The Snowfly

In Praise of
The Snowfly
:

 

“[This is] a truly wonderful, wild, funny and slightly crazy novel about fly fishing.
The Snowfly
ranks with the best this modern era has produced.”

—
The Chronicle
(San Francisco)

 

“Fly-fishing legend meets global adventure in Heywood's sparkling, ambitious novel . . . an engrossing bildungsroman . . . part Tom Robbins, part David Copperfield.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(Starred)

 

“
The Snowfly
is as much about fishing as Moby Dick is about whaling.”

—
Library Journal

 

“Heywood's
The Snowfly
is a magical whirlwind of a novel, squarely in the tradition of Tim O'Brien's
Going After Cacciato
and Jim Harrison's
Legends of the Fall.
”

—Howard Frank Mosher, author of
The Fall of the Year

 

“If
The Snowfly
becomes a movie, it will blast
A River Runs Through It
out of the water.”

—
Fly Angler's Online Book Review

 

“A finely tuned plot and masterful, literary craftsmanship. It will stand with
The River Why
as the finest of its kind.”

—
Riverwatch

OTHER BOOKS BY JOSEPH HEYWOOD

 

Fiction

Taxi Dancer

The Berkut

The Domino Conspiracy

Hard Ground

 

Woods Cop Mysteries

Ice Hunter

Blue Wolf in Green Fire

Chasing a Blond Moon

Running Dark

Strike Dog

Death Roe

Shadow of the Wolf Tree

Force of Blood

 

Lute Bapcat Mysteries

Red Jacket

 

Non-Fiction

Covered Waters: Tempests of a Nomadic Trouter

THE SNOWFLY

JOSEPH HEYWOOD

Copyright © 2000 by Joseph Heywood

 

First Lyons Press paperback edition 2006

 

This Lyons Press paperback edition 2013

 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

 

Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

 

Text design by Sheryl Kober

Layout by Melissa Evarts

 

E-ISBN 978-0-7627-9775-2

To Bullshidos Al, Reg, Bob, Dick, and Lars for more than twenty great years on the Pere Marquette. To G2 for our Michigan meanderings. To Sandy and my family for enduring a writer's stubborn ways. To my agent “Mambomama'' Betsy Nolan, and to “Catskill” Lilly Golden for her skillful and delicate scalpel; editing is an art. May your rivers flow clean and cold and the flies hatch at your convenience.

PROLOGUE

I am standing in life-water clear as vodka and cold as Kelvin. The trout rise. They are small, but they rise, which is all I care about. I have no further interest in large fish with jutting kypes. I heard that siren and followed that track far beyond the last station. It is written: We are born to die. Between these events we may cover a lot of water. Some may argue that this is a trouter's memoir. I say it is something more and something less. I never felt the chill of running water, only its heat. Most of what I have written is factual, but two writers can order the same facts into diametrically different tales. The story I tell is mine as I prefer to remember it, and am able.

It is autumn in all ways. This river, like all rivers and lives, holds secrets. How we handle the secrets of our lives defines us. Rivers define themselves and do not willingly surrender their mysteries. Some of us cover sweetwater in search of trout, but covered waters remain ever so. There is staghorn sumac behind me, rusty and blushed brilliant orange under a falling sun. The lack of light degrades chlorophyll, but knowing the science does not change the splendor. I am tired. Plaque collects where genes decree. I need to sit in the sun and let my mind have its head. Sleep comes easily in Indian summer on a rock beside a river with no name, but life comes hard in any season and truth comes even harder.

Bowie Rhodes

September 4, 1999

PART I

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

—William Blake

 

1

I was eight when the floater drifted past our cabin on Whirling Creek and hung on the rocks. It was late September and most of the leaves were already down, the creek awash with early-autumn debris. My sister, Lilly, was sixteen and crashed through the front door to announce the find, but when she opened her mouth to speak, she vomited and fainted.

