One: Poolside, August 2000

            I stared out at the same pool I’d been guarding for the last five summers, which I now managed.  In the shallow end, one of the old bats who thought she owned the place scowled at the twelve-year-old girl drifting by on a raft.  The breeze had pushed the girl across the pool into the old lady’s path, an affront if ever there was one.  She shoved the kid out of her way, waking her up and making her fall off with a splash.

            One of my teenage lifeguards was sitting next to me, making bedroom eyes when she wasn’t watching the pool.  In my idle moments, I made them right back, age difference and immorality of boss-employee relationships be damned.  I needed something, anything, to break the monotony of what had been a long, long summer.  Besides, she liked to fly fish.  I'd been fishing myself all of twice since May, and both times Bennett Spring had been packed solid with morons aiming only to get their five stockers for the frying pan.  To add insult to injury, the Pale Evening Duns hadn't revealed themselves, and there had been only one sporadic midge hatch.  Not good.

            In the deep end, the eternally off-duty cop was between his girlfriend's legs, again, having left his wife at home with the kids, like always.  I thought about telling them to cut it out, but only for a moment.  A friend had overheard the cop ranting about how he was looking for an excuse to arrest me, so it seemed prudent to lay low for another two weeks.  After Labor Day, when I went back to school, I'd never see him again. 

            I was barely 20 and already felt like I was at the end of my rope.  It was time for a change.

Two: An Apartment Scene, October 2000

After class on Monday, I strapped on my Strat, dimed my amplifier, and proceeded to rock out.  After a few minutes, just as I was getting the kinks out, my roommate came home and flopped down on the couch.  He turned on the TV.  He turned up the TV.  As the TV was plugged into my stereo system, Jerry Springer got quite loud.  Jerry and Jimi do not mix.

            I snapped off my amp and muttered something that would have gotten bleeped if I were on the show, the only sort of words I'd directed at my roomie in about three weeks.  Normally I'd have gone in my room and played through headphones, but the end-of-semester stress was bad enough only volume or flyfishing had a hope of cracking it.  I'd fished the White over the weekend, and the browns and weird fall-spawning stocked rainbows had been running, which helped the stress.  Every local knew they were running, which didn't.  Elbowing my way into a patch of water amid the snaggers and trophy hunters was something even a 25" rainbow on a Brassie and 7X couldn't make up for.   Twenty minutes of wholesome family hell while driving through Branson on the way back was enough to bring back most of the stress.

            Even college wasn't enough.  Fly fishing in the Midwest wasn't enough.  I needed to go back to Yellowstone .

Three: In Front of the Computer, February 2001

            Though there was some variation, no matter how I ran the spreadsheet program it always came out the same: if I had to live in Yellowstone flipping burgers at minimum wage in one of the hotel restaurants, the job I'd been offered, there was no way I could so much as break even and still fish at least three days a week.

            I worked through the calculations again and again, but with any remotely realistic budget for fly tying materials and flies I would wind up in the red, something I couldn't afford to do if I wanted to stay in school.  Damn.  Perhaps I could sell blood.

            "You've got mail," said the computer.  "Fishing in Yellowstone ," said the subject line.

            I opened the file thinking it would either be spam or someone replying to a question I'd posted on a fly fishing web board about fishing the Firehole River early in the season, which I'd never done.  It was neither.  "My name's Pat Straub, and I used to work for a guy named Richard Parks, owner of Parks' Fly Shop, in Gardiner , Montana , at Yellowstone 's north entrance.  From your post, it sounds like you know what you’re doing, and he's hiring guides for the coming season.  You should give him a call.  It's not a huge shop so you won't be working every day, but you'll have plenty of time to fish.  If you work for Richard you'll make way more money and have way more fun than if you work for a Park concessionaire."

            Me, a guide?  What?  I'd only been fly fishing since I was six and tying since I was twelve and had only written a half-dozen magazine articles about either.  That couldn't be enough experience, could it?

            Of course it could.

            Hallelujah.

Four: The Yellowstone Drainage, May 2001

            The scent of the evergreens was the first thing I noticed when I rolled down the window to pay for my Yellowstone Park entrance permit.  Even twenty miles back, in Sunlight Basin , where I'd gotten out of the car to giggle and make snowballs with fistfuls of corn snow from the rotting banks alongside the road, the sweet piney smell had not been so strong.  The second thing I noticed was that Soda Butte Creek was not so muddy here as it had been a few miles back --this early in the morning, the day's ration of snowmelt had yet to get this far downstream.  I could make out a few rocks that would provide cover, and there were likely pockets all along the undercuts.

            The creek grew and grew as I drove downstream into the Park, and as the Absaroka Range faded away to east and west.  The undercuts got bigger, the pools deeper.  Though down here runoff had transformed Round Prairie and Soda Butte Creek's lower meadow into vast lakes, I could barely keep my eyes on the road.  This was the first time I had laid eyes on Soda Butte, and already I was smitten.  The Yellowstone at the bottom of its Grand Canyon , where the Northeast Entrance Road crosses it, affected me similarly.  No creek in Missouri possessed the luscious meanders and undercut banks of Soda Butte, no river could compare to the vast, swift, bouldery Yellowstone .

            On the remainder of the drive to Gardiner, I crossed several old friends, rivers and creeks I'd fished as a tourist over the past eight years: Blacktail Creek and Lava, the Gardner River .  All were swollen with snowmelt but recognizable.  Every stream I saw flowed eventually into the Yellowstone in its canyons, and I wanted to fish every one.  Though I didn't know it as I unloaded my gear in the ratty little room I was renting for the summer, I would fish these streams more than any others over the next six years, would not leave Gardiner or the Yellowstone watershed except temporarily, to take care of transitory matters like fishing the Firehole and Madison or finishing my B.A. and a Master's in Creative Writing.

            More than anything else, the rivers are the blue threads weaving through Yellowstone Park that have bound me to the place.  Guys I've worked with and clients I've guided have come and gone, but the rivers have remained. 

Author's note: the above essay is adapted from the Prologue of my MA thesis, which I'm expanding into a book.  You can reach me at walter@rockymtnfly.com.