Shooting the Sky
It’s possible to try, but in the end gratitude cannot be faked. The author with expert guide Sam Vasily. Photo by Ed Olsen.
A better road trip is the sudden kind, an unexpected invitation to explore leaving precious little time to plan or plot. Such an invitation came my way last week when Ed Olsen, a great friend and fellow swordsman on the battlements, hit me up with a chance to fly fish on Pyramid Lake, Nevada. We’d meet in Reno the day before, and next morning bomb north to the Paiute Reservation where one of the world’s better treasures holds an abundance of Lahontan Cutthroat trout–a species once nearly driven to extinction and now thriving under the tribe’s careful stewardship. Ed and I have fished together on the McKenzie River, the Crooked River, and once took an extraordinary three day trip down the Lower Deschutes with Steve Erickson, a world-class fly fisherman, guide, and admirable human being who is also my neighbor, and who once gifted me a beautiful flask engraved with a quote from Thomas McGuane:
“The trouble is, you can’t properly present something you don’t believe in.”
So I said yes.
Pyramid Lake, which is equal in surface area to Lake Tahoe, is a defiant body of water. One of the last remnants of ancient Lake Lahontan, which covered most of the Great Basin, it is over 400 feet deep in some places and sits in the middle of a desert moonscape, fed only by the Truckee River. The Truckee flows down from Lake Tahoe, through the heart of Reno in the Washoe Valley–where it sucks the occasional bum and his shopping cart full of possibles into the current–and finally around the big bend at Wadsworth where Chief Numaga and his Paiute warriors rubbed out a contingent of drunken militiamen from Virginia City in 1860–when Nevada was still known as the Utah Territory. It has been home to the Paiutes for many thousands of years but was given its current name by John C. Fremont, who was guided onto its northern shore by Kit Carson in 1843. Fremont was taken by the towering tufa formation near that shore which is pyramidal, but the native name for the lake is Cui-ui Pah, after the Cui-ui fish. Pyramid Lake and the lower reaches of the Truckee River are the only place in the world that sucker-fish lives. It is also home to the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, a subspecies of cutthroat found only in areas of the Lahontan basin in Nevada, northeastern California, and southeastern Oregon. I grew up just west of Pyramid Lake, and have spent many nights camped at The Pinnacles–a science-fiction world of sand dunes and tufa formations where one expects any minute to see old Ben Kenobi come strolling through the desert with a staff. But I had never fished it, never been on the waters, and this was a chance I wouldn’t miss.
So I threw my things in a bag and punched out into the Cascade darkness in my truck, now known as the USS Eisenhower because it cannot be parked in spaces meant for sampans, dhows, or junks. The Eisenhower must be docked, and more often than not it must be anchored well away from any grocery store or restaurant, whose parking lots often look like a filipino fishing harbor after a typhoon. I’ve now sailed the Eisenhower over large portions of the American west and can report that we are seaworthy, sound, and bristling with armaments. I drove for two hours in the dark, scanning the radio for something interesting to pass the time, and feeling perhaps a little of William Bradford’s trepidation because I realized, listening to a report that the IRS has proposed to require facial recognition to view tax returns on line–that there indeed remains a howling wilderness, and that the airwaves are full of its noises–but that the wilderness of Bradford’s terrors isn’t what he thought it was. It isn’t the woods and the wolves and the winds and the darkness of a vast continent. The howling wilderness is made entirely of human beings.
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