Ben Marcus

NATIVE SONS
The Getting of Wisdom on Montana's Big Hole River

Gary Cooper and David Lynch are native sons of Montana and that makes sense.

Gary Cooper was born Frank James Cooper to English immigrants in Helena in 1901. Charles Henry Cooper was a Montana Supreme Court Justice and "a true Westerner," according to his son, who claimed. "And I take after him." Charles Cooper bought the 600-acre Seven-Bar-Nine Ranch (about halfway between Helena and Great Falls) when Frank James was five, and when Frank James was nine, Alice Cooper became ill and was ordered to take a long sea voyage as a cure. Frank James and his brother Arthur took after their mother and spent seven years in England, leading up to World War I. Cooper learned the proper Three R's in England, then returned to Montana to learn Riding, Roping and Roughhousing keeping 450 head of cattle fed and in line as a hand on the Seven-Bar-Nine. Cooper put in four years as a tourbus driver in Yellowstone Park before moving to Los Angeles to look for work in his early 20s. Frank James Cooper was an authentic Western man who kept his English sophistication close to his vest, but could pull it out like a pocket watch, when he needed it. Cooper's hard-earned Western ability with horses and cattle got him work as an extra on a dozen westerns through the second half of the 20s. At some point Frank James became Gary Cooper, and in 1927 he got a break in The Winning of Barbara Worth, nearly stealing the show from Ronald Coleman without saying much. Gary Cooper said as little as possible over the next 30 years, but still appeared in more than 120 pictures, starring in at least a dozen classics for which he earned five Academy Award nominations and two Oscars.

Gary Cooper in person and on screen is Western Man: strong and silent, distant but hospitable, country but sophisticated, wise and bemused. He is the man with the faraway eyes. In the movies Gary Cooper was Lieutenant Frederick Henry and Howard Roark and Longfellow Deeds and Sergeant Alvin York and Henry “Lou” Gehrig, but as Marshall Will Kane in High Noon Cooper was Montana personified: independent but lonely, scared but fearless and willing to face death to bring justice with an integrity chipped from Montana granite.

    

 

David Lynch is a different kind of Montana man, the twisted backcountry road to Cooper’s straight highway. Lynch is America’s bizarrest auteur, eagerly seeking out the evil slithery things that Cooper lived to squelch. Lynch is forever en garde for the severed ear in the grass, the madman behind the dumpster, the gas sniffing drinker of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Lynch was born in Missoula in 1946, and probably grew up wanting to be Gary Cooper and a good Montanan, but the gravity of the world jerked him into something else entirely. Those who wonder where a man could develop such a sensibility in Montana, how an Eagle Scout could go on to create Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive don’t know the whole story. Lynch is a native son of Montana but he was yanked from state to state with his research scientist father. He attended a number of schools around the country and art school in Pennsylvania, and it was the combination of small town Montana and dreary industrial cities like Philadelphia that shaped Lynch’s sensibility.

The American West is alternately appealing and appalling, and you’ll find bits and pieces of the Montana west in Lynch’s movies: the fascination with small town America and lost highways, the mysterious cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the eerie and the creepy lying just beneath the serene and beautiful. Montana has a lot of straight roads aiming for blue skies and high mountains and pastures full of cattle. But Montana has just as many backroads twisting deep into the shadows of the mountains and the trees, or crossing the empty, blank, crazy flat badlands east of the Rockies. Look under Montana's lovely surface and you'll find Lynchworld lurking.

 

 

A River Runs Through It is perhaps the most famous Montana movie. Fly-fishing is the metaphor and trout are the stars. Nature-loving Robert Redford directed the picture, but if David Lynch had a hand, he surely would have found a role for the lowly Whitefish. Some people find nobility in the Mountain Whitefish, but others see Prosopium williamsoni as a native Montana annoyance. Yeah yeah yeah it’s one of God’s creatures great and small and all like that, but I see the Whitefish as a trashfish, the David Lynch fish, the severed ear in the grass, the madman behind the dumpster. The Whitefish is the gaspy little beast you didn’t want to catch; the proletarian salmonid trying to compete with its bourgeois brown and red and rainbow-hued cousins.

Well maybe that’s a little harsh. I just don’t like Whitefish all that much. They are Montana natives, which gives them a certain nobility and some people don’t seem to mind hooking and playing with them, but when you are dressed to the nines in Patagonia’s finest, flogging one of Montana’s many rivers with several hundred thousand dollars worth of fly-fishing gear, every cell straining for the pull and splash and arc of a rainbow trout or German brown suitable for framing, Whitefish just get in the way.

