It goes like this: life in the country on the coastline is strange; you either have one good job, or you quilt patchwork-mismatched shapes. A good job means you make over $25 an hour, work 45 a week and have time to drink beer on Sunday after church. This is about as good as it gets. The rest of us make $15k here, $30k there, fill in the gaps with nickels and dimes, hoping that the seasonal work stocks the hours or one more good fishery awaits to keep the lights on. We finished our last work season supervising shipping lines and leading teams of prisoners, rejects and dejects on the farm, the one that shells out wreaths and rich white people stuff by means of illegal immigrants and gobs of overtime. The work is repetitive, the pay is meager but the food at the end of the season is grand. Right now, you can say we’ve been enjoying our well deserved rest. For me, this means time dedicated to mastering one more facet of bank angling for steelhead in Pacific Northwest streams, by means of improving the skill of reading water, a strict physical training regimen and by being an ardent student of observation. Mastery includes: adaptation to all water heights and colors, matching angling style to the timing of the run, the color cycling of lures and above all: perfect presentation. It also includes lure craft of every kind, from turning spinners, to rigging spoons, to tying jigs and mastering knots. My favorite skill set to sharpen each season is low water angling. It’s what buttered my biscuit as a 20's-something steelhead guide in those dwindling, highly pressured fisheries, the same algorithm deployed that stocks my freezer with fresh salmon and steelhead thus feeding my little 5#-of-fresh-fish-per-week (pseudo-pescatarian) wife through the year.

Since early last week when winter clenched tightly his frigid jaws on the Washington coast, the stream now fully exposes her ribs. The ribs move every year, and they’ve fallen into decent place after these last three higher water events. They weren’t high-high and she took her time to drop, which slashed the hatchery steelhead run since they move quickly with the abundance of space and comfort a rising river amply supplies for a migrating anadromous fish. The largest fish move in higher water at night, during the wee hours barred from fishing, thus deciding the fate of the trophy hunter; not this year, boyo! On the brighter side, the larger flows allowed me to train for VLF (very large fish) gluing me to a select set of rocks where I swung stacked-spoons and consistently hooked-and-played high-teens and twenties contenders, which evidently wasn't a good thing after the success encountering them burned out the drag of a brand new Shimano Stradic 1000 HGFL spinning reel that was recently purchased to increase my ability to harvest WR (winter run) fish. I’ve noticed that each year spent hunting for VLF results in permanent injuries due to the nature of riding the bull, win-or-lose. Last year I had the privilege of enticing two 20# hatchery brutes to rise during the low December flows, both of which were defeated in exchange for a cracked left knee cap due to blunt force trauma while navigating rock-to-rock and reeling for 90 minutes straight over 1/4 river mile to subdue one of the hefty leviathans. Constant pressure and a light drag kept the Gamakatsu barbless jig hook deeply imbedded in the large buck's upper lip at the cost of another mid-hundred-dollar reel, a trade commensurate with the skill of such a worthy opponent. The point is this: if you pull the tiger’s tail you get to negotiate the tiger’s teeth, which don't shake so kindly as human hands. As the water recedes this season, I laid down my trophy-weapons and reverted to tacking higher numbers of SBF (small, bright fish) and hunting large cutthroat trout (over 14”), which brings us to April’s special day, the one holiday of the year we celebrate: her beloved birthday.

When you’re a kid and your family beats the tar out of you because your father is an alcoholic and most wanted criminal, your mother is a mean, abused ex-bouncer tougher than nails from Saskatoon and your sister is the favorite on the round side of the mess, birthdays are forgotten, swept aside in the foundry of pain known as home. Sadly, these painful voids are never really filled, not by religion-and-Jesus, not by skin-deep nice folk, not by lofty promises of an afterlife where you can't even mow down a Red Robin double bacon cheeseburger but gotta sing forever; not when the psyche in the pre-life is permanently damaged and remains to be duct taped birthday-to-birthday. See here for us, a birthday is not a just birthday, but a celebratory day of appreciation for things like you didn’t kill yourself last year when your bunny died and the stress from life was molten, so we decorate it with strawberry sundaes and steamy-hot French fries. So the day after April’s special holiday, the day when I was precluded from pursuing a dream job after having the wool pulled over me after discovering that pay was conveniently one month out (which is not conducive to a struggling, working man’s pocketbook), the day the internet gave up the ghost as I began filling out job applications; the day the neighborhood transformer exploded after the recent resurrection of the internet just as I resumed survival procedures — we got the hint, left the wet-and-half-washed laundry in the tub, tuck-tailed and headed for refuge at the stream.

