Chapter 1a: The Dream

Chapter 1a: The Dream

“Come on Chase. Load up,” that’s usually all it took for the chocolate lab, if he thought he was going somewhere cool like fishing or hunting.

He would send himself leaping into the front seat of the red Jeep Cherokee, flying over the center console, just to find his spot in the passenger’s seat. At some point Rose gave up trying to keep him in the back seat because he’d never even acknowledge her if she told him to get back. And if Rose ever had a buddy come with, they fought over that seat and although Chase never won, he never really assumed he wouldn’t.

 The Jeep was still in good shape--definitely showing its 190,000 miles, most of them highway miles from the many road-trips over the years but miles non-the-less. Rose loved that Jeep. It was before Jeep decided to go super SUV with their wagons sporting leather and power everything and a price tag to line the pockets of the execs. It was when Jeeps were built for the real outdoorsy folk. They were tough. They weren’t fancy. Rose would like to think they were kind of like her.

            As they sped off, Rose couldn’t help but think about the latest email exchanges from the ex, which definitely made her drive a little more erratic. She wasn’t the one to end it, and certainly didn’t want it to go this way--the visceral attacks, the anger--but she guessed that’s what happens when two people decide to part ways. It’s like leaving a job unexpectedly. It never ends that well. One party inevitably gets hurt and it’s usually the one who either didn’t want it to happen or didn’t see it coming; that would be Rose.

            So, on this day she decided to leave the world behind for a couple hours and lose herself in a place she’d come to know well these last couple months. With her foot planted firmly in the floorboards of the jeep, she and Chase made exceptional time up highway 434 until crossing highway 200 where the paved stretch of road ended, turning into loose gravel. This part of Montana isn’t what one normally sees or expects when watching the movies that made places like the Blackfoot River on the western side of the Divide famous. The Eastern Slope is much different. Considered semi-arid grasslands by some and semi-arid desert by others, (often depending upon the time of year one is observing,) the slope provides for miles of rolling hills that stay green into July on average years, then browning up offering a contrast with the green of lodgepoles as grass butts right up to the tree line of the foothills on the Rocky Mountain Front. Highway 434 winds through coulees and breaks but stays relatively flat until it drops off the table, so to speak, into the canyon of the Dearborn River. With the drastic change in topography, you know you are getting close and just a few hundred yards further brings the man-made landmark of the red “High-Bridge” and the parking area on the other side.

            As Rose opened the door, Chase jumped out in a ball of fury to get a leg up on the new scents this place had to offer…literally. It only takes a few seconds for him to find the markings of another dog and like the pro he is, a leg is raised and by all accounts, this parking area now belongs to him. By the time Rose put her fly-rod together, he’s lain stake on the fence, the bridge, a rock next to the road, and anything else that may have some lingering claims of another would-be canine homesteader.

She asked herself at some point, “A dog does run out, don’t they?”

            It was early-September and the water in the Dearborn was flowing low. Air temperatures had been in the high nineties much of the summer but dropping to less damaging temps as the nights grew longer and cooler. She had been working at the fly shop earlier that day and by the time they ran their shuttles on the Big Mo and actually got to the Dearborn, the sun was already on its downward path and although there was still a few hours of daylight, the canyon would soon be supplying the welcoming shadows that would help to bring nervous trout up.

            Rose took a job in one of the local shops earlier that Spring when things went south with her live-in boyfriend; Lyndsey Carter. She had aspirations of getting into guiding ever since the first trout she caught on a fly only five years ago. Lyndsey was more into building his career and buying into stability. He bought a house in Townsend since he felt it was more equitable. It was right before the housing crisis and the cost of a home in Helena was going through the roof.  However, Townsend was an hour south of Helena and a good hour and forty minutes from the town of Craig, which in 2007, was quickly becoming the epicenter of the fly-fishing world. His plan was to go at it alone regardless of what she thought, so she bought a 1967, 15-foot Shasta camper and moved it up to the river.

            Lyndsey didn’t even tell Rose he was going to purchase the house in Townsend and that stung. She remembered vividly the conversation they had when he told her. She kept re-living that conversation in her head—how it hurt--how she felt betrayed. He knew she wanted to get into guiding. He knew how important this dream was for her and instead of trying to find a place where they could both get what they needed, he was only thinking of himself so he bought a house and she bought the camper and it didn’t take long for the resentment to burn down any foundation they had built in their relationship and now they were engaging in a battle of wills of who could hurt the other more.