There are a lot of Whitefish in the Big Hole River, which is otherwise close to perfect. There are a lot of rivers running through Montana but to declare which one is the best is a matter of taste. Just as some don’t mind Whitefish, some prefer the Madison or the Jefferson or the Beaverhead or the Flathead. In my limited experience, there is no need to look further than the Big Hole.

Coming from California, where all rivers flow south or west or a combination of the two, the Big Hole is a little twisted. It begins as a trickle at 7400 feet in the Beaverhead Mountains to the southwest of Jackson, then flows up, north by northeast through Wisdom before it tops out and flows southeast through Wise River, covering 156 miles along a million-acre valley of quality bottomland. There are thousands of cattle in the Big Hole Valley but less than 1000 resident humans. Montana State Lost Highways 43 and 278 trace the river and although the river is only 22 miles from Butte, it seems a hundred years away. The Big Hole is barely a trickle at the start, but fed by streams and rivers of all lengths and sizes, it is just the right width and depth for most of its length. The Big Hole is just about the perfect trout river for bank-fishing or drifting, with so much good terrain it looks like it was designed by a billionaire with taste. The Big Hole joins the Beaverhead near Twin Bridges to form the Jefferson River, which itself joins with the Madison River to form the Missouri.

The Big Hole is special in many ways: It was "discovered" by Lewis and Clark. It has the last population of Arctic Grayling in the Lower 48. The Big Hole has somehow remained one of the few entirely undammed rivers in the West. It also has an awful damn lot of Whitefish.

The Big Hole flows freely and so do a fisherman’s thoughts while angling it for rainbows, browns, cutthroat, grayling and brook trout. On a day in mid-June in 2001, I was fishing the free-flowing Big Hole and my free-flowing thoughts had come to the conclusion that Montana was living up to the hype. There are persons, places and things that live up to all you hear and read, and some that don’t. This was only my third day in Montana but I was already a believer.

Most of what I had heard about Montana came from a fishing fool named Mike Locatelli who had been making at least one trip a year from California to Montana and back for two decades. Mike and his partner Rich Metiver had fished all over Montana, but for the past few years it had been the Big Hole, Big Hole, Big Hole. After years of listening to Mike brag about Montanadventures, during the summer of 2001 I had occasion to see it for myself. I was on a mission to get to Kamchatka, Russia by way of Anchorage, Alaska. It was May and I had to be in Anchorage by September for a flight across the North Pacific to coastal Siberia, so I had the leisure to swing east from Washington and catch up with Mike and Rich. They were renting a cabin out in the middle of all that lush pastureland, along the Big Hole to the north of Wise River. They were fishing with Frank Stanchfield at TroutFitters, paying a couple of hundred dollars in hard American currency to drift the Big Hole to the north and south of Wise River. Every morning and evening Mike and Rich would gather with the local rogues for a BS session in the retail store at TroutFitters, where there is one photo of Rich holding onto a substantial, healthy German brown trout, caught on the fly.

On the morning of the third day Rich and Mike were heading upriver from Wise River for a long drift down. They dropped me at a place called the Sportsman’s Camp, where Rich set me up to nymph along the bank. Rich said that the Big Hole had 2000 fish per mile and usually no more than 8 fishermen, which is the reverse of my experience in California. That morning Rich gave me some Copper Princes and bead head nymphs and showed me how to drift them in the crease between slow and fast water along the edges of the river. “There are probably 100 or 200 pigs holding in there,” Rich said. “Just keep drifting your nymphs in that crease and you’ll catch one.”

Rich left, and left me alone. Completely alone. There was no one else in sight on about a mile of river, so I fished. And as I fished I thought about David Lynch and Gary Cooper and A River Runs Through It and other things. I thought about The Hunt for Red October, and the dying words of Captain Vasili Borodin. This was the character played by Sam Neill, the right-hand man to Sean Connery's Captain Marko Ramius. Together they had fooled their country and their crew and were streaming toward the USA on board Russia's most high tech sub, eager to hand it over for asylum in the Land of the Free. Connery had complicated reasons for his treasons, but Captain Borodin's needs were fairly simple.

CAPT. VASILI BORODIN
I will live in Montana.
And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits.
And she will cook them for me.
And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle."

An admirable goal, but Borodin died tragically, shot by a loyal Russkie in a gun-battle on board the Red October. Captain Borodin died in Ramius' arms, and his dying words were sad.

CAPTAIN VASILI BORODIN
I should have liked to see Montana.

