No one fished with more intensity than my friend Dave Palmer. When he suited up in his camouflage waders and drew out his rod, he transformed into a great blue heron, or maybe a Navy SEAL. His posture lowered, and he would creep and stalk and patiently wait out his prey.
No one I knew could spot fish better either. I remember when he picked out a steelhead holding beneath bubbles and heavy current on a Lake Ontario tributary.
“It’s right there,” he said, pointing at nothing but bubbles and current.
“Where? Where??” I demanded.
Just then, the faintest outline of a thirty-inch wild steelhead ghosted into view before dissolving back into rushing water. Ninety-nine out of one hundred anglers would have walked right past it.
“Dave, how the hell did you see that?” I asked.
He remained silent, not dignifying my stupid question with an answer.
There is a cliché about thinking like a fish, but Dave could actually do it. He once took me to a reservoir full of large hybrid striped bass where the best fishing took place well after midnight. Every few minutes, hungry hybrids crashed schools of alewives spawning noisily in the shallows.
When I first heard the violent breaks from feeding stripers, I said to myself, this will be easy. I’ll cast out a surface lure, chug it a few times, and hook one. But I quickly learned those hybrids had earned their PhDs. With so many thousands of spawning alewives around them, they would hold back, then all at once gang-rush the schools in blitzes that lasted seconds. Cast after cast went ignored.
Meanwhile, a hundred feet away, Dave stood motionless and silent. I could make out his shadowy outline in the darkness and see the glow of his cigarette waxing and waning with each drag. Then at some trigger point known only to Dave, I heard the whirr of his baitcasting reel followed by the plunk of a surface plug. After a single twitch, a cinderblock in the form of a large hybrid depth-charged his lure. I heard Dave rear back to set the hook followed by a low laugh. He had won the chess match.
Later he explained to me that he figured out the cadence of the spawning alewives just before the hybrids charged in. He knew just when the bass were about to pounce and timed his cast accordingly. Like I said, the man thought like a fish.
Dave taught fly casting on the side, and when my wife expressed interest in learning how to flyfish, I smartly hired Dave to give her lessons. All these years later, her double haul remains textbook.
But then Dave got sick and wound up in the hospital. Something to do with his liver. Though I knew he had been sober for years, he once told me he lived hard during his former days as a biker. He was admitted the day before I was leaving on a trip to Yellowstone with my wife. I called him, and he spoke to me from his hospital bed. As I expected, he first gave me some advice on fly patterns and places to fish in the park. Then he said, “Visit me when you get back. And don’t get freaked out that I look yellow.”
A few days into the trip we parked at a turnout that overlooked lower Slough Creek. We had spent a fine day catching wild cutthroats, so we decided to watch the sun set over the river valley while enjoying a cocktail. The light lowered, and a few birds made their final calls of the day from a copse of willows along the creek. An angler came around a bend from downstream. Now just a silhouette in the gloaming, the figure waded slowly, staying low, making deliberate, targeted casts. From our perch, we watched him methodically cover the pool.
“Doesn’t he remind you of Dave?” I whispered.
My wife laughed and told me she had been thinking the same thing. We joked that he must have followed us into Yellowstone, and then we toasted to Dave’s good health and speedy recovery. The figure waded upstream and disappeared around the next bend.
By now you have probably figured out the end of this story, and yes, it’s true. When we returned home, I learned from his wife that Dave had passed away the same day we fished Slough Creek.
The posture and intensity were unmistakable.
Excerpted from the new book Every Cast, by Stephen Sautner — available now at Amazon,Bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
