Patrick Larkin's Story

Here's my third illustration in the series.

Thanks for reading! What follows is fly fishing extraordinaire Patrick Larkin’s story:

Elias is an old friend from college that I’ve drifted in and out of contact with since graduating in 2009. He’s a lanky, brainy, far out, philosophizing type prone to bouts of drinking and smoking hand-rolled unfiltered cigarettes. We were close for a time in college, sharing poetry, getting drunk, and occasionally boxing with a group of friends. About 6 years out of school, after having no contact, he hit me up to stay at my house during a writers’ conference in Minneapolis. In the evenings he filled me in on how he spent his days: tending to two grumpy little tyrants, his children. Come naptime he snuck in some time staring at graphs to day trade measly sums on the stock market, dreaming of making it big. We had a good night or two drinking and shooting the breeze, reminiscing about raucous times. And then he was gone, back to his domestic confines in Ames, Iowa. I didn’t hear from him for a long while. In 2021, a mutual friend paid him a visit in Iowa and found out he had gotten into fly fishing during the pandemic. That was music to my ears - I had also gotten into fly fishing and had come to the realization that curating friendships around my main hobby - playing music - had left me with scant contacts interested in fishing and the like. After reconnecting yet again, we set up a time to hang out in the Iowa Driftless.

Before heading to Iowa, I performed what had become a ritual for me. I spent two days fly fishing for trout near LaCrosse, Wisconsin. I tromped around small spring creeks, crashing through brush and slapping down hoppers, scaring a lot of fish and occasionally getting lucky. I slept poorly in the back of my station wagon at a campground where dog owners with behemoth campers sat in chairs in a circle all day. I smelled like pee and mud, and subsisted on granola bars and oranges. In my last creek before I headed to Iowa, I remember trudging through tight bramble and willow clusters before stumbling into a massive pool of water with feet-deep silt near a beaver dam. Disgusted by the manure-smelling muck, I grimaced and cast a hopper. A nice chunky brown trout leaped out of the air for it. I wrangled it into the net and grinned for no one but myself. Satisfied with my catch, I emerged from the stream, hopped in my wagon, and headed to Iowa to meet up with Elias.

I met him at a campground on a popular creek about a half hour from Decorah. I rolled up and gave him a hug, and we peppered the air with small talk of our drives and our households for a while. The campground was a bit tight. We were about ten feet from some dudes with a deep fryer, two coolers full of Bud Light, and a big sound system. On the other side was a group of six other dudes who all drove pickups and drowned worms for stocked trout all the live-long day. They greeted us with gap toothed grins.The mineral blue creek lay just past our picnic table. It was manicured and full of big fat, dumb rainbow trout that had been stocked within the last few days. Being far too proud to fish stockers right in the campground, we walked a mile or so up the creek where it was wilder looking, amongst late-season wildflowers in a prairie.

We had a good time catching some stocked and some wild fish, and eventually went back to camp where we drank whiskey and smoked little hand-rolled ciggies, and made campfire pies. At one point in the evening the deep fryer dudes were doing some experiments, dropping whole chickens and loaves of bread and whatnot into the thing and watching the flame shoot up 15 feet or so with modern country music twangin’ on. One guy next to us on the other side insisted on offering us bacon-wrapped rainbow trout - we tried, but were unable to refuse. While we ate this decadent meal of stocked fish raised on dog food wrapped in pig, Elias caught me up on his life. He was going through a divorce, while at the same time his dad was dying and his mom was sick, and his wife had just finished testifying against a childhood sexual abuser. It was a very rough time and this trip was a needed moment for him to catch his breath. Phooey. Then Elias described a spot he had in mind for the morning. It was going to be grand. On this note, we snoozed.

We woke respectfully early, slurped some coffee and little packets of oatmeal, and drove past some churches, some telephone poles and a lot of corn. Mist was still rising from the valleys. We pulled off onto a little dirt road and parked where it ended.

We walked on a grass path through some restored prairie for a mile before descending down a hill and finding the creek. At first glance it was a bit of a disappointment - it was a beaver dam laden mess. Big stale pools too slow to drift a fly through, and skinny shallow little runs too cramped to work with. Beautiful and wild, but tough fishing. So we kept walking downstream to find better water, carrying on a meandering conversation. Eventually, we wound up along a much nicer stretch.

