memento remains—a stuffed ten-inch golden trout I caught with a worm when I was a small kid.
Back then, my friends all seemed to have Nintendos, and when I visited them and played Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Street Fighter, it felt like heaven. It was even more fun than looking through the stack of Playboys one of my friends’ dads left out. Who cares about girls or being in the outdoors when you can make an Italian dwarf do flips onto a psychedelic mushroom? When I tried to convey my passion for video games and begged for a Nintendo of my own, my folks were oddly quiet. Screaming, throwing fits, and running away for a few hours didn’t do much good either. Finally they had enough.
“Save up your money, and you can buy your own,” my dad said. So began an era of economic fortitude. No more Bazooka gum. No more packs of Upper Deck sports cards. No more fantasy lead figurines. My will was unbreakable. The Nintendo would be mine.
More than a year after I began saving, my family was spending the summer in Bozeman, Montana. I counted out my money and did the math. It was time! Before taking me to the store, my dad suggested we go fishing and camping for the weekend.
“Did I ever tell you about golden trout? There’s hardly any, and they only live high in mountain lakes,” he said reverently as he drove his three sons up a winding dirt road. Soon, he had me believing that catching a golden trout would be as unique and spectacular as seeing Sasquatch. My fascination with dead animal mementos and trophies came back with a vengeance. What if an asthmatic porker like me somehow managed to climb through the mountains and, by the wildest twist of fate, was able to hook the El Dorado of the trout world? Would it be possible to manifest that great moment forever and get it mounted by a taxidermist? The very thought of torturing my mom and solidifying my greatness as an outdoorsman sent shivers down my spine.
The two-mile hike was akin to Amundsen’s trek to the South Pole, but the thought of golden trout spurred me on. Finally, when we stood at the edge of a blue-water alpine lake, I put a worm on a hook and cast out near a partly submerged log. When my red-and-white bobber went under, I thought I’d won the lottery. The trout, golden colored with dark bars and spots, was a beauty. On the hike out, I wrestled with the most difficult existential question I’d yet to face: Nintendo or stuffed trout. By the time we made it home, I asked Dad if we could get the fish stuffed. He’d already carefully placed the tiny trout in wet leaves, and we beelined to a friendly taxidermy shop. I immediately regretted handing over the money. It would be years, perhaps forever, before I’d have enough money to buy a Nintendo.
My parents love that golden trout. It’s the only trophy I’ve kept from the woods, other than the Dall sheep horns on my bookshelf. My three young nieces sometimes suggest I upgrade and get a herring mounted for my next trophy. This offers me an excuse to ramble off a “when I was your age” story with a moral that neither they nor I can make sense of. Often these backwoods parables end with some wisdom like “… and that’s why you should never pet a humpy salmon when it’s spawning,” or “…and that’s why you should not dress up in a deer costume while hunting on Admiralty Island.”
The three sisters are lucky to have parents who make sure they get plenty of time out in nature. One of my favorite things to do is walk in the woods or go fishing with them and see how excited they get. When their dad, Luke, decided to take Kiah, his eldest, sooty grouse hunting for the first time, I was lucky enough to be invited along. Most folks call these grouse “hooters,” after the males who perch high in conifer trees and hoot to establish territory and attract mates. Luke and Kiah, with me and Dad tagging along, made an early season foray into the snowy mountains. Just the day before, there were a couple lovelorn fellows reciting their monosyllabic poetry in a winter storm, but on this day, the forest was quiet other than the wind, ravens, and a hairy woodpecker. On the last day of the season, Luke, Kiah, and I waded through brush toward a mountainside we hoped had a few birds. I’m pretty sure Luke and I were more excited than Kiah. Deer poop and tracks crisscrossed a muskeg. A network of game trails spread through a forest of towering Sitka spruce and western hemlock. Snowy mountain summits appeared through breaks in green foliage. Clumps of wolf hair hung in brush, and piles of bear scat lay at the edge of verdant avalanche paths. Soon the deep booming of grouse brought the forest even more to life. Luke began to get farther and farther ahead. Kiah didn’t stop or complain; she simply hiked faster. As she tunneled through a maze of devil’s club, she stared back with a confused look.
Luke and Kiah with a sooty grouse.
“This is what you guys do for fun?” she asked. I shrugged and said yeah, suddenly self-conscious.
Luke made a great spot on the first bird, but with just a tiny bit of it visible, it was the sort of shot only an expert marksman could make. The next bird offered a similar perspective, so I suggested Luke shoot it. As we were lacking a dog, I did the fetching. Kiah held the bird and studied it with mixed emotions, saying how beautiful it was over and over again. We moved on to the next hooter, which was silhouetted and quite a bit closer. Luke helped Kiah find a rest. At the sound of the shot, the bird plummeted. We found it beneath a giant root wad. Kiah stroked its feathers and held it tenderly before gutting and skinning it. At Luke’s encouragement—and the thought of how I might have to wait almost a year before having another delicious grouse dinner—I added another hooter to the bag on the hike down.
I followed my brother and his daughter, listening to other grouse hoot and thinking about how lucky I was to share the day with them. Kiah held her dad’s hand as we hiked along the edge of the ocean. She’d gotten dozens of devil’s club thorns, a few good scratches, and her feet were a bit sore, but she’d never admit it. Watching her with my brother brought back memories of the golden trout. That tiny fish may not be a four-by-four Sitka blacktail, or forty-inch sheep, or fifty-pound king salmon, but to this day, it’s the greatest trophy I have.
FISH TERRORS
“BITE MY FLY!” I woke up screaming. My girlfriend, MC, tried to calm me as I hyperventilated and shook an imaginary rod. Perhaps I inherited fish terrors from my good friend and commercial fishing captain, Joe Craig—while we were at anchor, he’d often wake me screaming about fishing in his sleep—or maybe my subconscious was trying to work through the emotional aftermath of all the fish that had ignored my lures or gotten away.
“Stop!” MC yelled as I nearly hit her. I was mimicking throwing my rod down in disgust. “Calm down. You had a bad dream. Was it the Arctic grayling this time?”
“No, it was that pike again. He just swam there, smiling with his big eyes and teeth, laughing at me as I tried everything I could to catch him.”
“You need to get help. You have a problem.”
“What’s my problem?”
“Something bad. It’s more than just being a lousy fisherman,” she said. She was still proud of the seventy-pound halibut she’d caught with my dad a few weeks prior. Though she’d once been a vegetarian, her Facebook profile picture for the next seven months would be of her and a dead halibut. She even started giving experienced longliners advice on how to catch the big ones. She got even cockier when Troy Leatherman, the editor of Fish Alaska Magazine, asked to use the picture for a cover shot.
That morning, while drinking coffee, I read an article in the most recent issue of Today’s Angler Psychology Magazine that offered a pretty good explanation on why I had fish terrors. It described a recent study that showed 81 percent of fishermen exhibit symptoms of The Fish Or Me (TFOM) syndrome. Doctors say the neurosis results from the feeling that one’s father or boat captain has at one time or another considered murdering them for not setting the hook properly or losing a fish. Those suffering from TFOM often have fishing performance anxiety issues and catch less fish than the 19 percent of the individuals who are deemed healthy. Finally my inability to catch fish made sense. It wasn’t that I lacked skills or commitment, or hadn’t listened to my dad as he painstakingly tried to teach me. It was