the hook in its jaw this time and I lifted my rod and tugged the trout toward me.

The fish charged in my direction, then reversed course and sprinted downstream. The tip of my three-weight bent toward the running trout as I sought to apply that perfect pressure – taut enough to keep the fly from simply dropping from its mouth but not so tight that the fish jerks free. It’s not easy to find that sweet tension. The trout leaped clear of the water 30 feet downstream, revealing it to be a couple of inches shy of a foot. That’s when it happened. In mid-flight, the tiny hook popped out of its mouth and the chartreuse fly line fell limply in front of me. It was over in ten seconds or less. I didn’t fight it long enough even to identify it as a brown or rainbow.

You would think I’d be devastated, what with all the hype surrounding Silver Creek and my single-minded concentration on unlocking its fishing mysteries. But I wasn’t. The goal was not to bring the fish to my net and hold it for the camera before releasing it — so-called fish porn in the sport’s parlance. No, the challenge was to channel all my angling skills into fooling a notoriously finicky fish into thinking my fraudulent fly was the real deal – one of the tricos that emerge from

On this river, on this day, I made the grade.

Call me a fly fisherman……I think.

Mike Tapscott is a retired country lawyer in Tupelo, Mississippi, who is still trying to figure out if he qualifies as a real fly fisherman.