Journal of a Repentant Trout Fisherman

MY FIRST AND ALMOST LAST ARIZONA TROUT TREK

It's the spring of 1952, and I am working the night police beat on The Arizona Republic, when a veteran reporter two decades my senior calls me over to his desk in the newsroom. Halfway there, he tosses me a set of car keys. "Kid, you've been working yourself ragged," says he. "You're all stressed up, and you need to go trout fishin'." "I wouldn't know where to begin." "Go up to the head of Tonto Creek." Whereupon he pencils a map and gives instructions, including, "On your way out of town stop at the Yellow Front store and buy a fly rod. They'll know what else you'll need." Indeed they did. They also had a cartoon at the checkout counter. Two men are passing a cemetery and a looming gravestone bearing the inscription, "Here lies an angler, an honest man."

One cartoon pedestrian is saying to the other, "Why, looky there. They've gone and buried two men in the same grave."

A short time later, I am tooling east through Mesa in Ben Avery's 1944 Milly Willys Jeep. The old Bush Highway with its choking dust and million corduroy bumps departs paved U.S. Route 60 four miles west of Apache Junction. Five hours and a flat tire later, the upgraded wagon road arrives at the ranch town of Payson, population 350, famous for its genesis rodeo and quarter horse races down dirt Main Street from the ranger station to the sawmill. There another gravel path draws me 15 miles through an immense ponderosa pine forest to Kohl's Ranch saloon, boasting of a beer license, seven bar stools, and one dusty glass.

"We keep it," explains the barkeep, "in case we ever get a lady customer. We never have."

Now the tiny ex-World War II Jeep in four-wheel drive slogs through the frost-heaved decomposed granite of the steeply pitched forest path, climbing from an elevation of 5,500 to 6,500 feet in a reach of about four miles. Firs appear. Black walnut. Pin oak, resembling holly, and Gambel oak, itching to foliate with leaves the size and shape of babies' feet. Clumps of aquamarine mistletoe. Leafless currant and evergreen manzanita and 300year-old alligator juniper.

The thin conifer-perfumed late-March air pours through the doorless 4x4 and pierces my quilted parka. Patches of snow blanket the north-facing slopes. Along the way, I am startled by a herd of pregnant mule deer does and delighted by gray squirrels busily trying to recall where they hid last fall's acorns. Till at last can be seen a rustic gate, which I take to be the end of the trail. The heavy snowpack under and beyond the Mogollon Rim has not yet melted, but Tonto Creek is running a fair head of water. With numbed fingers, I fiddle with the unfamiliar rod and reel, line, and leader. Once in action, the tip of the rod seems to possess a magnetic power to attract drapes of dormant grapevine and ominous sumac. I cast for an hour mostly untangling line without success.

"Hey, Ben," I mutter sarcastically to myself, "this is fun?"

Fluffy, moist snowflakes begin to flutter down through the hardwoods, almost making me decide to hike my cold feet up to the Jeep and retreat. But in a short walk upstream, I come to a fence beyond which is a huge, quiet, bramble-free pool. The fence is not much of a barrier - just a few strands of wire through which a bull elk might amble. There, even an amateur flycaster should luck out.

And that I do. On the first presentation of an artificial larva, the surface of the pond erupts with a primeval force. Then the fish feels the hook and sounds. The line seems anchored to the bottom. Then I sense a bit of give, gain a few feet and gently play the lunker near to shore. With a swish of net, the great rainbow, fat with roe, maybe 15, 16 inches long, is mine. It must weigh two and a half pounds. I pitch it into a snowbank. In those times, the year around Arizona trout limit was 10 a day and in possession, and in the next hour or so, cold feet and frosty cheeks forgotten, I fish my limit from that pond. Incredibly, there are no little ones. I fetch the sister of my first catch from under a mossy bank. Another rises from the foam where a Tonto rivulet plunges into an eddy. Yet another takes a grub wet fly. Wherever I cast there lurks a monster trout. When I am done, I dismantle my gear and pack the species into my creel. They overfill it, and I must tote a few on a string.

Then I notice a humble roadway lying a few hundred feet to the west. Why fight my way downstream through the thickets? I climb out of the creek bottom onto a piece of meadow and stroll down the road toward the Jeep. At the gate is posted a handcrafted sign: "Hope you enjoyed your visit to the Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery."

I have been fishing a brood pond! Quickly, I skulk back into the woods, stow the gear and plunder into the hoopie, smear some mud on the license plate, and light a shuck for home.

Today I trust the statute of limitations has run out on this dreadful transgression, however innocent of intent. Suffice it to say, a dear price has been paid in self-inflicted guilt and voluntary anguish.

For nearly 40 years, I have repented by fishing Arizona legally, all over.

There was that day with Dick Waters, up on Lake Mead, working the weeds with poppers for crappie, bonding a lifelong camaraderie.

A troop of piscatorial terrorists from Parker once took me doughball fishing for channel cats that cruised the irrigation canals east of the Colorado River. Imagine that. Fishin' out in fields of farms.

Several times a two-day ride out of Clifton near the border with New Mexico took us to the deep canyon of Black River, where the rainbows and brownies wintered over as firm, dark native-borns. There at the juncture with Reservation Creek, the Coronado Trail Riders fished the Black from horseback.

