After Mongolia

I read this paragraph in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times:

“From where I sit,” said Nancy Novogrod, the editor of Travel + Leisure, "traveling to Mongolia now is almost cliché. Last summer, it seemed like everybody was going to Mongolia. The bar keeps getting higher.”

The story is by Allen Salkin, and he gives a thoughtful account of the climate in which we travel.

It does little good to wish that our vacations were not merely another set of indicators, social markers that enter our conversations for the purpose of conferring status, as if one could display an experience like a brand.

In this overheated atmosphere, where any voyage less exotic than Melville’s Typee risks relegation to the lesser ranks of adventurers, the truly irrelevant among us must find our way, unaided, to other sorts of journeys.

Nearer, slower. Less distant, more peculiar.

Places both familiar and strange, to be enjoyed rather than consumed: around the corner, the end of the block, the top of the hill, the other side of the river.

Christmas in Vermont

According to old custom, newcomers to Vermont are called “flatlanders.” Because our family recently moved here from Montana, where the elevation of many riverbanks is a good deal higher than the peak of Mount Mansfield, I consider that a peculiar term. But, since I’m undeniably an outsider, I’ll save that discussion for another day.

This is not our first attempt to set up house here. In 1988, a few months before we left New England for the second time, we scanned the real estate ads with eager eyes, looking for anything within 30 miles of Woodstock that might prove affordable on a teacher’s salary.

As you might expect, we didn’t have much luck, although one enterprising agent did show us a derelict farmhouse with running water in the cellar. It was more of a brook, actually, and made a pleasant sound as it burbled through the foundation stones.

I was tempted by the prospect of flyfishing from the basement steps, but we couldn’t manage the mortgage. Even then, average property values near Woodstock were unrelated to average income.

Not that the place wouldn’t have made a good investment property. Although you can’t eat the scenery, there are plenty of folks willing to pay for it. By 2005, Woodstock’s median home value was $335,800, nearly twice the figure for Vermont as a state.

What do these residents get for their money? In December, it's the annual Wassail Parade: a cable-ready spectacle of horses, costumes, and costumed horses, in sizes from barndoor to wee beastie.

Still Burning Bright

I am partial to stories of people who triumph over long odds, writers who succeed after decades of rejection, no matter how small the triumph, how secret the success. Then, of course, there are the grand tales of genius unrecognized.

According to one authoritative website, the poet and engraver William Blake worked so hard that, for one two-year interval, he left his home only to "fetch his beer."


Whirlwind of Lovers (Illustration to Dante's Inferno) 
Birmingham Art Gallery

Blake’s work will repay your consideration many times over. Few clear memories remain of my visit to London in 1982, but I do remember reading these words on a page in the British Museum:

“Some say that happiness is not good for mortals, & they ought to be answered that sorrow is not fit for immortals & is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.”

Christmas in China

If you live in Shanghai, the scent of Christmas comes alloyed with that of diesel exhaust and fermented tofu. You won’t lack for Christmas lights or Christmas sales, and you can buy Christmas decorations exactly like those for sale in any North American discount chain at your local Carrefour.

But if, like our family, you can’t abide an artificial tree, and were disappointed by the peculiar selection of conifers at the flower market in Hongqiao or the landscaping center on Cao’an Lu, then His Royal Highness Prince Joachim of Denmark is your man.

Never mind the environmental impacts of shipping Danish trees to China. At this time of year, you really don’t want to ponder all the thorny issues of globalization.

What you need is the crisp odor of fresh-cut fir, the caress of branches as you hang your new ornaments, a scattering of needles on your living room floor.

Call Maggie at Shanghai Blue Fish Trading (021 5045 4088 or 135 6442 3727). I met her last December and was impressed with her efficiency. She’ll arrange for delivery to your home, and even pick up the weary twig when the season is over. Prices range from 490 to 2360 yuan, depending on size.

Shanghai Update

The Complete Residents Guide to Shanghai is now available at Amazon. My assignment included the chapter on exploring the city’s neighborhoods, parks, tourist attractions, and historical sites. Most of what appears on pp. 168–194 and 204–224 is my work.

If you're in China now or going soon, see my post for Friday, June 29, 2007, which describes our favorite route for circumnavigating the Bund.

Still Life with Water Buffalo

When I look away from my desk, I can see a red barn, a weathered split-rail fence, one green corner of the upper pasture, and the gray stones of a small cemetery. It’s a traditional postcard scene, and appeared at least once on the cover of the L.L. Bean catalog.

This morning a quick movement caught my eye: our Shanghai cat, proceeding up the hill with all due speed, a limp mouse clenched in his teeth. And behind him—four water buffalo, looking as if they had just escaped from a Balinese rice paddy instead of a nearby dairy.


