Gravel roads spray out from Dubois, Wyoming, in all directions. Follow one of these long enough and cross a wobbly bridge, and sooner or later, you’ll find a trout stream—not one of those famous ones you read about, but the mediocre streams that have framed my life and so many lives around me, and yours, too, if we’re being honest. Too thin to float a drift boat, these creeks and rills sprint down from the high country, braid, wander, and carve cut-banks under rooted gangs of willows. There are dispersed campgrounds, rumors of nearby petroglyphs, and those skinny range cattle that stare you down without irony as you string up your rod and begin to walk some serious miles. High-country streams teem with brook trout, which suffer a bit from bad PR, as perhaps they should. But high-country brookies are always abundant, beautiful, and stupid about dry flies. You can clean house with a size 16 Adams or a yellow Humpy in 14, ginked to the max, of course. Catch a few fish right off the bat and you begin to think that you’ve learned something about fishing over the years, that this whole thing hasn’t been an entire waste of time. There’s no better place to break out the 3-weight and knock the stink off the last few years.
Dubois is 195 miles from my house; there are no stoplights between Casper and my favorite stream. Dubois is the last town of note that I can think of without any chain restaurants. I’ve been stopping at the Cowboy Café for over 20 years, and I can say that the food hasn’t gotten any better or any worse. The men’s room is the size of a phone booth, and the toilet has been ghost-flushing since 2014. Only this year I spotted avocado toast on the breakfast menu, a sign that change comes slowly to the rural West. I often stop at the Cowboy for one last mediocre meal and a cup of bottomless Folgers before I set off into the wilderness. Whiskey Mountain heaves up over the little mountain town like a bully. The highway follows roughly the Wind River up to Togwotee Pass. If you drove that direction you’d crest the Continental Divide, then fall into the Teton Valley. You’d see the Tetons and the corresponding tour buses. You’d end up in Jackson, at a drinking establishment peopled by fit and beautiful hippies who work nonstop on their social media platforms, but this isn’t that kind of story. We’re staying in Dubois.
Take out the map and pick a stream: All of them are fishy; all of them tumble eventually into the Wind, and the Wind unfolds out onto the reservation, winding through farmland ringed with “no hunting” signs, buffalo graveyards, and Indian ambush points. Crowheart Butte seems to follow you as you drive the highway. The Wind River curls towards Thermopolis. The whole drainage supports wild populations of rainbows, browns, and brook trout. But the cutthroats are the fish that define the area. Cutthroats have become a fascination of mine of late; they are at once secretive and gullible. It seems like one of these two traits would eventually erase them from my life, but they haven’t disappeared and have only become more important to me as I trundle along.
Once a year, in August or early September, a group of professors from the college where I work do an expedition. A guy from Education, the Spanish professor, a sociologist, an English teacher who dreams of publication, another English professor who specializes in True Crime, maybe the guy from the History Department—we are a ragtag group who feel compelled to do at least one big trip before the semester begins. These outings prove the point that we live in Wyoming for a reason, and during the semester, when things are grim and you realize you haven’t had a pay raise in seven years, you can look back and remember the three trout you caught on three consecutive casts somewhere in the vast folds of a trail map. You do these trips to underline the fact that you choose to affiliate with certain people who work hard, who don’t sell out or give in to the usual hacks and their five-year plans—these are trips of resistance.
The first night around the campfire is fully dedicated to bitching about the administration’s latest effort to cancel the international program and pivot toward canned curriculums—but after that, we talk trout and elk. Someone breaks out a plastic elk tube and lets one rip. At first, these were backcountry gatherings where a fair amount of suffering took place. We hiked dozens of miles, camped above tree line, pumped water through purifiers, and ate the disagreeable dehydrated camp food that comes in foil packets. Ravaged by black flies and homesick, we often fished until we couldn’t stand it anymore, and used one day to hike to the highest point just to gaze across the tawny steppes of Wyoming. On a tiny camp stove, we’d attempt to fry a cutthroat or two, but at that altitude you can’t harness the heat, even with a lid made of tree bark, and the fish would be crisp in the middle, but raw at the tail and head. Someone would make a joke about sushi, and only the true believers would gulp down the slightly undercooked flesh. (I am one of those believers.) But these trips were exacting a terrible cost in terms of blood blisters and grumpy wives. Slowly our forays into the wild became less ambitious, the fishing became day trips out of camp, and the meals improved. We parked nearby so that we had ample cooler space and were able to bring collapsible tables and fold-out chairs. We brought steak and eggs for breakfast, a heretofore unthinkable concept. Fishing an ice-cold brew out of a 100-quart cooler seemed odd, and a bit cheap, but none of us complained about the experience becoming too inauthentic.
