This Offbeat Life
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How to Shit In the Woods, the definitive book on outdoor hygiene.

Bass fishing the Flathead River in Montana:
Not Carping or Anything...

text & photographs by Leslie Strom

My idea of a good canoe trip is one where there are no other people, lots of wildlife, a fairly flat river which moves but not too fast, and many days like this, just paddling, drifting, and camping. In the guidebook Paddle Routes of the Inland Northwest, I found a three day trip down the Flathead river through Flathead Indian reservation not far from where my parents live. We had a willing shuttle, a week vacation, a good canoe, a beer cooler, some camping gear. Smoked salmon, gouda cheese, some devilled chicken, some tequila...

SATURDAY -

I pack, drive to Yakima by way of the factory outlet mall and a few fruit stands. Tory is still working on a report for his job. He's no good at estimating how long it will take him to finish it. I perfect my technique for stuffing stuff sacks, managing to place two housecats and a sleeping bag in one.

SUNDAY -

We chuck the laptop (he's still not done with his report) into the truck, load the boat, and go. What I fear is going to be a death-march drive to Bigfork turns into a series of interesting stops with goals of dubious merit. Tory will stop at anything interesting, which makes him an ideal road tripper. Buy cardboard camera. Look for State Line, Idaho. Find a place that sells the biggest assortment of Gatorade. Stop at the 10,000 Silver Dollar truck stop and play video poker. Check out the cannon-firing at the Cataldo Mission's Heritage Days. We make it to Bigfork in time for dinner, and Tory finishes off his report.

MONDAY:

Pick up permits at the Bigfork hardware store. Get water, ice, more water, more ice. My cousin John, my dad, Tory and I head out to find Buffalo Bridge put-in. Mostly we find farms, no road signs, and lots of gravel. Drop off Tory and all the gear. I drive Tory's truck to Perma Bridge and ride back to Buffalo bridge with John and Dad. This takes three hours, and Tory cooks in the dry heat waiting for us. He is not in a good mood. (Better him than me, I think. He's from Yakima. I'd be dead by now, a sentiment that would have put him in a much worse mood.)

We push off, my dad and cousin watch to see if we bash into the bridge pilings. Our boat is loosely packed with our gear, and we look more ready for homesteading than camping. We have once again shown no restraint regarding what we are ready to take along in a big-ass boat.

Ah, finally. We're on the river, late in the afternoon, trees and shade and not-so-deep river bottom lined with round pebbles of varying shades of brown and orange. I stick my feet in the water and ignore Tory, who's still in a bad mood. I apologize, then think, hell with him. I know the mood will last a while. Yellow-headed blackbirds flit by. Swallows swoop for insects over our heads.

One beautiful potential campsite after another drift by. One with a gravel bar and a meadowy area under huge trees seems perfect so we pull the boat up. (Tory forgot his Tevas, so I get to do all the boat parking this trip. In exchange, I get to use his spoon and cup, which I forgot.)

Tory ambles off to take a bath in the river which puts him in a better mood. I put up my tent. I decide it's time to check out the area, and get stuck in ankle-deep black clay, falling several times so I have to not only wash up, but rinse the mud out of my overalls in the river. I'm dry in twenty minutes in the dry Montana air.

We make a nice dinner and watch as the stars come out. Tory marvels that he's never seen a night sky so well before... the Milky Way has more density, we spot little satellites zipping by and disappearing. The urge to find familiar constellations disappears... there are so many stars that it's pointless to do more than stare. We drink just the right amount of tequila and talk about idiotic topics like our digestion. Somehow it sounds profound. We have a nice cup of tea to go with the meteorites.

A toad sits on Tory's camoflage bivy sack and we look at it with a flashlight. It's small and perfect, and sits in the glare with no response coming to its mind. Evolution didn't provide it with an action to take when lit up by artificial light.

TUESDAY:

I paddle stern, Tory fishes from the bow. We drift along the bank. Fish leap here and there, but aren't interested in the fly Tory offers. The bird life is gorgeous and the iridescent blue damsel flies float around the gunwales. We see a beautiful spot and tie the boat up in the trees. We unload some food, fix some chili, unroll the camp mattresses and sleep off the hot part of the day.

The first third of the trip, before Sloan bridge, is the most scenic part, free of farms and range animals. The tree-lined banks have little grassy areas and look like a Constable painting. Past Sloan bridge, there is more evidence of cattle. Small herds drink at the river, stare cow-like at everything, take exception to the unexplained and blunder off in idiotic fashion. There are a few old homesteads and teepees. The second campsite we find turns out to be next to a boggy meadow trammelled by hooved animals, and damp enough to be populated with giant mosquitoes. On the river or in a breeze, they don't pester. On this particular site, they eat us alive. I pitch my tent under some low, dense trees, Tory rolls out his bivy bag, and we hide out from the bugs for a while until we muster the energy to cook.

