The Rio Grande - When Ho Who?

While gazing out the window at work it suddenly dawned on me the flags on the pole at the police station across the street weren’t straining against the raging spring winds anymore.

I stepped outside and sure enough the wind had finally died down. It was sunny, warm and much too pleasant for a workingman to endure.

It was one of those early spring days here in northern New Mexico that breeds a spat of mysterious stomach flu cases or a dead relatives’ second or third funeral.

And then there was the fact that the caddis were hatching up on the Rio Grande, an annual event designed to even up the odds with many a frustrated flyfisherman who’d been skunked on the state’s stingiest river.

I could only hang my head dejectedly, there would be no skipping out mid-week and hitting the water. I had started a new job and was now a weekend warrior when it came to fishing.
“God, what has become of me?” I thought as I shuffled back into work, dropped the window shade and got back to banging away at the keyboard.

A short time later my boss showed up in the doorway, leaned against the door jam and smiled sweetly.
“What’re you going to do on your day off?” she asked.
I was a little confused, “What day off?” I asked.
“Oh, you didn’t you know?” she said. “We get Good Friday off around here.”

I laughed inwardly at my incredible luck and lifted the window shade back up.

Down the Road
That morning I bounded out of bed early, leaving my warm, soft, sensuous girlfriend mumbling her goodbye into the pillows. It would be best if I departed quickly.

As my old van lumbered up the Santa Fe bypass, I dipped apples slices into a cup of yogurt balanced precariously on the dash. Wiley, my trusty dog, sniffed at me and gave me a look that seemed to say, “Hey pal, whatever happened to the breakfast burritos?”

We both turn our heads to watch the people trudging along the shoulder.

Here in northern New Mexico, the pilgrimage to the Santuario in Chimayo on Good Friday is a religious tradition and strung out all along the highway, walking earnestly, were hundreds of pilgrims making the hike.

For many it is the time to pay penance, give thanks or just share time with family and friends.

I feel a touch of reverence and a slight pang of guilt as I pass the many walkers. They’re looking at about 25 miles of blacktop from Santa Fe to the Santuario and I wonder if I could handle a hike like that myself.

The thought fades with the miles as I continue north out of Santa Fe, top out at Opera Hill and drop down into the Pojoaque Valley where I come across a crowd of pilgrims milling about at the intersection of State Road 503, a back road to the Santuario.

They are resting up here before taking on the final leg of the journey. The road is jammed with cars carrying food, water and other support for the weary walkers.

I think back to when I once lived off this road up near Nambe Pueblo and enjoyed many a summer evening driving along the back roads under a canopy of cottonwood trees, past the small family farms and pastures, waving to people on their porches.

In the surrounding piñon and juniper studded hills I would hike the sandy arroyos where Wiley could chase after an occasional rabbit.
It was quiet out here, very rural and I didn’t mind the 20-mile commute to my job as a newspaper reporter in Santa Fe.

But in the years since I lived there in a run down, rented trailer, many an adobe palace has sprung up behind a gated entrance with an expensive SUV parked in the drive.

I wonder what affect the onslaught of gentrification will have on the culture that led to traditions such as the one I was viewing now.

I continue driving north towards Española. The pilgrims have thinned out but I encounter a few peeling off the highway at the La Puebla and Sombrillo turn-offs that cut over to State Road 76, the main road leading to the Santuario.

I lived off that road, too, in another run-down rented trailer on a family compound. And I enjoyed many a summer night plying the back roads and hiking in the nearby hills with my dog.

That was late in my newspapering career when I moved up to Española to work at the Rio Grande Sun which was then a commendable paper run by an admirable man.

It was also one of most target-rich, news environments in the state and I liked the people and the culture.

And it was a hell of a lot closer to the prime fishing than most of New Mexico.

I found a place that summer on the outskirts of town just minutes from the canyon through which the Rio Grande flowed and spent many a night after work making my way upstream to stalk rising fish with dry flies.

I’d spend the night sleeping in my van by the riverside and in the morning would hustle back into town to dig up some news.

My base camp was a little camp trailer parked in a pasture with open fields, grand mountains and the big river nearby. I had electricity to the site and a campfire pit outside my door.

