Donner and Blitzen

Monday Nov 4, 2024. – Is it too soon to start slinging Christmas cheer? Hell, it’s the day before the election. The stakes are high, my nerves are fried, and it’s all too surreal to face alone. So, I dialed up my favorite aging Republican fishing buddy, Don, an 86-year-old Stanford PhD in Electrical Engineering and founding member of the San Jose Flycasters, to catch fish, dodge politics, and laugh in the face of anxiety. We hadn’t hit the water together since the Hex Hatch at Henderson Springs—those magic moments when the air’s alive with giagantic mayflies and the fish practically leaping into your landing net. Don is as GOP as they come, one of those throwbacks from a bygone era, a fellow IBM engineer like my late father, but sixty years of casting and battling have taken a toll. He’s no longer the man who could clock 100 days on the water without breaking a sweat and cast a shooting head 100 feet with one backcast. Still, I had a feeling the day could give us a taste of his old form.

The morning launched with a debacle—Don’s car battery was deader than Nixon’s re-election chances, so we sat twiddling our thumbs for an hour before we finally set off. The day had begun to ripen under that hazy California sun as we pulled into the launch, calm water reflecting the early-bird Cottonwood launch anglers who muttered something about “morning blitzes” and pointed us toward Check 12. Fine. We’d start there.

I played the guide, setting Don up at 30–40 feet, a distance that stretched his limits but just enough to test his mettle. He snagged his first fish with a swing of the fly in the current. It was like watching some ancient ritual—muscle memory battling biology, a man wrestling time itself. We moved from flats to the powerhouse, hoping for that elusive water flow, but it was just a trickle and fishless. My patience was thinning. Just when I was about to crack, I remembered Vaughn’s murmur about a school in the middle of the forebay. I turned the wheel and swapped my hat for the red “Make America Great Again” cap, like a talisman.

Bam! Schools of fish in the depths, 25 feet down, mocking us like they knew we’d arrived late. But we caught them, a dozen by the end of it, though noon brought us back to the powerhouse to find nothing but low water and empty rocks. I was about to say, “Let’s call it,” but then—there they were: white birds assembling along the dam, watching, waiting. Something was brewing. Suddenly, they were in a feeding frenzy, birds dive-bombing into the water, stripers launching out of the blue depths, yanking prey from each other like madmen. Right on the rocks. I positioned Don in the thick of it, and he was on the fish. We cast along the bank, moving up and down with the blitz.

But that was just Act One. Far off, across the forebay, I saw a vast churning caldron of white water and birds—a stripers’ paradise. An acre of water boiling, thrashing, seething, stripers tearing through schools of baitfish in a ravenous orgy of hunger. Why do Terrovas stow so slowly? We hurtled over, threw ourselves into the storm, casting and stripping like maniacs. I let the fly sit in the water, just long enough to tease the stripers into taking it hard. Stripers like to stun the shad to make them easier to catch and eat. Letting the fly hang for just a second before stripping it in works better than fast stripping across the blitz. Fish after fish after fish, with Don’s voice finally crying, “No more!” It was like closing the lid on a perfect day. Too much of a good thing, too dangerous to keep going. And I left the defibrillator in the truck.

We docked around 3:30, catching the eye of a lone fisherman with his dog, also docking, both of us grinning like fools, knowing we’d seen something extraordinary. On the way out, the inspectors informed us of the new rule: no more rebanding, inspection for all boats, Another bureaucratic hammer on the mussel problem, another nonsensical rule. But that was a thought for another day, one that hadn’t quite sunk in after such an epic day on the water.

Tomorrow is election day. I hope we can Make America Great again, God bless the USA.