Gremlins in Hiding
Story and Photos by John O’Bryan
When I moved to Idaho in 1984, I was sure I would find places to fish but the only fish I found were tiny ones, like the kind I would snag under the dock in Ketchikan and use as bait to catch salmon and halibut. After months of searching I gave up, sold all my fishing gear, got married and had kids, all thoughts of fishing driven from my mind by work, children, and the desire to rest when I had a moment to myself. Being married to Kelly is so much better than fishing, but having kids, well, let’s just say they’re lucky I didn’t meet my fishing partner Dave prior to their births.
I underwent three decades of lost fishing years in the Idaho Panhandle. It’s incredibly sad that it took me so long to realize that just forty miles south, a river teemed with monster fish. I really had no idea, and when Dave first asked if I wanted to float a section of the Clearwater River in his drift boat, I was reluctant and a bit skeptical.
A float in a boat sounded nice, but it would be nothing like Alaskan fishing and I had no desire to spend the day reeling in tiny “keepers” only to have to clean an anemic stringer of puny fish when we ground to shore at the boat ramp. But he kept hounding me until I reluctantly gave in.
The hour-long trip to the boat launch was filled with good conversation about life, family, and fishing, but I asked so many questions about the river that I think Dave may have regretted his decision to invite me. He backed the boat down the ramp, off the trailer, and into the current. In a few minutes the lines were in the water while the boat backed slowly downriver. The rhythmic pulsating of the rods as our large lures danced under the water gave me hope that things might be different than I expected.
The day was cold and the sun offered little warmth, but lent a crisp, golden glow to the crystal-clear water and a shimmer to the trees just turning autumn yellow and red. I was mesmerized by a kind of beauty I had never experienced. Then the pole buried itself in the water, Dave shouted, “Fish on!” and all heck broke loose.
A surge of adrenaline washed over me like a warm hug as I lifted the rod tip and a beautiful steelhead exploded out of the water, shaking her head as if she would kill me if given the chance. In that moment, I was back in Alaska with my dad, pulling salmon out of the bay. It was actually pretty small for a steelhead, but when I lowered her into the water after taking a picture, I knew my life had changed. That one fish and Dave’s one act of kindness sent me down a previously undiscovered path. It was like being born again to fishing, because the fish were big, the river was beautiful, and there was no rain. It was all the good of Ketchikan and none of the bad.
A year later, when David said he was going to buy a jet boat, I thought, “Cool. An easier way to fish different stretches of the Clearwater.” And that’s what it was…until there were no fish in the Clearwater.
No one could figure out why the steelhead didn’t come back to the river one year. Some blamed the dams, some blamed Fish and Game, and still others blamed the seals, or global warming, or gill netting, or the president, or El Niño, but all I know is I was sick to death when I got the email that all fishing in the Clearwater drainage was closed for the year. Then I got an even more chilling text from Dave: “I’m heading up the Snake. You want to come?”
If you are familiar with the Snake River, then you know it flows through the deepest canyon in North America, even deeper than that big hole in Arizona people think is so grand. In order to navigate the Snake during most times of the year, when the water is low, you have to know where bad things can happen—and it was smack during “most times of the year” when I got Dave’s text. Dave has mad skills in various areas of life, but knowing where bad things can happen on the Snake River was not by a long shot in his wheelhouse. I texted back one word:
“Um?”
“Come on, it will be fun.”
“Um.”
“Don’t be such a baby. We’ll just figure it out as we go.”
“Um.”
“Oh, and a friend of mine who can run the river with his eyes closed will be teaching me.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll go, but only if he keeps one eye on the river and one eye on you.”
As we dragged his twenty-two-foot jet boat down a dirt road, past house after house with large yards and huge shops, I got to thinking about how different it must have been over a hundred years ago, when the rule of law was a rifle and a strong arm. Hells Canyon has a sordid past. It has seen a Chinese massacre, tribal displacement, horse thievery, gold mining, get-rich-quick schemes, boat sinkings, and land rape, but as Dave backed the boat down the bank at Heller Bar, it felt less like any of that and more like a monster truck rally.