I don’t know anything about the practicalities of raising water buffalo on granite hillsides, but can report that Woodstock Water Buffalo makes real mozzarella and a densely creamy yogurt.

It took three guys holding big sticks to chase the four animals into a trailer, a tricky task that I complicated further by trying to take pictures. From the few words exchanged, I learned that water buffalo are not only headstrong and powerful, but naturally curious and easily distracted. In the end I was instructed to hide behind a truck.

Halloween in Vermont

After living in Tokyo and Shanghai, our family knows how bizarre and attractive our American holidays can appear to other cultures. You dress up in costume and ask strangers for candy? And they smile when they give it to you? Happy Halloween indeed.

There is something characteristically American about the trust required to ask, and the generosity necessary to give. Not to mention the penchant for disguise and the taste for sweets.



This year we celebrated in Woodstock, Vermont. It’s a beautiful town, with a traditional village green, an elegant and expensive resort (the Woodstock Inn), and an unusually high density of gift shops, real estate agents, and art galleries.


The elementary school’s afternoon parade was well attended and exceptionally good-natured, with much admiration exchanged from both sides of the curb.

What the Man Said

"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks." —Daniel Boone

The Limits of Landscape

Last week, looking north from Vermont’s Mount Ascutney, I really didn’t know what I was seeing. There were trees with leaves, trees with names that are hardly mentioned in Montana: maple, beech, ash, oak, and hornbeam.



From above, the landscape looked cozy and inhabited, with quilted patches of woodlot and pasture. It was a pleasant perspective, without the constant reproach of “No Trespassing” that I experience on the ground here.

Open space is better than urban sprawl, but I’ve been spoiled by Montana’s 32 million acres of public land—more than five times the area of the entire state of Vermont. An unfair comparison, I know, but consider these more impartial statistics: public land accounts for almost 35% of Montana, but only 8% of Vermont. No wonder I feel hemmed in.

Many locals seem to cultivate a healthy sense of ownership that extends far beyond the boundaries of their personal property. As a newcomer, I'm not there yet.

Meditation and Metaphor

On my last day in Ulaanbataar, suffering from a spectacular abscess on my back, I walked to the Gandan Monastery. Like many monasteries throughout Mongolia, it was partially destroyed during the Soviet era, while its monks were forced out of service, jailed, or killed. This standing image of the Bodhisattva of Compassion—almost 90-feet tall, cast in copper, and covered with gold—was completed in 1996, a half-dozen years after the Soviet departure.

As a personal metaphor, an abscess takes the cake: a festering from within, a little haven of infection that your body nurtures and grows.

Slightly delirious with pain, I entered the Dechengalpa Datsan, where the monks awaited their noon meal. They sat on raised platforms, with their shoes attending faithfully behind them, a sundry assortment of sandals, athletic shoes, and cavalry boots.

In their chants I could hear a blend of the mature and the childish; some of the robed figures looked as young as seven or eight. In the air I could scent the faint tang of sandalwood.


Each monk received a flat oblong of bread on which was piled a package of cookies, another of candy, and then a layered procession of other small snacks. I watched, straight-backed on a low bench, famished and grateful.

More about Mongolia

One of the things I dislike about the New York Times’ travel magazine, T: Style (I mean, other than their disregard for my work) is its focus on getting and spending. They even call one of their regular departments “The Get.”

According to the Fall 2007 issue, “Greenland is the new Mongolia,” which means, I suppose, that Mongolia has been officially relegated to “last year” among travel destinations. As it happens, I did go last year, to work as a flyfishing guide for Mongolia River Outfitters. I returned this year, to the same magnificent—and therefore threatened river—along with scientists from the Taimen Project, the World Wildlife Fund, and a crew from AEG Media, also known as the Trout Bums.



Last year, I was able to bottle what I learned into a single story, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal. This year, the confusion has so far resisted all of my attempts at distillation.

Chatav Ectabit's own website

I posted a long story about Chatav Ectabit, a creative partnership between my brother Cliff Fong and Sandy Dalal, over a couple of weeks in April and May 2007 (see archive). In a world where fashion—according to author Dana Thomas has “sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers,” their clothing provides a thoughtful remnant of luxury.

Shanghai, revisited

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I wrote most of a chapter for Explorer Publishing’s Complete Residents' Guide to Shanghai. Most of what appears on pp. 168–194 and 204–224 is my work. As far as I can tell, the full Residents' Guide is not yet available at Amazon.com, but you can order the Shanghai Mini Explorer, due out this month.

