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My first fishing did not happen until we moved from Milwaukie, Oregon to our own home along the McKenzie River in 1947. This home was ten miles east of Springfield, just off the McKenzie Highway (Oregon 126), a couple of hundred yards down a lane at the north end of Hendrick’s Bridge.

We could reach the river by going through Mr. Reed’s place and downstream, or by walking to the end of the lane to the Irvin’s place, through their barnyard and along a road to a “movie set” built for Rachel and the Stranger, filmed there in the summer of 1947 and released in 1948 by RKO. We knew about this access to the river because Dad had worked as a night watchman during active filming on that set.

This location was about a mile directly downstream from Hendrick’s Bridge, at the end of a mile-and-a-half-long deep run. Here the river began to turn south and poured over a gravel bar before entering a series of riffles, then turned northwest and formed another deep pool and run tail-out.

Dad decided this bar and riffle would be a good place to fish. He brought all of us — Mom, my sister, my brother, and me — here in the evenings to walk along the river and explore the now-abandoned movie set. Where the river pitched over the gravel bar it created a small island and a little run on the near bank, easily reached and fishable from shore, especially in late summer and fall when the flow dropped.

Dad would carry a roll of black fishing line, some snelled Eagle Claw hooks, and a coffee can of wriggling worms in a bit of dirt. He would cut a willow stick for a pole and tie six to eight feet of line to the end. A snelled hook was attached to that, baited with a single salmon egg — though in the early days we probably used larger hooks and worms dug from our garden. This method came straight out of Dad’s childhood in Iowa, where fishing meant farm ponds and deep, slow, muddy streams. It was only marginally suited to a swift western river.

We later learned to use salmon eggs and the smaller single-egg hooks they required. Salmon eggs were particularly good bait because Chinook salmon still ran up the river and were stopped by a weir across a shallow stretch a couple of hundred yards upstream of the bridge. Backed up there, the fish would drop down to the tail-out of the run where it began to shallow over the gravel bar. As many as two or three hundred salmon would be digging redds and laying their eggs in the depressions they’d created. In September and October the water at the top of the riffle boiled with frantic activity — hens working the gravel, bucks chasing each other off the redds in a series of V-wakes cutting through the current. Many eggs escaped the depressions, and trout lay in wait just downstream for the bounty drifting their way.

Dad had a bamboo fly rod and reel his father had given him. He could reach further out into the river than Bill and I could, and he caught considerably more fish. That first Christmas on the river, Bill and I each received a nine-foot J.C. Higgins three-piece bamboo fly rod, a fly reel, and fly line. We were excited about the prospect of using these new weapons on the unsuspecting fish in the river — and then faced a long, agonizing wait, since trout season didn’t open until mid-April, when the river would still be running high and difficult to fish.

The following summer, Mom and Dad let Bill and me go to the river alone, and we spent nearly every evening there, learning to work the rods and the new tackle. A significant discovery came when we learned to use a longer, finer tapered leader with the small gold single-egg Eagle Claw hooks. Now we could reach further into the river and really get to the trout. We consistently caught three or four small fish each evening — most between six and eight inches.

Exploring along the river, we found a small channel cut across a big bend, neither wide (perhaps ten feet) nor deep (eighteen inches to two feet) — ideal water for two boys learning to fish. We learned to cast among the overhanging branches, to let the egg drift near the bottom on a split shot, swing downstream, and rise toward the surface. We could watch the small trout follow it and move to take. As that summer wore into fall, both of us became proficient. We competed to see who could reach his limit first — eight fish over six inches — and who could land the biggest.

The McKenzie is renowned as a trout stream and is routinely fished by fly fishermen from the drift boats developed along the river to handle its many rapids and riffles. These boats would come floating past Bill and me in the evenings, a fly fisherman standing at the bow making long, graceful casts that placed the fly gently on the water in front of surface-feeding fish. Too often, it seemed to me, they were casting to the same fish I was trying to interest in my egg.

Their success pushed my buttons and made me determined to learn to cast a fly. Mom was now working at the Richfield station at Cedar Flat for Ross and Merl Buehner, who operated a shuttle service for guides drifting the river with clients, and for fishermen running their own boats. The Buehners had a boat take-out ramp behind the station, and guides would stop to pick up a shuttle driver who would ride upriver with them to the put-in, then drive the vehicle and trailer back to wait for their return late in the afternoon.

This parade of drift-boat fly fishermen peaked in the late afternoon when the day cooled and flies began rising from the river in great numbers or hovering over it to lay eggs. At those times the surface would be dimpled by trout sipping flies, or pocked with splashes as fish leaped to snatch them from the air.

