Posted on March 20 2017
Sometimes you find the fish; sometimes they find you.
Mid-June after a May-long drought and, weeks before we thought they would, the rivers had begun to "take shape," an idiom I've always loved for its suggestions of primal formation and rebirth. What was just days prior a brown blob squirming primordially down from Rogers' Pass is suddenly the jade-green Blackfoot, its boulders and riffly musculature apparent and alluring, the bankside willows laden with salmonflies three whole weeks before the bar-sidled, self-proclaimed experts—myself included—had anticipated. Why hadn't the bugs consulted us before emerging?