didn’t know “Me and Bobby McGee”— further supporting the alien invasion theory—but nodded vigorously when she landed on “Mr. Bojangles”). In the hot mineral-water pool I settled in a couple of shadows away from a loud group that included a buzz-cut brute of a young man repeatedly vowing to fight anyone who bad-mouthed Butte or Missoula. I eased back into the 104-
degree water and gazed up at the moon. It was a “supermoon,” in fact, the name given to the coinciding events of a full moon and its closest orbital proximity to Earth. With only 14 such supermoons occurring over the past 110 years, I was expecting some sort of lunar extravaganza. But it just hung there in the sky like any other full moon; I wouldn’t have been able to pick it out of a lineup.
I arrived at the creek just as dawn was breaking, the cloudless sky affording a bona fide solar appearance. But even at full bore the sunlight was flat and weak, no match for the heavy, dirty grays and browns dominating the landscape. A viciously cold wind blew my fingers numb as I struggled to tie a black wooly bugger on the end of my fly line, further hindered by my beer and whiskey encounter from the night before. I stepped into the very run where years before I had landed a half-dozen fish in less than an hour, the trout averaging a good 18 inches and peaking with the lunker rainbow that bent my rod double for a good 10 minutes. I worked that piece of water hard with the bugger and came away without a single take. Another angler, who had arrived a short time after I did and visibly slumped his shoulders when he saw me in the honey hole, moved into the run below me at an uncomfortably close distance. Though I’m not confrontational by nature, my initial impulse was to address this breach of etiquette in direct fashion. But fighting over water should be left to those who believe they can own and sell it, and besides, it’s not like there was anything to defend. I headed back to town for a pork chop sandwich and a thawing soak in the hot pool. I returned to the creek in the early afternoon as revitalized as my condition would allow, determined to stick and land a fish by whatever means necessary. My interpretation of necessary in this case was to run tiny nymphs through the deep runs in the creek, the same method that had rewarded me so richly on my earlier trip. Nymphing is my least favorite form of fly fishing but I will do it when desperate, and brother, I was desperate.