All Fishermen Are Liars Read Online Free PDF Page A

that much. Instead, they’re busy doing the countless, mundane, mostly invisible things that allow their clients to fish.
    I’d never fished the White before. I’d heard it was a good trout river but that most of it was private and what public water there was could be hard to find unless you were a local who was already dialed in. Of course, it’s in the nature of rivers like this to be private, at least here in Colorado, with our unenlightened stream access laws. Much of the state is a beautiful but steep, infertile landscape and back in the homesteading days the first settlers grabbed up the river valleys with their flat meadows and year-round water. Desirable real estate being what it is, most of it has stayed in private hands ever since. There was a time when you might have been able to sweet-talk your way onto places like this with a six-pack of beer and the promise of a limit of cleaned trout. Ranchers were often proud of their fishing, but they seldom had time left at the end of a long, hard day to fish it themselves, so it was mostly appreciated by visiting relatives, friends from town and the occasional polite stranger.
    You can still wangle access from time to time, but many of these places have now been leased to outfitters to help pay the property taxes or sold outright by people who saw the family spread less as a heritage and more as a grubstake to a different life. The consequence is that some of these places are now fished much harder than they once were and by a different class of people: in extreme cases, those who think roughing it is wearing an L.L. Bean sport coat instead of the usual Louis Vuitton.
    I got off the interstate at the town of Rifle, gassed up, grabbed a cup of convenience-store coffee and headed the forty-some miles north on State Highway 13 toward Meeker. The speed limit is sixty, but this is the kind of lonesome two-lane blacktop where you stand an equal chance of being passed by a young buck doing eighty in a dual axle pickup or getting stuck behind an elderly rancher going eighteenmiles an hour in a thirty-year-old station wagon. It also pays to keep an eye peeled for cattle. Over here the yellow signs along the shoulder still say OPEN RANGE , while on the east side of the Rockies too many people didn’t know what that meant, so they changed them to CAUTION, COWS ON ROAD.
    I mention the drive in some detail because the journey itself is the destination, as the Buddhists say, and because it was somewhere up this road that I stopped feeling pressed for time and was suddenly just going fishing. Of course, going fishing always seems like the answer, even when it’s not clear what the question was.
    I got to the K bar T a little after eleven o’clock and was greeted by Princeton, who passes as the ranch dog. Princeton is the result of a romance between a Chihuahua and something small, white and wiry. He’s a friendly little guy with a head smaller than the average house cat and he’s smart enough not to venture out into the open where he could be picked off by a golden eagle or red-tailed hawk by day or an owl at night. Given time and an overriding affection for all dogs, you get used to him and remind yourself it’s not his fault that he looks like a wet chicken.
    After a quick, early lunch, Mark and I drove half a mile across a meadow and waded up a shallow side channel to the river. (Buzz had unspecified ranch business to take care of and said he’d try to join us later.) Here in its upper valley the White is what a Coloradan would call a medium-sized river. It was the second week of September, so it was low enough to be a little bony, but you still had to search out a place shallow enough if you wanted to cross. Mark said it wasn’t floatable this high on the drainage except maybe at the height of spring runoff when it would be pointless to fish it.
    The ranch is at an elevation of a little over 6,000 feet—almost exactly the same as my place on the other side of the