Blue Lines: Our Little Blue Line

BY THOMAS REED

There are those among us who are ridgeline-gazers, seekers of the far side of the mountain, the unknown, the move up, over and beyond more important than the soil at one’s feet.

The angler in today’s world is quite often the seeker, the mover who goes from spot to spot, peninsulas on distant continents, bays on northern oceans, jungle rivers where oddities swim and slam strange offerings. I have been that traveler, that mover, that hunter and that angler. A seeker. The future, the ridgeline, more important than the present moment.

Many years ago on a back eddy in a famous Montana river, I stood with a friend fishing a rise that was nearly unprecedented in its duration and consistency. After what seemed hours of catching and releasing rainbows and browns, I turned to my comrade and asked, well, should we go see what’s happening downstream? To which he added this maxim: Why leave rising fish to go look for rising fish? Good point. Here I was infected with the itch even when what I sought was right before me and all was working. We fished there until dark and rowed out to a towering young moon and a memory indelible.

There is no denying the endorphin rush of discovery, of seeing what is around the next bend, of understanding the unknown. But is this true knowing? Does deep knowledge come when the visits are brief and truncated by modern day schedules that pull one away hours, days, a week, two weeks, maybe a month, into our experience?

To know the moods of a mountain ridgeline, one must sit and listen, watch shadows move across her face, listen to her winds, stand out in her storms.

The renowned of this and previous ages arise from pairings of human and a particular place. George Grant would not be George Grant without the Big Hole River. Frank and Jeanne Moore without the North Umpqua? Nope. It’s hard to imagine writers J. Frank Dobie without Texas, Jim Harrison without Michigan, Tom McGuane without Florida, Alice Munro without Ontario, Kent Haruf without bitter flat plain of eastern Colorado. These are their settings, where their art met the nature of the land, where inspiration came from knowing and a sense of belonging, being not just the visitor on an adventure, but a part of the whole.

I am entranced by a vision . . . grasshoppers in tall grass. Grass nodding their seed heads over sun-spangled brass water, a slow run in late summer’s rich light. This is our place, where we fit. Fourteen years ago we arrived on the banks of a little stream that is a tributary of one of the West’s great destination rivers. Our water, running through the place we call home, is just one tiny segment of this tributary. A good marksman, on an average windless mountain morning in the heart of deer season, could stand on one end of this stream at the west boundary of our ranch, place his crosshairs on a fine whitetail buck at the other end, and bring it down with one shot. That is our creek’s length as it twists, meanders and bends back on itself from the west boundary to the east boundary on this piece of land that soils our toes.

My son and I stalk the tall grass and pounce, hands cupped, hoppers caught. We edge up, peeking just over the grass, me on knees, him standing tiptoe as tall as a five-year-old boy can stand and we fling our offerings into the water, watching them kick, kick, spin and then, suddenly, there is a rabid splash and the grasshopper gone. “Yes!” and “Got It!!” we shout and giggle. Then catch more hoppers. The little brown trout in the slack water above the headgate are fed hopper after hopper, father and son laughing, the souls and sounds of boys on a summer day. We don’t think to fish, we only think to feed our fish.

“Isn’t it possible that what we call ‘legal ownership’ is impossible?” asks author David James Duncan. “Which part of ourselves do we own with? Our hands? Our minds? Our file cabinets full of legal documents? How do documents, minds or hands own a thing? By gripping it? Thinking about it? Typing a description of a thing, affixing a notary public’s stamp to it and filing it at city hall?”

So let us say that while the title for this ranch may be filed and notarized in our county courthouse, that we are mere renters, borrowers of time and place, and when one lives upon a piece of land, one must do one’s dead-level best to be a fantastic tenant. To follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s prayer: “Water flows over these hands. May I use them skillfully to preserve our precious planet.”

The “tenants” before us had been sheep enthusiasts and the stream’s banks were bare from boundary to boundary in those early days. No young willows grew, no alder, no shade for coldwater fish. Given a chance, nature rebounds, but we modern humans leave so little to chance. What, we asked, if we just stood back and watched? Learned?

Time moves on and the land never quits. Things changed, rebounded, came back. Willows and alders and cottonwoods. They planted themselves, the livestock fenced away from tender stream bank and now lush with growth, shade for the water, cold for the trout.

There has been no dirt work. No heavy equipment, no consultants with carefully engineered maps and surveys. Ours has been a light touch with a thin budget, or no budget at all. A log left in a stream. A wheelbarrow of cobble and gravel dumped off the bridge, a water gap for the livestock, an old Christmas tree placed on an eroded bank to hold back the soil.

This summer a great grandfather cottonwood came crashing down into the stream, taking more trees with it, creating a massive pile of wood. Only a month or so later, the water backs up, forming a pool, a mock beaver dam that we will leave in place just to see what happens. Ice will form this winter and then spring will be here, carrying snowmelt from the mountains. We will see what the stream does then.

Ours has been a light touch with a thin budget, or no budget at all. A log left in a stream. A wheelbarrow of cobble and gravel dumped off the bridge, a water gap for the livestock, an old Christmas tree placed on an eroded bank to hold back the soil.

There’s a bridge just below this logjam and on spring mornings, when the water temperature is just right, we startle spawning big rainbows nearly as long as the creek is wide. In the fall, it is browns, burly shouldered and butter-yellow sided, up from the big water far downstream.

We live in a destination state, a place that causes humans to crow and chestbeat and recount adventure when they return home.

But what of home itself? Beyond the mountain on our western horizon is a stream we have yet to visit, an adventure. Someday we will go there. “Water flows from high in the mountains. Water runs deep in the Earth. Miraculously, water comes to us and sustains all life,” prayed Thich Nhat Hanh.

In this best-of-both-worlds world, we watch our little segment flow toward the gulf.

Author Thomas Reed works for Trout Unlimited from his ranch near Pony, Montana, where he and his wife raise their children and provide food for the local community. He is the author of Blue Lines, A Fishing Life, and his latest work, released in the fall of 2023, is the anthology, Mouthful of Feathers, Upland in America