In 1939, Ernest Hemingway eulogized a friend, saying: “Best of all he loved the fall . . . the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high blue windless skies . . . now he will be a part of them forever.” The author knew about such places.
They are your favorite waters. The rivers and streams you have fished so many seasons over the years that you know them intimately. Every bend, every pool, every run is familiar to you, and you have given certain one’s fond names. Like that section on the Carson with the broad, dancing riffle which glitters in the full light of day – you call it ‘Sparkle Plenty.’ Or the deep pool below a massive granite boulder you named the ‘Glory Hole’ – you hooked three sixteen- inch rainbows there one glorious August day. And that sharp bend in the Mackenzie, you always fish late in the season when the water is low. There’s a fallen fir tree jutting out from the bank where you once spotted a bobcat standing in a spot of sunlight. You named it Bobcat Corner. The last run before the Truckee breaks into a series of nasty rapids – this is where you quit at the end of a long day’s fishing – the run you always think of as ‘Day’s End.’
There are others, too. Special places in your creel-full of favorite waters which link you to something else – a sentimental connection to someone special, this case a man I never fished with. There are two such pieces of water I am very fond of because they remind him – Ernest Hemingway. The Big Wood River in Ketchum, Idaho is such a river and Silver Creek, which flows into it near Picabo, is the other.
The ‘Big Wood’ is a classic, free-stone, trout stream, bordered by sloping banks and populated by Green Dakes and Blue-winged Caddis. Shadowing the cold blue stream aspens and pines stand like elders passing judgement on everything that happens beneath their branches. In the summer the aspen leaves shimmer like newly minted silver dollars. The water is as pure and clean as Hemingway’s sentences.
Silver Creek is different from the Big Wood River. It is shiny, artesian course, sparse of trees and wide open, winding its way across open grassland. Deceptively simple, ultimately Silver Creek a challenge, compelling you to immerse yourself in the intricacy of insect hatches, leader variations, and subtle unseen currents; fishing emergers here is akin to plumbing the deeper meanings Hemingway infused in his stories and novels.
In the ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ Hemingway wrote of his love of fishing for trout in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, still it could just as easily have been the Big Wood River which he fell in love with and bought a home close by, and while he fished there, he never wrote about it. Nevertheless, the regenerative and healing powers of nature in his early Nick Adams stories remain an important part of his legacy. No doubt something he gained from time spent on the Big Wood River and Silver Creek. As the author wrote: “It was a good place to be. . .”
Hemingway knew that a favorite river, a memorable day spent on that water, lived in your heart when you’re away. A big-hearted river or two you can fish always.
