This is a story I wrote for the Robert Traver Fly Fishing Writing Award Contest in 2023. The contest is named after the author of Anatomy of a Murder, which seems an odd eponym for a fishing story, but it’s not.

Robert Traver is actually the pen name of John D. Voelker, a noted writer, lawyer, and fly fisherman from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Voelker’s Anatomy is based on a true murder in that region, and was made into a film starring Jimmy Stewart in 1959. The opening scene of the movie shows Stewart’s character Paul Biegler walking into his house carrying a fly rod and a creel full of trout.

This story explores what is to me the most compelling virtue of fishing: the perpetual promise of fish. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t caught a thing when you’re out fishing, because your very next cast could be the one that will hook you the trout or bass of your life.

Anyway, I didn’t win the contest, but this story was a finalist, and I’m pleased for that. The fly that’s the catalyst for the story is shown above.

© 2023 Mike Toth

It’s not a bad looking fly, considering that it was tied in a Dodge van, at night, at Madison Campground in Yellowstone National Park, 42 years ago. The fly never succeeded at its original purpose—hooking a giant rainbow trout feeding on salmonflies in the Box Canyon of Henry’s Fork in Idaho. But over the decades, that imperfect aggregation of fur, feathers, and thread has evolved to represent something much larger than an oversized stonefly.

Any fly you tie is a miniature work of art, no matter how untidy it may be. And when you’re a kid, a fly that you tied yourself is a trophy. My fly-fishing father let me use his vise and materials, and my flies, when I could actually turn one out, looked very little like the patterns I studied on the plates in Ray Bergman’s Trout. But I was proud of them and carried every one in my little fly box, picking them out and gently caressing their wings and hackles in the long, torturous winter before fishing season.

But catching a fish on one of those flies was something else. I just wasn’t a good enough fly caster to successfully finesse my nymphs and wet flies in the fly-fishing-only stretch of northern New Jersey’s Big Flat Brook. But I could work a streamer, and that Saturday morning in late April, when a 15-inch rainbow slammed the homemade concoction of bucktail and tinsel I was twitching below a riffle, was one of the best days of my young teenage life. The live throbbing energy of that trout surging up my line, down my rod, and into my soul—a fly-fishing baptism, I suppose—has never left me.

That experience has informed many of the choices I’ve made in life, including how I spent my college years.

***

Penn State, for a student who’s a fly fisherman, is the good-angel-on-one-shoulder, bad-angel-on-the-other trope personified. The bad angel, however, isn’t holding a trident. He’s waving around a fly rod.

Here’s why. Penn State is surrounded by trout streams. World-famous Spring Creek runs on the edge of campus, and Logan Branch is right up the road. Fishing Creek, Bald Eagle Creek, and Penn’s Creek aren’t far away. Thousands of anglers have made trout fishing pilgrimages here. Yet I was here to study.

Spring Creek and Logan Branch are limestone streams, so water temperatures don’t dip very deeply in winter, and trout are active year-round. Consider that for a minute: You’re in class, or reading a textbook, or writing a paper, and you realize that somewhere close by, the trout may be biting. I found out the hard way how that can be toxic to one’s grade-point average. On the other hand, those streams were limitless treasure to a student so fixated on fishing that I once brought my fly rod to French 301 class to explain, in that language as my solution to an assignment on giving a ten-minute presentation, how to cast it. (“Fait attention!” I said to my classmates as the double-taper line from my Fenwick whipped around in the air above their heads.)

Joe Humphreys, the master fly fisherman and fly tyer who caught the largest brown trout ever on a fly in Pennsylvania, actually taught a flyfishing class at Penn State back then. (The current flyfishing program at Penn State is named after him.) Wait. What? I can tie flies, go fishing, and…get college credit?

To make that experience better—or worse, depending on which shoulder angel was doing the talking—I had apartment roommates, and a neighbor, who loved to fish as much as I did. Bruce, Brian, Dave, and I would hit those trout streams as soon as we got to school in late August, and fish right through the winter and into the spring. We learned all about the rich biology of limestone creeks, the underground springs that would feed them, the cress bugs that inhabited them, the sculpins that the big browns would feed on, and of course the caddis and mayfly hatches. Many nights we’d sit around our kitchen table with our vises (our textbooks worked well as supports for the clamps) and tie up whatever pattern was right for the season: Elk hair caddis in early spring. Adams dries soon after. Small black ants in summer. Sowbugs year round.