I was living the life of a genuine trout bum and news hound and recall those days with fondness.

And it was on one of those warm, summer nights down on the Rio Grande at a place called Pilar that I met a fellow fisherman named Wen Ho Lee.

What a Ride
I was breaking down my gear after a long foray up a side canyon through which the Rio Pueblo De Taos runs down to the Rio Grande.

That stream is best wet waded in shorts and sneakers with a light rod, short leader and a hopper. There’s plenty of pools and eager fish the higher up you go but more of that later.

It was late and darkness was setting in. There was a rust colored, early model, American-made sedan parked behind my van. I had to laugh at the car being parked so close to mine when there was so much room to breathe out here.

The car reminded me of my Nana’s old 1973 Olds Cutlass, a coupe with a Rocket 350 under the hood fed by a four barrel Holley Carburetor.

Man, that car could move. When my Nana got older and didn’t drive as much, she would ask me to take the Cutlass out on the highway and “blow the pipes out.”

One of the few speeding tickets I’ve ever received I got in that car.

I was down in Las Cruces where I had gone to State and earned my journalism degree. I was rushing over to the Gila Wilderness on a Super Bowl Sunday to try and get in some fishing before the game started later that afternoon.

I crested a hill and bore down upon a slow moving Isuzu Trooper. I punched it and swung out and around the truck. The road headed down into a gully and then climbed again before curving off to the right at the top of the hill.

I had that Olds humming by the time I popped over the crest and passed a state trooper in a black and white heading the other way.

I knew I was busted and let it idle down until I pulled over up around the corner where I sat and waited.

A moment later the trooper came barreling around the corner and locked up his brakes up after he overshot me parked by the side of the road. He banged a hard u-turn in a cloud of burning rubber and screeching tires and pulled up next to me, driver’s window to driver’s window.

Smoke and dust drifted through the air. My engine ticked and sighed as it cooled. The Isuzu slowly puttered by, its driver grinning from behind the wheel.

“What the hell were you doing back there,” the officer asked as he removed his mirrored sunglasses.
“I honestly don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe seventy?”

He laughed and ran a hand through his short-cropped hair.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “You had to be doing at least ninety but my radar wasn’t picking you up on the other side of that hill.”

Naturally he asked what my rush was, I told him my grandmother’s orders as I handed over my license and her registration.
“So I guess you’re just being a good kid uh? Respecting your grandmother’s wishes and all?” he asked.

I could only grin in return and accept the ticket he gave me for doing something like nine miles over the limit. He said that seemed fair since he knew I was speeding but he really couldn’t say by how much. I agree and it turned out that was the cheapest ticket he could give me.

With our business concluded we exchanged some small talk about politics and the weather. Before leaving he commended me for pulling over on my own, said he sure liked the Olds and warned me to keep it out of the ditch.

Years later long after my Nana had passed on I ran that Olds hot one day and blew a head gasket. It now sits in a friend’s pasture in Las Cruces waiting for the day I repair it and I will repair it, some day.

But this car parked behind me at the river looked more like Telly Savalas’ ride from Kojack, a Buick Century maybe. I wondered where the owner was because it was getting dark fast and things could get real hairy down on those slippery, rocks in the canyon.

Just then a little Oriental guy wearing a Vietnam era boonie hat and hip waders, just like mine, came trudging up the trail from the Rio Grande.
He nodded hello and I offered him a cold beer. He declined and instead pulled a thermos of coffee from his car.

I asked him how he made out, what was he using and stuff like that but his answers were short and clipped. The conversation died and an awkward silence ensued as we broke down our gear.
I made one last attempt at conversation when asked him where he was from. He told me Los Alamos and after I told him I lived and worked in Española, he seemed to relax and open up a bit.

We talked about the lack of meaningful research coming out of the publicly funded national labs at Los Alamos. Solutions for the common good rather than just continued nuclear weapons studies.

He remarked that he felt like he was wasting his time and talent, that he didn’t get a lot of real work done and felt like they only kept him around because he knew too much to be let go.

He joked that it was like being in the Mob, where once you were a member of the family, it was for life.

