Old School Guys

Steven Bird & Jeff Cottrell

Time for a story. This one appeared in The Drake magazine last year. A true story. Jeff Cottrell called me, expressing the opinion that I should post it on SHJ. So here it is.

A Full Circle

For a lot of years after I met Jeff I would have said Bear Creek was the best small stream I’ve ever fished. A secretive tributary of the San Gabriel River not far from the troubled sprawl of the L.A. basin, it was the kind of place fishing kids knew about and escaped to. Bayonet sotol, nettles, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions and despairingly steep canyon walls helped to ensure light traffic – alder and willow overhanging the creek served as vexing deterrents to reasonable fly casters. A few miles upstream from the confluence with the West Fork, away from the mainstem and its deformed hatchery trout, you got into the good fishing. 

Rare to meet anybody up there. It was wild and lonesome enough you met another angler it just seemed natural to stop and compare notes. I’d been camped for a couple days five miles upstream from the confluence and had it all to myself. Lots of fish – wild rainbows on small soft-hackles and wetflies – bright leaves of trout. And though the memory of it is no longer vivid I remember it well enough.  

                                                                      *

I’m fishing downstream, on my way out. He’s working his way upstream, a tall kid, about my age. I note the seven-foot Fenwick he’s carrying. Lucky, I think. I’m fishing the one-piece, six-foot, four-weight I built from a noodly nondescript glass blank I found in a discount bin. It’s not bad, perfect for Bear Creek. He greets me with a wave and a broad smile, openly delighted at meeting another fly fisher so far into the isolation of the canyon. I stop and return the greeting. Tacitly, we find seats on the stones beside the creek. We both light cigarettes.

His name is Jeff Cottrell and he’s from Whittier, downstream from my home in Glendora, at the base of the mountains. Like me, he is a regular on the San Gabriel, a Bear Creek backcountry camper. He likes my rod.

“Perfect for Bear Creek,” he says.

Examining the wee soft-hackle fly riding the stripper, he asks, “You into Leisenring… soft-hackles?”

I pull out my childhood Perrine, flip it open and hand it to him.

He scans the clips loaded with flymphs and wetflies and nods appreciatively. “Man, really nice. Bet you catch a lot of trout on those.”

“Vacuum them, sometimes,” I reply, feeling leather-backed with recent success.

He takes out the box he’s keeping his big stonefly nymphs in, opens it. Some of the nymphs are hackled fore and aft of the thorax, in the style of Charles Brooks, his recent hero. They are beautifully tied. “Hey, have you read Charles Brooks? Nymph Fishing for Larger Trout?” I’ve been catching a lot of the bigger fish up here – sixteen, seventeen inches – using the big nymphs.” He selects a couple flies and hands them to me, studies the contents of his box, then selects a third, one with a peacock herl body. “Oh man… this one…,” he says, handing it to me.

I give him a few of the soft-hackle flies that have been working for me. That seems to please him a lot. We share an enthusiasm for wetfly design. Turns out, we are zealots for the cause and soon we are excited and both talking at the same time, the fly talk punctuated with gesticulating tales of our angling prowess meant to illustrate and emphasize the killing effectiveness of favorite patterns. He reads a lot and fishes a lot. Says he caught a steelhead out of Sespe Creek. We smoke a deuce of cigs apiece before finally packing it up. We shake hands, wish each other luck, then he goes his way and I go mine, and we don’t meet again for another forty years.

                                                                     *

I bought a copy of Nymph Fishing for Larger Trout. Found it one of the most useful and influential books on flyfishing for trout I’ve ever read. I still have that copy on my bookshelf, a reminder of that meeting in the sun flecked shade of Bear Creek canyon. A compatriot met in a lonesome place had given me the product of his art and pointed the way to knowledge that would change my game – and that given freely, for the sake of the game, a game Jeff Cottrell played so well that it became his occupation, as it eventually became my own.

A lot passes in forty years. Families built and kids raised. Lifetimes lived. Folks gone down paths in twisty, seemingly random directions. Yet I suspect there’s really no such thing as randomness or coincidence. There seems to be a synchronous purpose to it all, though I can’t for sure say what that is, or why.

                                                                     *

I’ve been living beside the upper Columbia since the early ‘70’s, having moved there not long after meeting Jeff on Bear Creek.