That winter I devoted myself to picking people’s minds about what flies to use and how to fish them. Ross stocked a number of patterns and made several recommendations. We were initially drawn to mosquito patterns, since those seemed to be what was out and about in the evenings — but mosquitoes don’t hatch over moving water; their larvae require slack water to survive. Much later I learned that the flies we saw over the river were caddis and mayflies. We weren’t particularly sophisticated in those days and chose flies based on what people said worked, without yet understanding how those patterns related to what the trout were actually rising to.

I did learn to fly fish that next year, 1949, and over the following several years my success grew considerably. But within a few years I went from an avid young teenager with all the time in the world to an older, busier one, and then a college student with no time for such frivolous pursuits. The fly rod, reel, and line were put away.

My brother and I didn’t completely abandon fishing, but our reach expanded greatly with the new freedom to drive. In college I would often head into the Cascades to fish the more remote mountain lakes. Lakes are notoriously fickle — one day the fishing is foolishly easy, fish practically fighting each other to get to your hook; the next you can’t buy a strike under seemingly identical conditions.

One year Dad rigged a bicycle-wheel dolly to carry his twelve-foot aluminum boat — inherited from his father — and the two of us maneuvered that contraption about a mile up a trail to one of the Erma Bell Lakes on the edge of the Three Sisters Wilderness. The lake was calm when we arrived, with plenty of surface feeding. We rigged up, chose the right fly — I don’t recall the pattern, but that morning it was deadly — and caught a trout every five minutes or so, quickly filling a stringer by mid-afternoon. Another fisherman nearby had little luck, so we chatted with him and offered him a limit from our string. He accepted and went happily back down the trail. Dad and I went back out and proceeded to blank for the rest of the afternoon — not a hit or a bump.

Another time, after I’d returned to Oregon following military service, Dad and I were out on Davis Lake, just east of the Cascade crest. The day was gray and drizzly — typical Oregon, though a bit unusual on the east side of the mountains. We’d fished hard all day with little luck until we finally located some actively feeding trout and I figured out how to approach them. They were feeding in a line, each rise five to ten feet beyond the last. By watching the pattern, I could cast to where the next rise would be, and managed to take, land, and release several nice fish.

My fishing went into eclipse shortly after that trip. I got married and returned to graduate school, and upon graduation Mary Lee and I packed up and moved to Colorado, where I took a teaching position at the University of Colorado Denver. A new family and an untenured job left no room for much else.

While I was in graduate school, Mary Lee had taken a fly-tying class at the recreation center across the street from our home in Eugene. When our son was about three, she suggested I get a fly rod and take up fishing again.

I did, and soon became an avid fly fisherman once more. I read everything I could find about fishing, flies, hatches, and tying. I got a vise and set about collecting feathers, yarn, wool, fur, and hide of every sort — duck wings, beaver fur, bear hair, moose, elk, and deer. I bought rooster capes in a range of colors, natural and dyed, and tied dry flies, nymphs, wet flies, and streamers. I learned the varieties of insects that came off Colorado rivers at different times of year: mayflies, caddis, salmon flies, midges. I came to know the forms they took in the water — nymphs, emergers, duns, spinners — and filled fly boxes with hand-tied patterns to match whatever I might encounter on the river.

I fished several times a month, usually alone, almost exclusively on the South Platte River in Cheesman Canyon. The first fall I hiked in, I caught two fat rainbow trout about fourteen inches long, a pound apiece, and we had fresh trout for dinner that evening. I was full of myself — I had mastered this supposedly difficult stream on my very first trip.

The river humbled me over the following months. I fished every two or three weeks and did not catch another trout there for over a year and a half — not until I had finally mastered fishing far and fine with small dry flies and nymphs matched to the hatch.

The learning was worth every frustrating trip. I became proficient enough to catch fish nearly every outing — not always large fish, but good fish. I learned to read the water, identify the best feeding lanes, drop a fly into difficult spots, and connect with fish as they rose. I also learned that while I loved catching fish, I did not enjoy killing them. From then on, every fish was carefully handled and returned to the water as quickly as possible.

I still fish several times a year, and I very much enjoy being on the water with a friend — river, lake, or ocean. The challenge of choosing the right fly remains, though now that decision is often made by a hired guide showing us how to fish somewhere new. I have caught beautiful rainbow trout in the Rockies, on the coast, and in Alaska. I have caught brawny brown trout in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon, and New Zealand. I have caught salmon on a fly, and steelhead on a fly.

What I enjoy most now is the company — the sharing of knowledge and skill, helping someone else learn the tricks that mean a hook-up instead of a miss. I have also learned that the catching is not the point. Being on the river, experiencing the tranquility of a day in the open air — sun or drizzle — is value enough in itself.