“See that burned area over there?” I said, making sure I had an audience, pointing into the dusty distance. “Tomorrow I’m going to hike over that bench and drop into the river basin.” I asked if anyone wanted to come along.
“Dave, that’s five miles away—that landscape would eat you up.”
This year was a bit different. In April I had a breakup with an art dealer in Jackson Hole. We had only been dating a few months, but I was thrilled about her. It was a COVID winter, and we solved our loneliness by skiing and walking our dogs up snowy forest roads. Perhaps it was in my mind, but I thought we were a perfect fit. I decided to skip Alaska that summer and hang around Wyoming just to see. Sure, I’d miss the salmon run—forecasted to be a record-breaker—but when she talked about the Gros Ventre Range, she did so in magical terms. I wanted to see what she saw. But Chiffon said the summer was coming quickly, and she didn’t want to get bogged down in a relationship. “I want to bop around with my dog, do what I want when I want,” she said. And just like that, I was released back into the trout stream of 50-year-old singles. Unlike most breakups, though, she kept in contact with me as the summer wore on. She sent me photos of herself in her workout clothes, her auburn hair swirled under her baseball cap that advertised a tarpon lodge in Florida. Herein I realized that these love affairs are most vivid in our own minds, and they are only truly dead when you forget to revisit them.
Chiffon began dating a war vet from Rock Springs. It was too late for me to flee to Alaska, where I do most of my healing and terminal fishing. I hooked up with a marathon runner from South Denver, a neighborhood of Sudanese restaurants and hookah bars. I was bummed about Chiffon primarily because I never got to take her fly fishing. I thought that I was sufficient enough with my 3-weight to show her how it was done. She owned an Orvis combo that her last boyfriend had purchased for her. They had never even strung it up. But soon after our breakup, she began to fish almost every day. She sent photos of herself on the Snake River with a nonplussed and undersized whitefish, her first fish on a fly. She sent photos of her little Idaho Shag cattle dog curled up in the shade of spruce trees, river scenes that I placed in the Gros Ventre, sweepers of spruce trees breaking the current on Crystal Creek, and her new fly vest so thoroughly stuffed with unnecessary items that I figured she was getting bad advice. Often there was a hulking shadow of her fishing partner casting over the sage and rabbit brush. Is this the guy who replaced me? I wondered. I really couldn’t criticize a Marine who blew his knee out in Iraq for my freedom, but I couldn’t be happy for him either—my version of patriotism only goes so far. She suggested that we should get together and fish around Pinedale, but these trips never materialized. And why Pinedale? Was I no longer welcome in Jackson?
Then towards the end of the summer, she sent a text: do you ever miss me? She asked me to show her how to nymph. Was I reading too much into this? There was an upscale restaurant at Turpin Meadows. I knew of a gorgeous bend in the Buffalo River where big whitefish and the occasional cutthroat stacked up in the late season. A guy (or gal for that matter) could fish a whole day there without having to move. There were so many whitefish in that deep run that I often felt bad for the mechanical way I pulled them out one after another. These kinds of places are terrific for newcomers, as they require perfect drifts, and they provide enough action that the tyro begins to connect technique with success. And, in my mind, I’d take her to that restaurant afterwards and she’d invite me back into her life—this time with sincerity. But I was already moving forward with the runner; she was turning out to be the real deal, even if she frequently flew across the globe to scuba dive on the world’s receding and imperiled coral reefs with a pair of commercial pilots she called friends. I was, as they used to say in my hometown of Newport News, writing checks with my mouth that my ass could never cash. I found myself packing for Jackson with a lump in my throat. Socks, underwear, a plastic cup full of size 12 Bitch Creeks with rubber legs. If Chiffon dragged me down into her basement bedroom would I ever reemerge to clear my name?
Luckily she canceled, saying she had a friend coming to town. It reminded me of the Eagles’ classic song, “The Hotel California,” that lyric where she got a lotta pretty, pretty boys that she calls friends. I had been listening to that song for 40 years, but I never understood it until this past summer. So I fished dispassionately around Casper with a thumping sensation in my chest. I caught and released a dozen trout from the abandoned uranium mine 50 miles out in the Shirley Basin. I stayed until the sun went down, until the sage purpled, or until my Lab, Henderson, swam out into the lake to bother the geese and their young-of-the-year. Some days I forgot to eat. Still, the texts continued, and Chiffon continued to say she wasn’t catching much.
