These days there are several new angling writers worth reading, and I have always enjoyed books that have vicariously taken me on fishing trips of the mind, trips that I will never have the opportunity to take. This summer it was my privilege to write a blurb for a wonderful book by Canadian writer Robert Reid to be released in November entitled Casting into Mystery. The book (which I will review after its release) weaves the author’s in depth perspective on how fly fishing impacts his life with insights and quotes from naturalists, philosophers, poets, song writers, and other angling authors about fishing and the natural world. Reid also delves into the spiritual realm of nature including the Celtic Way, which is reflective of his own Scottish heritage. After my second time reading through his manuscript, my mind began to drift to bygone days.

For some reason, I have always been consumed by fishing until absolute darkness. As the ashen hues of twilight dissolve into the black of night I have often felt engulfed in a web of peacefulness. Since few anglers out West fish up to dark, my aloneness during that time evokes a sense of complete oneness with my surroundings as well. According to Reid, Celtic lore defines that thin line of time experienced between sunset and total darkness as “the gloaming.” A culture totally absorbed in nature, the traditional Celts believed “the gloaming” was a holy period where our profane world connected to a sacred “other-world” as the awakening of nightlife merged with the mystery of life beyond. Relating this belief to fishing, I found the concept of gloaming particularly enlightening.

Watching and waiting in eager anticipation, a river comes to life as darkness descends. Almost magically so, an ensemble of insects engage in a ritualistic dance celebrating the cycle of life while one by one trout awaken and start to rise in mystical cadence to the music of the river. As an angler trying to immerse myself into the rhythm of the moment, at one point it happens. Like that precise instant when a person falls asleep, time and eternity become one while the enchanting flow of water crosses that thin line of gloaming as if to catch glimpse of the “other-world” to which the Celts refer. I cast, and then cast again in a meditative state hoping never to wake up. But upon my return to “our profane world”, there is a sense that I have been touched by something special beyond catching a few trout.

Wherever I pursue salmon, steelhead, stripers, or trout, I love to fish the gloaming.  And though I am not on trout water as much these days, I just close my eyes. Recalling the words of country songwriter and singer Tim Ryan, I am somewhere on a river at twilight.
        
      I know the sound a river makes
      Flows through my memory everyday
      Carries me home when I’m far away
      I know the sound a river makes

May the gloaming be with you all.

How do you see a place like Montana? A place that is roughly 550 miles across at its widest, and—in total—occupies more of the planet’s surface than Japan. A place with magnificent rivers that push through gorges, ravines, canyons and valleys to funnel the snowmelt from roughly 100 named mountain ranges and return it to the far-away destinations of the Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico. A place you are drawn to because of those rivers, especially the 450 miles that are wrapped in ribbons. Blue ribbons.

It is a place so big that you can’t possibly see it all. So you break it down. You call on friends who know parts of the place well. Friends who have cast in the pale light of the canyons searching for—and sometimes finding—the answers. Friends who have planted grafts of their hearts along the banks of the rivers, and whose souls still sing with the sandhills and hover with the hawks. Friends like Jerry Kustich, Bob DeMott and Todd Tanner. You follow their advice, hoping that perhaps you too will find the answers.

You wade the fabled rivers: The Big Hole; The Beaverhead; The Missouri; The Madison; The Yellowstone. Each is generous at times; selfish at others. Just as you hoped they would be. You cast your flies hoping they will return with added weight. You cast your cares hoping they will return with less.

You fish hard in the mornings, even harder in the evenings, and in between you drive. You try to count the number of times you cross the Continental Divide, but you lose track after the fifth or sixth. You cross the Pioneer, Anaconda, Beaverhead, Sapphire, Bitterroot, Garnet, Adel, Elkhorn, Tobacco Root, Madison, Gallatin and other mountain ranges, and, like the stones that line the bottoms of the rivers, they all look the same from a distance. But up close, their unique beauty is unquestionable. White crosses remind you, though, that getting this close to beauty is not without risk.

Just as you plan to do, you take your first fish—a solid brown—on your first morning on the Big Hole. In the evening, you hike over a mile to a bend in the Beaverhead and hope that a big fish will feed on the surface at dark. When that snout first pushes through the water, followed by a dorsal fin and a tail about two feet behind, your hands shake. You are 1400 miles from home, and you ask yourself if the big trout here are smarter, more cautious, or just plain different than the ones you’ve learned to catch. You manage to tie on a fly and cast. You are pleased with the answer.

Over three weeks you cast your favorite bamboo rod so much that it breaks, and, with it, so does your heart. You give your broken rod to Glenn Brackett and his skilled hands assure you that he can repair your rod with the same ease that his kind and contagious smile mends your heart. Montana’s treasures, you see, extend far beyond its mountains, rivers and fish.

When you return, you will have driven a distance that is equivalent to a coast-to-coast round trip across the United States. New friends and memories will fill voids in your heart that you didn’t know existed. You will have seen Montana, but now—more than ever before—you will need to see it again.