An Underground Review: Many Rivers to Cross by M.R. Montgomery

Some of my friends exhibit excellent taste (despite the fact they’re my friends), and when they suggest a book, fly, fly rod or leader design, by god you try it.

Sully - the Underground’s Montana Correspondent and Director of Curmudgeon-Related Activities - mentioned that Many Rivers to Cross was a book worth reading.

So by god, I got it. And read it. And truly liked it.

First published in 1996, it’s a 256-page chronicle of M.R. Montgomery’s quest for some of the West’s rarest, most-endangered species of trout.

While the terrain veers from the Oregon to Lewis & Clark’s route to Custer’s last stand to desert trickles, the book remains true to its original course; the writer searches for the rare untouched places holding rare, untouched trout.

Tight, witty, and awash in keen observation, Montgomery writes about the tiny-but-beautiful (and largely hidden) trout streams that shelter the rarest trout, yet still manages to neatly skewer the “big fish, big river” mentality that drives modern Western fly fishing.

Trophy fish are frozen, sent to a taxidermist, cast in a mold, and recreated in plastic and painted to look more or less like the original fish. Most guides try to discourage the practice, as a large fish that lives in the pool below the big rock (or any other identifiable lair) can be caught over and over again. This is good for their business. The basis for modern catch-and-release fisheries management is elegant science, but the political energy that makes it work comes from market forces at the point of sale, and the guide is on the river and the taxidermist is not.

His contempt for the damage done to a small reclusive streams due to overgrazing is palpable, a fury fed by the knowledge that the rare cutthroat subspecies that are his quarry are often found only in those streams, hanging on by the width of a fin.

He criss-crosses the west, and while fishing for trout is obstensibly the point, the book isn’t much concerned with the nuts and bolts of fly fishing.

Indeed, the bulk of the book isn’t focused on fly fishing at all.

Instead, the author pieces together historical accounts about the area he’s visiting into an interesting narrative about Indians, whites, explorers (and everyone else) - all reflecting on the disappearance of the “real” American West.

In one passage, he describes fishing a small stream which - at the lower elevation - was predominantly rainbow trout. As he fishes upriver, native cutthroat genes start to assert themselves.

I had angled farther and farther into the past, moving back down the chain of being, watching the genetic code (or the outward expression of it) revert with time and distance. The double helix unwound and recombined and was made original flesh. Rainbow trout genes were kicked off like dirty boots until at last the small trout in the headwaters were native and fine.

It quickly becomes clear that the author isn’t seeking a “quality fishing experience” as most fly fishers would define it. Instead, he’s looking for remnants of the old West, and his search takes him everywhere from Oregon to Arizona, with Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and New Mexico figuring in his search.

He ends up in some highly out of the way places more as a tourist than a fly fisher bent on catching dozens of trout:

A hundred miles away in any direction, other tourists were seeking their West. They were drawn to the huge water-and-wind-cut sandstone spires, sheer cliffs, and deep box canyons, all first shaped when this desert was green and riverine. We were all looking for the same thing, the Old West. Their goal was sculpted rocks of magnitude, free of city grime and graffiti, all glowing against the sky. And I had desired with all my heart these aboriginal fish burning brightly in the midday sun.

Yes, such trout are easily caught. But who, when remembering America’s Zion, ever wept for it, that it was easy to see?

Knowing the sad state and precarious existence of the few remaining native cutthroat sub-species, it would be easy to sink into a funk, but Montgomery avoids this maudlin (and predictable) step. Instead, he finishes his book with grace:

There is time now; I can stop for a while and be confident that somewhere the things I love will still swim and fly and bloom. Someone is watching out for them. There are a few special trout left to look for, and I know where they are and where, I do believe, they always will be. When there is time and gas money and I’m back in California, a state where I was partly raised, I will head over the Sierra toward Reno and find the Paiute trout (O.c. seleniris), that spotless, truly immaculate trout of the moonlight rainbow. If things go well in New Mexico, there is the Gila cutthroat, and some spring when the saguaro cactus is in bloom down on the desert, I will go up in those piney hills and touch one.

Availability

Many Rivers to Cross is available at Amazon.com (I’m an affiliate). New copies are still available at $16 (and worth it), but since I’m bent on rediscovering old titles instead of the glossy new ones, you benefit: they also sell used copies for as little as a buck (perhaps re-sold by those disappointed in the lack of casting tips).

Their loss is your gain (it’s my loss too, since my Amazon affiliates fee on a $1 book is approximately five cents). Being as a dollar will take the average automobile about nine miles, I know which I’d opt for.

Click to buy: Many Rivers to Cross: Of Good Running Water, Native Trout, and the Remains Of Wilderness

And while you’re at Amazon, consider getting a copy of Montgomery’s 1991 essay book:

The Way of the Trout: Anglers, Wild Fish and Running Water

Paperback copies are available for less than a buck, so I’d kill two birds with one stone (I just ordered my copy).

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