While nymphing the Sportsman’s Camp I was focusing pretty hard on what I was doing, hoping to catch with a fly a brown trout like I had seen in Rich’s hands on the wall at TroutFitters. Every once in a while I would look up and around and take in a spectacular view of trees and mountains and river and big velvety blue sky and every time I would look around I would reaffirm that there was something a little special about Montana. There are a lot of combination of mountains and trees and rivers and sky in the United States, but there is something about the Montana combination of these ingredients that makes Vasili’s screen death so tragic.

Two thousand fish per mile sounds pretty good at first, until you realize that a large proportion of that number are those dreaded, devil Whitefish. I caught at least a half dozen fish that morning, but instead of Mr. Brown or Mr. Rainbow or Mr. Cutthroat, they were all Mr. White. I felt no reward or honor in catching a Whitefish. They are frisky and take the fly okay and fight with some honor, but they are a greasy fish with an ooky mouth, and they make this ghastly, Darth Vader wheezing noise as you take the hook out. Since I was thinking of movies that day, I thought of some lines from Lawrence of Arabia, in which Price Faisal explains the Turkish treatment of Arab prisoners to the journalist, Mr. Bentley.

PRINCE FEISAL
Sometimes they are dealt with harshly.

BENTLEY (eagerly)
How harshly?

PRINCE FEISAL (princely)
More harshly than I hope you can imagine.

There are some fishermen who deal with Whitefish harshly, but I am one of those live and let liberals from California so I released all my Whitefish with a silent wish that they and their brothers and sisters swim to another part of the river and give Mr. Brown and Mr. Rainbow a chance.

Ever have those Last Man on Earth fantasies? On the Big Hole even in June you can play them for an hour at a time. This was a Thursday and so there were no people around and very few cars. It is possible to fish with absolutely no human distractions in a river loaded with fish and let your mind wander as your copper-weighted nymph searches the deep.

In such isolation the mind and eyes play tricks, and also the ear. After about three hours of a hundred casts and about a half-dozen dreaded devil David Lynchfish, I all of a sudden heard the sound of… yodeling? Yodeling. Someone was playing the guitar and yodeling on a Thursday at the Sportsman Camp in a lost corner of Montana.

Later on this trip some of the locals in Homer, Alaska would talk about the pop singer Jewell and how she used to yodel for money in the bars around town. Well there is good yodeling and bad yodeling just as there is good mariachi music and bad mariachi music, but this was good yodeling. Someone was playing the guitar and yodeling and it was a bit of a David Lynch moment. And then three kids ran out of the trees and down to the river’s edge.

There were two girls and a boy about 10 and they looked like they were having a good time. They broke all the peace and quiet but it wasn’t so unpleasant and in fact it was nice to have people around. The boy was fishing, standing up on a rock well downstream and casting something conventional. Over an hour he worked his way up toward my position and pretty soon I had a chatterbox at my elbow, someone to fish with.

Caught up in the David Lynch of the moment I half-expected the kid to start yodeling. Instead he talked a mile a minute. “That’smygrandpaupthereplayingtheguitarandthosearemyssistersandIliveinHelenarightnowbutwe’reoriginallyfromAnacondadoyouknowwherethatis?
I’musingaPantherMartinI’vebeenfishingthispartoftheriversinceIwasakidandI’veseensomebigfishcaughthereareyoucatchinganythingwelldon’tworry
youwill.IliveinHelenarightnowwithmymombecausemydadjustdiedhecommittedsuicideyouknow.”

That last little bit stopped me and I looked at the kid to see if he was telling the truth and his face told me he was. Poor kid. His name was Austin. “HeyI’mAustinandifit’sokayI’mgonnastandrighthereandfishbecausethatcreaseyou’reworkingisaprettygoodoneI’veseensomebigfishpulledoutofthere.
Iwon’tgetinyour wayokay?”

That was no problem with me. This was Austin’s state and Austin’s river and I was an interloper. He was casting yellow Panther Martins with kind of a funky little spinning rod like you’d buy at Safeway and I had on about a million dollars worth of high tech fishing gear hanging off me. Austin had an aura of sadness around him and he was too young and in too fine a place to be a sad kid. I tried to be neighborly and tell the Kid what Rich had told me about nymphing the corner. But he was the local using lures and I was the outsider using flies. At one point I cast and snagged my fly in the middle of the river. I remember Rich telling me that all of the four big browns he had caught he thought were snags at first, until they moved. For a moment I thought that was my situation, but then the fly broke. As I was reeling in I got crossed up with the kids’ line and he untangled it. We both apologized.