Bruce and Brian were twin brothers, and had taken a family vacation to the West a few years before. They had fished a bit in Yellowstone National Park on that trip and would occasionally bring it up when we were having a fly-tying marathon, talking about the wide, rambling rivers and the untold numbers of giant trout they held.

“We should go,” Brian said one night. “We could camp wherever we want to fish. There are streams everywhere. And the trout are huge.”

When you’re a 19-year-old college student, fantasies come to mind as freely as the Genesee Cream Ale flowing out of the beer tap on a Saturday night in State College. Eventually, however, you realize that no, you’re not going to make a million dollars the first couple years after graduation, buy a giant tract of land with streams and lakes and a lodge so you and your friends could reunite and fish together whenever you wanted, and invite the Charlie’s Angels there, who would actually show up, and think that you and your friends were all so cool.

Flyfishing Yellowstone National Park was one of those fantasies we’d talk about when we were tying. It always seemed out of reach…but it never quite made the “never going to happen” list.

And then, we made it happen.

Spring of 1981. Commencement. A few dollars in our pockets from graduation gifts. We had the rest of our lives in front of us, but none of us had a job waiting, or any other immediate obligation. All of us back home, we phoned each other and talked. Bruce and Brian had a Dodge van that would hold the four of us. If we drove out in the van…camped the entire time…cooked for ourselves…and put off job searching for just a little while…we could actually go trout fishing in Yellowstone National Park.

I started preparing for the trip: gathering camping equipment, readying tackle, getting maps, making lists of everything I needed to do and get before living out of a tent for a month. I amassed a pile of gear in my parents’ garage, all the while thinking that something would go wrong and kill the entire trip, and I’d soon be at my summer moving-company job while scanning want ads and sending out resumés on weekends.

But one day in May, Bruce and Brian showed up with their van. We loaded my stuff, picked up Dave, and hit the road, taking turns at the wheel and driving day and night while playing Outlaws and Marshall Tucker Band cassettes. (To this day I can’t listen to “Can’t You See” without picturing highway lines flashing by in headlights.)

One evening we got to Madison campground, situated near the junction of the Firehole and Madison rivers. Exhausted, we pitched a tent, crawled in, slept, and woke up to a skim of snow early the next morning. We hurriedly fried eggs on a camp stove and grabbed our tackle. Bruce, Brian, and Dave headed over to the Firehole, and I walked down to the Madison.

I’d seen photos of the river in Field & Stream and Outdoor Life, but I was still completely overwhelmed by its size as I approached it. When I got to the bank, I just didn’t know where to begin. How do you fish a river that’s 100 feet wide? I walked upstream until I found a spot with current slow enough for me to trust my feet, put on a size 14 Coachman wet I’d tied up in our Penn State apartment, and let out a long cast across the big riffles.

The fast, heavy spring current took my line so quickly that I had no time to mend it. I gathered it in and cast again, this time nearly straight upstream, and mended as fast as I could, certainly looking like just what I was: a guy from New Jersey trying to adapt to flyfishing the biggest trout stream he’d ever seen.

Eventually, I found a solution: short casts, directed toward discrete pockets and narrow runs. On my tenth or twelfth cast, just as the fly passed in front of me, the floating line shot beneath the surface. I frantically grabbed line, reared back, and was fast onto my first western trout.

It felt like an 18-incher to my eastern senses, but what I had was a foot-long brown trout making hard runs and lightning-fast turns in the fast water in front of me. I remember looking down at that trout in the net, dripping into the shallows beneath me, spots bigger than I’d ever seen on a brown, gills strong and working, eye sharp and staring, broad shoulders sculpted to navigate those powerful currents. I unhooked it and watch it flash away, feeling for a few seconds like the best fisherman on the planet.

That first week was our fantasy realized. We’d wake up, start the camp stove, make breakfast, and then hike or drive the van to wherever we wanted to fish: the nearby Madison and Firehole, the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone Lake, the Nez Perce—holy trout waters that we now counted as our own.

What was becoming more and more unappealing, however, was us. Without really realizing it, we’d all gone ten days without bathing.