Jeff started guiding in California, the private water Arcolarius Ranch section of the Owens River, then moved on to a long stint in Colorado where he met Jan. And that led to a long tour out of the country, guiding on the Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego. Wanting to eventually retire from guiding and make a home in the Northwest, he’d made a go at a fly shop in The Dalles, but, turned out, traffic was light there, and then the economy tanked. Now I meet him again, in another secretive place, on a much larger river, far from Bear Creek in southern California, managing Black Bear Lodge for the Evening Hatch, downriver from my fish camp on the American Reach.

Though the Evening Hatch crew might be considered my competition, there are no guide wars on the upper Columbia, and those of us operating there are friends. Their clients have left and the crew, CJ Emerson, Rial Blaine, the young guys, and Jeff are catching their breaths, waiting for the next round. I show up. Jeff pours me a cup of coffee. And we’re all sitting around the lodge’s big dining table. It’s October caddis season and we’ve been working up new patterns. Our fly boxes are open on the table and we’re comparing notes on designs. Even though he knows more than any of us on the subject, the history, Jeff is doing the least talking. He’s listening, pulling flies from his steelhead box and stacking them into a pile on the table.

He is old school. I’ve heard that said, and his flies might create that impression. But that description serves only as a shallow generalization, it’s not who Jeff Cottrell really is. It would be more precise to say he is well-schooled. He knows that ‘tradition’ is the archive of what worked. Like a lot of guides he is a closet intellectual. He is a ‘man of the country’, and though he lives immersed in angling there is nothing of the didactic fly-shop-pro about him. He is no self-promoter. Jeff Cottrell is having fun, and that is magnetic. Scott Sadil told me even the most hard-assed ranchers will give Jeff permission to fish on their property. “Jeff’s the guy to send in,” Scot says. Women like him too. Both of the girls on my crew lined up to hug him goodbye after first meeting him, a gesture they reserve for only dearest friends. He is confident, engaging and light with them – they like that. Jan, his wife and partner forever (also a hugger) knows him better than anybody, and she might tell you he is a stick and stay family man. Jeff Cottrell is not well-known in the way that writers archiving the life and times of our sport in front of a screen are known. He is practicing at a level where flim-flam does not pay off. He is a writer’s angler.           

Jeff and I like traditional elements, natural materials and soft-hackle flies. Rial tends toward synthetics, rubber legs, a ‘modern’ approach. Young CJ, guiding since high school, fiercely loyal to Jeff, his mentor, gives Rial some shit about rubber.   

Rial, laconic, spooning a cup of yogurt, rolls his eyes, says: “Least I don’t have to worry about being responsible for the extinction of silicon rubber.”

We all laugh.

Jeff, having assembled a generous pyramid of steelhead flies, pushes them over to me, smiles and nods, a signal to take them. They are beautifully tied. One with real jungle cock cheeks tied down-eye style. I recognize a couple ancient patterns, an exquisite Lady Caroline, but most are of his own design, reflecting his knowledge of Old World styles, yet, decidedly ‘West Coast’. In them I see the influence of Trey Combs, Jeff’s close friend. Jeff gives stuff away. He moves things toward you, those things he knows you like or need. I thank him for the flies, wanting to pass him my whole box to reciprocate. He’s got a day to kill, so I invite him to fish my secret lake.

                                                                 *

The small lake is a perfect circle. Some say it was created by a meteor hit. It spans the meadowlands of a narrow valley, mountains on both sides framing a blue delta of long autumn sky. All is mirrored on the calm surface of the circular lake. An aureola of cattail reeds lines the shore and the water quickly drops off from there. We are in my jon boat casting sink-tips toward the reeds. We have it all to ourselves.

Every once in a while I give the oars a pull. The conversation is an easy back and forth while we chain-smoke and fish. The fish are wild redband rainbows with some shoulder on them, and every time Jeff’s rod bends into one of them his face opens to a smile. He enjoys every trout, marveling at the purplish-blue coloration the lake gives them. And he seems to enjoy the ones I catch even more. He is the best kind of fishing companion, still the adventurous kid I met up Bear Creek canyon, long ago.

He remembers. We recall that meeting. Jeff shakes his head and laughs, says, “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we Steve.”  He means it as an affirmation, not a question.

His words sink in. An osprey hovers in the arcing vault of sky over the lake, its head tilting. I entertain some thoughts about those born to be fishers, for who it is not a sport but a living and a way. And I think about arcs of trajectory and the eventual circularity of everything. I pull on the oars. Jeff lays out a cast. The osprey tucks its wings and stoops toward something hidden, falling toward the dark mirror of the lake, its reflection rising swiftly to meet it. “Yes,” I allow, “We have come a long way.”