Late summer is thick with memories of the outdoors

By Chester Allen | The Olympian • Published September 04, 2008

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When I was a kid — probably in 1974 or so — I found myself jammed into a tiny sweatbox of a theater to watch a movie about surfing.

“Five Summer Stories” took all of us on a journey to crazy surf destinations — as only a movie made in 1972 could do. So, what does this all have to do with fishing?

Well, “Five Summer Stories” was the first time I realized that we all have outdoors stories.

Here are my Five Late-Summer Stories:

1. South Sound’s Deschutes River flowed low and clear, and it was easy to see the big, dark salmon hovering over a big patch of clean gravel dug from the riverbed.

The chinook were black and red — with spots of fuzzy white fungus on their bodies. Death was near — after laying thousands of eggs for the next generation of fish.

I got on my hands and knees — waders are expensive but catching fish is the idea here — and crawled toward a deep, greenish run below the spawning salmon. I tied a barbless hook on my leader, added an egg fly, cinched on a nontoxic split shot and lobbed a cast into the water.

I could see the egg fly glowing in the shallow water as it slid into the deeper, greenish water. Bright flashes of light — they looked like miniature flash bulbs going off underwater — lit up the green water. A pod of egg-eating cutthroat trout were fighting for my fly.

2. That little lake near my house steamed in the early morning light. The cold air touching the warm water created a thin, rising fog that made the lake’s surface look like a dry-ice fog on a stage.

My popping bug — black with yellow rubber legs and big, boogly eyes — landed next to a bed of lily pads with a meaty splat.

I let the bug sit on the glassy water for a few seconds — and then gave the flyline a short tug. The bug burbled on the surface.

A few feet away, the lily pads started to shiver. I popped the bug again, and the lily pads leading to the bug moved as a bass hiding under the pads began tracking my fly.

I popped the bug again.

3. The barnacle-crusted gravel crunched and grated beneath my feet as I walked a South Sound beach. Buried clams squirted water in the air as I approached the water.