            Rose had talked to the owner of the fly-shop into letting her park the camper behind the shop and plug into one of the outlets for power. In return, she would work at the shop running shuttles and selling flies for minimum wage and hopefully, fill her days off with guiding. She became the “shop bitch,” which she didn’t really understand what that meant until years later. What she did realize quickly is that boys in this industry didn’t play well with girls—especially not attractive girls like Rose. They resented her. They only saw her for her looks and thought the only reason other outfitters and shops hired her was for eye-candy. It was a rarity that anyone would actually give her any credit for knowing how to fish.

            To be fair, Rose was pretty green to fly-fishing. The first trout she ever caught on a fly was with a co-worker at Alternative Youth Adventures only five years prior to taking on this new career path. She was working at AYA, which was a back-country rehab program for adjudicated youth for about a year when she was asked to fill a spot in a boat. Mike Garrett was just getting into guiding and needed a guinea pig, so he took Rose and another co-worker out to the river for some R&D.

            Although Rose had never fly-fished for trout, she had grown up in a family of outdoors people in Minnesota and lived for fishing and hunting. She was the quintessential ‘Tom boy,’ and did everything she could to make her dad proud. At three years old she caught her first crappie on a lake called Miller Dam in western Wisconsin with her dad and her grandpa and older brother floating anchored up in an old Grumman canoe. She could remember that fish and how excited she was. She screamed while reeling that first fish in as her dad shushed her so to not bring too much attention to them and their lucky fishing hole. She loved being on the water with her dad more than anything--so much so that he could rarely ever get out with other friends or family members without her. When he tried to leave her behind, she would throw a fit until he would eventually cave, and Rose would get her way.

            When Rose was nine, the relationship with her dad changed drastically. She remembered waking up one morning to her neighbor fixing breakfast.

            “Where’s mom and dad?” She asked Donna, the neighbor and one of her family’s closest friends.

            “Your dad is in the hospital,” Donna replied. “I’m here to help get you guys get to school.”

            “What?” She asked. “Why!?”

            “They think he had a stroke,” Donna explained.

            “What the hell is a stroke?”

            As Donna tried to explain, a heavy fog took over in Rose’s thoughts. She didn’t really listen. She was scared and confused and knew, somehow life was going to be different from that day forward and it was. All the things her dad was teaching her; everything she was becoming as that outdoorsy little girl was now going to have to be learned on her own, which set the path for her life as an independent and to some degree, a loner.

            That next summer, Rose was digging through her dad’s fishing gear and came across his Fenwick fiberglass fly-rod. Before the stroke, he had delved into fly-fishing a little with some of the guys in the neighborhood. They would all meet down at a fishing access site on White Sand Lake, and wade out into the reeds and bull rushes and cast for bass and sunfish. Rose never saw them catch anything, but she was intrigued with the process. The casting was so much different than what she was used to where she would reel in all her line and fling a bobber or a lure out into the water. She generated power and distance through rearing back and flinging the weight of the lure as hard as she could. This casting she was witnessing was very different. These guys were throwing a bunch of line into their back-cast in order to throw more line out into the water.

            As rose picked up the fly-rod and assembled it, she remembered studying the men of the neighborhood casting on those occasions and remembered how weird it looked. She also remembered how some of the men seemed to be much better at it than others. In fact, it felt like some of them spent way more time untangling line than they did fishing, and she never understood why they would want to subject themselves to that. But there was something about it that fascinated Rose and now with the rod in hand, she was going to give it a go.

            She pulled out line from the auto-retrieve reel and was set to thread the line through the guides on the rod when she noticed the trigger on the reel and tripped it. The line shot back into the reel and before she knew it, she found herself disassembling the reel in order to get the spring inside to re-engage. There is a reason they don’t make those reels anymore and she learned quickly that playing around with the reel and the trigger would lead to more time disassembling and reassembling than casting.

            Rose didn’t get too frustrated and was still intrigued and once the line was threaded, she walked out into the yard. Making sure she had plenty of room to work, without anything behind her; she tried emulating the men from the neighborhood. She threw about 10 feet of line up behind her and before the line could extend out and up, she threw the rod forward. With a crack, the leader snapped back and fell to the ground. It sounded cool anyway and Rose thought that was the intended outcome until she noticed one very important thing: the leader kept getting shorter and shorter with every crack.

