The first thing I noticed was the snow—there wasn’t enough of it. Driving across the lava rock desert of the Snake River plain, the snow went from sparse to nonexistent then back to sparse again as the road stretched out across the plain and climbed into a narrow valley beneath the tallest, driest peaks in Idaho. While Montana’s snowpack is hovering around average, central and southern Idaho are in trouble unless some serious white stuff finds the high country between now and May. This bodes poorly for summer fishing; on this day I was not interested in summer fishing.
It was the first day of the fishing year. Several failed launches mean that I had not gotten out in a couple of months. I was jonesing for a trout river, for someplace without doors and rock salt and fluorescent lights. This place had none of those things. Instead it had many, many trees and plenty of trout. Because it was January, my preferred parking spot was empty—two months later this place will be crawling with anglers. The sun felt good on my face as I zipped a fresh license into my vest and rigged up a single rod—complete with an indicator and two tiny nymphs. I walked upstream rather than down simply because the water upstream—once you get past the cabins—can be stunning in its beauty. Too many of my recent days had been spent staring at interior walls. I was looking forward to gazing at the walls of a canyon.
The river splits and winds around an island and forms a back eddy where one spring several years earlier I found a big rainbow eating midges and mayflies off the surface with such slow lazy rises that I wondered if the fish had fallen asleep while eating. Inside the eddy the rivers goes a deep green and the current pirouettes in tiny circles and swirls slowly. That’s winter water, I thought to myself as I pulled the year’s first line off the reel and dumped the year’s first cast into the riffle above the winter run. The indicator hesitated while I tried to mend the line onto the right slot of river. Then the whole rig caught the wrong current and raced onto the fast water a foot or so outside from my targeted drift.
Two casts later I finally mended with just the right touch and the line, indicator, and flies meandered down the four-inch seam, tightroping between the eddy and the fast water like a toe-dancing ballerina. Should be a fish there, I thought. A microsecond later, the indicator agreed. I raised my arm and felt the wildness I had been craving for weeks pulse up through the line, down the rod, and straight into my cabin-fevered heart.
