‘Mad Men’ originally appeared in Swing The Fly’s 2014 Winter Issue, which Swing The Fly subscribers can see here in its original form.
We’re honored that ‘Mad Men’ will be a featured piece in Dave’s upcoming book, Calling After Water: Dispatches From A Fish Life, which can be purchased at davekarczynski.com . Swing The Fly encourages you to reserve your copy today to ensure you get a signed copy.
Congratulations, Dave. Good luck out there!
The night before our last full day, a huge winter storm hit. Sleet turned to snow and didn’t so much fall from the sky as fill it, fallingly. On the TV, the meteorologists threw themselves into the storm with an urgency and relish usually reserved for tornadoes. Here they’d get eighteen inches of snow. Here fourteen. Here twelve.
Then the thunder and lightning started.
“This does not happen in St. Petersburg,” Ivan said, following a particularly hot flash of light, a particularly angry growl of thunder.
“We call it thundersnow,” I said. “It doesn’t happen here all that often either.” Snow was still falling into next morning, and even the heavy-duty pickups were spinning out on the wet sugar. Still in my long johns, I put on my boots and poked around behind the lodge to get a look at the transformed landscape, amazed at how much snow was crammed onto every available surface. Even the twiggiest branch of the tiniest alder held heapfuls; with their soft powder freight, they reminded me of August antlers, thick and velveteen. The thermostat read twelve.
It was a dream come true.
“You can’t be fishing in this,” Ivan said as I tore through my layering material. He was propped up in bed on his laptop, earbuds in, ringed by notebooks and notecards.
But this is it, I wanted to tell him, the day we suffered for. The reason we’re here. But I didn’t say that, or anything else—I knew my credibility had expired sometime midweek, back in the middle of a frozen, fishless day. And so I just smiled and shrugged, tucked a hot thermos of coffee into my slingpack, opened the door, and gave myself happily over to bright-white steelhead oblivion.
Walking the quarter mile to the access, the world felt much larger. The unending whiteness seemed to fling the horizon back a hundred miles and stretch the world to a taut, glittering canvas. Two snowmobilers whizzed past me at a railroad crossing, and I watched them as they plumbed the wide lane between the white woods. I’m generally not a fan of those whiny machines, but today they made perfect sense. How else could one fathom this deep white world? How else could one determine whether its promise of endlessness were true?
At the river I tied on a weighted woolhead sculpin and got started. I was midway through a promising run when I heard an ear-splitting crack and watched in horror as a massive white pine split itself down the middle and fell across the river just fifteen yards downstream from me. I went ashore to bypass the tree and check out the damage up close. The trunk had broken on a diagonal, almost lengthwise, the newly exposed wood glistening like fresh cut ginger. Once-hibernating insects squirmed in the open air. And even as I stood there, thankful to have escaped injury or worse, I heard another splitting crack off to my right and watched a mushroom cloud of fresh powdered snow rise up above the tree line and swell outward in the gray sky. It appeared the weight of this snowfall was too much for the tallest, oldest trees.
Wading extra slowly, with one eye out for widowmakers and the other for the river bottom’s many sharp drops, I discovered lies I never knew existed: secondary runs that I usually walked past after swinging through the obvious water; short, deep pockets where they did not belong; narrows slots and chutes half hidden by logjams. I was deep into my second pair of gloves when I felt a sharp, ripping tug—a hot fish. It fought with the strength of a fall specimen, peeling line and surging for a snaggy cutbank, and I was forced to push my tippet to the limit to keep him on. It worked. The fish braked, the tippet held, and a few short surges later I was backing the two of us up onto a shallow island of midstream gravel. I produced my forceps and removed the hook without exposing the buck’s gills to the crystallizing cold, admiring it briefly, an upper twenties buck flush with the dark colors of his river residency. Who was this strange, solitary creature? I wondered. Was it counting the days to spring? Waiting, like so many anglers back in their warm homes, in anticipation of a more primary performance? Or did it, like me, find this winter kingdom a perfect place unto itself?
A few minutes after I released him, the clouds lifted for the first time that day, and through the dull white wall I saw a scrape of blue, then a pale apricot light in the treetops. I stopped for a midstream cup of coffee when, from the corner of my eye, I saw a large object missile out of the water and belly flop down—my fish. It had recuperated enough to shake its fist at me, the kind of angry, defiant gesture I have only
ever seen in just-caught steelhead. It leapt once more, tossing sickles of light off its body, then splashed one final time—and the winter stillness rushed back in.
Some might have called it a day at this point, but high on the list of fishing skills I’ll never master is the art of knowing when to quit.
So I fished for another two hours, until my third and final pair of gloves soaked through and my reel only turned in stuttering rips of ice. Until I had to bring the rod to my mouth and nibble the river from the guides, crystal meat from steel bone. Until my neoprene waders grabbed my reel like Velcro, and my left hand went so numb I had to flex my biceps for a good while to get the blood back into my digits. When I finally started the walk back, my inner gauge told me I had just enough strength and flexibility to make it to the lodge.
“How was it?” Ivan asked when I stumbled back into the room, a frosted zombie too stiff to get out of his jacket.
What could I say? That, having caught one fish in the great snow palace, I’d had an absolutely perfect day on the water? That I had possessed my own little Xanadu of flow and frost, had caught the moment I’d been chasing all week? That in that dark water and winter fallout I on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise? With winter steelheading, you either get it or you don’t, and there’s no amount of fancy language that’s going to change that.
“One for one,” I said, then hurried into the bathroom and thrust my cold hands under warm water and stood there, smiling, for a very long time.