The next day we drove to the town of West Yellowstone to shower at a laundromat and dry out our damp sleeping bags. Feeling rejuvenated, we stopped at Bob Jacklin’s Fly Shop to get some tackle and intel. That’s where I saw my very first salmonfly dry fly.

From top: My van-tied salmonfly dry, a salmonfly dry from Bob Jacklin’s fly shop, and a stonefly nymph that hooked one of the biggest trout I’ve ever had on a line.

Tied on a size 2 long-shank hook, with an orange fur-dubbed body, saddle hackle ribbing, blonde elk-hair wing and tail, and thick deer-hair hackle, this was the biggest dry fly I’d ever seen. It was the size of a bass bug. Bigger, even. And this thing was for trout? Where?

“Box Canyon, up on the Henry’s Fork in Idaho,” said Jacklin. Those giant stoneflies, called salmonflies because their orange bodies have the same hue as salmon flesh, hatch in various rivers throughout the West in May and June. Those hatches often prompt unabated daytime surface feeding by big, mature trout that normally would only eat larger prey at nighttime. But pinpointing a hatch is extremely difficult (sometimes the hatch progresses upstream, sometimes it doesn’t). This, of course, was in the days before cell phones and websites with hatch updates, and rumors and hearsay were the fly fisherman’s currency. We bought some finished salmonflies along with the materials to tie our own, and headed back to camp.

Brian and I set up our vises in the van that night. While a salmonfly dry fly isn’t terribly difficult to tie, a vise clamped onto an armrest, in a van at nighttime, isn’t the ideal place to put one together. Even so, we each turned out one good pattern.

The next morning we drove to Idaho and found our way to a dirt road that paralleled the Box Canyon. We parked and clambered down the steep rocky slope to see a stretch of river that looked like Class II rapids…with absolutely no sign of bugs. If there was a salmonfly hatch here, it was over (and later I did find an exoskeleton on streamside brush—Jacklin had been right, of course). We split up and I knotted my van-tied salmonfly dry onto my leader, just in case.

The few casts I made with it were all close to shore, because the currents were too strong to allow wading out to the deeper, slower water. After watching the dry disappear beneath the surface yet again because of uncontrollable drag, I put on a black salmonfly nymph that I’d picked up at Jacklin’s the day before. I had a hard time casting that big weighted bug because it would pendulum uncontrollably toward my head on the backcast—my eastern-stream trout rod just couldn’t handle that heavy western fly. I resorted to stripping out line and working the nymph in pockets downstream of me, lifting and dropping, taking a few steps, lifting and dropping again.

One upside to slow fishing is that you get to enjoy the ambience of the river. I noticed how the sounds of the rushing water echoed off the canyon walls, felt the current pushing hard at my wader legs, looked upstream and down at this immense, beautiful river. That, of course, was when the rod almost got yanked out of my hand.

Fish long enough and this will happen: You will hook a fish that is much, much larger than what you expect. When that happens on a fly rod, it can be overwhelming because the long, slow taper allows you to feel not just the strength of the fish, but its weight as well. This was the biggest fish I’d ever hooked in freshwater, bending my fly rod halfway down the shaft. I’m sure I let out a gasp as I stood there with a giant trout on my line, and no one else around to see it. And a second later, it was gone.

Standing there in the Henry’s Fork, 2000 miles from home, looking out at that wild Western trout river, being exactly where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I’d come to do, I realized that was the first big fish I lost that didn’t devastate me.

***

The ride home from out West was quieter than the ride out there. Our future lives were waiting, but we knew that whatever they held, the adenture we’d just had was one we’d reach back to over the years.

But when I shake my van-tied salmonfly dry fly out of the empty baby-food jar I now keep it in and bounce it in my palm, I don’t dwell on how old it is, or on all the things that have happened since that ride home: marriage, kids, career, aging, the death of one of us. When I hold that fly, I marvel at what it is about fishing that compelled four guys to drive across the country, sleep in a tent, make meals on a crooked camp stove, fish all day, and tie flies in a van at night.

It’s what motivates every fisherman: That perpetual promise of fish. Every fly you own is loaded with that potential. That night in the van, putting the final wraps on that salmonfly, I had the unshakable belief that the next day it might catch me the biggest trout I’d ever seen.

And you know what? It still might do that.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote, and she was right. All the more so when they’re lashed onto a hook.