River of Screams: Why I Fish the Arkansas

Just back from two days on the "River of Screams," which is how in weak moments I refer to the Arkansas River. In the guide services brochures, the South Platte is the "Dream Stream" - I guess because the fish are so large, correspondingly dim-witted, and because it helps to have some marketing when you need to sell guide packages . . . 

Average day on the South Platte

. . .  whereas in the Arkansas, the fish are middling-sized, smarter than the average 10-year-old, and are what I call "entomologically specific," or (not to put too fine a point on it), "damned partiklar as concerns their diet." So more often than not I come home cursing the Trout God (which somehow I always expect will be me), the specific River God (depending on how the flow has been ordered and whether I have managed to keep my footing), numerous Insect Gods (whether for manifesting themselves or not I scarcely ever can predict), and of course the multifarious little gods and demons of wind, weather, sunlight and shadow - I generally wish the entire busload of them at the Devil. 

Not on this little foray into the wilds, however. I was blessed with the kind ministrations of the entire agency of godheads, not to mention an obliging audience of Salmo trutta (fario) in the 14-17 inch class. Which is about as big as they generally get in the Arkansas, and probably why it isn't called the "River of Dreams" because who dreams of small fish (no, on second thought just ignore that).

My Salmo trutta (fario) were bigger than this

First you should know that the river begins ("finds its headwaters" as the touristic sites tell us) in the mountains above Leadville, and is fed by tributaries flowing out of the Sangre de Cristos, which have a snowpack until July 1. So I never wade without waders of some sort until maybe August, when it feels safe to walk around, with some feeling in my extremities, in my nifty no-slip water sandals:

I've never slipped in these

Then you should know that most of the river bottom is covered in boulders which may have been there, growing smoother and slicker (as have fly rods, obviously) since the Late Pleistocene . . . 

No relation (with flyrod)

. . . the current is generally faster than you thought it might be, faster than it looked, than you thought your hip waders could handle, than you brought dry clothes for, than it is in Denver - remember, this is not the "Dream Stream." It can get unruly in a hurry.

River of Dreams (admittedly in the middle of Denver)

But late spring is the season of golden stone flies . . . 

and little green caddis larvae . . .

both of which I had in my scraps of tackle, which I keep meticulously in a series of labeled plastic grocery bags with occasional used flies which I seem to remember tying but always look as though they were purchased by a drunken charwoman at a rummage sale . . .

"I'll just have two of the wee tiny green thingys, and a pint of vodka."

. . . and the way it's done is to tie on the larger fly (the golden stone, in this instance) to your tippet, then tie a piece of tippet on the hook bend of your first fly, tie the smaller fly (the green caddis larva) onto the trailing tippet, and then toss the mess into a current of 3-5 feet, mend the line so that the contraption floats with the water and not with the drag the current puts in your flyline, and watch the tip of your line to see if it stops unaccountably or veers off in some direction that fails to correspond with the current in which you are fishing. Any such veer or arrest in its progress generally indicates interest in your wares, in which instance you raise the tip of your rod and hope to feel some weight as it comes up.

On this foray I was able to spend the cooler mornings trailing nymphs down the current, watching my line veer this way and that, and then spend the warmer afternoons fishing alongside the current in pools and seam water with dry flies, picking off the risers with a blue-winged olive. I figure by now the Insect God must have owed me a good day.

 

So there I was, talking to perfect strangers who would pull over and offer me a bit of advice or a place to park my camper where the river wasn't so "overfished." I thought it was all pretty good. And today I think I'm smarter than the average 10-year-old. We'll see.

Noodling With the Saints

I mentioned catfish noodling in a rather offhanded way in my previous post. I do not wish to leave the impression that the sport lacks its refinements and its esoterica. Ignorance of the fine points can end in impairments temporary or permanent, including wrinkled skin, "muddy water pallor", psychic trauma, lost limbs, time away from family and the office, even death. Noodling is considered "extreme sport" everywhere except in Alabama, where it is considered "nontaxable income", in Texas, where it is a cornerstone of Governor Rick Perry's "statewide job creation initiative without President Obama's he'p", and in Louisiana where it is simply "Cajun dating."

  

"His Cajun date"

I have a brother-in-law who grew up and still lives in the precincts of the "Ar-KAN-sas" stretch of the Arkansas River south of Wichita. He is a wealth of local catfish lore and an unfailing mine of accurate information on the topic. From him I learned that, historically at least, rivers oftentimes harbor large catfish because those rivers, and by extension their resident catfish, were receptacles of sewage. Time may be the river I go a-fishing in, as Thoreau would have it, but Oh Lord preserve me from eating what I catch (or catching what I already ate). "There's a good reason those catfish are so big," Dave concludes sagely. All in all, the catfish noodler must feel a lot like a dog chasing a car - what do I do with it if I catch it?

