The Speckled Trout of September

By Gary Topping–

What I remember most vividly is my wader boots shuffling through the colorful leaves that were already beginning to fall along the river banks.  And then there were the Colorado River cutthroat trout, surely the most beautiful of all God’s creatures, with their lavender gill plates, the scarlet stripes of their “cut throats,” their dark green backs and tan sides with the dark speckles getting closer and closer together toward the tail.

I recover these forty-year-old memories as Robert Frost did in “After Apple Picking,” dimly and distorted, as through a broken pane of ice.

Alec Avery and I shared two things: we both worked at the state historical society, which meant that we had very little money, and we were obsessed with pursuing those speckled beauties through Utah’s mountain trout streams and beaver ponds.  Most of our gear was cheap as could be: I tied my own flies, and we relied on hip waders we purchased at Sears for, as I recall, five bucks a pair.  They weren’t worth even that much, for their propensity to puncture kept us patching them more than fishing.

We didn’t skimp on our fly rods, though.  We were both bamboo snobs who disdained to fish any of the synthetic materials.  Both our rods were bred for Rocky Mountain trout streams and born in the Colorado shop of Goodwin Granger.  Mine was–and is—a William Phillipson, built by one of Granger’s apprentices who went out on his own.  If Rembrandt had ever built fly rods, he would have learned his craft from Goodwin Granger.

(I was with Alec the night he broke his Granger.  We were fishing a late evening hatch on the Provo River just down from Hailstone Junction.  Alec unknowingly snagged his back cast on the old one-lane log bridge and when he powered into his forward cast, the rod broke.  My dad and I were watching him from the bank, and when we heard that sickening little snap, nobody made a sound.  Nobody even breathed.  Alec, the very soul of patience, just gathered up the pieces quietly and waded to shore in the most profound silence you could ever imagine.  Sometimes there are no words.)

Otherwise it was inexpressible fun.  How often we stepped into a big beaver pond in the Uintas and lengthened our already spider-web-thin 9-foot leaders to 12 feet or more to conceal our tiny flies from the wary trout in that mirror-clear water.  Sometimes when our line tightened we would yell, “Big fish”!! And the other would wait until the lucky one would delicately pilot the fish into his net.

Back in camp it was high living on a low budget, out of dutch ovens and big coffee pots, but then baking powder biscuits baked over campfire coals don’t cost much, and the whiskey drank while they perked away made our troubles seem distant.  We joked about the hastily tied flies on the open lid of the glove compartment of my Jeep, and the time I fished a beaver pond so obsessively until dark, not realizing that my waders were slowing sinking into the mud, and when I turned around to wade out, I measured my length in the water.  Or the time my misplaced cast hung my fly up over a limb where it dangled about six inches above the river.  A big cutthroat came all the way out of the water, turned over in the air, and took my fly on the way down.  That was one catch I didn’t deserve.

Alec and I had a very tangled friendship, as so many of mine have been (it’s their fault!).  But we loved those fishing trips.  Cutthroats and campfires.  Dutch oven stews and biscuits. Trout and eggs.  Chardonnay from a tin cup.  Busted marriages, busted relationships.  Friends and lovers.  Fathers and sons.  Budweisers chilling in the river.  The bottle of bourbon on the Jeep tailgate, and the incredibly clear starry, starry nights.

Through a glass, darkly.

Like all of us, Alec had his demons.  When they got the best of him and he killed himself, I lost a fishing partner without equal.  God grant that in the next world Alec’s spirit may pursue the spirits of all those cutthroats we didn’t catch.

*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.