Norman Maclean never intended to be a pain in the ass. The man simply wrote a manuscript that went to a small university press, who published (and have continued to do so for half a century) the book that Robert Redford read and loved. And then made Redford all but beg to let him turn it into a movie. Which of course triggered a boom in fly fishing that went nuclear decades later during COVID lockdown. Inmates paroled from their homes descended upon river and stream in boot and wader, rods and reels and lines and flies and boxes and families in tow.
I was, of course, one of those dunderheads.
Well, sort of, anyway. A few years before COVID, I’d picked up something called a tenkara fly fishing rod sold by Patagonia. It was minimalist, Japanese, and I’d been wanting to give fly fishing a shot since (duh) seeing A River Runs Through It. And I lived in Alaska for crying out loud — everyone should fly fish at least once in Alaska.
Tenkara rods use no reel. The line affixes to the tip of a collapsible rod. “Stick and a string” it’s been called, sometimes derisively. Fixed-line fishing has existed across all cultures of the world for eons, but the Japanese were the first to combine the method with artificial flies.
It didn’t really catch on for me. It was fun to practice casting in the back yard, occasionally catching telephone lines and branches in the process. But I was a runner. Runner’s don’t have time to fly fish. They’re too busy obsessing over training calendars and smashing pavement. And the activity itself a) burned zero calories and so b) could not possibly improve one’s cardiovascular fitness.
Before COVID landed, though, I’d already decided my days as a competitive masters runner were over. An untreated deployment 2012 deployment injury had turned chronic and flared into acute every time my training turned serious. Nordic skiing became my new version of running. But it left half the year open. And like everyone else in the COVID summer, all we wanted to do was be outside. It was time to try that fly fishing thing out for real.
The short version: I dove in. It’s what I do now when there’s no snow on the ground. I tie my own flies, fuss over knots, and drool over the latest in wader tech. I own a fly fishing boat for god’s sake (which I’ve christened the SS Smeagol because that dude could fish). But here’s the twist: I only fly fish with a tenkara rod. And in Alaska, that makes me a bit of a weirdo. Which is saying something if you know anything about Alaska, because this place is chockablock with weird.
The fly fishing here is legendary, and I found ways to make tenkara work not just for the small trout the method evolved to target, but for the big, hard-fighting species Alaska is most known for — salmon. The learning that occurred over the 2020 - 2022 fishing seasons was, well, really something, but I’ll speed past for now because I want to take you to the Russian River last June.
The Russian is legendary for its sockeye run, the bears that love to eat them, and the hordes of anglers whom descend upon its shores looking to land their daily bag limit of wild salmon.
I’d been wanting to test out my tenkara skills on the Russian for a couple of summers. With the fam out of town, I had no excuses. The run had arrived, the weather was good, and the calendar was clear.
I arrived Saturday morning later than I’d have liked, the lot already almost filled to capacity. But I was excited as I pulled on my waders, shouldered my bag, and began the short hike down to the river. I’d been thinking about this for the past few years. The place was slammed, but the spot I picked was as clear as one could hope for on the Russian during the sockeye run. As I prepped gear on the shore, anglers were hooking into fish, rods curving and reels whirring as the salmon the the other end of the line turned to run with the current, stripping line and breaking the surface as they fought for survival.
I should make some things clear at this point. For one, salmon angling in Alaska isn’t typically the catch-and-release method your passing fishing aficionado would associate with fly fishing. Folks are angling for the run, for sure, but also to fill the freezer. The bag limit on the Russian is typically 3 salmon a day, and the limits set by Alaska Dept of Fish and Game go up or down depending on the strength of the run. On this particular day, the limit had been raised to six.
Fly angling for sockeye also looks nothing like the graceful, rhythmic casts you might think of from A River Runs Through It. In fact, the method itself is boring, repetitive, and ugly. At the end of your line is a big, flashy fly that is hopefully easy to see in the water. About 18in above it, some shot attached to the line to get the fly down to fish level. Salmon don’t eat once they hit fresh water, so you’re not shooting for a sockeye to actually strike your fly as if it’s food. Sockeye swim upstream with mouths agape — and it’s that open mouth you’re using to your advantage. Plop your fly upstream, let it drift down a bit in the current, hoping your line ends up in the mouth of an unsuspecting salmon. Nothing? Flip it back upstream and do it again until something happens.
The advantage of using a tenkara rod in this scenario is that the length of your line is fixed. Which means that set up correctly, it’s very easy to flip your rig quickly. The more your fly is in the water, the better your odds are at actually catch something. The disadvantage? You’re the shock absorber because unlike your rod and reel compatriots, you don’t have a reel and its mechanical drag to aid in fighting the fish. When I hook something and it runs, I literally run with the fish. In the river. In my waders. On slippery river bottom.
My first cast on the Russian was at a pod of silver shadows darting upstream, and I had a “bite” on my first drift. Twinkie fingers there, because it means my fly’s hook snagged a sockeye’s mouth. But the hook didn’t set. No matter. Second flip. Nothing. Another. Drift, watch. There. I withdrew my rod, drawing the fly towards me. Felt the hook bury, and the immediate shake of a head. Fish on.
In a split second, the sockeye turned, leaped, and ran with the current. My rod curved, and I prepared to fight the fish out of the main current before it ran into the angler downstream of me.
With a hollow POP, my rod broke.
Fish off.
I’d broken my rods before. But the nice thing about tenkara is that the rod is nothing more than that collapse inside each other. So, if you keep spare sections on hand (like I generally do), then all you have to do is swap out the broken section right there on the river, and you good to go. Unfortunately, I had no spare sections. But I did have a spare rod. Out it came. Re-rigged. Back in the fight. Six hours later, I had four salmon on my stringer, and lost another dozen. Fishing story over. Thrilling. Manly. ‘Grammed.
The embodied aspect of all this is another story altogether — and one that persisted over the months of fishing that followed. In a word: Anxiety.
I’m pretty confident that I was an anxious person before going to war, but I now know that it got a lot worse in the multiple afters that follows. Here’s a short list of some of the intrusive thoughts I experienced that day on the Russian last June:
I’m going to slip, fall, fill my waders, and drown
The dog I left leashed on the shore (I brought Ila the Wonder Dog with me that day) is going to bite someone
The dog following me to my spot on the river is going to slip, catch the current, and drown
I’m going to hook into a fish and it’s going to run me right into another angler and they’re going to be upset
A bear is going to eat me
A bear is going to eat my dog
A bear is going to eat me and my dog
I’m going to violate some obscure fishing regulation
I’m going to break my rod (again)
I’m not going to catch anything
All of this isn’t to say that there weren’t interludes of pleasure. The happiness of having secured food for my family, by hand. Warm sun, cool river. The crunch of a salty snack streamside during the obligatory mid-day slow down in fish movement. The satisfyingly sweet smell of skin that has recently handled onchorynchus nerkus.
When Norman Maclean put his first words on the page some decades before University of Chicago Press published A River Runs Through It, I’m pretty sure that telling a great fishing story wasn’t what he had in mind. Like all great stories, the book’s fishing narrative is just one of many ways into a larger, more complex narrative. This post isn’t nearly that. But I hope it has complicated the idyllic way you might think about fly fishing.
I’ve got a few more posts from last fishing season in the pipe, all of them similar to this one. There was a No Good Very Bad Day, Fresh Waters, and Half Japanese Tenkara Guy Takes Issue with Outside Magazine. I hope you stick around.
A great read, Matt.