White Wasteland by Jeff Kirkham (best color ebook reader .txt) 📕

Evan’s mind, and a hard pit formed at the bottom of his stomach. He hoped he was wrong, but the information coalesced in his head to a point of dreaded certainty.

He needed to ask Tanya a few, incendiary questions and after that, he wouldn’t be able to control how the falling stone hit the ground. It could take them down a dark and complicated road, but Evan didn’t see how it could be avoided, at least not forever.

When it came to glass-in-the-mouth decisions like this one, Evan turned to a personal catechism—a mantra that’d become the bedrock of his personal honor.

To catch the man-fish, you gotta let the boy-fish be.

The axiom came to him the fall after he finished army boot camp. It was the last fishing trip he’d taken with his dad before bone cancer chewed him to pieces. His dad loved backcountry Yellowstone, where the bears were a credible threat and only the most intrepid fly fishermen dared camp. The entire southwestern quadrant of Yellowstone had been set aside purely for backpackers and not a single road marred the pristine wildness for over a thousand square miles.

There wasn’t anything special about the fishing. The wild places of the backcountry didn’t teem with fish; a fisherman competed with twenty other predatory fishers, from bears to otters to golden eagles, none of which was burdened by a fishing license. But his dad loved the place anyway, despite often catching nothing.

As they had half-a-dozen times before, Evan and his father hiked into the Bechler River Valley and set up camp in a copse of pines at the languid confluence of Slough Creek and the Bechler.

They’d arrived in the afternoon, and the first full day on the river didn’t begin until the next morning. The next morning, Evan shadowed his dad for a while. Then, he fished his own holes. They leap-frogged fishing spots for a couple hours; one fisherman would pass the other every hundred feet and trade off between holes, cutback banks and willow overhangs.

Steadily upstream, they progressed, casting feathery Parachute Hoppers, Green Drakes and Pale Morning Duns to trout that were either being petulant or simply didn’t exist. Not a single fish made itself known. As was often the case fly fishing, the outcome between wary fish and nonexistent fish amounted to the same slick-surface mystery.

After several hours, Evan gave up working his rod like a liturgy. He’d swallowed more than his fair share of discipline in boot camp. He had no desire to fish like stubborn monk. On the next pass by his dad, he sat down on an eroded grass bank and watched the old man fish.

The river swept by in a steady curve opposite where he sat. The current slid, shadowed and deep, under a cumulus procession of willow bushes. His dad had tied on an electric orange Chernobyl Ant, and it slipped under the water the moment it touched down at the end of his casts. Evan couldn’t imagine how his father, who couldn’t see a stop sign half the time, tracked the float of the tiny, submerged fly.

Evan’s side of the bank was crowded with pines, leaning over the burbling river like children listening in on their parents’ conversation. The pines blocked his father’s backcast, but that wasn’t a problem for an expert. Instead of risking a snag, his dad roll-casted—using the springy rod to impart and arm-span hoop in the line that rolled across the water, lifted the fly, and hurdled it forward. As if that magic weren’t enough, his dad imparted a liquid twist of his wrist at the last second, sending the fly the last few inches up and underneath the drooping snags—where the big rainbows might be sulking.

The operation defied gravity and mesmerized Evan. The prowess of an old, faltering man with tens of thousands of hours of practice made him sigh. Would he ever become such a master?

Evan understood the theory of the roll cast, and could execute a rougher version, but this was something from another universe. In a fair world, his dad would be slaying the fish, but the dogged art of his father failed to produce the slightest dimple on the apathetic surface of the creek. After a half hour of watching, easier fish called to Evan. He slung his day bag over his shoulder, clicked his tongue at his dad, and gave him an adios salute. His dad nodded with a wry smile and went back to his ritual.

Evan hoofed up-valley three miles to where he knew the fish would be greedy, like hornets to the picnic. As the Bechler Valley reached its upper end, the creek climbed out of the meadow and carved up into a stony canyon. The open grassland gave way to barren cliffs as the creek changed its nature from placid gentleman to angry pugilist. In the portal between the sub-alpine highlands and the wetlands where his father fished, the river churned over a succession of cascades—some a few meters high and others more than a hundred feet tall.

The bored trout of the meadow never failed to congregate at the base of these falls, ever eager to find novel lands and willing lady trout in waters not ruled by the piscatorial old guard. Evan learned to fly fish in these very pools and pockets, where the hungry trout pounced on any fly offered. The falls ranged from difficult to impossible for a trout to swim—not even the burliest rainbow could charge up a hundred foot waterfall. So, the ambitious fish grouped up in the pools, gathering their strength for their next futile attempt.

Like the fish, Evan climbed treacherous boulders and shimmied across questionable cliff ledges to arrive at his spot—a raging cataract just below an impassable, towering fall. From a distance, the base of the waterfall looked like aquatic chaos, but Evan knew from experience that he’d find six deep holes carved into the house-size boulders just feet from where the roaring water made landfall.

For the next two hours, he gleefully