The Rite of March

Photo courtesy of Scott McEwen

Everyone has a food philosophy when camping. Mine tends towards flexibility. If I’m base or car camping I go for extravagance, cooking meals like dutch oven prime rib, iron skillet shepherd’s pie, grilled steak sandwiches with au jus, or beer can chicken just to name a few. I once made a lasagna in a homemade box oven just to show off. If I’m backpacking, things change. I become a “it’s less about the taste and more about the weight to calorie ratio,” kind of guy.

While fully aware of the freeze dried consequences for myself and whomever shares a tent with me, I’d rather roll those dice than pay the piper in terms of ounces to pounds. Impromptu adventure where overnighting might become a thing? I go with the gas station solution. My staples are a couple of cans of ravioli, freeze dried coffee, and some jerky. Sometimes I don’t even bother heating the ravioli. Straight from the can works just fine.

That said, if one thing jams my gears and makes my cooking decisions difficult, it’s weekend river camping. On the one hand, there’s a boat involved. Boats carry coolers and a kitchen better than your back, making extravagance an option. On the other hand, if there’s a river and a boat then there’s fishing. And if there’s fishing that means at any given moment things could get good and I could forget about food until setting camp and by that time it’s too late and all I want is something hot, fast, and filling. This dilemma always dredges up an old adage in my mind: you can’t control the fishing, but you can control the food. And you might as well eat good because one out of two ain’t bad—and two out of two is always great.

Over the years, I’ve settled on a split the difference approach. Decent sandwiches that double as two lunches or breakfast when needed, burgers that can cover all three meals in a pinch, and as long as there’s coffee for the morning, everyone will get home alive. Loading the cooler into the drift boat for my yearly spring float chasing March browns on the McKenzie and Willamette, that was the menu—burgers and sandwiches and jerky and coffee and a little bit of hope, too, because you never know if spring’s first trip means mayflies or misery but at least you’ve got something to chew on, which is a kind of philosophy as long as you don’t think about it too much.

After a long winter of waiting, March browns—or Rhithrogena morrisoni for those interested in proper names—are the first mayfly hatch of spring for the Willamette Valley. Few bugs are as steeped in fly fishing lore and legend as these first signs of winter’s breaking. Come late February, if the cold turns mild enough and spring weather flirts an early appearance, trout bums start poking around, asking questions. The first few just want to know if anyone’s seen any bugs coming off. They know they’re early, so they ask gently. They qualify their curiosity in the happenstance of a few warm days, a slight uptick in humidity, river flows dropping and the always popular, “been sometime since we’ve had a frost.” Soon others start showing up, wondering if anyone’s stumbled into a hatch, if anyone has seen that miracle swarm where mayflies come off the water in droves and the swallows swoop and the water boils with feeding fish.

The March brown. Photo courtesy of Will Conable

Then the rumors start, “Jason got into a few the other day. He said it was a slow hatch, but they were there;” “Carolyn swears she saw them down at her place. She’s close enough to the river to know;””Well, if Jeff’s tying up the dries, it’s just about time.” Yet the listeners (being anglers themselves) know these rumors come from other anglers which means every spoken truth is about three-fourths embellishment and two-thirds maybe. Still, they hope. They poke at the fly bins, buy handfuls of patterns—Klinkhammers, Western March Brown, dark Cahill, Quill Body Parachute Browns. They stare out the windows, wondering, looking at dappled sun and afternoon showers and find themselves thinking “maybe today.” In a way, their behavior mirrors that of the hatch itself, fitful and generally reliable; wholly dependent on conditions yet surprisingly free spirited. There’s a symmetry there, a seasonal concordance I can’t ignore.

I know the March brown hatch can be predicted with scientific, data-driven accuracy. The USGS has enough monitoring stations on our local rivers reading water temperature and flows to get a comprehensive sense of things. Weather forecasting, despite grumblings from taciturn anglers, provides a small enough ballpark of air temps and humidity to subdue mystery. Then, of course, there’s info to be gained through the fly fisherman’s grapevine—the old counter lean, barstool yap, group chat and club email list. Taken together, these data points can more-or-less promise a reasonable shot at getting the timing right.

For my part, I use other signs, a complex, somewhat arbitrary cipher of environmental factors telling me when to go. They include, but are not limited to, the blossoming of hyacinths around my neighborhood, the appearance of buds on the sugar maples outside my house, whether or not I have heard spotted towhees calling for mates, when the last frost happened, if my wife has started to talk about spring cleaning the garage, my level of quiet desperation, and finally if I’ve lost hearing in my left eye. When the majority of the list gets checked, I go. I go for at least two days because the hatch might happen, or it might not but overnighting on the river at least doubles my odds of being in the right place at the right time. I don’t go far because all I want flows within thirty minutes of my driveway and the rivers wind their courses in just such a way that I get a sense of being out there even if I can see house lights through the trees on the far shore. It’s all rather scientific and mysterious.

This spring I invited my friend Scott along for the trip. He’s relatively new to fly fishing but an accomplished backcountry hiker and veteran of the Pacific Crest Trail. In my experience, the best local float to take early in the season for an overnight trip runs from either Harvest Landing or Armitage Park launches on the McKenzie River to the Marshall Island launch on the Willamette. The river miles run long enough for two full days of fishing and there are enough islands along the way for dispersed camping on the river. Personally, I like launching from Armitage. It’s a shorter drive from home and since my wife runs the shuttle, anything I can do to lessen her drive means a shot at a longer grace period to clean out the garage.