As I tied on a new nymph I told the kid about brown trout and how the big ones can feel like snags. At that point he flopped his little yellow Panther Martin out about 15 feet and within seconds his pole was bent and his reel was zizzing. “HeynowIthinkIgotone!isthatafish?”

The flowing waters of the Big Hole are closer to root beer clear than gin clear but out about 15 feet there was a big flash of silver brown and from the looks of Austin’s little Safeway pole he had one of those legendary Big Hole hogs on the line.

Austin fought it and brought it and as the fish got close it was much much bigger than anything I had seen in my few days in Montana and probably the biggest trout I had ever seen anyone personally land. Austin was maxing his rod and line as the moosed the thing in, and my heart snapped a little as the line snapped and the fish started to wiggle for freedom. But Austin was a native son with skills and he leapt over a rock or two and got good and wet as he pounced on the fish and lifted it into the air.

Austin was a little excited at first but then he went back to that stone face. He lifted the fish and looked at it and I had to speak: “Kid, my friends are paying $250 a day to catch that fish right there, and they aren’t catching it. You caught it.”

Austin had the fish up close to his eyes and was looking it over. Time was running short for him to put it back, but he didn’t put it back. He walked away with it, up the path, in the direction of the yodeling. His sisters saw what had happened and fell into line behind him.

And I was left standing there with my hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Patagonia fly-fishing finery, with an antique but classic Fenwick fly-fishing rod and a hand-made reel I bought for $200 Canadian dollars from some Swedish guys up on the Kispiox. That reel was equipped with the high-tech interchangeable Rio line system and I had another couple hundred dollars worth of leaders in one of my vest pockets and hand-tied flies in one of my fancy plastic containers.

Meanwhile a kid with a dime-store spinning rod and a $1.39, yellow Panther Martin walked away with a Big Hole brown trout suitable for framing.

I cast a few more times and felt like an idiot and then walked up the path, toward the source of that mysterious yodeling. To be perfectly honest, I was going to my van to get some spin-casting equipment I keep hidden in a secret compartment under the floorboards, but don’t print that.

Up in the parking lot, under the trees I found what you might call a Montana Gothic. There was Austin and his sisters, with their Grandpa, the yodeler. He was as much a native Montana son as Gary Cooper or David Lynch and he had a similar speech impediment to Austin. When he talked he grumbled and rumbled like Popeye, and I could only make out every fifth or sixth word:

“Grumblerumble I got 11 kids and 27 grandkids. Grumblerumble damned kids making all that noise. Grumblerumble hey that was a good fish my grandson caught. I do a lot of grumblerumble hunting and fishing. Lotta elk. Lotta moose grumblerumble.” He grumbled about motorcycles and working for the railroad and said something about $400,000 and in all that I learned that the kid’s last name was Wyant, he was 11 and his dad had recently been shot dead. “Grumblerumble, yeah they said suicide but I don’t know grumblerumble.”

I felt bad for Austin but also good. He was a good kid who’d just lost his dad and was living in a city but belonged in the backwoods of Montana. I prophesied that he’d be back soon, taking city folk down the river in small boats for $300 a day.

Grandpa Wyant had kind of a Mel Tillis thing going. He didn’t talk so good, but when he sang it came out clear as a bell. As I left, Austin was putting Mr. Brown on ice as his sisters watched and Grandpa yodeled about trains.

That evening, I had a decent story for the BS session at Troutfitters. I even had digital photos I showed on my big-screen laptop. When Rich Metiver saw that brown trout in the hands of the Montana Kid he said, “That’s what we were trying to catch today,” and then he looked up at the photo of himself on the wall for reassurance.

When I told the story and said the kid’s last name was Wyant, a lot of the men in Troutfitters exchanged glances, which I interpreted as, “Nice kid. Nice fish. But he shoulda let that one go.” Apparently the Wyants are a well-known family from Opportunity near Anaconda who have been hunting and fishing in the area for decades.

That night in the cabin we had chicken-fried elk steaks for dinner out on the porch, protected with screens from a hundred million bloodthirsty mosquitoes, with a hundred million bright stars beyond that. I read a little bit about the area and learned that the three forks of the Jefferson River had originally been named by Lewis and Clark, in honor of their patron, Thomas Jefferson, and two of his finer qualities. The middle fork was always the Jefferson but the west fork was originally the Wisdom and the east fork was the Philanthropy. The Philanthropy became the Beaverhead and the Wisdom was later changed to the Big Hole by settlers in honor of the valley it ran through. But that June day in 2001 was all about Wisdom.