Casting Call

The Way Of The Rogue
By Gillian Floren

If you’re a seasoned fisherman, you might want to skip this story and dive right into Jessica Maxwell’s account of fly fishing the North Umpqua. Jessica, unlike this writer, knows her way around a fish.

So why is a rookie like me writing a story like this? For one, I’m living proof that a proclivity for fishing isn’t a genetic trait, that — on a beautiful day when the sun is shining and the fish are biting — it can be learned with little effort.

It was on southern Oregon’s Rogue River that I learned it, on a day jump- started with bacon and eggs at the Indian Creek Cafe in Gold Beach, where the river meets the sea. Guide Steve Beyerlin talked as we ate, recounting the considerable wonders of Rogue River Country, a region bordered west and east by the Pacific Ocean and Highway 97, north and south by the Umpqua and Klamath rivers. Within this expanse are two national parks, three wildlife refuges, 10 wilderness areas and six rivers, more than 600 miles of which are designated “wild and scenic” — 87 of those on the Rogue itself.

The Rogue emanates from the Cascades’ Mount Mazama, the volcanic container that cradles beautiful blue Crater Lake, then meanders 250 miles to Gold Beach. Down the mountain past the 40 miles of rapids that lure rafters by (literally) the boatload, the river calms and expands, flowing clear and green between walls of forest and rock. The Rogue is also full of fish — spring chinook, summer and winter steelhead, silvers (coho) in fall — making the river a gratifying one for anyone inclined to drop a line. Unlike the North Umpqua, whose complexity attracts the fly fishermen elite, the Rogue is a river for the people.

True, some have been famous people. The Rogue has drawn an eclectic group of luminaries over the years: writer Zane Grey, of course, but also Herbert Hoover, Clark Gable, even Martha Stewart.

As for our humble party (guide Steve, my husband, Greg, and I), we’d put Steve’s driftboat in at Jerry’s Flat, a dozen or so miles from the café, then puttered down to Lowry Riffle. There I found myself with a six-weight flyrod in hand and, minutes later, a fish on the fly — one of the Rogue’s “half-pounders,” steelhead unique to the region that’ve been described as homebodies for their tendency to stick close to the rivers that spawned them.

The fish got away. But no matter — there were many more to come. Fifteen to 25 half-pounders in a day is typical, Steve said; an exceptional day’s fishing can reward you with a hundred.

Now, Steve is a smart guide and kind enough to not let on that this sort of “fly fishing” would make a skilled fisherman snort. Our technique was not a beautifully choreographed slinging of line but rather an unceremonious plunking of a nymph into the water and letting out of line until Steve said “that’s plenty” or “bring it in a little.”

Happily, lack of ceremony isn’t an issue for me. Nor is spending a fine day on the water miles from computer and voicemail in the company of osprey and bald eagles, herons, egrets, mergansers and kingfishers. Steve pointed out tracks crisscrossing a sandbar where a bear had padded to the water.

We switched from flyrods to bait casters further downriver at Duffleburger Bar, where chinook were leaping about in a deep pool. The hope was to appeal to them with globs of roe, but for all their prolific posturing, none rose to the bait. Steve was dutifully disappointed, assuming we were fixated on catching fish and it was his job to deliver.

Which he did in spades late in the afternoon, having steered us to a favorite hole, called… “I don’t want to tell you,” he said, seeing my pen ready to betray him. So, let’s just call it “Jack’s spot,” which Steve does in the name of a departed client whose ashes he sprinkled there. As spots go, Jack’s got a good one, loaded with silvers visible by the dozen. There, with spinning rods we cast lures, and there, with Jack’s spirit smiling upon us, I hooked the fish of the day: a hefty two-foot silver.

By the time we pulled away, the Rogue had turned silvery, the shadows blacker. Midway across the river a blood-red drift boat rocked in the riffle, its two fishermen hip-deep in the river, each with a fish on a fly. The breeze had cooled. An occasional comment broke our silence; some fishing humor on Steve’s part, ribbing us about clumsy casting and fish we’d let get away. Otherwise, it was just us, three people in a boat, absorbed in random thoughts.

Steve says that the problem with city people who come to fish is getting them to calm down. I believe that. Which is the whole point, in my estimation. Fishing isn’t about fish. It’s about slowing down, leaving troubles behind, immersing yourself in the moment and taking in all that is the river — wildlife and weather, forests, canyons, and shores of river rock, gray-white and worn smooth.

We pulled the boat out downriver by Massacre Rocks, where generations ago white settlers, lured to the region by the promise of gold, ambushed the native Indians whose existence had nothing to do with gold and everything to do with the land and the river. Leaving Gold Beach as the sun melted into a yellow-orange band over midnight blue water, we had miles to go before we slept. The night’s destination was the town of Grants Pass and the historic Weasku Inn (yes, as in “We Ask You In”). The inn was a favorite of Clark Gable, who is captured many times over in the lodge’s photo collection — Clark with a chinook, Clark with Carole Lombard, Clark next to a redwood tree.