My mother, Queen Anna, whispered, “Please God, don't let it be morning sickness.” It was years later before I understood the significance of that remark.

My father and I went outside to look around. Actually, he told the rest of us to stay inside and went to investigate alone; naturally, I followed. We were two males in a household of two strong-willed females and at eight I was already trying to assert my gender. Whatever had put Lilly down was outside and if the old man was going out, it was my duty and my right to be beside him, but the old man was a strict constructionist about his rules so when he went out the front door, I crept quietly out the back and circled, Indian style. What I imagined to be Indian style.

It was ten o'clock in the morning and sleeting. The barren ground was iced and slick; the stiff browned skeletons of ferns crackled when I brushed past them. The old man made straight for the creek bank. Years before, he had stacked boulders upstream and down to create a swimming hole for us. Summers I caught brook trout and browns from the hole, mostly on worms and crickets. I often went out early on Sundays and caught enough for fresh-fish breakfast. I did not fish anywhere else along the creek because I didn't need to and because the old man said it was too dangerous. Such declarations did not welcome requests for explanation.

When he got to the embankment, the old man hunkered down. He was small and wiry with knots of hard muscle and no fat. In deer season he could squat for hours and not move. He never complained of being hot or cold. At times I was sure there was nothing he couldn't do.

“I know you're over there,” the old man said without looking in my direction. “You might as well see this, son.”

I approached warily. The body had tumbled over the spillway and hung on ragged downstream boulders. I didn't need to be told I was looking at a dead man.

“Damn fools,” the old man said.

I noticed he had grouped the floater into the broader category to which he consigned many people he knew or encountered.

“What do you think happened?” I asked.

The old man lit a cigarette. He smoked Chesterfields, but only outside the cabin. Queen Anna didn't abide smokers (or most anyone with habits and values that differed from hers, meaning virtually all males). The old man cupped the butt to protect it from the sleet.

“Lotta stupid people in the world, Bowie. They're not stupid all the time. Most of the time they do just fine, but they've got weaknesses and blind spots. Like trout fishermen. If I told you there were diamonds in the back forty you wouldn't go running out there to dig like a maniac because you'd know that this isn't the right kind of land to make diamonds. Right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, knowing full well that if I didn't get into a digging frenzy I'd certainly give the back forty a thorough going-over just in case a few of the gems had worked their way to the surface by pure chance or God's plan (which were about the same to me). The old man was a practicing pragmatist, as was my mom; in later years I'd learn that this genetic default skipped me and landed squarely in my sister. A time came, in fact, when I wondered if I had been adopted, because no matter how hard my parents tried to inculcate certain values in me they never seemed to take. I tried, to be sure, but something always came undone. I didn't see what diamonds had to do with a drowned man or trout, but the comparison only added to the delicious air of mystery.

The old man continued. “See, that gent there on the rocks is a fool. You can see he's a gent by his clothes. Spent a lot of money to look like a trout fisherman. In England they even wear coats and ties when they fish.”

I tried to picture fishermen in coats and ties but couldn't get full resolution. Was trout fishing a form of worship? The old man only wore a tie and coat to church.

“Trout fishermen have all sorts of knowledge,” he said. “They're loaded down with information, but they don't always use it. Whirling Creek's killed fifty, sixty people in my lifetime. If you fish upstream, it'll kill you. Everybody knows that, but still they go. That's a fool for you.”

“Why was he up there?”

The old man flicked his cigarette into the creek's wintry black water. “Looking for diamonds,” he said with a sort of clucking sound. “Fool.”

This turn flung me off the old man's logic trail. The dead gent was fishing for diamonds? I needed clarification, but the old man didn't like being questioned. He did his own thinking and expected others to do the same. I shifted gears.

“We gonna pull him out?”

The old man gave a long, reflective look. “Think you could deal with a corpse?”

“It's just a stranger,” I said.

This got me a peculiar grin from the old man. “You're a hard-nosed little shit,” he said proudly.

