News from Blue Ribbon Flies

2012 Catalog Entries.
Yellowstone Dreams

Photo by Julia Horowitz

Yellowstone Dreams By Howard Kligerman

I had two dreams as a kid growing up on the South Jersey shore: to catch a large striped bass in the surf and show family and friends what a fine fisherman I was and to fish the famous trout streams of Montana, to see Dan Bailey's store and its famous Wall of Fame and to cast in her waters. My oldest brother, Martin, prepared me for the first and my friend, Howard Bethel, a licensed outfitter, set me up for the second. While many years divided those two events, their significance in my life remain immense. When I was young, Martin pushed and prodded me to fish for everything with light tackle and artificials. He had infinite patience with fishing but little with me. He would often take my cousin, Tom, and me freshwater fishing even though the ocean was two blocks one way from our house and the bay two blocks the other. While we caught some flounders, snapper blues and sea bass in the bay, the larger fish in the ocean were beyond our reach. Instead we often pursued panfish, stocked trout, pickerel and largemouths in mainland ponds.

Once fishing at a small feeder stream that ran into one of the ponds we frequented, Tom and I spied a pickerel lurking in the weeds. We were all of twelve at the time. We cast every lure we could think of at him. All he did was move back a pace. Martin surprised us by catching a small sunfish, impaling it on a huge hook and casting it, with a bobber, to the pickerel. The fish pulled the bobber under immediately and proceeded to toy and run and practically turn the sunny inside out before Martin set the hook. That night he picked through every last bone, delicately devouring the fish. In those days Tom and I would pour over the Dan Bailey catalog with as much attention as Martin paid to eating the pickerel. We ordered Heddon Mark II fly rods that looked, to our eyes, just like bamboo. We had matching Pfleuger Medalist fly reels and Air Cel Supreme lines. We ordered flies but had no idea what patterns to buy, so we opted for McGinty Bees and Mosquitoes. They looked like insects we knew. The Fan Wing Royal Coachman looked awfully pretty, too. But we never caught a thing on them. Our trout had a predilection Liver, worms and Velveeta cheese along with an occasional CP Swing and Dardevle.

When I hit sixteen I caught my striper off the surf at night on an Atom Plug. I hauled it down the beach and to my cousin's front door. That bit of gloating capped our changing relationship. I don't believe that I ever fished with him again. I never fished with Martin again either. He went on to medical school; and by the time I graduated from college and moved back home, he had ended his life. I thought of Martin on my first trip to the Yellowstone region in 1988. What a good fly fisher he would have been. The concentration, dexterity and delicacy of the sport were perfectly suited to his temperament. I thought of Tom as I stood under the sign at Dan Bailey's. I sent him a postcard from Livingston and wished that we could wave our Heddon wands in the air once again.

But the Yellowstone trip was more than a venture into maudlin reminiscence. It was a treasure trove of experiences and a well-spring of new memories. I returned to my home in upstate New York with the clear waters and vibrant rout etched into my mind. Even now as I prepare for sleep, twenty-five years later, I fish those waters. On the Gallatin I probe the pockets with a Royal Wulff, watch a moose bolt across the stream, see a rainbow materialize from below a cut bank and hold a wild brown in my hand to release it. The Madison holds the memory of Howard Bethel and me working our way upstream as I cast a Dan's Hopper to the banks while Howie works the edge of the fast water with a big Humpy. Side by side we move against the current pounding it with hard casts. I see a rainbow ghost up from beneath a bank side boulder to engulf my hopper and head back underneath.

I recall to my mind's eye a sub-alpine lake, ringed by lodgepole pines that today are blackened remnants. The silence is pierced by an osprey as it plunges into the lake and emerges with a grayling in its talons. In a float tube I hear a splash and turn to cast a fly into the ring of the rise and a rainbow leaps into the air with the fly in its mouth. On Slough Creek I see a huge cutthroat rise slowly from the weeds and sip in my Letort Cricket, the largest trout I had ever caught up to then. And I remember the first trout I caught on a fly that trip, a rainbow on the Gardner; but I remember more the coyote that walked from around a rock to stand face to face with me as I headed downstream. He calmly turns and disappears around a bend.

But the Gallatin comes back to me most frequently: the water rushing around my ankles or knees or thighs as I each step into its clarity brings me into its surprising depth; the wild little browns that leap at the prick of the hook; the leopard backed rainbows that surprise you with their size as they attack the fly from seemingly shallow pockets. I remember it all a I prepare for sleep: the clarity, the rush of water, the wind; always the wind.