You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

FISHING TRIP

Prince Helfrich was the patriarch of a family of McKenzie River guides. He and his family made their living taking clients on whitewater fishing trips. Prince was a man who was dedicated to the preservation of the Cascade Mountains, rivers, fish, and lore. For several summers, Helfrich took a group of 9 to 11-year-old boys into the Oregon Cascade mountains for a week of living in the wilderness. In the summer that this event took place, Prince and the boys had set up their camp next to Ilene Lake at the foot of Husband Mountain.

One evening, while sitting around the campfire Prince suggested a challenging task for the following day. The boys listened as he described the project. They hesitantly agreed to try to accomplish it.

The project started after breakfast the following morning. Each of the ten boys took a bucket or a pot from the cook’s tent and headed down the creek which was the outflow of Ilene Lake. In July, this creek ceases to flow. By August, when the boys were there, all that was left of the creek was a series of small pools. Trout fingerlings were trapped in some of these pools. These fish were doomed to perish as the last of the water evaporated or was absorbed into the soil.

The boys spread out along the creek looking in these small pools for trout. When a boy would find a pool, he would lie motionless on the bank watching to see if there were any fish in it. If there were, he would take off his shoes and socks and wade into the ankle-deep water to chase the fish to the shallow end, where he would grab them and put them in his bucket of water. Many of the boys were successful and carried their buckets containing fingerling trout back to camp. It would have been a worthy effort were the boys to release their trout into Ilene Lake, but that was not the plan. These small fish had a far more important destiny.

While the boys were catching fish, Heldfrich and his wrangler, Veltie Prewit, prepared sandwiches to take on the hike up Husband Mountain to their destination, a pristine high mountain lake on the shoulder of that inactive volcano. A crystal clear lake, among Douglas firs. A like which was idyllic except that it had no fish. The creek, which flows from Husband Lake, has waterfalls that prevent fish from swimming up to populate the lake.

Carrying buckets of water with tiny fish is difficult, especially for children. The hike up the mountain was risky, There was no trail. If a boy were to stumble and have his bucket tip over, the fish would likely die before they could be found and put into another bucket of water. Heldfrich and ten boys managed to get all of the fish up the rocky slope and down to Husband Lake. Once there each boy ceremoniously emptied his bucket into the lake to watch as the little fish cautiously swam away into their new home. The boys celebrated their success in this heroic venture with lunch on the bank of Husband Lake, before carrying their empty buckets back down the mountain to their camp. Ten years later, a college friend told me that he had hiked into Husband Lake. He said that “it was teeming with enormous trout”. The normal life span of lake trout is between ten and 15 years. It is a good bet that some of those trout in the lake at that time were the same individuals that had been saved from the drying creek to be carried up the mountain in buckets. And if not, they were the offsping of those original trout.