The morning I was setting out for the annual professors’ fly-fishing trip, I received a last-minute text from her saying her plans had fallen through and she’d love to meet me on Sunday morning in Dubois. We’d finally be able to fish together. We decided to meet at 7 a.m. at The Perch, a coffee spot where we had been in the past.
“I won’t have any cell service, so you have to be there on time,” I said.
“You know I’m solid,” she said.
The professors I fish with don’t take themselves too seriously. New this year was a guy from Dubois who once took some of our classes. Matt now runs a painting company in Dubois, where the dude ranches and millionaire spreads keep him busy. Apparently, just keeping the expansive decks and outbuildings covered in stain and protective lacquer can keep a crew of two busy all year.
And Matt knows these streams. I fished a branch of the Wiggins Fork with him on the first day. He remarked on the temperature of the stream and said that maybe the fishing wouldn’t be so great. There was a caddis hatch, and a little mayfly species I had never seen before. Still, we staggered over the braided sections of cobble and caught little, feisty brook trout until it was time to get back to camp.
Eric Atkins, our Spanish professor, had brought fixings for fajitas. Mike Olson slow-cooked the marinated steak on a huge flat pan that looked like a field disc. The camp hosts whirred up on an ATV and showed us some fossilized wood they had “washed.” These chunks looked more like jewelry than petrified wood. They offered some beautiful examples to us. I took an ivory-colored piece. I thought I’d give it to Chiffon. I gave 50/50 odds that she’d be in Dubois at the appointed time.
The next day Atkins, Henderson, and I split from the group and walked up a horse trail that paralleled the creek. Though we were tempted to peel off and hit the deep pools, we continued up the trail for an hour. We held true to the philosophy that if we could show some discipline and get thoroughly upstream, we might have a good experience. Atkins, who once lived in Los Barriles, Mexico, hardly fly fishes these days. Mostly, he comes along on these trips to provide his deadpan humor, to tend fires at camp, and to listen to our embellished stories about 40-fish days. He says he’s unlucky when it comes to fishing.
And guess what? We fell into a rhythm of catching trout at an alarming rate. We caught cutthroats and brook trout mostly. We also caught browns, which, in local lore, were not present in this stretch. Let’s not go into numbers. Atkins carried the one can of bug spray available to us, and the only complaint I can muster is that the clouds of black flies were particularly virulent. I made the mistake of wearing wading shorts, while Atkins had on Tevas. The flies seem to focus on our calves and feet. Poor Henderson had 15 flies feasting on his nose at any one moment. I killed a few—five with one slap—but Henry thought I was beating him for no reason. So I quit striking, and only cringed while the back flies settled on his muzzle and around his eyes. One guy would spray the other guy’s feet while he casted into the pool. We took turns catching and releasing fish, exploring further and further upstream. We sweated in the muggy, smoke-heavy air. But the fishing was better than we could believe. We didn’t linger too long at any one pool. I had the passing thought that I could bring Chiffon here the next morning and the pools would have reset from the day before. But I worried that she might be wearing shorts, and her perfect legs would get ravaged by black flies. Atkins and I exhausted the whole can of Deep Woods Off! and therefore had no other choice but to head back to camp. We stopped to eat lunch, but everything we touched tasted of Deet.
The next morning I drove out of camp before sunrise. I stopped at a kidney-shaped turnout to change clothes. I tossed my boxers into a bear-proof trashcan. I tossed my t-shirt, too. I brushed my teeth in a gas station bathroom in Dubois. I doused myself with off-brand eau de toilette. I told myself, She’s just a person you dated for a few weeks. I bought two fresh cans of Deep Woods Off! and various upscale snacks I call “girl food.” I was delighted that the store carried the sparkling water Chiffon prefers. I had an hour to kill, so I took Henderson to the public park behind the Bighorn Sheep Center and let him wade to his belly in the Wind River. Midges were coming up already.