The float itself offers no classified challenges as far as river running goes. A quick check of the Oregon State Marine Board provides a general sense of obstructions if the map has been updated recently. The bigger concerns come down to the same things one pays attention to on the first trip of every spring: new channels cut by winter flows, new trees left as snags, new and newly shifted root wads and log jams and sweepers and strainers. Basically, the same safety concerns we always pay attention to but with the first trip after winter leading to more erring on the side of “expect the unexpected” than later in the season. Between Armitage and Marshall Island the river stays broad but has some choke points. The float takes you through a few riffles and there are a few braided sections where it helps to know which way to go.

Then there’s the confluence where the McKenzie enters the Willamette. Here, two similar but different systems come together to make something new. Not particularly technical to row, the confluence sports several long gravel bars where beaching the boat and wade fishing work well. This isn’t a white water float. Rather, it’s an honest, easy, mellow drift perfect to crack winter’s ice and rediscover the river. I’ve always considered this first trip the slow rite of March—my way to take part in spring’s creative surge where I’m just far enough from home to be close and just close enough to be far.

Loading the boat out with camping gear didn’t take long. Tent, sleeping bags, camp cots, cooler, grill, jet boil, some firewood because even if it’s spring, it’s early spring and everyone knows you go camping for the fire. Fishing gear takes a little more thought. Sure, March browns are on the brain. However, I’ve played this game long enough to know you shouldn’t bank on one thing with more options available. We brought the dry fly rods, of course. But we brought the nymph rods and spey rods, too. With a lot of water to cover and the hatch generally happening around 2-4 p.m., we figured to get some other fishing in while moseying along.

The spey rods were my idea. While it’s early for steelhead, there’s always a chance. Besides, the same kinds of runs that fish well for spey rods tend to have solid mayfly hatches. If one doesn’t happen, there’s always the other. And, if two good things come together at all the better. Truth is, fishing teaches a special kind of optimism, something we could all use a little more of these days.

We left on a Sunday and had the river to ourselves both days. Now, this is the part where I tell you how great things were, where I tell you the trout practically leapt into the boat, that we had to try to not catch fish, that ballads of our prowess will be sung into myth and legend for ages to come. Spoiler alert: didn’t happen. There were no trout rising and only a few mayflies—small March browns and even smaller blue winged olives—popping off. The size of the bugs on that first day let me know we were early. The sparseness of bugs on the second day when we floated the warmer Willamette confirmed my fears. Granted, what I did see were the first mayflies I’d seen in months. They were a welcome sight, but the hatch never rose to a spring crescendo. Mostly we saw halting and tentative flights. There was no mad dash to cast, no shaking hands as we searched the fly boxes for the right size and color to match the hatch. There were no joyous somewhat panicked “yawps” as the water boiled all around you because the trout keyed into something specific, and we’d stumbled into glory. That’s okay. Adaptation is part of the game like always.

So, instead of two days of dry fly glory, Scott and I got two days of steady, even fishing. They were days where the river showed us a new face after a winter of change. We both managed to get a few on the dry fly. Coastal cutthroat trout almost always come to the rescue of desperate dry fly enthusiasts. My best fish came on a nymph near the end of the first day at the confluence. We’d both fished a long gravel bar hard with dries and spey rods to no avail. Turning desperate, I’d switched over to nymph fishing. I tied on a black stonefly and a #12 prince nymph in olive. It’s one of my go-to combinations and I reasoned that if a fish wasn’t interested in this menu offering, then a whole slew of other life choices, not just fly selection, needed re-evaluation. Near the end of my third or fourth drift the yarn indicator went down slow and soft—the kind of sinking that signals any number of things from a fish to a snag. I set and felt the certain heavy weight of a good fish. I had slack line on the water and in my hands and knew that if I didn’t get things right they were bound to go wrong. The fish ran towards me, something rainbow trout like to do, and I started running backwards stripping line, trying to tighten everything. Through clumsy grace and a total loss of skill, I managed a small measure of control long enough for Scott to get the net. We landed it clean and fast and let it go after a quick photo, because Scott is better about things like posterity. It was a nice male with crimson cheeks and the tell-tale red band of native McKenzie trout, the kind of fish that scales a whole host of other troubles to their proper proportions. You really can’t ask for much more than that.

Scott’s best fish came on the Willamette about a mile from the takeout. He was working a new back eddy formed by a cut bank and cottonwood root wad that had gathered a small log jam. It was quintessential dry fly water fished at the right time of the day between sun and clouds, just before the cool of late afternoon. He was fishing a #14 parachute Adams, a common dry fly that has probably caught more fish than a host of other patterns because it seems to work just about anywhere. Like most good fish, the take coalesced from the strange alchemy of a pretty cast, mend, drift, and chance. Scott’s fish took the fly fast and clean. It gave a few good runs and a few good leaps helping us both smile and hope a little more. We landed it and released it, not taking the time for a photo op. Cameras keep anglers too honest. Come heavier spring melt and rain that eddy will be gone. Sometimes rivers erase their records. Still, we’ll keep the memory of the fish, which is another sort of record, one sure to help us through a few more winters into a few more springs.

A native McKenzie River trout. Photo courtesy of Will Conable

By the time we made the boat ramp, we were out of food but still good on coffee. We’d survived. My wife waited for us at the take-out, letting the dog romp in the river while Scott and I organized the gear, broke down fly rods, stripped out of waders. We finished the last of the coffee leaning against the trailered boat, not really talking, not really thinking, rather just trying to be and make sense of time after springtime on the river. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Leaving the river doesn’t just mean going back to a life of work and schedules and appointments. It means returning to mechanical time after two days without all that noise which, by comparison, feels a little less like life and a little more like imposed order. There’s a heaviness there, a sense that maybe we have the cycle all wrong, that the river has it right. After all, where else can the weight of the world become less than that of a mayfly? Not many places, I’m sure. I suppose there’s a philosophy in that, too, just as long as I don’t think about it too much, either.