 

"I'll mount her, and then I'll take her to Branson."

The way Dave tells it is (and this is pretty much as it came from the horse's mouth): 

"Every weekend, this old boy at the office would go down to the river where they dumped all those old junk cars, and noodle for the catfish that would hide out in the cars. And there got to be some pretty big fish in there, and every Monday he'd come to work and talk about these big catfish he was catching. Well, this other fella got interested and kept after him to go down to the river with him and show him how it's done.

"Now the way it's done is, you get down on the bottom and feel around in the water and when you feel a catfish lying there in the mud, you slide your hand in under its belly and you rub its belly back and forth - sort of relaxes the fish. When the fish is relaxed, you slide your other hand into its mouth, hook your fingers in there behind the gill plate, and slowly bring the fish up out of the water. They'll come right up real easy until they break water, and then they just go crazy. You've got to be sure your feet are on the bottom and that you're not over your head. People have been dragged under and drowned by big catfish - that's why noodling was illegal in Kansas for years.

"There are two kinds of catfish in the Ar-Kansas. There's flathead catfish . . .

and there's blue catfish . . . 

"Any catfish will have these gristly little sharp teeth along the jaw. When you bring up a flathead, he'll just flop on your arm. But when you bring up a blue, he'll spin around and shred your arm with those teeth. Now these boys go out on the river together one weekend, and the next Monday Earl comes into work with his arm all bandaged up. We asked him, Earl, didja have a good time noodling? Oh, yeah.

"So we asked Carl what happened, why was Earl's arm all bandaged? Well, it happened that every time this old boy felt around on the river bottom and found a flathead, he'd get his hand into it and bring it up. There, he'd say, that's how you do it. And then whenever he'd find a blue he'd say to Earl, OK, here's one, now you try it."

Same Water, Different River

Voluntary or enforced, retirement is a strenuous affair when properly managed - it requires vigilant maintenance and brooks no slacking. So after returning from two weeks recreating in Texas, I drove down to the Arkansas River in my camper for a few days of fishing. 

The Arkansas is a schizophrenic flow of water running from Leadville, Colorado and emptying somewhere in the Missouri River (which is mostly in Montana and somewhere other than Missouri). The personality of the Arkansas is split between the western stretch, known as the Arkansas and properly pronounced AR-kan-saw, and the eastern stretch, known as the Arkansas and mispronounced locally as Ar-KAN-sas. They are two distinct rivers.

The upper portion of the river, between its source and the dam in Pueblo, is a classic freestone trout stream, clear enough that one can read a Chinese prenuptial agreement in six feet of water, and home to brown trout like the one shown here in the death grip of an amateur's disembodied hand. (I surmise that this is the hand of an amateur because 1) this is no way to treat a lady or an obliging trout, and 2) in his excitement he's thrown his rod on the ground, left his reel marinating in a puddle, and posted a photograph of the fiasco. Not to mention the clean fingernails.)

"GA-AA-CK!"

The lower (Ar-KAN-san) portion of the river is a lazy, muddy meander through sandbars, downed cottonwoods, the hulks of '59 Edsels, derelict washing machines and hot water heaters, harboring catfish of a stupendous size and appetite, as this specimen landed near Quangdong, Kansas amply illustrates (and "amply" is, I think, the mot juste):

1964 Nash Rambler retrieved from Arkansas River

The Upper Arkansas is the precinct of flyfishing with tiny flies, light tackle, stream waders - the usual aristocratic paraphernalia of any tradition-bound endeavor. The Lower Arkansas is the world of "noodling," the pursuit of large catfish by submersion in chocolately-brown water and trying to put your hand securely into the maw of something that, if it doesn't succeed in dragging you into eternity, can seriously abrade your arm. (Baptizing is just "noodling for Baptists.")

"First we dance, then you can buy me a drink."

In any case, I found myself camped along the river, communing with the geese, who float by in pairs and threes. Geese are the RV-ers of the natural world: they park anywhere they like, defecate everywhere, and seem to the innocent mind like a real wildlife sighting.

 

 "Hey, let's just camp here tonight. Bathroom's over there."

I will not discuss my successes or failures in those three days, except to say that by the end of the first day I was feeling pretty frustrated. So when at day's end I did finally land a decent trout in the 14-inch class, I decided that it would be supper. Since it was about to become a piece of history, this fish was clearly of the variety trutta simplistica, which are the only ones ever hooked and landed (generally the ones who think they're still living in a hatchery).  The other common varieties are trutta ascetica (the ones who never eat anything); trutta vegetariana (the ones who never like whatever fly you're offering); trutta bulemica (the ones who promptly spit out whatever goes into their mouths).