Guide boats sped up and floated down the river, each of the six souls aboard dragging a length of lead, a hook, and a glob of eggs along the bottom of the river. They whooped and hollered every time one of them hooked a fish. Tour boats as big as blue whales lumbered and thundered past the ramp, hauling hundreds of people up the river to experience the natural wonders of the canyon. The constant roar of big engines and the growl of trucks pulling off the ramp was exciting but made me realize I was a long, long way from the peaceful, gentle Clearwater.
Dave in his drift boat on the Clearwater River.
Dave with his jet boat in Hells Canyon.
At rest on the Snake River.
A busy put-in site, Hells Canyon.
John looking a bit perturbed by his first jet boat ride on the Snake.
View of the canyon.
Coming up fast.
Rounding the bend.
An all-American pastime.
It’s a dog’s life.
I had been on the Snake once before and to be honest, I was a bit disappointed. I had expected to blast through every wave-train like a rollercoaster loosed from its rails, but what happened was far less dramatic. The boat skirted the rapids, tiptoeing through them like it was avoiding broken glass. I learned that the last thing a boat owner wants to do is to break every welded seam by smashing his boat over and over through every single wave, no matter how much fun it would be and, honestly, it’s not that much fun. Hitting big rapids in a jet boat feels a lot like getting hit by a car and after the pounding you take, you can’t get out of bed the next morning.
Remington, our guide, waved a hand in the general direction of upriver and said, “Go up there.” Dave buried the throttle, added to the din, and in a moist cloud of dust and engine smoke, we went up there. From what I could hear over the engine noise, Remington explained there really are only a few rapids you need to worry about. The rest of the miles and miles of hydraulics are just a matter of knowing how to read the water and your depth finder, which fluctuates from two feet to thirty-five feet in the blink of an eye.
To be a good jet boat driver you have to have quick reflexes, since you often can’t slow down and stop if you lose your way. Sometimes you can, but frequently you’re running in very skinny water and if you stop, you stick, and getting a multi-thousand-pound boat off a rock or sandbar isn’t all that fun. As we motored upriver for the first time and I watched Dave do an amazing job of navigating, I got the distinct feeling I was in a giant video game, dodging gremlins, except it was being played on a fast-moving body of water, where you sometimes can and sometimes can’t see the rocks. Unless someone holds your hand as you go along and points out every gremlin hidden in the river, you eventually will hit bottom as the big “Game Over” flashes on your screen. Only there is no screen, just a cold float and a long cling to a slimy rock until someone stops by to peel you off. In this game, losing is not an option.
Remington was the one who casually told me this as we came to the next in a long succession of rapids. When he said if you run the river enough, at some point you will hit a rock, I said, “What?” and asked him to repeat himself. “Yep. Just a matter of time.”
I’ve trained my mind to worry. It has kept me alive for sixty years. I’ve never been able to trust blindly to providence and luck but I think that to keep the thing I fear in the forefront of my mind helps me to stay agile and awake to every potential issue. I wondered when we would hit the rock, what it would look like, and what would happen when we did. I hoped that the rock with our name on it would be rounded smooth by previous boaters, or that the extra half-inch of aluminum on the hull of Dave’s boat would be protection enough.
I had ample reason to worry because I actually had hit bottom in Dave’s jet boat before this, and I’m not talking about drinking or drugs, as if it were some intervention in his jet boat with friends and family telling me how my actions had affected them. No, I mean Dave and I thumped a big rock as we sped down the Clearwater River, because a guy with a thousand-dollar fly rod in a drift boat was camped right in the deep channel, and we turned right instead of left and hit a rock. We flew around the inside of the boat for a bit, Dave grew ashen, and tried to act like hitting the rock was what he had planned on doing all along. The drift boat guy pumped his fist and got ready to paint another hash mark on the side of his boat next to the other fifteen that were already there.