Chiffon rolled into town at exactly 7; she leapt from her truck and jogged to the tailgate. She freed her Idaho Shag and he sprinted over to Henderson for a quick snarl to reestablish dominance. I had a fresh cappuccino ready for her. She hugged me, but it was motherly, complete with a back pat—sort of how an aunt pats you upon graduation from a state school with a degree in business administration. She looked diminutive, thinner, and I had to wonder how such a small person had such a profound impact on a galoot like me. And then we were on one of those gravel roads that wind out of Dubois in every direction. I hadn’t seen her in the flesh in months. I studied her jawline, her flowing auburn hair. She caught me staring.
“What’s your deal, man?” she said.
She played Miles Davis on her truck stereo and told me about some of her summer highlights. It had been “beautiful,” “epic,” “stunning.” Her training had intensified, and she was now on a diet called The Whole30. She offered me some strips of baked eggplant. They reminded me of dried, oily fish. She told me not to mention anything about her diet to the professors if we happened to bump into them along the stream.
“They’re probably already out fishing,” I said.
Suddenly, she realized the scenery—it had been there all along. She jumped out of the truck and snapped a few photos with her cell phone. And she drove a tad over what I thought to be a responsible speed. The truck fishtailed and got squirrelly once or twice.
At the trailhead I tied a size 12 stimulator on my tippet and a size 10 Purple Haze on hers. The Purple Haze was the fly of the day the previous day, and I wanted her to catch something. It’s a long understood act of passive-aggression to offer your fishing partner the superior fly. I watched her pull on her wading boots. Luckily she had brought long pants. I warned her about the black flies. All of the introspective and cunning things I had planned to say upon seeing her flew away, and I fell silent. Perhaps I should have had some notes to work from? Most of the snacks I had brought didn’t meet her current dietary needs.
We walked upstream, roughly as far as I had marched the day before with Atkins. There was no sign of the professors, so we had the area to ourselves. The anticipation of fishing was making her irritable. Several times she asked if we shouldn’t just descend to the river and fish the obvious pools. We talked about how quickly the summer had flown, but we avoided specifics. She never asked if I was dating someone new; and I didn’t ask her because my gut told me she was abundantly entertained.
Finally, we pushed down through the blowdowns and thimbleberry bushes to the streambank. I saw a gray drake wobble drunkenly from a pool, and I pointed it out. Unbelievably, the black flies had disappeared. They had terrorized me and Akins not 24 hours before. It was overcast, and perhaps that was the cause of their absence. But just ask Chiffon and she’ll tell you that, in her life, things have a way of always working out. She’s lucky like that.
She kept her hand on her line when she casted the little 4-weight. She let the line purl through the guides. She did a downstream mend, and a little brook trout snapped at her Purple Haze. The fish was too small to take the fly, but it thrilled her to see the trout rise to her first cast.
“You’re pretty good already,” I said. “I thought we were going to have to start from scratch.”
“I’ve had a lot of instructors,” she said. This made me frown. I always wanted to teach her myself. She could tell that her joke hit a nerve. She smiled and blushed.
“Sorry,” she said.
A rookie would counter this moment by telling her about his new girlfriend who may or may not be related to Bill Withers. Angelyn had convinced me to run in a 10K in Denver a month ago. And though she finished 15 minutes before I did, she ran back and paced along with me for the last two miles, her hair pulled back in a power bun, her smile glowing. I lost two toenails and had to ice down my calves for a day. Without prompting, Angelyn ordered a pair of inserts for me—she described herself as a problem-solver. I kept this information to myself. This was, after all, a fishing trip, not an audit.
We continued upstream. She missed fish, caught a few dinks, and eventually said that I should go off and fish by myself. She didn’t want to hold me back. Her cast was faltering; she couldn’t manage even the few feet required to fish these tiny Wyoming streams. She was becoming frustrated. Worse, though, was how her dog was beginning to tremble. The slightest distant thunder made him quake and pant. During ski season, when ski patrol is avalanche bombing, the dog burrows in her closet and refuses to come out. She lashed him to her waist with a leash. The two of them, trundling along in a light mist, cut tragic figures. I tried to help her with her cast.
“Will you please just go away for a second?”
I noticed that she had missed a guide when she had strung up that morning. I took her outfit, bit her fly off with my teeth, and restrung her rod. And then she was moving from pool to pool, picking up fish, and even calling her shots. In four casts she caught two brookies and two cutthroats. Finally, I saw that grin that took me in so many months ago. She unleashed her dog and he didn’t flee the scene, though he often snuck off and curled in the thigh-deep fireweed. When she couldn’t see him she became instantly stressed and called his name. He stood up in the fireweed and she sighed in relief.