Here was yet another bitter, angry government employee who wished he could just move on and forget all about their frustrating career in public service, I thought to myself.

I wished him luck and we said our goodbyes.

Later Days
I forgot all about that guy until one day I was watching the nightly news and there’s a couple of buzz-cut, beefy FBI types leading this little, Oriental guy out of a house in the bedroom community of White Rock up near Los Alamos.

He was being charged with being a spy at the labs.

And then there’s the FBI guys searching through the trunk of this rust-colored, older model American-made sedan and pulling out a pair of hip waders.

This was all starting to look vaguely familiar and then it hit me. Hey, that's the guy from the river that night.

Well what do you know?

Now I don’t claim to know the whole story about Wen Ho Lee’s case as my paper didn’t really cover it, but I know from news accounts that he spent about nine months in jail, in solitary confinement, before he broke down and accepted a plea to a single count of mishandling computer files and was released.

The rest of the government’s claims about him being a spy for the Chinese went up in smoke along with their case. It was such an embarrassment that a federal judge in the case apologized to Lee for jailing him on such flimsy evidence.

The disgraced scientist would later file suit claiming the government leaked information about him to the media which resulted in his being sacked with less than a year to go to retirement.

And one of the names that came up as a possible source for the leaks is our governor who was then head of the Department of Energy, which oversees the labs.

I guess we’ll never know because the case has been settled with several media organizations picking up a good chunk of the estimated $1.6 million settlement tab.

They did that so they wouldn’t have to reveal in court who supplied them the leak.

So now our governor’s off running for re-election, a race he is expected to win handily, and then he’s thought to be preparing a campaign for the White House?

Meanwhile Lee’s reputation has been horribly smeared and the media look like easily, duped fools - once again.

What’s wrong with this picture? Whatever happened to the day when the media was inherently skeptical whenever the heavy hand of government came down on the little guy? Where have all those heroes gone?

Back to the Fishing
I snap out of my reminiscing as I roll up on my favorite spot on the river. In years past I have done quite well here during a caddis hatch. It’s a nice day with just a slight breeze coming upstream. I don’t see anything happening on the water but it’s early still.

I gear-up and climb down the steep bank to the river below. Hordes of caddis cling to the streamside willows, scattering in the air as I push through the thick bushes. They settle on my clothing and I can feel some crawling about under my shirt.

I fish for the longest time with no luck and see no risers. My bottom fishing with an imitation caddis emerger is ineffective. I am perplexed as waves of caddis wash over me, headed upstream on the wind. They founder on the water in eddies by the rocks but nothing pierces the surface.

It slowly dawns on me that the surface feeding frenzy characterized by years past when I got to this spot has apparently passed. I was a day late it seemed.

The fish were already gorged on caddis and laying low. Besides, why chase my imitation on the bottom when millions of the real things were floating by? And with that much to eat off the bottom why come to the top?

I begin to worry I’ll be skunked and desperately began to fish harder. I tie on a triple rig and re-dedicate myself to the effort.

Then I see the first rise of the day, off where a side channel connects with the main current. Just the slightest dimpling of the water where its snout broke the surface and sipped off a bug.

I quickly stripped off my bottom gear and tie on a single elk hair caddis fly, one of several I tied up the night before. I slowly waded across the river, below and behind where I’d seen the rise.

It wasn’t the caddis that got him; it was a tiny copper-colored, bead-head pheasant tail I tied off the back end as a dropper. And it wasn’t a trout but a small-mouth bass that saved my day.

Just a little guy the size of my hand, but, boy, was I happy to see him. Then the wind picked up and began to blow hard. White caps appeared upon the water, clouds blew in and the temperature began to drop.

I called it a day and once again the Rio Grande proved it could be one the stingiest of rivers in the state, even under the best of conditions.

Some may say if I had taken a good, long walk earlier that day it might have improved my odds.

The Rio Chama - Busted Butt Blues

It’s winter and I’m driving with the window rolled down, the cold air trying to crawl under layers of wool, fleece and thermal.