Home from Mongolia

Now that the taimen season has ended in Mongolia, I’m back in Vermont sifting through notes and photographs. After each long day on the river, I didn’t read as much as usual, but two books deserve your attention.



David Malouf’s novel, An Imaginary Life, offers the sort of sentences that you’ll quote to yourself in times of trouble, such as: “What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitted perfectly to another, and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business with nets and hooks, these old analogies.”

The other book, Harry Middleton’s The Earth is Enough, was taken on loan from an old friend. It’s nominally about flyfishing but rather more concerned with family, and memory, and the escape from memory. I found it frustrating to read, almost maddeningly in need of a close edit, and peculiarly moving.

Gone fishing

For the next five weeks, I’ll be working in the headwaters of the Amur River in northern Mongolia. If you’re curious about this odd interval of good luck, visit the website of Mongolia River Outfitters.

“Anyone would think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on writing, but it hasn’t amounted to much.” –Philip Larkin

Looking Back

10,000 copies of Explorer Publishing's guide to Shanghai will be given away to registered attendants at September's Expat Show. I wrote the chapter on exploring the city, which was a bit like writing a condensed version of War and Peace. If I neglected your favorite spot, please post a comment here.

For a good read, set in Shanghai, try Qiu Xiaolong’s When Red Is Black. If you’ve lived there in past decade, you’ll find plenty of illuminating detail about the city. If you haven’t, you’ll still enjoy the distracted manner in which Inspector Chen, the poet of the police bureau, solves this case.

Yellowstone yet again

As artist-in-residence, I curated an exhibit at the Madison Museum: letters from three eras of Yellowstone visitors (on foot, by horse-drawn carriage, and by automobile), a range of writing implements from the quill pen to the laptop computer, and a display of photographs by Mode Wineman, taken while he was a member of Calvin Coolidge’s party, in 1927.

I also wrote letters every day, to family and friends, and hung a different one on the wall each morning alongside the historical artifacts. It was fun to watch tourists come across the new letter amidst the old ones, then glance around guiltily as they realized that the personal details they were reading corresponded with a person who was living in the same moment as themselves. Twice my own letters were stolen from the museum, which I considered a gratifying critical response.

Here’s the most important sentence from the first recorded letter mentioning the Yellowstone region, from trapper Daniel Potts to his brother in Philadelphia, July 8, 1827 (courtesy Yellowstone National Park Archives):

“Write me immediately on the receipt of this . . . giving me the price of Beaver.”

More about Yellowstone

Like almost every former Yellowstone employee, I think of the park as a shrine and a haven. I worked there as a fishing guide and a woodcutter many years ago, then returned in 1994 as the Moran artist-in-residence. The following story was a runner-up for the Robert Traver Award, and appeared in the September/October 1997 issue of Fly Rod & Reel.


Letter from Yellowstone

I remember Yellowstone in 1978 the way the snake remembers Eden: like a good dream shortchanged, heaven in flames, a paradise ruined through my own corruption. So you of all people should understand why I have to go back every year. You knew Laurie then, loved her too, I suppose, though we never spoke of it, never negotiated the right or honest approach to love. You stood beside me on the sun-warmed dock at Grant Village, in our Y. P. Company uniforms, and watched her dive into Yellowstone Lake to swim with the otters, the water barely fifty degrees in July. And you watched her bite the head off a wriggling twelve-inch cutthroat and casually spit the head into a bucket, the way an ordinary person might spit out a watermelon seed. And you watched her climb the last few hundred feet of Avalanche Peak in a lightning storm, then dare us to follow her by flying her shirt from one outstretched arm, like a signal flag. You might even have married her had I not been desperate enough to quit the best job of my life three weeks early to drive with her to New Jersey for her sister’s wedding. But after sixty-four hours in a borrowed Volkswagen, listening to her rave about the splendor of rugby and the sanctity of marriage and tarpon on a fly, I forgot all about friendship. When it was my turn to drive, I spent most of the time stealing sidelong glances at the passenger seat, admiring the play of headlights in her hair, watching her face grow softer with sleep, and making plans to transfer three years of credits to the university in her hometown, Missoula.

