BY ANY OTHER AM N o

What’s so special about whitefish?

Like writers who garden, all of whom seem compelled, eventually, to share stories of their adventures messing around in soil, shing writers, especially writers who y sh, and of those the ones who sh for trout most of all, at some point take it upon themselves to detail their shameless a ection for white sh.

It’s hard not to follow suit. After all, who of us hasn’t experienced the pleasure, or at least relief, of a few white sh tugging on the end of the line when the trout appear to have grown comatose in the cold? Or those days when the closest thing you see to a bug turns out to be crumbs, from your morning bagel, stuck to your 2.0 readers. Or the sparse hatch, you discover, is really a new eye oater causing you to swat at nothing, especially while you’re trying to tie on another di erent, and probably pointless, new y.

Still, the praise you hear for white sh always sounds a little backhanded. It’s like trying to get excited about how well your rhubarb is growing. Or the Swiss chard. Or showing o a lunker-sized summer squash.

Yeah, but.

I can agree, on the other hand, that coming up tight to a white sh, when you’re hoping to catch trout, is far less disagreeable, or disappointing, than sticking a largescale sucker, Catostomus macrocheilus, so common on lower Columbia basin tributaries when shing in late spring for steelhead. I’ve been known, as well, to dredge up more than my fair share of these beastly creatures while running a pair of small nymphs, escorting a pellet of lead, along the edges of Deschutes River whitewater, a talent for which I don’t expect to earn anyone’s even eeting respect. e most emphatic response inspired will often end upon discovery that our y is tucked into the hinge at the base of one of the sh’s pectoral ns. No trace of glory, I’m sorry to say, accompanies such enfeebling sport. en I lifted the sh out of the water.

Your paean to white sh, anyway, will rarely, if ever, ascend into a hallelujah chorus venerating the species’s ravishing strike, the tenacity of the ght, a white sh’s staying power, the allegory of heart.

Nor is size what matters, although I’m pretty sure most of us have brought one or two to hand that we still hold dear. I recall one along a rip-rap bank on the Deschutes, above Trout Creek, that I was sure was a steelhead until my buddy, Fred Trujillo, hollered from far downstream. It looked like a white seabass. en there was the shocking beast I wrestled to the bank along the long island downstream from the South Junction campground. In hand, it was the size of a steelhead—and when I noticed an angler passing along the railroad grade, I called to him to share a look at the thing.

“Some big white sh in there,” he said, dismissing my enthusiasm.

“Oh, my God,” he added.

The very rst white sh I recall encountering were on the Teton River, near Driggs, Idaho. is was my rst real stay in trout country; up until then, trout—and, by way of them, y shing—were the sh of far- ung vacations, escapes from the arid Southern California coast.

I had a job that summer replacing a water line, prone to breaking in winter, that ran a quarter of a mile, and nearly 500 vertical feet, from a spring above a rich woman’s so-called cabin on a thousand acres surrounded by national forest. e woman’s son and I carried three-quarter-inch galvanized pipe, and bags of Red-e-crete, up through the woods on our shoulders. We had to encase every other pipe joint in concrete; otherwise the weight of the pipe, hanging down the steep hillside, could pull the joints apart. It was tough, grueling, mind-numbing labor—exactly the kind of work that added to the romance of being a so-called y sher in trout country. e white sh were in the long quiet pools crossed by two di erent gravel roads skirting ranches on the way into town. A college friend, Peter Syka, had driven up from La Jolla to sh with me, and one evening we killed a couple of good-sized white sh, for reasons that still escape me, other than we caught them and that’s what you did with good sh—as long as it was legal.

Still, as Gary LaFontaine pointed out in his forward to John Gierach’s early book, Trout Bum, spells like this are, for most of us, no more than an adventure, nothing that quali es as a genuine way of life. I was, at best, a dilettante, a refugee from my crowded homeland, still deeply attached to a heritage of surf, a writer in training without any clear notion how to transform words into any semblance of a wage. I should also mention that this was years before Trout Bum was published, before I’d ever heard of Gierach, before Gary LaFontaine published Caddis ies—before I even knew there was such a thing as sporting or outdoor literature, much less a job title like shing writer.

I’m still struck by our naiveté. Of course, this was before smartphones, iPads, PCs, the internet. Information was conveyed in books and magazines— or passed along rsthand from people in the know. Yet growing up there’d been no y shop in Hacienda Heights, La Habra, nor even La Puente. In fact, nobody I knew in the freeway suburbs talked about y shing, white sh—or how to make a living as a writer.

