The Middle of Nowhere

Reflections on Verdigris Creek

 

            I came to Nebraska to work six years ago.  My clients are all farmers and ranchers.  Most of them have become clients in hard times. I mention these things because I want you to know that I am aware of and, frankly, sympathetic toward the economic struggle and change on many of today’s farms.  But that is another story.  I want to write about Verdigris Creek.  I do so reluctantly, for fear of drawing more anglers to a place I have come to love.  But the creek faces an uncertain future.

            I have been privileged in my life to live in many areas of the world, both growing up in my parents’ itinerant home and in my working life.  I went to highschool in India, for example, at a school built in the last century by American missionaries.  Many of my life’s affections and directions I can trace back to my years at that school, not the least of which began on a stream.  I forget the name of the stream.  We hiked to it, when we could get away from school, to fish and camp.  On one such trip, fishing my spincast rod and daredevil spoon up through a meadow, I came upon Tom Fergin.  Tom was older than I, the son of a Lutheran missionary.  He had two brothers in the school.  His family, like mine, lived in Sri Lanka, an island nation some few hundred miles to the south.  They were from Missouri.  They were fly fishermen, every one.  I stopped my fishing that afternoon to watch Tom and to learn.  He gave me a quarter hour of lesson and demonstration, retrieving trout, it seemed, on every exemplary cast.  He laid long loops of line out in the air above the marshy grass, shot it forward along cut banks of stream and dropped his fly in the brief shelter of overhung bushes.  He was quiet, skillful, modest and successful.  That Christmas, my brother gave me an old fly rod.  

            I have since that afternoon with Tom Fergin fished for trout in many places, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri and Iowa, in Vermont, Wyoming and Colorado, in Canada, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand.  I have grown up fishing.  When I moved to Nebraska, the angler in me hung his head.  “You left me out of this decision,” his shadow seemed to say.  I rationalized proximity to the West, plotted road trips.   

            Guides show up in life.  Surprises occur. A few months into my work in Nebraska, traveling home across Highway 20, I first heard about Verdigris Creek.  A colleague, a man who farms and works in numbers, a man whose openhandedness I have come to recognize as distinctly Nebraskan, surprised me with word of nearby trout.  Skeptical, I refused at first to believe the news and for months discounted it as overdrawn.    

            Later that year, on a hot summer day, my four year old son, Luke, and I first went to Verdigris Creek.  I presumed the stream would prove a good place to get Luke started on trout fishing.  Verdigris is the home of a trout hatchery, afterall.  I imagined that it would be like catching fish at a trout farm: cans of corn, dollars per pound of sluggish, pale, chow-fed fish, trout in name only. The stream surprised me.  It had the look of a classic spring creek as it flowed through deep grass meadows, clear, cold and pebble-bottomed.  It swept through cut bank, pocketed in thigh-deep pools.  It combed and laved submerged heads of freshwater fern.  Canopies of cress grew out at the shores, shadowing the streambed, narrowing its visible sunbrightened channel. I reached down into the water and lifted up a handful of fern.  The plant in my hand began to crawl to life with mayflies, scuds, caddis and sowbugs – trout food.   

We tried to fish.  My expectation of easy trout for my son quickly faded in the heat, in the height of the summer bulrushes and in the weariness of the trout.  This was not a stream for a four year old to learn on, at least not that day.  In summer, the marsh grasses thicken and tower, cattails hide the creek and swallow up anglers. A few children float and wade the stream, in a world unseen, in tunnels of tenfoot grass.  Their cheers and shouts seem to come out of nowhere, out of the marsh, startling like redwings in defense of unseen nests.  

That day, Luke and I walked upstream from the hatchery, out of sight of any one, to where the creek narrowed and the banks were firm underfoot.  We shed sweaty clothes and, with my son on my back, I stretched out in the creek and began walking on my hands upstream, Luke spotting the quick black dart of trout that fled in front of us.  

I have in the years since that summer day fished Verdigris Creek many times.  I prefer to fish it in fall, in winter and early spring. I have raced to it after work, through a hoarfrosted countryside, jealous of the remaining hours of daylight.  Not only are there fewer people on the creek in winter, but the towering marsh grasses have died down, making it simpler to stalk and cast to trout. I like to fish the creek’s marsh, where it separates and braids, delta-like, in advance of the pressure of the downstream lake.  It is harder fishing.  The bootsucking bogginess of the marsh makes the going more work, makes the stalk more problematic, makes the missed strike of sizeable fish more heartstopping.  The marsh also keeps most anglers at bay.  People prefer to fish the upstream serpentine curves of the creek and to walk on solid banks.  It is fine fishing there as well, if more pressured.   