The old man did not retrieve the body, but he did crawl out onto the rocks to secure the dead man so he wouldn't float away. Then the two of us walked out to Chickerman's General Store in Pinkville to call the sheriff. Queen Anna did not believe in telephones and even if she had, we couldn't have afforded one. I walked beside my father, feeling his equal and swollen with the knowing.

Gus Chickerman did not talk like the rest of us. He had come to the U.S. sometime during or after World War II, been sickened by New York and Detroit and moved on to upper Michigan. Facts about Gus were cloudy and often butted against each other, but I assumed this was how it was with all adults and paid no attention. Gus had a wife and an eight-year-old daughter formally named Raina, known to everyone as Punky. She was my best friend.

Chickerman's was our local lodge. You didn't have to carry cash in hand to be welcome. Gus Chickerman himself had a scraggly gray beard. He did not limp but his back was bent and he always carried a cane. It was as black as obsidian and crooked with an ivory handle inlaid with three gold diamonds. Raina's mother, Ruby, had a wide smooth face bathed in a perpetual smile. Usually Gus and Ruby were happy to have children in the store, but this day they were focused on my old man and the news we had brought.

Punky found me and plopped down beside me. “You see the dead guy?”

I nodded solemnly, savoring my newfound importance.

“I wanna see him.”

“Girls can't take it,” I said. No insult intended. I'd already seen the effect of the dead body on my sister.

“I can,” Punky said. “I can do anything.”

It was well established that this was true. Raina Chickerman was an antisocial “brain.” She also was the best athlete in the third grade, got the best report cards, drew the best pictures, had the finest singing voice, and was best among us at just about everything except making friends. Worse, she did everything without apparent effort. The rest of us had to work at things, but Punky seemed to get and do everything with ease and confidence. She was scary for a girl and a lot of kids made fun of her, but she and I had always been comfortable together and I had been her only friend.

“Sheriff's coming,” I told her. “Otherwise I'd give you a look.”

She shoved me gently. “You think you own the goddamn thing?” She also swore more than anybody in the third grade.

“It's in
our
swimming hole.”

Sheriff Bielat did not come. Instead he sent his deputy, Roger Ranger. It always sounded funny, a joke, to have a lawman called Deputy Ranger, but Roger Ranger was no joke to me. My old man owned two hundred acres; on paper it was his, but I thought of it as equally mine and spent most of my time exploring my wooded kingdom. The thing about exploring is that you never know what you'll find. Twice I'd been treed by a mama bear with cubs. Another time a stranger stopped to take target practice with his deer rifle and knocked loose a dead branch, which hit me in the head and earned me thirty stitches and a scar that forced Queen Anna to part my hair differently.

My most puzzling discovery involved Roger Ranger and my sister, Lilly. I found them with their clothes off. He had hung his uniform and gun holster on the open rear door of his cruiser. I'd slipped up for a look. They were wrestling, sort of. He was smack on top of her and she had her legs wrapped around him and they were rocking fast and grunting, not talking. I emptied Roger's gunbelt and dropped the bullets down a woodchuck hole. I'd found the two of them for the first time last summer and many times since, though they never knew. Deputy Ranger stopped at our house a lot to brown-nose Queen Anna and flash stupid grins at Lilly.

One day the old man said, “I know what that jamoke has in mind.” He didn't elaborate and I didn't enlighten him with what I knew. Whatever game they were playing, Lilly was at least as enthusiastic as the law officer.

Three years after the floater, Lilly and Roger got married and everybody seemed happy. Many years later Sheriff Roger Ranger was found in another county, hog-tied, shot once in the back of the head. The murder was never solved. The loss hit Lilly hard. I suspect she has never gotten over Roger.

This time, though, the deputy was all business. The old man and I got in the cruiser and rode with him to the cabin. He didn't hesitate, but went right to the dead body and announced, “Looks like he drownded.”

