Back on the Missouri

Six years ago, I spent a season up on Montana’s Missouri River, working at Headhunters Fly Shop as  “shop rat.” Days were spent staffing the chicken coop-come-fly shop, running shuttles for visiting guides and anglers, and—in rare moments off—exploring the Missouri and trying to discover the secrets of one of the most famous trout fisheries in the world.

It was a long, hot summer with its fair share of both adventures and misadventures (chronicled here in detail on ChiWulff’S Dispatches From Craig series). I learned a boatload (pun fully intended), carried my camera everywhere, managed my second bout with giardiasis, and slept on an old camping cot in a small studio apartment across from the post office in nearby Cascade, Montana. It was a summer of learning—I listened, I shot photos daily, and I wrote constantly. Really, all there was to do was fish, talk fishing, write, shoot, and anticipate my bi-monthly runs up to Great Falls for groceries.

It was awesome.

It’s been a long, weird road in the six years since that summer. Somehow I’ve now traveled to work on six continents, and photographed things I never would have dreamed of. I’ve walked the back entrance to Petra and slept outside in the Wadi Rum during a sandstorm. I’ve woken to a hippo in the middle of camp at midnight while on assignment in rural Kenya, and marveled at dangerously large night skies wheeling overhead on the northern edge of Australia. The adventures are there if you make them happen, and I’m forever grateful for the incredible people I meet along the way.

There’s something to be said for returning to the familiar places, though. This past weekend I headed up to Craig, to spend some time on the waters I’d learned the summer of ’13. Meeting me up at our old haunts was Jake Gates, who some of you may remember reading about over the years with his trout-savvy Border Collie Marley. Jake and I both worked the shop that summer, and when a skittish stray dog that no one claimed came into our lives, I don’t think either of us would have believed Marley would still be around six years later, still haunting Jake’s steps on the river.

Jake’s lovely parents were in town from Hawai’i, and his girlfriend Lynsey came along as well, crafting a fitting reunion on the banks of the Missouri. We fished for two days, talking about the old times and planning for new adventures (stay tuned… good things in the works!). The Missouri gave us the traditional late-season conditions—technical fish, windy weather and glorious scenery.

One night I sat crouched on the bank, camera held to my eye as I watched Jake cast at a pod of risers. The river behind him was changing from golden to shades of purple as the sun dropped below the horizon. Marley was hunkered not too far up the bank, her gaze fixed on the fish and following the drift of the dry flies with unerring intensity. The wind was whipping and the temperature dropping.

And it was grand.

I’d argue that you can’t really go home. (I don’t know where I’d call home anyway, these days.) But sometimes you can go back. And those moments are special.