But the marsh, the marsh is unexpected terrain, foreign, baffling, frustrating, wild. The creek seems to vanish, only to reappear twenty struggling paces on, in sheltered, deep narrow pools.  I have seen big fish in here and have landed and released with some regularity 15 and 16-inch rainbows and browns.  The length may not seem boastworthy, but Verdigris fish, when they survive into a few years of wildness, grow fat in that clean, cold, bug-rich water.  They have girth and it is the girth in them that fights, that shakes and thumps the rod.  It is girth that drives their bold brief runs and sends them thrashing into the air.   

Trout tend to thrive in beautiful places.  Verdigris is no exception. Colonies of sumac drift on its eastern hills.  Fawns spring up and flee in the timber-edge grasses.  A great owl silently navigates the snow-sleeved limbs of a bur oak timber. Out of the sky comes a racket.  I look up and scan the blue.  Nothing is there.  The racket increases.  I search and search the sky.  At last, out of the corner of my eye, sight reaches higher, into thinner altitudes, and there in numbers that I cannot at first believe, the source of the racket, hundreds, thousands, of wheeling cranes.   

I remember one evening, my Pilger friends and I, having packed away our rods and waders from a few fine hours of fishing, sat at a picnic table, enjoying a beer and recounting for each other the day’s fishing.  In the twilight at the end of that unseasonably warm late winter day, a single coyote spoke out from across the creek.  It spoke out again, closer.  Suddenly, at once, came the reply of many coyotes, in song so close and numerous it excited the blood.  

One spring day, I took an out-of-state friend to Verdigris.  I have fished with this friend for years, every year, out West.  When we arrived at the creek, it was cold and gray and blustery, but the trees were leafed out, in early pale green.  We geared up and set out, but shortly into our walk along the path, stopped.  The sound of birds arrested us.  Not cranes caterwauling overhead, but song in the trees and bushes.  We picked them out - in thickets of stunt plum, in wild raspberry, in the locusts - bluebirds, cardinals, orioles, finches, robins, indigo buntings, they all seemed to have converged in the shelter of that shallow creek valley, away from the cold and gray and wind of winter’s fitful return.  It seemed improbable.  It seemed frankly hard to believe, this profusion of songbirds I have met nowhere else.  We went on that day to catch many fish, throwing out dry flies in tight wind-fighting loops.  I remember my friend’s wonder and satisfaction at this challenging, trout-loving stream. As we drove up out of the valley, along the final red bar of sunset, he went on and on about his last strike, missed in the near dark:  “It slashed at the fly, Joe, it came up out of that dark cutbank and hammered that muddler minnow.  It was big.”  He talks about Verdigris often, with praise in his voice, as if let in on one of our secrets.           

Verdigris Creek is one of Nebraska’s secrets.  It is at times as fine a trout stream as any I have fished.  Last week I landed a seventeen and a half inch brown out of the marsh braids.  I had to stand at one point waist deep in silt to stalk that fish.  It wasn’t clear when the time came to move that my boots were going to come out with my feet. It was worth every slow, plodding effort.   

I wouldn’t call myself a booster.  Nebraska, by more lights than my own, I imagine, has room for improvement.  But when outsiders deride what they presume to be the plainness and remoteness of my relatively new home, and when urban Nebraskans make veiled apologies for living here, I wonder about that strange and common phrase – the middle of nowhere.  It is a useful phrase. I love it as it appears in bold blue letters across the poster that hangs in my office announcing with celebratory irony Ainsworth’s Middle of Nowhere Days.  But the common use of the phrase is without irony, intended to judge and dismiss.  Used that way, it is a phrase whose significance in my experience reflects more on the speaker than on his subject. It was Nebraskan John Neihardt, afterall, who rendered into English Black Elk’s spiritual insight that everywhere is the center of the world. The middle of nowhere is not a place; it is a way of looking at the world, a way that reflects impoverishment. In my opinion, putting Verdigris Creek at risk is to adopt that view. It is to adopt that view about our land and about ourselves. That brief spring creek partakes of a beauty that teaches us, if we will listen, to make everywhere the center of the world.    

My father-in-law and his son were one day driving around looking for Steele Creek in Holt County.  They couldn’t find it.  They waved down an approaching pickup to ask for directions.  An old timer pointed them the way, and when they wondered out loud about getting lost, he put it right: “You can’t get lost, you’ve got all day”. Ah, the middle of nowhere.  

© Joe Hawbaker  March 17, 2000