We got in after 10, bumbled our way through the dark to our cabin, then woke in the morning to a floor-to-ceiling A-framed view of leafy trees and mountains and the sounds of wind and river — the Rogue. It had found us again in the night.
- END

The Mighty Umpqua By Jessica Maxwell

The canyon water of the North Umpqua plays the bluest note in Oregon’s choir of rivers. The Rogue and McKenzie run a handsome hunter’s green, as does the big easy Willamette, when it isn’t muddied up by its ranch and farm duties. But the north fork of the Umpqua River remains a glorious glacial blue, a giddy splash of watercolor pastel in the olive drab world of Western Oregon.

This, I was sure, my husband would notice first as we twisted east on the road alongside the turquoise water that has long dazzled anglers and sightseers alike. But no. It was the structure of the river that caught his eye.

“It’s a pool-and-drop stream, that’s for sure,” Tom declared.

I was thrilled. From the beginning I’d been hard set on converting him to my recreational religion: fly fishing. Despite his preference for the more athletic pursuits of swimming, cycling and cleaning out our roof gutters with terrifying gusto, he’d been a real sport about it. He had even demonstrated a sort of fisherman’s Midas touch by catching the first, most and/or biggest fish on every trip we’d taken so far. But reading a river is a sure sign of deeper understanding, and hearing one’s husband do so in proper piscatorial language is an auditory aphrodisiac to any fly-fishing wife.

“Real curvy,” he continued. “The Umpqua is the Marilyn Monroe of rivers!”

We were, in fact, in search of signs of a former North Umpqua celebrity, but it wasn’t Ms. Monroe.

“It’s Zane Grey’s river,” I reminded, not wanting to be out-curved by a body of water. Indeed, this pretty, complicated steelhead stream was Zane Grey’s favorite, according to his son, Loren Grey, as reported to angling author Trey Combs in Steelhead Fly Fishing. Combs’ lyrical scholarship in that work is matched only by his 1976 classic, Steelhead Fly Fishing and Flies, known to steelhead fans as “The Bible.” Both volumes make it clear that Mr. Grey was not beloved unto his fellow fishermen, having suffered from what Combs calls a “competitive mania.” But it was Grey’s chronically inflamed ichthyologic one-upmanship, as well as his honest love of rivers, that spurred him to record his angling triumphs in scores of books.

Copies of most of them now line six full shelves in the library of the Steamboat Inn, the finest little fishing lodge in the Umpqua Valley, if not the Pacific Northwest. And that’s where we were headed in order to fish in Zane Grey’s dubious boot tracks and pursue the river’s famed fighting fish, the wily Salmo gairdneri, an exercise in angling masochism if there ever was one. The steelhead isn’t called “the fish of 10,000 casts” for nothing.

“There are 600 in the Umpqua now,” our table neighbor told us at dinner between sips of a poetic Archery Summit ’99 Oregon Pinot noir. “I only turned three.”

Meaning he got three steelhead to look at his fly, but no takers.

“Six hundred fish?” Tom replied in his ringing trial-attorney baritone. “How hard can it be?”

Two dozen seasoned fly fishermen stopped mid-bite of Steamboat’s flawless Oregon Salmon au Bearnaise. Little puffs of smoke snorted out of their nostrils and cracks appeared in the varnish of the inn’s old sugar pine dining tables. Patricia Lee, Steamboat’s revered manager, chef and haute fishing coach, fixed Tom with a stare like a barbed fish hook.

“Are you aware, Mr. Andersen, that Zane Grey had the stroke that eventually killed him right here on the Umpqua?” she offered as she slid a slice of butter-rich apple galette under his nose.

The day was already bright when ace fishing guide Bill Marx met us at our cabin overlooking Camp Water, Zane Grey’s most famous — and challenging — fishing ground. An explosive volcanic history created the intricate basalt structure that gives Umpqua steelhead endless hiding places and vexes wading anglers with steep banks and deep pools. We agreed to hike a mile and a half upriver to Grey’s less daunting haunts. Bill tied colorful red flies on our lines.

“Umpqua Specials,” he said.

“Looks like part of a Las Vegas showgirl outfit,” Tom replied, then secretly pulled off part of the brown hackle feathers. “Better shape,” he whispered.

First we fished Knouse Pool, named for Herb Knouse, one of the Umpqua’s original regulars. Next we cat-walked across a centuries-old downed pine to Tree Pool, where Tom got a bite on his second cast and I got nothing.

Hiking on, we passed a sign by a long-abandoned campfire that read “Site of Zane Grey’s Fishing Camp.” Bill was distressed to see that Grey’s old rusty bed springs were missing. We didn’t have time to fish Loren’s Run that day, named by Pat Lee after Grey’s son.

“No runs are named for Zane himself,” Bill said, “because he left such a legacy of greed.”

Two, however, are named after Grey’s cheerful Japanese cook, George Takehachi, the butt of his employer’s jokes, including the time he was fishing from up in a tree, then, directed by Grey, cannonballed into the river when a member of their entourage hiding behind a boulder tugged violently on his line.

The joke was on me while we fished our way back to the cabin, as Tom continued to turn real fish and get real strikes and I didn’t. We soon learned he was the only Steamboat angler to see any action that day and was therefore the object of great interest at lunch.

“What fly’d you fish?” our fellow anglers asked him.

Tom shrugged and replied coolly: “A Marilyn Monroe Special.”
- END