Of course, fishing may range from high drama to low comedy. To devotees of artificial lures, the clowns of angling are those who dress their hooks with supermarket goods: hamburger, cheeseballs, shrimp, and the like. One day I was hiking out of Christopher Creek led by a tireless, sixyear-old hunting-size cocker when around a bend there appeared a hilarious tableau: my spaniel, backing away from an advancing furious fisherman, who was shrieking: "He ate my cheese! Just snuck up behind me and swallowed the whole chunk

TROUT TREK

TROUT TREK

before I knew it. Now I'm all out of bait. I've a mind to . . ."

"Mister," said I, step-ping between him and my pooch, "when you do that kind of fishing, you've got to look out for that kind of dog."

My big brother Frank and I put the very first boat on Woods Canyon Lake north of the Tonto Rim in the early spring of 1957. Just to say we did. Woods Canyon had been impounded the year before and filled with snowmelt. Through snow showers, we churned up the Rim, chains on all four tires of the Jeep. At the lake, we offloaded a 14-foot aluminum skiff, launched it, sat in it, and immediately put the boat back on the trailer and headed down the mountain. Fishers will do anything to gain a little bit of immortality.

On Canyon Lake, on the Salt River above Phoenix, I watched Frank hitch onto a five-pound largemouth bass. Watched him get so excited, he knocked my five-tray fishing box overboard. In the clear hundred-foot-deep water, I watched my lure-crammed fishing box pass the bass on its way up.

Soon after stripers were introduced to Lake Powell, I drifted onto a ravenous school of that noble species and - as the television ads say about men outdoors - "It just doesn't come any better."

Long before the White Mountain Apaches developed their gorgeous wood-ed highlands into a recreational heaven with numerous fishing lakes, Jack Hill and I camped out on the Little Diamond. We were rustling supper at twilight when a long drink of water wearing waders and a fly-bedecked hat shuffled up and wordlessly dumped six cans of beer onto the grass.

"It's against the law to possess beer on the reservation," he sternly lectured. "I found these cooling in the creek. Are these your beers?"

"No, sir!" blurted Jack.

"Well," stated the stranger, "it's contraband, and it would be our duty to do away with it." Whereupon with a church key the gent opened a can and took a big gulp. Jack and I then knew we'd been had, but we laughed anyway. And so began a lifelong friendship with the Rev. Art Guenther, missionary at Whiteriver.

Lake Pleasant northwest of Phoenix soon will be a much greater body of water.

But at its original full size it served as a splendid setting for a late afternoon launch, a campfire on a far shore, and storytelling through a soft autumn desert night with good friends.

Crazy fishing. One time, Frank, two chums, and I packed down nearly to Hell's Gate 10 miles south of Kohl's. I took along six half-grown laboratory mice and a plan to perch them on shingles and float them one at a time across a great pool of water to where it was rumored dwelt a granddaddy carnivorous mossyback of a brown. Alas, we never learned the trick. So I turned the critters free, perhaps to found a thriving colony of albino Mickeys and Minnies.

Never have I fished Luna Lake near Alpine without recalling the joke of Ernie Gay: Stranger drops in for a drink at the White Mountain Country Club. Local character is bragging how he goes to Luna and gets his limit with a stick of dynamite tied to a brickbat. The stranger asks to be taken fishing. So they go to Luna. Guy explodes his depth bomb. Fish by the dozens rise to the surface. "I'm the game ranger," announces the stranger. The local sport just goes on taping another stick of dynamite to a brick. He lights the fuse and tosses it into the game ranger's lap, says: "Now, mister, are you gonna arrest me, or git to fishin?"

Three couples of us once took a houseboat on Lake Havasu on the Colorado River. A wind came up to push that high-profile vessel across the lake into our private cove where we certainly would have perished had not our trolling line snagged a huge carp. Poached in a court bouillon, that fish saved us, for all else we had in ship's stores was a case of everything.

Then one summer, I participated in a forest service citizen's committee to study the possibilities for Canyon Creek, yet another stream that springs from under the Mogollon Rim east of the Tonto. We voted in the 1960s that Canyon be limited to lure fishing and three decades later that remains the rule. In the Arizona of the 1990s exist other lakes and streams limited to artificial lures, but some 30 years ago, Canyon Creek showed the way.

I taught my daughter at age three to tempt bluegills with earthworms in the tiny turquoise catchment at Horsethief Basin in the Bradshaw Mountains, south of the old territorial capital of Prescott. We became pals for life. And at the other generational end of the family, when Dad became too rickety with arthritis to wade Bonita or climb up Horton or drop down into West Clear Creek, we'd motor him down to the Blue Hole at Bear Flat, where he could spincast Super-Dupers after 10-inch stocked rainbows.

All that. Extraordinary fishing. Excellent fishing. But never worse than good.

After a lifetime of fishing Arizona, I go not so often, and if at all, with a barbless hook and no keepers. Let the younger anglers share the bounty. It is my hobby to while away a Sunday afternoon crafting from feather and thread, from jewel and spoon, for my friends miniature lures that go into a plastic baggy along with the printed reminder: "God does not subtract from human life those hours spent fishing."

Yes, I have been pleased with a bountiful portion of Arizona fishing. But never, never has this old sport exceeded his First Arizona Trout Trek.