In fact, it seemed like a dream. Beautiful bluff on one side, a giant moss-covered boulder, crisp clear water rushing over rocks into a deep pool full of promise. And the promises were kept - the fish were cooperative. We took turns pulling brown trout out of the hole. Eventually we spooked it and moved on. Eureka! Even more fish. They were taking flies top water, below the water, nearly every cast. We hole-hopped past each other until we got up to another nice big pool. It looked to be a neverending fountain of trout. We took turns pulling in the speckled salmonoids, each one seemingly bigger than the next. They were so plentiful that we started keeping them - I wore a stringer full of dead fish along my thigh while we continued to slay ‘em. At one point, Elias got stuck in muck and ended up falling, filling his waders. We laughed and he walked it off, dumping his waders out in the grass and laying out in the sun to dry off while I continued to land some nice chonky brown trout. It was mid-day and we could not believe our luck. It was, as Elias coined, “gemmy.”

It was amidst this magical feeling that we were confronted with a middle aged man and what seemed to be his mother and a mangy mutt. Not a very threatening dog, despite the intent. They bluntly informed us we were trespassing on their land. To our left was a sign identifying State Forest Land, and to our right was these irked Iowonians in plaid layered over wrinkly Iowa Hawkeyes t-shirts. We looked deferentially up at them from the water. We apologized, saying we hadn’t realized, and got out of the water and started walking. Not satisfied with that, they escorted us stiffly to what was definitively state land.

We shrugged it off and resumed fishing. After twenty minutes, they approached again. They’d been surveilling us to make sure we were being compliant landless paupers! Apparently we had not. They let us know that due to a bend in the creek, we were again a foot or two into their property. I scoffed a bit, but we again apologized and moved on. We walked maybe another 100 yards upstream, figuring surely we were out of their hair by now, and got back to it. There was another dunk tank of a pool before us, and we were catching like gluttons. Elias pulled in a nice big buck brown on a dry fly take. He cleaned it and handed it to me to put on my stringer. Just as I’d strung the fish, up rolled a golf cart.

It was driven by the same middle-aged man we had interacted with twice. Beside him was an older man - his father, the master of the land. A beaming emblem of a farming, land-owning, God-fearing Iowonian, with a red face and a look of confused rage.

“Put it down, dad,” we heard the son say with a compelling urgency.

I caught a glimpse of the old man storing something in the dash - was it a small handgun? Likely so. I backed up as the angry man climbed unsteadily out of the golf cart. Elias watched cautiously from the opposite bank.

The patriarch began righteously yelling about how we had no respect, how we interrupted his football game, how these damned fisherman from Illinois come here and think they own the place, and they drive fancy cars and have fancy gear, and how the DNR purposely doesn’t label the property lines, and how they let their section of creek turn into beaver dammed shambles and how they don’t even mow the grass. He carried on for a bit, letting it all out in big bursts. But then, there was an unexpected pause.

He stared at my midsection.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, “Hey!

“They’re keeping the browns! You’re keeping the browns!”

A knowing grin came over his face. “Hey, that’s great! Most of these idiots just let ‘em go!”

I was perplexed, but tried to maintain a stoic look and demeanor.

“Yep,” I told him, “I like to keep ‘em when there are brookies around…”

I held up the stringer to show him the lifeless slabs, mouths agape.

He smiled and gave me a thumbs up. Then he started talking about how there aren’t supposed to be any brown trout in the creek, and how there are dams in place to stop them from moving upstream, yet they still show up. He insinuated that DNR staff were sneakily stocking browns on and above his section of creek, perhaps to undermine him.

This train of thought slowed, at which point I sought a segue.

“Hey, thanks, and, sorry again. We’ll keep moving so we’re sure we’re off your land.”

“You guys have a good one!” he said, grinning. He hopped in the golf cart, and they were off.

Elias, who’d been quiet through the interaction, let his eyes get big and let out an exaggerated sigh, before shaking his head. Then he suggested we call it a day. We hoofed it well into the sanctuary of public land.

Before we wrapped up, I wanted to catch one last fish. So I hopped in the creek a half mile walk up, and threw a classic elk hair caddis into a narrow section between overhanging clumps of grass. The fly drifted downstream for a moment, before a healthy little brook trout took it in an elegant little leap. I held it for a brief moment, admiring the nuanced vermiculations on its back, the bright orange belly, the occasional red dots with blue halos mixed in with all the yellow dots, the deep green scales, the slight hook jaw. The kind of beauty that my aunt would use to argue that god exists - living proof.

I let the fish go, and climbed up the bank. We walked through the prairie back towards the road, with wildflowers swaying all around us.