“What do you think about this weather?” There were some ugly clouds coalescing in the west.
“Medium,” I said, and kept fishing.
“Medium?” She was beaming, her rod bent on another trout. “What the hell is medium?”
I shrugged.
On the walk out I pretended to get lost. She didn’t buy it. A light rain began to fall. I told her that when I was in college, when my sole transportation was a Honda 350 motorcycle (with a top speed of 60 miles an hour) or hitchhiking, I carried a two-dollar plastic poncho. If it ever began to rain, I’d park the motorcycle and walk off in the woods where I’d deploy the poncho as a makeshift bivy sack and listen as the drops intensified. I didn’t have a map or a GPS, so I often got lost for days in the Virginia countryside.
“You told me that before,” she said.
“I didn’t think you were listening.”
We had to bushwhack up a slope to find the main trail. It was steep and I found myself winded. Henderson was winded, too. But Chiffon pushed up and up. We were pressing through some serious old-growth. Wild raspberries and thimbleberries grew everywhere. I saw her plucking them and shoving them into her mouth as she climbed over deadfall. We were in one of those sacred patches of forest where, if a full-grown bear suddenly stood up from a nap, you’d have to pretend to be surprised.
I lost sight of her for a moment. I saw her cattle dog moving through the woods, but where was Chiffon? I found her on her back eating raspberries. She was holding her cell phone out, trying to capture the old leaning trees, the ancient spruce that grow to unheard of proportions, the grandmothers that topple and rot in anonymity.
“These trees,” she said. There was raspberry liquor on her lips and cheeks.
The professors had broken camp and headed back to Casper. School started the next day, and they were no doubt working on their syllabi. I felt that familiar lump in my throat. Maybe I should be more devoted to my profession? I wanted to introduce her to the professors. All that was left of the campsite was a ring of stones and soot.
In Dubois we had dinner at the Cowboy Café. “Anyone in this day and age who eats more than a quarter of a club sandwich is some kind of pervert or ne’er-do-well,” I said. Nothing on the menu worked for her so she ordered a salad sans dressing. Under the table she clutched a baggy of dried eggplant. I had a burger. Across the street was the hotel where we stayed the night we met. I stared it down. She said she had to get back to Jackson to help her mother who was planning a big party for Rosh Hashanah—otherwise, she said, we could get our old room back and have some fun. But comments like these merely underscore the fact that the romance has collapsed, and all that’s left is some housekeeping. Sooner or later you have to admit that enough is enough, even if it wasn’t enough.
The town was hopping. Octogenarians were crowding the boardwalks. Many of them wore blue ball caps denoting the Navy ships they had served on, the conflicts they had fought in. Korea. Vietnam. On their forearms there were deep green echoes of tattoos. Their wives steered them around and toted sacks of trinkets picked up in the multitudes of gift shops. They held hands.
Chiffon surrendered and ate a few fries off my plate. She said that those trout were the prettiest things she had ever seen, and that she had never been as lucky as she was today. I told her that these streams are like that: overlooked, out-of-the-way, and unpublished. Anyone can catch fish here.
“The famous places are pretty much ruined,” I said.
Are you the kind of guy who is going to act, or are you too meek to do what needs to be done? I queried myself as we stood beside her truck to say good-bye. I was facing a three-hour drive across the Indian reservation and natural gas operations. It was impossibly hot and dry. The storm had blown itself out and blue skies were breaking over the Absaroka Range.
She attempted a quick goodbye and hugged me. We were like that for a while. When she went to pull away, I pulled her back. I said, “Do you remember how you used to sleep on me?” Or at least I think I said that. My head was buzzing. She smelled like DEET and sweat, but in a good way. She reached up and massaged my neck. It seemed like we could stay like this forever.
“Get a room!” yelled a teenager with a pronounced Adam’s apple. He was putting through town in an old Honda, the same year as the one I inherited from my mother. I made a note of his license plate in case I ever ran into him under other circumstances.
The thing about driving across the Wind River Indian Reservation is that you have plenty of time to think. Crowheart Butte accompanied me for the first hour. Then it was just me and Henderson and the road. The asphalt was wet from the passing storm. It’s best not to stop along the highway at the various impromptu monuments to Indian deaths. I tuned into the reservation radio station and listened to the drumbeats and high-pitched wails. The sun was still up and it was hot. I tried not to think about Chiffon. I had to get back to my life in Casper, and she had to get back to hers.
Crowheart Butte faded in the rearview.