I’m acclimating, preparing for an afternoon fishing the Chama River below the dam at Abiquiu, New Mexico. It’s one of those beautiful days with plenty of bright sunshine, just a slight hint of breeze and the promise of a warm afternoon.

It’s that quiet time of the morning when everybody has gone to work and the highway is empty. Just north of Espanola I see the first dead dog, crumpled up on the shoulder, a spray of darkness on the pavement marking the impact.

There’s somebody’s dog that won’t be waiting in the driveway tonight.

I pass a blackened, burnt out home that’s been there for years. Its rusty tin roof has collapsed into a gaping black hole where the living room might have been. Undamaged on one side of the building, painted over the ruddy brown stucco, is a colorful mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Bedrock Catholicism rules in Northern New Mexico and with that comes the belief that life’s triumphs or tragedies are simply a matter of God’s will.

I wonder why they left the ruins still standing? Were they preserving the mural? Who knows, this can be a tough town to figure.

I cruise down the highway, past the white Corrections Department van parked in the middle on the median. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits stoop over in the roadside weeds to pick up trash, they never seem to stop moving but they always look up as you drive by.

I give a slight wave, they nod with their chins and we all go back to our lives.

I go on past the chopped and dropped Neons with their dark tinted windows, parked by the mobile homes clustered in compounds, their wrought iron bars and chained chows there to keep the thieves at bay.

On past the place where the famous black and white photographer, Ansel Adams, took his picture, “Moonrise over Hernandez”.

It’s a tribute to photography’s basic truth; it’s really all about being there.

Adams lucked out and caught a full moon rising over the distant Sangre de Cristo mountains while the crosses in the old church's graveyard were lit up by the fading rays of the setting sun.

The result was a captivating photo and one I find somehow revealing of the fatalism and hope that is Northern New Mexico.

It is a place where one encounters the desperation of a twitchy heroin addict casing cars in the supermarket parking lot, countered by the pride and determination of a single, teenage mom, working days at the local convenience store and schooling nights at the community college.

It’s a tough place to live, I know, I did it for years while working as a reporter for the local newspaper and later with a non-profit trying to help this rural community deal with its staggering number of heroin addicts and overdose deaths.

I’ve since moved on, but both the paper and the problem still persist.

I breathe a little deeper and push the gas a little harder.

I’m finally out into the country, where cows, pasture and empty hillsides keep the gritty city at bay.

This is Georgia O’Keeffe country, where the red rock cliffs, the seemingly endless vistas, the towering mountains and the stark beauty of the high desert can certainly be inspiring.

I sense the river and its possibilities ahead, I catch a glimpse of it off to the right just after passing the two little roadhouse bars at the El Rito turnoff.

It looks good, not too high and not too muddy.

This stretch of the Chama is a tough piece of water, and much like Adams’ photo, timing here is everything.

And that time is in the fall when they bring down the water flow at the end of the irrigation season. Then the level slowly begins to drop and the normally ruddy colored water begins to clear. Sometimes it seems to take forever for the silt to settle and then just when it seems about right, they kick up the flow again for some reason and the wait resumes.

But as the time grows near I find a way to slip out of work early and make the fifty-mile roundtrip to check on the water. It’s difficult to gauge unless you see it.

It’s all in the color, like a cup of milky tea.

And then if it’s right, the fish will let you know.

There’s the tug and then the run and in the waning light of day you cradle one of the hardy browns that has managed to survive the mud, the insane flows and the harsh environment.

It’s an exciting time, but sad, too.

I know I will only have a few weeks to catch and release the biggest and best browns on this stretch of river because there’s other guys out there, waiting for the right time too and they’re determined to take fish home.

Within a month most of the browns will be gone and in their wake a trail of empty salmon egg bottles, spinning lures packages, cheap beer cans and cigarette butts mark their departure.

It can be depressing and then there are days like this.

It was a weekday, a little late in the season but I had the river to myself. I was on a bank high above a hole peering down into the water from behind a downed cottonwood. I was just looking for now and would soon slide down the bank and into the water to take a stab at it.

I was just leaning on the log taking it all in when a bad feeling suddenly came over me, that feeling you get when you thnk there's something sneaking up behind you.

