Fishing for thought

Field report #6

An old Sequoia National Forest postcard, via Wikimedia Commons

At the end of the week me and James and John drove in John’s truck to a dirt parking lot in the Sequoia National Forest that perched above a canyon and a trail down to a river. In the bed of the river there were trout, rainbows and browns in the riffles, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and green in the shallow parts. Small camps dotted every quarter mile along the bank where years of campfire smoke had blackened the rocks gathered into rings.

And that will be the end of my poor homage to the opening of Farewell to Arms.

A few weeks ago, before heat waves blanketed the country, an invitation came from John, a friend and longtime fisherman, to escape the city and join him and his buddy James – also James’s dog, a miniature collie named Banjo – for a weekend in the Golden Trout Wilderness, part of the Sequoia National Forest.

I hadn’t fly-fished in twenty years. This would be a backcountry expedition: a couple miles’ backpack to the Kern River, then days of hiking to different pockets, nights under the stars. We’d see a few people, not many. After a couple weeks of intense work, it sounded ideal.