How a River Changes

Heading east out of Bend it is only twenty minutes until you arrive in what could best be described as the middle of nowhere. The groves of junipers and the green river-paths in the city peter out into lone trees and dry canyons and plateaus like dining tables for things much larger than people. The landscape here does not speak the language of green or lush but that of brown, maroon, sand, rust. If you are lucky in the first or final hours of sunlight you may spot a desert hare, or an eagle looking to eat him. But the sun turns it all into a cast iron skillet during the day, cooking, hazy heat-waves boiling up from the dust, and the animals take cover.

This summer we drove through the desert in the morning, so it was still cool and you could see frost on the windshield every time you came over a mountain pass. Fog crowded us here and there, on the straightaways, around windy corners. In some places it was so bad you couldn’t see a damn thing in front of you, and me leading the way, it was more dart-throwing than driving. It did not matter much though because at these hours there are rarely cars, and at dawn the fog melted reluctantly away as the sun cast brilliant orangish red across the sky and the great wide canvas of the desert.



At first glance, the Owyhee River seems an odd place to build the tallest dam in the world. It is not the biggest river in Oregon. It is not even the biggest river in Eastern Oregon. It is stark, modest, beginning its 346-mile journey in Nevada and carving through vast expanses of desert until, once crossing the Oregon border, it joins forces water to the Snake, which in short collapses into the Columbia.

That the United States would choose to construct a dam on the Owyhee as one of its more spectacular Depression-era infrastructure projects was not obvious. But then the Owyhee was a river, and the land below it did have good use for irrigation, and the United States did want to develop water resources in the American west. And so, in July of 1932, Herbert Hoover traveled to Oregon to dedicate the tallest dam in the world, on the Owyhee River (the dam would later serve as a prototype for the one Hoover is named after, on the Colorado River).

There is something tragic about the building of a dam. It is especially sad when the river you are building the dam on is, as the Owyhee was, a free river. Prior to 1932 the Owyhee flowed happily through its canyons, across the desert. Now it ran into something foreign near the Oregon-Idaho border; an obstacle. There is a reason Saruman was the one with the imposing dam on the river Isen, and there is a reason the Ents tore it down. The Owyhee River will never be as it was.

But installing that hulking slab of concrete was not the last time the Owyhee River changed. Just a couple of decades after the dam’s construction, the State of Oregon introduced rainbow trout beneath the dam. The rainbows thrived. They grew big. A few lucky people in the know got to fish for them. In 1990, though, a decision was made that would shape the future of the river forever: the ODFW released thousands of young brown trout into the river.

What prior to 1932 had been a warm river with dramatic seasonal shifts in water level had turned into a steady river fed by a constant stream of ice cold water from the Owyhee Dam. And what had formerly been an unknown, irrelevant little stream in the desolate expanse of Eastern Oregon had been thrown, unknowingly, on a path to becoming one of my favorite places in the world.



First, though: what is a fly fisherman?

It’s me, sure. But it was not always me. Like many young boys who grow up in places with tall mountains and wide rivers, I grew up fishing. Worm-on-a-bobber fishing. The usual stuff.

It was only when I was about twelve years old that a cousin of mine told me about a different kind of fishing he was trying. A few weeks later in his driveway I cast a fly rod for the first time, and to say I was hooked would both be a bad pun and a drastic understatment. This was the thing for me.

If you are like most people your extent of fly fishing knowledge reaches as far as watching Brad Pitt pretend to cast a fly rod in A River Runs Through It, which is to say you have no knowledge at all. I will do my best here: fly fisherman are notoriously soft, pretentious, fickle. While early in the morning the bait fisherman revs up his greasy trolling motor to kill some salmon, the fly fisherman is busy sorting through the two hundred dollar chore coats in his closet and wondering which will look best when he takes off his waders at the end of a long day.

There are advantages to being a fly fisherman, of course, particularly if you fly fish for trout. One such advantage is that your fishing trips often take you to some of the most beautiful places on the planet. Places the average tourist or hiker may not read about in a travel guidebook and are far better than those places. One day you get into fly fishing and a few months later you find yourself standing waist-deep in a clear wide river in a thousand-year-old desert canyon, listening to the river lapping at your waders and the occasional rise of a fish, watching the sun paint the canyon pink then deep red then not at all, and you will be the only person in the whole uinverse who is experiencing that very moment, and you will say: yes, this is fucking magic. Of course then there are the fish, and those are nice too. 

That is fly fishing.

When you find a good river, it matters. To you, and to the people you fish with, and if you are anything like me when I discored the Owyhee River, to the trajectory of your life. 


