Restless Waters: The Trestle Bend

Restless Waters: The Trestle Bend

The ground rumbles as the long train snakes its way north. We wait, cut off on the mountainside in a boneyard among assorted pieces of rail, ties, and spikes, strewn about in random fashion. The train’s steel wheels squeal and the couplings bang as the boxcars weave a tightly-knit course roughly matching the river below. On it goes, to Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. We go down, crossing the tracks, following the train upstream.

Above the trestle there is a tight turn in the river, hemmed in by a wall of rock. Some 60 feet above the October waterline a 3 foot thick log is perched like a teeter totter in the sky. What hydrologic forces, what Pacific storm, what tide of snowmelt deposited the log up there? But now, late in the season, the river is small and the gravel bars big and wide, the access easy once a path is plotted and poison oak identified and avoided. So we choose from a smorgasbord of pools and runs, and work our way from the tracks to the trees.

No one can forget that first May back in the early '90s. That's because, since the spill, the new generation of trout did not know about us, had no guile when it came to floating fur and feathers, had gotten fat and sassy without ever being hooked. So the rainbows were free spirits and free risers, and the talk on the river and in the fly shops was electric. The Upper Sac was the place to be in the West. At least for a time, it was the trout stream of memory. Perhaps better.

But it couldn't last. And it didn't, I recall, as we rig up with pheasant tails and midge larva on some rocks above the riffle. Those were the days, right? Above on our left the river pours like a faucet into a pool, then pushes across until it hits a smooth gray wall, bouncing back toward our position about midway in the run. While I snip some tippet tags a nice fish leaps and lands lopsided in a showy splash. Greasing our indicators, we see another trying in vain to defy gravity. Gently we slip down off the boulders and into the cobblestones beneath the translucent liquid

Behind us, the sun dips, the bottom half hiding behind the hill. She hooks up first, a gimme fish that hooks itself as the tight line hangs downstream. Who needs strike indicators? I ease my way along the shore in ankle deep water, avoiding a snarl of boulders and blackberry, driftwood and detritus, on the bank. Flipping my rig upstream into a gently twirling seam capped with foam, I hear splashing and see she's got a nice fish. It's a blur of crimson and emerald as it twists on the line at her feet. She hasn't moved since she stepped in the river. She's on to something.

Cedar waxwings cavort in the willows. Western tanagers, a tequila sunrise splash of color in the dark edges of the forest, flit from limb to limb in the larger trees. Something scurries through the thick weeds behind me. A muskrat perhaps? Then my fish rises.

The water, the yarn, a thin layer of cloud, all float lightly past me as the evening air, still warm, takes on a cool edge. But there is something moving, darting, diving against this flow, and I see that it is another fish, a big fish, a huge fish, with her at the reins. I set my rod up on the rocks and stay back at the edge as the long, rusty-red rainbow explores the shallows for avenues of escape. I warn her about the huge boulder ahead, and she turns the trout back toward the trestle. I gather it up for her as she shortens its tether, and we stand in awe of the wild trout framed but not contained by the net.

I notice that fish has taken a dry fly; the October Caddis. She tells me she got tired of nymphing, even though nothing was rising. We laugh at that as the huge fish slips out into deeper water. I change my as yet unsuccessful nymphs in favor of the deer hair dry, and the river comes alive with charging, flying, sailing fish. The frenzy lasts, at most, three quarters of an hour, and as the sun slides below the trestle bend, I can see the smile on her face. She knows something. Laughing, we follow the tracks toward the fading light.