            It wasn’t long before Rose realized, that probably wasn’t the intended outcome and she worked at not making the leader snap. She also realized, somehow intuitively, that what probably mattered most was to get the line to lay out in an almost perfectly straight line and having it settle softly on the ground, which would eventually become the water after she practiced a bit. That was a little harder than she first thought but she kept working at it and working at it. She became obsessed with it and didn’t even realize what she was doing to her hand until it was too late.

            Rose worked at laying that fly-line down perfectly all day long and even started picking out the bases of trees that she would have to try to hit without catching the line in the canopies, which meant compressing the loop she was throwing and shooting line into small spaces. In the end, she developed a propensity of casting an incredibly tight loop but also, she developed a blister on her hand the size of a sliver dollar.

            She worked all summer on her casting. She rarely ever fished with the rod but loved casting. The few times she brought the rod to the lake, she never caught anything because she lacked the knowledge of the essential gear and flies needed but she loved casting much like target practicing with her BB gun or her re-curve bow. It was a challenge to her. It was fun.

            When she did actually fish, she would revert to her spinning rod and gear. Mostly, she would use bait. Sometimes she and her brother would catch frogs and fish for bass. They would use an old rod tip and walk along the shore of White Sand Lake tapping the frogs on the nose, stunning them. They would put them in a bucket and wade out into the reeds and cast them into little pockets where large-mouth bass would be cruising around hunting for a big meal like a frog swimming across the surface. The explosions were epic.

            When they fished for sunfish and bluegills, they would use worms or pieces of worms. Rose wasn’t like other girls. She was ok with breaking pieces of nightcrawlers apart and threading them onto a hook. To her, it was just part of the process. She just wanted to catch more fish than her brother and would do anything it took to make that happen.

            One day, after catching a few bluegills, Rose dug through a Styrofoam carton of black dirt to find another crawler and realized she was out. The dirt in the central part of Minnesota was all sand. The crawlers they used came from one of two places: One was the bait shop a couple miles away, the other was catching crawlers while visiting their grandparents in Wisconsin where the dirt was black and rich and perfect for nightcrawlers. Either way, she was out, and she wasn’t going to get any crawlers soon.

            Sitting on the shore, Rose thought for a while about how she was going to catch more bluegills. She knew her brother was probably catching fish. She had hooks. She had bobbers but no bait.

            An epiphany came to her as she sat their looking into the grass for either a grasshopper or a bug to thread onto her hook. She could take a piece of grass and wrap it around the hook to make it look like a grasshopper. It was a long shot but what other choice did she have?

            Rose spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to tie a piece of long grass onto the shank of the hook to make it stay and make it look like food to a bluegill. When she was finished, she looked at the presentation with doubt but also, with a little bit of pride.

            “It might actually work,” she thought. “Only one way to find out…”

            Rose cast the grass imitation out into the lake. She was fishing a little bay off White Sand Lake they had named Turtle Bay. In the springtime, bluegills would spawn in Turtle Bay and were easy to find. The bobber plunked into the bay with a splash and the grass-tied imitation floated just a couple feet away. A few seconds later, a bluegill slowly came to the surface and curiously; to Rose’s amazement, sucked it down.

            Rose set the hook and came tight on this bluegill and reeled it in. It was exciting. It was gratifying. It was unbelievable and although it was the only fish that ate her first fly she ever tied; it was something she would put in her metaphoric tackle box for later in life. She didn’t know it yet, but she had done something she would definitely draw from in the future.

            It was 13 years later that Mike asked Rose to take a spot in his boat. Rose had never fly-fished for trout and actually, since that summer of learning to cast, had only picked up a fly-rod a few times. She had graduated with a degree in Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Mankato and then went onto grad-school in Milwaukee. While in grad-school, she was introduced to Alternative Youth Adventures through the stepdad of one of the employees at AYA. That employee was Mike Garrett who was now posed to change her life profoundly.

            It was a short trip that Mike had planned for the three. Things at AYA had become incredibly stressful and Mike had figured it would be good to get Rose out, away from the job for a few hours. She was a Team Leader and was responsible for 10 teenagers and 4 staff members at all times, while they lived and worked on their rehabilitation efforts in the back country. She was getting called out numerous times a week to drop the hammer on what had become an incredibly difficult group.