Three clear memories remain from our first trip to the Owyhee. The first is a little silly.

As we turned the corner towards the final stretch of road before reaching the dam the river spills out of, we spotted a pocket of water that fly fisherman fantasize about—the kind of water you know you are going to catch fish in, even if you have never fished there before. Brett and I saw this at the same time.

“Holy crap,” he said.

“Wow. That’s insane water, dude.”

We spent the next few minutes silent because one thing had become obvious: the miracle stretch of water was only big enough for one person to fish. After frantically working to set up our fly rods we both started, first slowly and then in a full sprint, towards the stretch of water.

I don’t know who yelled first, but before either of us knew it we were shouting like little kids, faces red, and before long I had convinced myself that the idiot I was looking at was not my friend, and that it was bewildering as to how I had ever considered him a good person in the first place. In the end, Brett secured himself the stretch. We both caught fish. He caught more. Later, of course, we both pretended that nothing had happened.

The second memory was born on a late afternoon about halfway through the trip, when we had been fishing for a few days. The afternoons on the river during summertime hit the mid-90s, and even though you were standing in the water it was still sweaty, sticky business. We had all caught hundreds of fish by that point of the trip but we were not going to stop fishing just because of a little bit of heat.

I only looked up at the sky that afternoon when I realized the temperature had dropped like a stone. Where I had been covered in sweat before I was now shivering, and where the sky had been a pastel blue it was now an inky black. The clouds then opened up fully and the river became a minefield, explosions of gumdrop-sized raindrops ripping across its surface. Lightning raced from cloud to cloud and, once or twice, met the shrubby trees riverside. You would think (and prudently so) that waving a 9-foot graphite stick around during such a storm is stupid. But then we were stupid 14-year olds. I hooked a strong trout during a great roll of thunder and brought him in, laughing and freezing all at once.

“Is it over?”

When the tantrum ended the river scrambled to return to normalcy and did so at a remarkable pace, embarrassed to have behaved so out of hand. It was not long before I was sweating again, downing more ice-cold Pepsi.

“Another one!”

Eventually the sun would go down and it would get too dark to do any sort of fishing—which is darker than you might think, if you are a 14-year-old having the time of his life—and we would hop in the Rubicon to drive back to the riverside camp. My third category of distinct memories from the first trip lives here, not fishing on the river but spent around a lazy and well-fed campfire after dinner. That first year we fished the river at the same time as my cousin, and so him and his buddies sat around the fire and had fun telling lies about their day.

“We caught 80 fish each,” one might say. “We caught a 10-pounder,” another might boast in between burps. They’d ask where we had spent the day fishing and we would tell them, and they’d nod with the look of someone who believes they know more than you and are just happy that you’re enjoying yourself. I didn’t participate all that much in these conversations but observed, Pepsi in hand, as embers made crackling escapes from the fire and danced in the wind and found their way among the stars.

II. The river and the graduation of high school

There was this tradition I had with my dad: every year on my birthday he would take myself and a friend somewhere to go fly fishing, no matter how ridiculous of a proposition the trip was. One year found us sleeping in the car near Frenchglen, a depressing almost ghost town three hundred miles from any McDonald’s, where we parked in an abandoned campsite and were lulled to sleep by the tap-tap-tap of rain on the roof of our Ford. Another was marked by a morning during which my dad ate a whole bag of snap peas, later discovering quite violently that he was allergic. On yet another of these trips, my dad recorded the bathroom usage of a family of seven in our small log cabin near Terrebonne—we still don’t know the culprit, but snap peas look suspicious.

I sometimes wonder why he didn’t come up with some excuse to stop taking us on these trips.

This year was my 17th birthday. Junior year. While in retrospect there is a long time between your junior year and graduating high school, at the time the deadlines felt like they were bearing down on me, little devils whispering anxiously into my ear. Decide which colleges you want to go to. Plan visits during the summer. Land on the job field that you will spend the majority of your adult life working in. Secure some real relationship experience before you’re thrown into the big leagues.

And so it is true to say that driving out to the river that year felt like something of an escape. The further you get from the city the further you get from the city’s problems, and by the time we had crossed the mountains and were well into the high desert everything about colleges and careers felt like hazy memories of another life. All I had to worry about now was catching brown trout after brown trout, and leaning back in a creaky camp chair during the evenings as we put to bed another successful day.

It was February this time, not summer. Just as the river is burning up in the summer it is glacially cold in the winter, and the weather oscillates between a deceptive freezing sunshine and powerful bursts of snow and ice. You never know what is coming and when.

