When I was considerably younger and living approximately 2,000 miles east of my current Montana address, I had an experience that helped shape my ongoing fly fishing journey in ways I couldn’t really appreciate at the time.

My fly fishing is starting to rust. That’s never a good thing when you’re in love with your angling.

I’ll get back to the rust in a minute. First, though, I wanted to share a few things I’ve noticed over the years.

While I’ve been sticking close to home for the last year or so, I keep hearing that I’m pretty much the only one. Reports from rivers across the West, ranging from the Frying Pan in Colorado, to Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake, to the Madison right here in Montana, are all in agreement. There are more fly fishers on the water than ever before.

Portland and Seattle are in the Pacific Northwest, a region known for its rain and cool temperatures. Until recently, the all-time high temperature in Portland was 107 degrees, a record set back in 1965. On Saturday, June 26th, 2021 — a little over a month ago — the city set a new record of 108 degrees. The next day — a Sunday — Portland broke its all-time record yet again with an astounding 112 degrees. On Monday, June 28th, the city literally blew that number away when it reached a hard-to-fathom 116 degrees. The average high temperature in Portland, Oregon at the end of June is around 76 degrees.

The fact that Portland set a new record high temperature on three consecutive days is certainly newsworthy. The fact that this happened at the end of June — a month not normally associated with high temperatures in Oregon — is more so. The fact that the new record exceeded the old 1965 record by 9 degrees and topped the date’s average temperature by 40 degrees is astounding. And when we consider that Seattle also set a new high temperature record of 108 degrees, and that Salem, which is 45 miles south of Portland, topped out at 117 degrees … well, it’s probably not all that surprising to learn that a subsequent headline in the Seattle Times proclaimed: “Crushing heat wave in Pacific Northwest and Canada cooked shellfish alive by the millions.”

There’s a river I fish on a fairly regular basis that’s less than a 10 minute drive from my front door.

While it’s relatively large — at least for a Montana trout stream — it runs warmer than our other local waters because it flows into, and then out of, a natural, un-dammed lake. Except for the cooling influence of the occasion spring or seep, the river water below the outflow is approximately the same temperature as the lake’s sun-baked surface — which means things warm up quickly in the spring and stay that way into October.

Last week was wild. The wind screamed down from the mountains with gusts pushing 50 miles per hour and the massive spruce tree less than ten feet from our back door bent first with grace, and then, as the storm’s fury increased, with a sudden and jarring violence.

The long green limbs acted like a sail in the wind, putting immense pressure on the shallow root system, and we watched the ground on the tree’s windward side bulge up three or four inches with each house-shaking gust.

Things are different when you grow up on a pond. The sounds of water lapping at the shore, and the melody of the birds, and the faint whisper of a breeze are always there, but they’re invisible—inaudible—residing just far enough from your conscious mind that they’re like the air you breath; vital, but forgotten and unnoticed in the moment.

If you ask a dozen fly fishers to describe the major threats to our angling, you’ll find a fair amount of agreement. You’ll hear their concerns about public lands, and habitat loss, and pollution, and over-fishing, and poor management practices, and invasive species. You may even have an angler mention our kids’ addiction to video games. There’s a fair amount of consensus regarding all those issues across the outdoor community.

I have an uneasy relationship with boats.

There you go. Now it’s out in the open.

I suspect, though, that most folks who share my views about watercraft come to their ambivalence more honestly. Maybe they’re afraid of water. Perhaps they’re uneasy in a vessel that can tip over in a high wind, or be swamped by waves, or that will take on water and sink if the boat’s structural integrity is breached, or if its weight limit is exceeded, or if there’s a serious operator error.

I’m not usually afflicted with envy or jealousy, at least not when it comes to angling. I guess I’ve caught enough fish over the years that I root for other folks to be successful regardless of whether I’m sticking a few myself.