ILLUSTRATION by Brian Lemke

For many years my dad and I enjoyed world class flyfishing for trout in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Montana. Wearing cowboy hats, fishing vests and neoprene waders, clutching split bamboo ultra-light rods, we cast artificial flies across countless blue ribbon trout streams and crystal clear lakes. We camped out under the stars, rose before dawn and labored up steep mountainsides through frigid alpine air to fish in remote beaver ponds. We even risked drowning by wading in dangerously deep rivers, water lapping against our chins, just so we could better position ourselves to drop a midge the size of an exclamation point smack dab on the nose of a feeding fish. We hooked, fought, netted and released thousands of brooks, rainbows, browns and cutthroats, all brilliantly colored wild trout, thick as thieves and twice as slippery.

In those days, we were two sun-tanned, athletic guys, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a swiftly flowing mountain stream, Stetsons silhouetted against towering snowcapped mountains, fighting twin rainbow trout lightly hooked on hand-tied feather-and-yarn insects. The fish danced on their tails, leaping and somersaulting, in a doomed attempt to regain their freedom. Sometimes a baby blue ESPN helicopter hovered overhead, cameras sprouting from every orifice, broadcasting the action below to a live national television audience.

Well, okay, that might not be entirely accurate. For one thing, Dad and I seldom fished shoulder to shoulder. When we arrived at a stream or lake, we took off in opposite directions and tried not to get near each other again until the end of the day. But now that we’re both retired and living in Arizona, where golf, not trout fishing, is the economic engine that drives the state’s outdoor sports budget, I’ve learned to improve my recollection of those glorious days of yesteryear. That’s because my wife and I moved to Prescott in 1999 and, six months later, my parents showed up here, too. And Dad and I were confronted with a new flyfishing challenge.

The first time we drove north to the Williams area in search of Arizona trout, we visited four small lakes in rapid succession: Cataract, Kaibab, Dogtown and Whitehorse. Later that day, hot and discouraged, we stopped at a rustic café in Chino Valley for post-fishing refreshments. Over cherry pie and coffee, we wrestled through an intense father-son talk that rivaled in shock value the birds-and-bees discussion we had mutually endured when I reached puberty in 1955.

“If this is as good as trout fishing gets here, we’re in serious trouble,” Dad said. “The water in those four lakes looks like last week’s burnt cocoa. A trout can’t strain water that dirty through its gills without lapsing into schizophrenia.”

“Trout were gasping and wheezing all around me,” I said. “A few were spitting up mud-balls the size of frogs’ eggs.”

“I caught plenty of fish,” Dad said. “But they were all exactly seven inches long and skinny as yo-yo string. Jut plain silver from top to bottom. Looked more like butter knives than fish. They might have been some weird form of genetically engineered cutlery.”

“They were hatchery-raised fish,” I said glumly. “My barber explained this to me last week. He called it ‘the old put-and-take routine.’ It’s used by desert states wherever cold water is scarce and natural breeding is impossible for trout.”

“Yikes,” Dad said. “I thought the idea that fish can be raised in a hatchery was just a rumor.”

“It gets worse,” I said. “According to my barber, when a trout can no longer pull dirty water through its gills, it just morphs into a catfish. Catfish thrive in mud. He claimed they actually prefer it to oxygen.”

Dad stared at his half-eaten pie and said, “Egad.”

“We can always sell out and relocate to Alaska,” I said. “My barber claims they’ve got trout up there big enough to swallow a man whole.”

“You’re confused,” Dad said. “He’s talking about grizzly bears, not trout. Even if you were lucky enough to hook a bear on a dry fly, son, you’d lose your arm trying to stuff him into the net.”

Fortunately, our fear that we might never again catch a respectable trout vanished when we later fished Lee’s Ferry, the Colorado River and numerous other excellent lakes and streams in the White Mountains 200 miles east of Prescott. We learned firsthand that Arizona has trout fishing equal in quality, if not quantity, to anything we’d encountered before. But these days, it’s not always economical for us to drive hundreds of miles in search of prime trout water, so we usually fish lakes conveniently close to Prescott.

And we’ve adjusted to that new reality. First, we acknowledged that put-and-take fishing is an unavoidable byproduct of the choice we both made to retire to the warm and sunny Southwest. We also came to appreciate the state’s efforts to provide us with something to catch, even if it’s just a baby trout. Finally, we decided that exercising a measure of literary license in discussing the results of our local fishing trips makes the adventure far more satisfying. This delightful practice was invented by Sir Izaak Walton (1593-1683), author of the classic text, The Compleat Angler; Or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation. Walton was the first flyfisherman to declare that lighthearted exaggeration is perfectly acceptable behavior when it comes to describing the day’s catch, especially to persons not in a position to disagree. Now, after a day spent on those same four cocoa-colored lakes near Williams, when Dad and I slide into a booth in our favorite rustic café in Chino Valley for pie and coffee, the conversation goes something like this:

Dad says, “It was brutal out there. I fought so many trout that I’ve partially dislocated my right shoulder. I’ve got blisters on my palm the size of half-dollars from casting #20 Black Gnats all over creation. And my fingertips are in bloody tatters because of the hundreds of razor-sharp trout teeth I touched while releasing those fish.”

I say, “I caught and released my legal limit three times before noon. Had two good-sized holdover fish on for a while, but they both got off in thick weeds. Just before the biggest one chewed through my #20 Quill Gordon, I got a clear look at him. He was a cross between a brook trout, a rainbow and a grouper.”

Dad says, “As I was netting my twentieth trout of the morning, a bait fisherman sidled up to me and said, ‘I have to ask what lure you’re using, mister. I’ve never seen a man catch a fish on every single cast before.’ I handed him a mildewed streamer that’s been rusting in my fly box for twenty years. Told him it was a #6 Moto’s Minnow and said he should go to the other side of the lake, as far away from me as possible, hold his breath, and cast it a minimum of two hundred times with his back turned to the water.”

I say, “I heard a helicopter overhead at one point today but I was so busy netting a wildly thrashing fish I had just bamboozled with a #22 Trico Spinner that I couldn’t take the time to look up. Did you happen to notice what color it was?”

Dad says, “I think it was baby blue, but I’m not absolutely sure of that because the fish I was fighting right then was hurling buckets of brown water on my sunglasses with his tail. He was an absolute savage. Kept spitting little mud-balls into my flared nostrils. I caught him on a #16 Pale Dun. Let’s order a second piece of pie and I’ll tell you what happened when a goggle-eyed tourist from New Jersey waded out into the lake in his street clothes to beg for my autograph just after I hooked two trout at the same time on a #10 Joe’s Hopper.”

That’s an Izaak Walton, almost-honest description of the way Dad and I artfully create a memorable experience out of what some might consider a routine outing. We believe it’s a technique all serious flyfishermen should strive to master.