We had only driven a couple of miles up the river canyon when we realized the weather was not the only thing that had changed since our first magical visit. Where before we had been disgusted at the sight of bait fishermen plucking trout from those hallowed blue-green pools, this time we saw something even more disturbing: hundreds of fat carp, belly-up in the water. Dead. Even a non-fisherman could have told us that if there is ever a bad omen for catching fish it is seeing hundreds of dead ones before you have even started. Having driven for over half a day and knowing it would be our only opportunity to fish the river until at least the upcoming summer or the one after, we remained optimistic. After all, we were not after carp. Maybe dead carp was a good thing.

It went about how you would expect. On the second day of not catching a single fish, my friend and I decided that the omen had turned out to be something much worse than bad. Around sunset, having given up on fishing for the day in a show of deference to whatever gods had cursed us, we scrambled up one of the steep edges of the river canyon. The angle was about seventy degrees and it was the kind of hike that you can only do if you are 17 years old and filled with adrenaline and whatever other hormones make 17-year-olds so reckless. The fractured nature of the rock meant you’d slide back a foot for every two feet of progress you made, and the wind came in short strong bursts, nearly pushing us off our feet.

We did eventually make it and were rewarded with a sweeping panorama of the river that I had not seen before and have not seen since. It all looked surprisingly small, from the top of it all. The sun had its head on the pillow near the lower end of the canyon and was sending up final rays of orange and red through the gathering clouds. The wind roared up there, and neither of us could hear much of what the other was saying. So we resolved to not say anything, to look at the sunset over the sad cold river. We shivered, perched on our respective boulder-chairs, as the last rays of sunlight slipped beneath the far horizon.

The following day I made up my mind that we had submitted to the gods for long enough and that it was time to start attempting to catch trout again. I sent my friend somewhere downriver and picked my way through a patch of dead carp, beached forever on the rocks, to a short stretch of water that had been so productive for me during our first trip to the river. In the middle of all of this the sunshine had vanished and it had begun to snow so hard I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face, much less my friend downriver. In weather conditions like this it is damn near impossible to wear the proper amount of clothing, so I stood freezing there, trying and failing to catch fish at what I thought was my favorite river in the world.

The snow passed and the river became quiet again, brooding. A few hundred yards downstream I settled into that very first stretch of water I had seen as a 14-year old, the one Brett and I had fought over. It felt unfair this time, having the stretch all to myself. But what good did it do if the fish weren't biting?

The memories from that first trip had been clear and exhilarating in my mind when we had arrived but now they felt as far away as the moon. With every cast I imagined it was not 25 degrees and snowing but that the sun was beating down on me and that I had a half-drunk Pepsi in the front pocket of my cheap waders. I imagined that I was sweaty from a combination from the heat and from hauling in so many big fish, and that with every other cast the head of some monstrously large brown trout was coming up to grab my grasshopper pattern, that I was hollering down river to my friend to tell him I’d hooked another one. I imagined I had not yet entered high school, and that the most important decision I would have to make upon coming back home was whether I was going to spend the sixty dollars in my bank account on either a Madden game or an Assassin’s Creed game. 

A small splash brought me back to reality. It was a six-inch rainbow trout that had made a valiant leap for my dry fly—and missed. This was the first sign of life I’d seen all trip. I set the hook anyway, just in case. You couldn’t have heard the splash of the fish hitting the water from more than ten feet away.

Not long after we were all sat in the Ford, cruising back home along those lonely desert highways under a snow-grey sky. The little devils which had been asleep for the majority of the trip found comfortable places to roost as we neared the city, and at once I started thinking again about college, and relationships, and careers. The river was now in a canyon on the other side of the mountains.


In the end we did all decide to go to college. We, and we being my friend Brett from the first trip to the river and my friend Adam from the subsequent trip, had chosen the college mostly because it was close to the two most important educational landmarks for an aspiring college student: rivers to fly fish and a mountain to snowboard. The year seemed promising in every way but academically.

Only a couple of months into the year my Hospitality Management teacher, having seen a half-assed presentation I made about fly fishing lodges the night before, called me and offered to hire me to write for her wellness business, part of which involved promising middle-aged women that the course would help them ‘rediscover their body and have better, and more, orgasms’. This was both exciting for me (wow, I must be some prodigy, I thought) and also slightly damning for the overall quality of students at the college. My Excel presentation really was not that good.

By the end of the year we had all dropped out of college and were on the way to the river once more.