Supper that evening demanded some culinary genius, as I was bereft of the usual complement of ingredients that makes a trout on the table what it is - for example, I had brought along on this trip no butter, cooking oil, herbs, eggs, bacon fat, corn meal, and so on. Nothing in fact, except one (nonalcoholic) beer. I decided to make a court bouillon in which to poach the fish. So I diced up the carrot and celery sticks in my larder (intended for lunch the next day), simmered them in the beer, added a packet of Gulden's Brown Mustard for some frisson, and poached the trout.

I won't say I dined like a king, but what with the magnum of Roederer Cristal '85 to start, a complex little Batard-Montrachet '97 with the trout, a half-bottle of Dow's late bottled '64 port and a few rounds of chemin-de-fer at the Indian casino, I did better than the geese in the parking lot. And so (as Samuel Pepys used to say), to bed.

Chernobyl Ants and Twenty Inchers

Now that February is nearly upon us and the western regions are enjoying the benisons of a warming globe, I had thought to totter down to the local freestone water 



and have congress with the resident trout. The Arkansas River, from its headwaters until it reaches the plains of eastern Colorado, is a source of joy and recreation, for me and for about 2500 brown trout per mile of river. And going fishing in early spring becomes more urgent as the cold weather hatches begin and give way to the fabled mid-May "Mother's Day Caddis Hatch," an entomological donnybrook in which caddis flies emerge from the water in honor of American motherhood, and fill the river valley like a blizzard. 

What makes spring angling even more urgent, however, is the impending "rubber hatch." By the first of June the river is bobbing with a flotilla of inflatable rafts

filled with tourists wearing plastic helmets and day-glo Mae Wests, 

 Float My Boat

slathered in various unguents and sunscreens, throwing their gum into the river and behaving like 12-year-olds. The river in spring flood keeps its share of them but never in numbers quite sufficient to abate the annual traffic. Once the rubber hits the river, other quieter civilized pursuits become impossible.

Even more sinister than the rafting conspiracy is the dark plan of the infamous blackguard and professional curtain hanger, Christo, to drape the river under what the locals disparage as "Rags Over the Arkansas,"  six miles worth of silver-ized fabric festooned through a narrow stretch of canyon where the sunlight that spawns a healthy insect population can be at a minimum; the haunt in ordinary times of eagles, osprey and kingfishers. One can at least justify rafting by the profit motive, or the excitement and sense of adventure that come with the prospect of a horrible drowning. Draping a river in plastic has no such rationale beyond the fact that lovers of such spectacle generally buy hamburgers and throw the wrappers along the road. 

 "Rags Over the Arkansas"

Plastic draperies can improve the scenery when festooned from, say, the Coit Tower or the Hoover Dam or the Seagrams Building. But unless it's the Cuyahoga on fire or the Mississippi in the precincts of New Orleans' oil refineries, no river to be at its best needs help from Christo. "Ars gratis artis" doesn't mean the same as "devoid of any point or redeeming feature."  Some of Christo's earlier "temporary" industrial-scale installations remain, like old mining operations, to haunt the landscape. In 1971, he erected the "Valley Curtain" project near Rifle Gap, Colorado, an attempt to drape a heavy plastic curtain between two canyon walls. As the curtain sagged and project engineering proved inadequate, more and more structural materials were trucked in. At least one large concrete supporting bunker is still in place; other concrete formations are sliding slowly down the canyon in a litter of old steel girders and other industrial refuse. It was a Seventies thing, I guess, before Christo knew about Earth Day.

 You see, then, the urgency of getting onto the river before it turns into a veritable gallimaufry of multiple uses.  I pulled out my flyboxes, which are generally by late winter an unsorted litter of flies left over from the fall fishing, flies in various stages of ruffled and unravelling disreputability. Hackles have loosened like a mangy fox stole on a dowager scrap metal heiress; a once immaculate Royal Wulff now resembles Leona Helmsley in a stiffish beeze. I tend to tie the classic patterns, patterns known to work where I fish - black ants and green drake and caddis, pale morning dun and blue-winged olive, serviceable flies named for exactly what they mimic. "Adams" means nothing to the uninitiated, but it's a traditional pattern recognizeable on either side of the Mississippi, named like the Hendricks, the Quill Gordon, the Cahill and the Gray Wulff, for its inventor.

But the newer generation of flies can be baffling. Once you've learned the old vernacular, it's a new country and a new language - what's a Chernobyl Ant? a Woolly Bugger? a micro-flashtail egg? a Red Pig Sticker? a Skinny Minny? Get Stoned? and why do I need to buy foam to tie flies? And is a Twenty Incher what I think it is?

Chernobyl Ant

But maybe this is the best of possible worlds. I'll be able to see a radioactive Chernobyl Ant floating along in the semi-darkness beneath six miles worth of silver-ized fabric.  And maybe Christo will be there in person, rafting downstream without a Mae West.


Update - January 17, 2012: See my newer post at http://shootingafly.blogspot.com/2012/01/rags-over-arkansas.html