Tory has a can of Crisco in his bag, which he uses to fry tortillas. We stack them and pour on salsa, avocado pieces, canned shrimp. When the feeding frenzy is over, I notice I am covered with bug bites. I down some tequila and retire to my tent and have a nice long sleep. We don't have the will to stay up late, but I am able to see a few stars from my tent.

WEDNESDAY -

We have more of our ubiquitous oatmeal for breakfast, pack up the cooler, and head out. We have a rudimentary map of the river and think we are heading for the 20 mile straight stretch that ends up at Perma bridge. Two Great grey owls sit in a tree and one flies away when we round the bend. We try taking pictures but the owl is too well hidden. Our wonderful sighting has us bothered for a while... when up on a snag a young Golden eagle watches us drift by. We try reversing our course and paddle into an eddy, to get another look (and maybe a picture) of the eagle, but it has vanished. Oh, well. At least we saw it at all. Around the bend, there is a fence post, and the eagle is sitting on it looking at us curiously, having gotten a bit ahead of us to check US out.

The glassy waters last a few hours, then we get into a head wind. As an experiment we stop paddling to see if we drift downstream with the river current, or upstream with the wind. To our misery, we are blown upstream, so we resume paddling.

Seeing Perma bridge is a mixed blessing. I want to stop the exhausting fight into the wind, but I want to camp out some more. Pulling into the eddy at the bridge, we wash up, put on clean clothes, load the truck, and head back to Bigfork. The small town of Dixon has a burger place that serves huckleberry ice cream and buffalo burgers, so we stop for lunch.

THURSDAY -

We head south to the Big Hole valley. This is probably one of the most beautiful places in the world and I managed to convince Tory that the very long drive was worth it. We pitch a camp in Wisdom at the American Legion park outside of town, walk into town, have dinner. I leave Tory in a bar and go back to listen to the singing of some kind of burrowing rodent in the vast range outside the fence of the campground. I've camped here before, so I climb into my tent, pile all my clothes on top of my sleeping bag, and try to bolster against the cold night.

FRIDAY -

I wake up and knock a quarter inch of ice off my tent and wipe the condensation off the inside of the tent. It's July, I remind myself. It's also 6,000 feet elevation, my map tells me. We drive to Jackson, not to be mistaken for Jackson Hole. Jackson has a population of about 40 people, but sports its own cyber-center at the old Oddfellows hall, a public access facility with two computers connected to an ISP in nearby Dillon, Montana. "Pete" Halazon (www.nobackroads.com click on Dillon) runs the place with grant money, and on occasion will put an eyeball-cam on the door frame to prove to people that indeed cattle do get driven down the middle of main street like in the westerns. She has new friends met on line coming to visit her from all over the world.

I run out of film in Idaho. I'm sort of sorry I didn't get pictures of the naked hikers (both of them men, and probably the types who wouldn't mind a picture at all) on the mile trail to Jerry Johnson hot springs. As we sit in the warm pools of water, a few other men with shovels come around to chat... they spend their summers as volunteers arranging the rocks around the pools at the hot springs. Didn't seem like such a bad way to live.

We make another nice camp on the Selway river. The moon is gone, we drink too much tequila, I go to the truck to get some things, fall in a hole clutching a towel and looking up at the stars through a tunnel in the trees. It's the kind of dark where you can open your eyes wide, let your eyes adjust and it's still so dark nothing registers. It's the kind of drunk where a clear-headed voice barks orders to the inebriated idiot how walking works. Maybe I'll die from hypothermia here in this hole if I fall asleep. Maybe a bear will eat me. Maybe a cougar. I stand up and still can't see a thing. I fall down again. A car goes by and the headlights momentarily reflect dimly on the tent. I stumble back through the blackness, through clumps of ferns to our camp to find tequila spilled in my tent and I'm so mad all I can do is tell Tory's sleeping form that a bear should eat him and I should just go find someone nicer who won't sleep while I'm sitting lost in a hole in darkest Idaho. He's dreaming of someone who's not me. I'm clutching a towel, thinking about bears eating him in his sleep.

SATURDAY -

We have a nice long talk over breakfast. He makes me double oatmeal which nearly makes up for the tequila-swashed tent. He's sorry he fell asleep while I was lost. I'm sorry I wished death by predators on him. We drive home across Eastern Washington, stopping in Dayton Washington for lunch. In a large old bar, we hear about John Kennedy's plane crash, which occupies our discussion for a while. We get back to Yakima, wash our clothes, the tent, the canoe. I wish we could repack and head out again.

SUNDAY -

I finish my drive to Seattle the way I started it, by way of the factory outlet mall in North Bend. At home when I go to bed, indoors, I don't like the feeling at all. Even the buggiest, coldest camping is better than sleeping indoors. I open my windows but it still doesn't seem like Montana. I scratch my bug bites and sleep.