It was cold out, even so late in the afternoon. There was more ice than pavement and you’d have to ask for a helping of pavement to complement the slicks of ice, no surprise due to the torpid nature of the local road crews. Per capita, Pacific county is the crusty armpit of the state, but what it lacks in mental capacity, ability to act and quality of human (drug addicts outnumber your beautiful, red-blooded, hard working American), it remunerates with serenity and salt-screened landscapes. Though GK (Go-Kart is his name) read a lofty 44, we knew it wasn’t so down in the icebox haunts we frequent, shielded by both sun-and-wind near the artificial re-route blasted in by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the mid-1900’s. After we parked next to the farmer's field up top, I strapped on my chains and April slung her teddy bear backpack across her shoulder and we proceeded to cross the gully behind the guard rail, beating feet to the slots. In the low-and-clear, while the slots are well defined, the holding water is not. Many fishermen fail to understand that per the wreckage from the Golden Eagles pinching the lower reaches, that all of these talon-scarred returners are wary and fearful of said aerial destroyers. Much to the dismay of what the local fish biologists affirm to know from school about their short-term memory, steelhead do indeed remember this sh*t in the long term; we can't prove it with test tubes, but their actions speak their biology and living beings are fact. When you do 100 consecutive push-ups every day since your 26th birthday, never skipping a day no matter where you are located on God’s verdure Earth (or high seas in summer and winter), that’s 292,000 push-ups to date, plus the extra days since I turned 34 but I’m not so bright with math. What this means is that after one of these here steelhead avoids every predator for every second during the past four years of life, it is more proficient at surviving than my mind and body have been trained by perfect repetition. So when we arrived to Cabin, a place the angels made near dusk on the fourth day when God conceived the beloved steelhead, we started from the tail out and worked up to the sweet spots, carefully keeping our distance from the water, rods-and-bodies always hidden behind the forward-and-upward seeing creatures. After waving the slots up, we worked them down yet couldn't sire a fin to rise. Now, well beyond the golden biting hour, (unlike other streams, the fish on out here wear wrist watches, but just the regular ones with digital numbers, like you can get at Walmart), we decided to call it quits and head down to Crusher. Since Hermit Dan finally left his 50-year-spot beneath the head of the riffle and the senseless city boys called it quits, we traced the ghost trail and descended the icicle strewn hillside to practice perfect repetition and trace a few more liquid seams. City-folk who brazenly visit out here are queer and pollute our home with their strange ways. They gobble up everything they can find on the internets, buy whatever the young e-commerce entrepreneur tells them to and then proceed to break it all off on the river bottom (while decorating the willows and alders in-between snags), their fluorescent, orange-tipped, clear floats neatly dotting the tree line because they can’t cast worth a damn, a skill they actually couldn't master by sitting on their behinds, gaping mouths inhaling the almighty YouTube. A mentor down in Northern Oregon, Dean the Mayor, used to call them washers because they move the fish around, suck up precious oxygen and chiefly, they just occupy space. We sure miss that old man’s wisdom and seeing him down yonder the Wrinkle, a slot on the lower Clackamas off a mid-highway exit, preserved in time. The electromagnetism of that haunt made it eerily unique and in a cheerful manner. He always brought a few handfuls of cracked corn to feed the geese and enjoy the freshly hatched waterfowl when he wasn't casting his 1/16th oz pearl white head and black tailed marabou jigs. I guess back then when the steelhead used to march in civil war regiments to the battlefield, they used to sip them colors and red wine with their ranking officers. Actually, I think that's how the famed Nightmare jig may have been conceived... Ode to the days when fish were still fish, not Instagram effigies, and when men were still men, plain and simple.

As I cycled through lures, traced seams and dredged ledges, April focused on presentation, mindfully controlling her float speed, occasionally adjusting the depth of her 1/16th oz Winter Workhorse, a pink headed staple jig pattern that kept my mattress filled with lukewarm air and my dented, red canteen full of Top Ramen, back when I worked as a lowly stud guide on the mighty Skykomish. I tracked her float as I was retrieving my #3/#4 cerise and hammered genuine silver blade spinner through the pocket as her 1 1/8” 1950’s Bluegill Tackle Portuguese cork float took a dunk. Though I knew she was just caught up on my line as we crossed paths, I let her feel the hook-set; it had been a rather slow afternoon flogging the chilly drink together, so why not? To my surprise I felt no resistance as her rod whipped back and her rod tip began to slowly pulsate, bobbing in a fishy manner that etched two words on the ancient green chalkboard in my head: fish on! Before you could say biscuits-‘n-bubblegum, my spinner was neatly latched on my spinning reel, my rod was gently propped against the frozen hillside and I was at her side checking line tension, adjusting her drag, and assessing her playing style. When it surfaced, it became apparent it was a she, and a stream born she at that. Though you can imagine after seeing hundreds of fish that you’ve seen ‘em all, its still a fresher each time one rises to an invitation. On this particular occasion I was feeling as green as the chain at the local sawmill is long, knees buckling with the excitement for the first fish she’d hooked since we stripped the braided line from our reels at the end of last March. Since she wasn’t a head shaker and she wasn’t aerial, it was clear that she wasn’t raised in the hatchery, but what remained to be seen was her size. According to the frigid temperatures she adjusted her playing style, expending her limited winter strength on two medium-but-steady runs, sweeping in and whirling out in aqueous cartwheels redolent of a classic wild WR hen. Near the end, she laid gently on her side and kindly eyed the both of us, telling us she may have been encountered in her earlier travels, though judging from her scales and clean finnage that it hadn't been for a while. Though not steel-and-chrome, she was bright, and plump with large skein, swimming home in her rainbow-clad body and talon-scorched left tail flank. We marveled at her laid back nature during light handling and her uniquely clean face, completely void of any spots that generally work their way from the tail and speckle forward; it was clear how when this one was painted, the Artist skipped her face, later choosing to supplant the usual black dots with brushstrokes of pink-sheened silver-steel around her longing, ginger eyes. A few snapshots later and a light turn of the body had her quickly shimmying back into the riffle from where she lay.

Not two dozen casts later April proceeded to pick my pocket, sliding a firm, blushed kelting hatchery hen to the bank, a cool 8.6# for the taking. And those two silver ingots were sent for just her to enjoy, for just two anglers, two lovers, entranced alone in the silence of a frozen riverbank on the stream we call home.

Happy Birthday, my beloved.