The Fish's Eye by Ian Frazier

the bank and sang a couple of bars from “We Will Rock You,” by Queen. Then I raised my arms and kissed my biceps. I walked to my car and drove back to the house I was staying in and took an Olympia beer out of the refrigerator and drank it. The motto of Olympia beer is “It’s the Water.” That night, I had a physical memory of the river. It was a feeling of powerful current pushing against my left side so insistently that I had to keep overcoming the illusion that I was about to be washed out of bed.
    â€œDid you fish that day, on the tenth? How did you do?” I asked.
    â€œOh, that first day we were on the Yellowstone I hardly even got out of the camper,” Deren said. “I was pooped from driving, and I honestly did not think that conditions were at all favorable. The water was down, it was too bright. I did take one walk down to the river, for the benefit of these two guys who were following me. When I’m in Montana, guys follow
me wherever I go, because they think I’ll lead them to good fishing. I showed these two guys a piece of holding water where they might find some big trout, and then I went back to the camper. Later that evening, after dark, the guys came to my camper, banged on the door, woke me and Catherine up. They had this goddamn huge brown trout they’d caught, right where I told them. They were pretty happy about that.”
    â€œI didn’t catch any big trout, but that same night I forded the river,” I said.
    Deren looked at me. “That’s a big river,” he said.
    On the inside of the door to his shop Deren has posted what is probably his most famous maxim: “There don’t have to be a thousand fish in a river; let me locate a good one and I’ll get a thousand dreams out of him before I catch him—and, if I catch him, I’ll turn him loose.”
    For Larry Madison, a wildlife photographer and magazine editor who often fished with Deren thirty years ago, a thousand dreams were hundreds more than his patience could stand: “Jim would get in a pool and just pound it all day. I’d say, ‘Oh, Christ, you been in there for ten hours and you haven’t had a hit. Let’s go home.’ Not him.”
    Fishing is worth any amount of effort and any amount of expense to people who love it, because in the end you get such a large number of dreams per fish. You can dream about a fish for years before the one moment when your fly is in the right place, when something is about to happen, when you hold your breath and time expands like a bubble until suddenly fish and fisherman feel each other’s live weight. And for a long
time afterward the memory of that moment gives you something you can rest your mind on at night, just before sleep.

    (The last word I had from Deren came via my brother-in-law, John Hayes. A few months after this article appeared, in 1982, I moved to Montana. That December, John stopped by the Roost, and Deren asked why I hadn’t been coming around. John said that I was now living in northwest Montana. Deren said, “Tell him, ‘Don’t drown.’” Jim Deren died, and the Angler’s Roost closed, the following year.)

ON THE AUSABLE

    O n the West Branch of the Ausable, an Adirondack river three hundred miles north of Manhattan, the stone looks the same as the stone downstate, only wilder. Big rocks of the kind that people sun themselves on in Central Park spill down the bed of the river, which sometimes pools around them and sometimes rushes by, white and fast; granite boulders the light gray or rose-pink of building fronts sit in mid-current in skirts of eddies; smaller boulders on the stream edge make a chain of bathtub-sized pools filled by small waterfalls. Looking into some larger pools from above, you can see sharp-edged blocks of granite lying toppled on the bottom. Tea-colored water pours steadily over lips as smooth as subway stairs. Cliffs of granite climb