            Kids at AYA were court ordered to be there. They usually had some kind of chemical dependency issues as well as various other problems like anger management, and anxiety issues. Some of the kids were just bored and did stupid things like stealing cars and running them into the ground just for fun. They were given a choice by the courts to either spend a year in juvenile detention or to spend 5 months at AYA—60 days of that in the back country doing intensive wilderness therapy.

            The job was stressful and didn’t pay much but it was something that Rose could pad her resume with and it was a great opportunity for personal and professional growth. The burnout was high, however and she was just about to the end of her rope. Mike sensed that.

            It was a cool, cloudy April day. The three-sum hit the Missouri River at around noon. The water was still in the upper-thirties so it took trout a little while to wake up and start eating. There was no need to get out early. Mike rowed first while Rose fished out of the back of the boat and Mike’s good friend Dave fished out of the front. Dave hadn’t fly fished much either and Mike was focused on getting him into fish first. Rose was definitely ok with that as she was more the type to lay back in the weeds and try to figure things out for herself without having the spotlight on her. Plus, she just took a lot of pride with self-learning.

            At one point, Mike looked back at Rose and said, “Wow, you’ve done this before.”

            “It’s been a long time but I’ve thrown a fly-rod a time or two,” Rose admitted.

            Rose was amazed by the Missouri River. Her only experience with it was as it meandered through the Midwest. It was big and brown as it reached the Mississippi but here was very different and totally out the realm of what she had expected. In fact, when Mike asked her to go fly-fishing on the Missouri, she couldn’t believe there would actually be trout living there. But this water was pristine. It was clean and cold and although big, it was a gorgeous trout stream and completely took her by surprise.

            An hour into the trip, they hadn’t seen a fish. Dave took the oars and Mike jumped into the pole position. Rose was still working on her casting out of the back of the boat. Mike wanted to try chucking the streamer rig with a little more speed and precision than what Dave or Rose could accomplish in order to put something in the net and just to see if what they were doing was going to work.

            Rose took note of what Mike was doing; throwing the streamer right up into the rocks along the bank as they floated along and stripping the fly quickly away from the structure like a sculpin or a crayfish being chased by a toothy brown trout. He was hitting pockets the size of a coffee can as seems dumped past rocks, creating eddies where trout could take refuge from the main current of the river. He didn’t waste time. It was rapid fire and erratic. It was also beautiful with a kind of frantic precision. Rose emulated Mike’s casting and stripping.

            It wasn’t long before a yellow/brown streak came rushing out from one of those eddies towards Mike’s streamer. Rose caught a glimpse of the brown trout out of the corner of her eye.

            “OH!! There he was!” Mike yelled with excitement. “Damnit! He didn’t eat it.”

            Rose chucked her streamer to the spot where Mike’s had just come from and started stripping.

            “Got him!” She yelled.

            Somehow, the excitement of hooking that brown didn’t send Rose into a panic. In fact, everything slowed down. She lifted her rod up and grabbed ahold of the line in her trigger finger of her rod hand while stripping line in with her left. She was tight on the trout and kept tight on it; letting the trout run when it wanted and stripping in when it allowed her and in a couple minutes, she had the 20-inch brown next to the boat. Mike netted it. It was crazy. It was invigorating. It was like nothing Rose had ever experienced.

            They only landed two fish that day. In fact, Rose caught both of them and after the second one, Mike said, “Ok, you’re done. Until someone else catches a fish, you are done.”

            “So, what am I going to do?” She asked.

            “You’re going to row the boat.”

            Rose finished off the day rowing under Mike’s tutelage. She couldn’t decide what was more fun; rowing or fishing. It was all so amazing. She would watch the bank and try as hard as she could to position the boat in a manner that both Dave and Mike could fish the “fishy” water. It was challenge and as they reached the boat ramp in Craig, she knew how she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

            But her dream was not Lyndsey’s dream and in fact, they couldn’t have been any different. She wanted to explore. She wanted to chase the unknown. She wanted to share that with people. Lyndsey wanted the comfort of a stable job and a concrete foundation under a house that was rock solid. He couldn’t understand what created this passion for her and she couldn’t understand what he saw that was so wrong with it. It led them to a fork in the road where Lyndsey followed his plan and Rose followed her dream—to be a Montana fly-fishing guide.