We caught fish this time, and a lot of them. It was late April, and the dreary grey skies of that winter trip felt light years away, like a different version of myself had experienced them. On paper, this trip was similar to the first one: friends on the water, warm spring sun beating down, shouting downriver as we doubled or tripled up on fish that anywhere else would be trophies. And, when I look back at my photos from this trip, I see evidence—a smiling version of myself, with friends and fish.

But there were no thunderstorms that year. The fish were smaller and took our flies less often; you couldn’t even plausibly lie around the campfire about having an 80-fish day. No longer did we have the river to ourselves, either: hordes of grey Tacomas lined the pullouts near the river’s best riffles from dawn until dusk, and we spent many hours driving up and down looking for somewhere, anywhere, to try our luck. Nor was the ambience so carefree as it had been as a 14-year-old. There were real problems to return to on the other side of the desert and the mountains: problems like what jobs we were all going to have, and how we were all going to pay the rent. After a long winter, I was asking myself if I even wanted to live in the city anymore. Perhaps worse, those fat grasshopper patterns we caught so many fish on the first time had ceased to work altogether. Maybe the fish had seen too many of them, or of us.

Four months later, I booked a one-way flight to a friend’s wedding on the other side of the world.

IV.  The river and a long-awaited return

There is something scary about returning to your old haunts after having spent a couple of years discovering new ones. Partly you wonder if they will be as good as you remember them, and partly you wonder if you will realize you made a mistake leaving them in the first place. Of course these anxieties were nothing in comparison with my craving to return to the river once more when I found myself, for just a few weeks, back in the place where I grew up.

Nobody tells you this, but the easiest time of your life to organize spontaneous adventures is while you are in high school and college. Once you enter adult life friends have other commitments and other friends. Priorities change. Relationships become serious. It’s no longer as easy as saying, “Why don’t we spend all next week in the middle of nowhere without cell reception?” and hearing a resounding yes. Now you have to plan. Maybe this changes in retirement. In any case the boys were eventually all in, and we went.

Since the last trip, I had been busy doing other things that left me with other memories. Grand memories. I fly fished, walked on a glacier, and slept at the top of a mountain under the stars in Patagonia. I had a real hangover for the first time in Brazil. I, vis a vis the founder that had hired me, wasted some venture capitalist’s money at a Mexican beach resort. I played tennis on grass for the first time at the only club of its sort in Buenos Aires. I improvised a magical trip through Switzerland. I could continue regaling you but you would stop reading, if you have not already.

And yet, even as I was doing all of these things, the river had been there. Waiting.

As the Jeep roared around one of the final bends before we approached the dam, we spotted our favorite stretch of water just as we felt it should be—empty. Hurriedly, almost panicking to make good use of our luck, we tied on a couple of heavy sinking nymphs and half-ran, half-slipped in our felt wader boots down to the river. “There we go,” shouted Brett, the first happy exclamation of hundreds that day. It was hot again like it should be and we were catching fish again like we should be and all was well in the canyon and the water running through it; and this trip did not feel like a short escape from a complicated world but one vignette in a long series of adventures. At the campfire in the evening we had beers and looked up at the sky and wondered how we had ever fallen out of love with the river in the first place.

On its surface you could have said that the trip this summer was no different than the last time we went: the grey Tacomas were still there, and in greater number. There were even a couple of new Broncos—a sure sign of a booming local economy or crippling debt, with about an equal probability of each. Cold local IPAs, aluminum cans with tears of cooler-water running down them, replaced Pepsi. Nymphs replaced hoppers. But while it looked like the last trip, it did not feel like the last trip. It was happier somehow.


I am back again this summer during another short visit back to the place where I was born.

A lot happened in between the last trip and this one. I found a home in another country. My friends grew their roots deeper back in the city we went to college in, and they run a real business now. It is harder and harder to catch up with people; the responsibilities of life get in the way, and people change. I have bounced around between jobs and clients, and in my personal time have been writing more than ever.

As for the river, there is no plausible way you could say the river is still a hidden gem—just last month it made a major feature in the most popular fly fishing magazine in the world. People fly out to fish it now. Partly because of all the fishing pressure, the hoppers don’t work quite as well these days. When you reminisce at the end of the evening at your campfire under the night sky, you can no longer say a number like seventy fish and expect anyone to believe you. The truth of it is that there is no going back to being a wonderstruck kid on a perfect empty river in a perfect happy life, except in dreams.

But as I look up tonight at the sky, beyond our campfire’s sleepy smoke trail and into the same stars that a fourteen-year-old version of me stared into so many years ago, I remember what it was like then and commit to memory what it is like now. And I think that, at least in between this riverbank and the one across the water, there is something worth coming back to still.