I slowly turned my head to look back over my shoulder and then, right there in the air above me, a Bald Eagle came sweeping down.

I ducked and she veered away, looking back at me as she glided off across the river to land upon a branch high up in a big cottonwood tree.

We watched each other for a moment and then she took off again with slow, full beats of her massive wings, flying off around the river bend and out of sight.

I laughed nervously to myself. Damn that bird had scared the hell out me.

I replayed the moment over in my mind. Her wingspread had to have been as wide as my outstretched arms. I saw the gnarly yellow skin around her talons, the white fan of her tail and felt the air rustle as she came at me.

Man, that was amazing, to come that close to an animal, the symbol of our country, something we had nearly driven to extinction.

I had seen Bald Eagles here on the Chama before and some down on the Rio Grande by Velarde. Then there was one in a cliffside nest up off the Red River near the confluence of the Rio Grande and plenty on the Baca.

It’s always a thrill to see them because they always tend to fly off before you can get near them.

This one was different.

This one got me thinking.

Then it came to me, maybe was she trying to scare me off.

I looked down at the river below.

We'd both been eyeballing the same fishing hole?

I slowly slide down the bank and crept up to a spot where I knew they’d be.

The Aftermath

Later, I was sitting at the roadside bar, obsessing over what I must have done wrong.

I had snuck up on that hole like a coyote, placed the line perfectly with no splash and then tensed up in anticipation as I watched it drift over the spot.

Nothing.

I slowly pulled up the line, recast and waited again.

After the third or fourth cast I knew it wasn’t going to happen but I kept working at it until the sun set behind the mountains and it grew cold.

I shook my head, drained my beer and pushed myself away from the bar.

“I guess I’ll see ya next time,” I said to the woman working the bar.

She nodded and told me to drive carefully.

That wasn’t an option on this stretch of road, you either drove it carefully or died, I thought as I climbed into my old Dodge van.

The roadside descansos here told that story. Some simple crosses, others elaborate memorials, all marking the spot of those who had been killed on this nasty stretch of highway.

I remember the night I was coming back after looking at a piece of riverfront property in Medanales. I was following a car down the highway, it was one of those older model lowriders, a Chevy or Buick, just motoring along slowly, heading into town.

I was impatient, itching to floor it and swing out and around the car but it was a moonless night, pitch black outside, so I waited until I was sure I could safely pass.

Then the lowrider began to drift off towards the shoulder. I began to lean on the gas when something made me hesitate.

I backed off and instead followed the lowrider off onto the shoulder and right past a pickup truck, dead in the water, in the middle of the highway. No emergency lights on, nobody standing outside waving down traffic, just left there in the dark.

I wasn’t that surprised, just relieved as we went around it and kept on going, flashing our lights to warn the on-coming traffic.

I checked with the cops later that night, but apparently somebody hauled the truck off before anybody got hurt, because they didn’t know anything about it.

I remember how I couldn’t sleep for a while because I kept thinking about how close I came to wrecking if I had impulsively passed that lowrider.

Yeah, this sure could be a tough place to live.

I would go back to the eagle’s hole the next week and again the following week next but with no luck.

Maybe there weren’t any fish left in there, maybe the eagle or the bait fishermen got them all already.

I was just chasing a hunch and it wasn’t panning out.

But then late in the season I found myself trying the hole again. I went to lift my line off the water and I found it hooked on something.

I tugged a little and it held fast. I cursed and then began reeling in as I waded up to it, I’d have to get out in front of it to try and pull it loose. By then I’d have to write off the hole, all semblance of stealth gone.

Suddenly the line twitched and began to move downstream, I lifted the rod and felt the weight and knew instantly I had been right about this hole all along.

I laughed liked a crazy man and began working on bringing her in.

From the depths she came, a hefty brown, barely discernable in the tawny water. And then I saw the fading, white claw marks across her back.

Seems that eagle gave this brown a try too but couldn't quite pull her out.

She was a big fish, I pinned her against my leg, one hand under her belly as I quickly slipped the barbless hook out of her lip.

She slipped back into the water and faded away, hopefully to live and fight another day, just like some of the tough, old spanish folks who inhabit this land.