I take that back. My father, like his father, knew a little bit about the sport. Before moving to California, they had both bought cane rods, in Nebraska, to sh for pan sh. Over time, my father discovered the pleasures of hiking into the Sierra Nevada and getting bunches of small brook trout on a size 16 or 18 Adams, a reasonable approximation of the vexing mosquitos. Still, he often claimed he didn’t like eating sh, especially trout, and there was never much discussion about what you did and didn’t kill with a y rod.

Also, he read Harold Robbins.

Peter and I brought our white sh back to the camp, on the rich woman’s property, where I was now helping her son get started building a genuine log cabin. I had a ’55 Chevy wagon, propped level on blocks, its windshield facing the Tetons. We red up my Coleman stove, heated oil in a cast iron skillet.

Together, we’d by then caught plenty of surf perch; we knew how to dip sh in egg and corn meal and fry them up whole.

Brian, the rich woman’s son, came out of his tent to see what we were doing.

“White sh?” he said. “Nobody eats white sh.” e dam gone, trout and white sh both are now able to migrate throughout the system, coming downstream to feast on salmon eggs washed from redds during highwater. More important, perhaps, the chinook and coho have returned to the river in increasing numbers, in large part due to the perfectly-sized aggregate that was released and spread throughout the lowest reaches of the river when the dam was breached. Above the old dam site, the river runs through deep basalt ssures, with only pockets of spawning habitat. But with the dam gone, the lower reaches, replenished during highwater, now support a healthy mix of resident and anadromous sh alike.

Nearly ve full decades later, what seems important now is not who does and doesn’t eat white sh. Instead, in the wake of all that’s changed in the West, with invasive species in ltrating rivers and streams at alarming rates, at the expense of who knows what, I’m just happy that white sh are still with us, an integral part of our salmonid watersheds, even if we don’t understand the signi cant role they might play.

Or recognize that they’re at least as much fun to catch as Nebraska pan sh.

My buddy Joe Kelly, the sheries biologist, got me thinking about white sh this winter after he snuck out, without me, and found a few in a local river where a dam was pulled out over a decade ago.

“White sh so fat they looked deformed,” said Joe.

I couldn’t get there before the next wave of storms rolled in o the Paci c and pushed our westside rivers back to the tops of their banks. Why not a winter day on the Deschutes? e drive east reminded me not only is it always a good day to go shing, but also, where I live, down close to the Columbia, it’s a good idea to escape, every chance you get, the persistent blanket of winter gray that grips the lowlands weeks at a time, an inversion layer that keeps temperatures just above freezing with little or no change throughout the day—a perfect storm of stagnation that can threaten the spirits of even the most optimistic among us, but especially those of us inclined to sense, given half a chance, the walls closing in all around. e road climbed in and out of fog until a sudden sweep of blue sky outlined the surrounding hillsides. Swaths of dormant wheat t neatly between plowed slopes just beginning to blush green. Patches of snow still lay in the shadows of yam-colored oaks along Fifteenmile Creek, while overhead a murder of crows studded yet another verse of cloudless sky. e pullouts and campgrounds along the access road were all but deserted. Not a bug nor even bird wherever I stopped. But when I pushed through a thicket of blackberries beyond the parking at Jones Canyon, I could hear the rattle and kissing-like sounds of quail scurrying about nearby, a good sign I might not have recognized had I not waded out into the river and begun coming up tight on small, willing sh.

By the time I crested the nal pass and started into the Deschutes watershed, I wondered what I had been doing lately that seemed important enough to keep me from coming this way more often.

Nymphing 101: An egg pattern and little Hare’s Ear bracketing a pellet of lead. Trout and white sh both, every one of them stuck to the dainty egg, tied on a curved, light-wire number 14 hook.

End of review—even if there’s more to it than words can ever describe.

And, come to think of it, is there ever really more we need to say about white sh? Especially white sh in winter? e day ended abruptly: One minute I was still into it, still hooking sh; the next thing I knew I felt silly, even reckless, as the light changed, the temperature fell, and I sensed I had better warm up before my body—and mind—began to implode.

Back home, in front of the woodstove, I always try to recall one good take, one good sh—something to remember the day by. But the edges of this one had already begun to blur. After all: What’s so special about white sh? S

Gray’s Angling Editor Scott Sadil is rarely more delighted than when something new and unexpected appears on the end of his line.