The first thing that comes to mind when you hit bottom is you’re going to sink, so you quickly lift the engine cover and look for water in the bilge or beams of sunlight where sunlight shouldn’t be and then you run to the edge to see if the bilge pumps are shooting out copious amounts of water. The second thing you do…wait, back up. The first thing you do is wet yourself. Then you open the cover and look for water, then you beach the boat quickly, and catch your breath. If you see water shooting out of every one of the boat’s orifices, you get out, grab an adult beverage and hope the water is shallow enough and the river calm enough for the salvage guys to float it out and onto your trailer. If it’s not, you call the insurance company and start looking for another boat.
If everything seems normal, you keep fishing and hope you didn’t miss anything. It turns out that we didn’t miss anything and when we pulled out the boat at the end of the day, the blemish on the bottom of the hull was about the size of a small mole that you thought might be cancer but turned out to be one of those spots that just mean you’re getting old. I was thankful that we hit bottom on the Clearwater where the calm, steady ebb and flow of the river has smoothed the rocks to a polished and mellow state, and not on the rock-and-roll turbulence of the Snake River that smashes and breaks huge boulders into jagged hidden things that bite.
I don’t like bitey things and as we motored upriver, Remington mentioned one of those things. “There’s a boulder, right there,” he said as he pointed to a smooth-as-glass piece of the river. Sure enough, as we roared safely past, you could see it smirking to itself a few millimeters underwater. These deadheads (things just below the surface that you can’t see and that have nothing remotely to do with Jerry Garcia) make the course knowledge of people like Remington all the more valuable to avoid a dent or a hole but preferably a dent.
There have been efforts to make the Snake more navigable. At one point, two tall white navigational poles, called channel markers, were installed above and below each rapid. The theory was if you lined up the poles one behind the other, going up or down the river, boats would have a repeatable way to run each rapid. That is, unless the river changed—and the river always changes. Wild rivers like the Snake kick at their confines and tear at canyon walls and move sand, silt, slag, and boulders around in an effort to escape. The river wants to wander and it can’t, so it bucks and kicks. If you think you’re safe because two white sticks are lined up, think again. The river is fluid but so are the boulders, and the first guy who lined up the sticks perfectly and struck bottom must have thought, “What the heck?” as he bounced off the ceiling of his boat’s cabin. Only I’m sure he didn’t say “heck,” and when he washed out the back of his boat and floated downriver as his craft turtled and sank, he must still have been wondering what had happened. No one really uses the channel markers anymore, which, again, makes the advice of those who know the Snake invaluable.
As we made our way upriver past the confluence of the Salmon River, we got a history lesson from Remington. We saw iron rings that long ago had been pounded into the cliff-face to help pull sternwheel boats through the rapids, and he pointed out a boiler from one of those boats that broke apart when the rope fouled the paddlewheel. We saw white marks high up on the cliff, where engineers thought a new dam would be good. There are petroglyphs from long-gone tribes, kilns from lime mines, and the foundations of defunct copper mines. There’s even a tunnel through one of the cliffs that comes out on a different river. We received a thorough education that day, which sent us scouring the web for Hells Canyon history books.
We videotaped every single inch of the run up the river and with the help of Remington’s narration, Dave has pretty much figured it out. He still studies the film like a third-string NFL quarterback who got thrust into a starting role just before his debut in the Super Bowl, but the last trip we took with another guide and friend resulted in only a few tweaks to the way Dave now runs the river. Even though the final test will be when he’s on his own, I think he’ll do fine. I’m getting more comfortable but still haven’t yet been able to sit in the copilot seat when he’s running because I’m just too nervous—but that will come in time. The river and the canyon offer a new fishing opportunity we’ve never had. Not only are there steelhead and salmon, but there are trout, bass, whitefish, and sturgeon. There are sandy beaches, deer and bear and bighorn sheep and the opportunity to river-camp. It’s really cool that he’s figuring this whole thing out and it makes me happy I get to do this with him.
All of it was just starting to feel doable and normal when I got a text from him that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck and sent shivers up my spine: “Hey, brother. Now that we’ve learned how to run the Snake, maybe it’s time to try the Salmon.”
The Salmon River, you realize, is called “The River of No Return.”
Someone, help me.
John O'Bryan Writes 