I was surprised when Roger left the body where it was and went back to use his car radio. By midday we had a black hearse and attendants from a neighboring town's funeral parlor, more policemen, and a young doctor from Ludington. We also got a visit from a woman in a red Cadillac El Dorado convertible who identified herself as the dead man's wife. I expected her to be sad, but she seemed more angry than anything.

“Fucking men are so fucking stupid,” the woman told me. “Fly fishermen are the fucking worst. Pure assholes. No sense of reality. You ever hear of the snowfly, boy?”

“No, ma'am.” She used language I'd never heard from a grown woman.

She gave me a crooked grin. “That's because there's no such thing. You think that jerk Chuck would believe it? No way. He says, ‘Baby, I gotta do this.' And now he's gone. Isn't that about the stupidest thing you ever heard?”

Adults said a lot of things that struck me as stupid. I didn't rank them or answer her because I knew she was talking at me, not to me. Before she departed, she called me over to her Caddie. The door was swung open. She wore a bright red dress and red leather boots. She was sitting sideways. When I got close she opened her legs and I saw a patch of flaming orange hair.

“You know what this is, boy?”

I shook my head.

She laughed. “You will and when you do, you keep your mind on that and don't run off and do something stupid like my Chuck did. Hear?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

The old man came up to me after she was gone. “What did she say?”

“It didn't make any sense,” I told him. “What's a snowfly?”

The old man rubbed his chin, thought for a few seconds, said, “Beats me,” and left me to wonder.

A month or so later Deputy Ranger stopped in with a wooden apple crate. In it was all the dead man's fishing gear, a vest, a bunch of small metal boxes with flies, waders, a small knife, a wooden-handled net.

“The widow said she don't want this stuff,” the deputy announced solemnly. “Said we could ‘just chuck it.'” He held the box out to me. “But I thought maybe Bowie would like it.” I wasn't fooled. The gift was a gesture aimed at Lilly, and shortly after the presentation I saw them at their favorite parking spot. This was getting to be old hat. The cruiser shook and rolled steadily. I was more interested in my new treasure. I had seen fly fishermen on Whirling Creek before and had always admired the quiet way they went about their business. I liked their vests and the colorful little flies and their wicker creels and rubber waders. Now I had most of what they had, all but a genuine fly rod and reel, and I spent all winter examining my unexpected windfall.

Queen Anna took me to the Pinkville village library on Sunday afternoons. I found everything I could on fly fishing and, in doing so, began the formal part of a hunger for information about trout that has lasted the remainder of my life.

The following spring I found the dead man's fly rod. It was jammed along a cedar sweeper two hundred yards downstream from our place, like it was a naturally growing branch. The straightness of the rod caught my eye and I crawled out onto the sweeper to fetch it. The reel was a mess, but the old man put it right with oil and a thorough cleaning. The rod was made of split bamboo that was green and brown when I found it, but the old man cleaned it and waxed it until it shone a deep yellow-orange. I nicknamed it the Golden Rod, but never told anybody about this. What amazed me was the feel of it. I couldn't get over how light it was compared to my old steel rod and bait reel.

“Lotta wand for a kid,” the old man said. I caught my first trout on an Adams that May. It was a nice thirteen-inch brown. It rose as a gray shadow, a submarine from below the boulders in our swimming hole. The family witnessed my catch and they all looked at me like I was crazy when I let it go.

“Why'd you go and do that?” Queen Anna demanded.

“So I can catch him again.”

She grunted, which was her well-established signal of disapproval. “First, you don't know it's a him. Second, you can't catch the same fish twice.”

I had no idea why I'd done what I'd done and I didn't care. That day, at that moment, having caught my first fish on a fly, it felt right to let it live. From that day on I spent my every spare moment casting flies for trout, letting most of them go and still wondering what a snowfly was. I asked a lot of people about it, but nobody seemed to know, and it would be a long time before I found anyone to even bunt at an answer.