And now she’s gone to Costa Rica with some Orvis-endorsed guide from Livingston, to stalk permit on the flats and—as she says—to wander her options. Isn’t it sad that after fifteen years of more-or-less congenial divorce, it still hurts that she didn’t ask me first? It’s been that kind of summer in Missoula: a late June frost, then an early August one. The tomatoes turned directly from green to black, and the snap beans produced only one meager crop. I couldn’t seem to find time for the river, or when I did was so frantic to catch trout that I pulled the fly from their mouths. Laurie’s phone call raised a welt like one of those interstate bees that crashes into your bare forearm at highway speed, bumbles weakly inside the cab for a few seconds, then recovers just enough to sting you under the chin before escaping into the slipstream. She was cheerful as always, as sure of her good intentions as on that April morning when she announced that she’d bought a house in Livingston, and would be moving there with Marina the following week, and that it would probably be easier on me if I didn’t help them pack. I put down the phone and walked to the Clark Fork to catch my breath. At the confluence with the Bitterroot, two sandhill cranes lumbered over the bare-limbed cottonwoods—necks up, legs down—struggling like swimmers past their depth.

I haven’t recovered. For fifteen years, I’ve been trying not to prepare for the death of hope. Every few months we have a family dinner at Chico Hot Springs or Sir Scott’s Oasis. Every August we fish together on a favorite stretch of the Madison just inside the park boundary, and on those river days I can almost forget that we share only a family history—no present, no future, no geography. But her recent cheerfulness had a new lilt, an unnerving musicality that reminded me of our honeymoon in Alaska, the note of triumph as she’d set the hook in a steelhead bright from Prince William Sound: I’ve got a fish. I was already facing the prospect of winter without my stock of beans canned with dill weed and jalapeños, without trout in the freezer, without tomatoes dried on the picnic table and bottled in olive oil. If Laurie was in love again, and not with me, then where was I to go?

So I called Marina, the daughter we named after the old boatyard at Grant Village, a sophomore now at Montana State and seasonal waitress at Roosevelt Lodge, where you and I used to sit in the big rockers with our feet on the porch rail, sipping gin drinks and looking out over the sagebrush until the smell of barbecued ribs and baked beans almost overcame us. I asked her to meet me at Chico on Friday night so that we could drive into the park together, and she agreed with all of the cheerfulness inherited from her mother, and then I closed my eyes and saw two twenty-year-old shadows close together under the lodgepole pines: the shadow that might have been you, and the shadow that almost certainly was Laurie, her face lifted for a kiss.

Arrived Chico at midnight Friday, bearing two hundred miles of hunger and a hectic month’s worth of exhaustion. The kitchen had closed promptly at ten, and the dining room staff had just finished eating the last of the night’s unordered desserts. They looked pleased with their work—and only mildly apologetic. Happily, Marina and her friends had saved a few morsels from their plates, wrapped in aluminum foil fashioned into the shapes of swans. A medallion of beef, a sliver of venison, four miniature spears of asparagus, the wing and breast of a quail.

That held me to morning. After breakfast, we turned south underneath Emigrant Peak and headed for the park, Marina beside me in the pickup and a present from her affixed to the inside of the windshield—an employee’s entrance pass, silhouette of a white pelican beneath the word Yellowstone. As we hit the curves for Yankee Jim Canyon, I felt that familiar dizzy feeling—a sort of vertigo almost—when the truck seems to be rolling downhill, while the road is most definitely moving uphill, against the falling river. I only feel that way in two places: on Highway 191 from the Gallatin Gateway to West Yellowstone, and on U.S. 89, from Livingston to Gardiner. Perhaps it’s because I know that I’ll soon be in the park, a sort of premeditated giddiness that goes along with any return to a beloved place or person.

On that day the Yellowstone was running dirt-brown from a thunderstorm in the Lamar Valley and the sky was filled with pelicans, wheeling like oversized gulls in a great flock above the road. We craned our necks to see them as they passed over the windshield, their enormous wings flashing silver against the blue. They seemed drunk with flight, with the power to float unhindered on thin air. When we reached the stone arch outside the north entrance, a pronghorn skipped across the pavement as if possessed with that same power, each long leap more like a prelude to flight than an earthbound gait, the whole meadow like a runway.

I was sorry that you weren’t there, really I was. Sorry that you couldn’t feel the insane satisfaction it gave me to pass through the gate with an employee’s sticker on my windshield. To shift into second gear for the twisting climb to Mammoth that we made so many times with Laurie between us. Each switchback in that road was like a pleasant surprise—a surprise because I had memories for each one, and a pleasure because I remembered.

We fished Slough Creek that afternoon, taking turns with the one rod that I brought from Missoula, an old five-weight with a willowy mid-section that’s just right for daydreaming your way through a reach of pools and riffles. I dropped Marina at Roosevelt in time for her evening shift, then headed south towards Lake Hotel, brimful with the good fortune that is my daughter.

On the way up Dunraven, I got caught behind a motor yacht trolling for scenery at a leisurely fifteen knots. Instead of trying to pass, I laid off the accelerator and rolled down the windows. The hillsides below the summit of Mount Washburn were already tinged with the red of autumn. At eight thousand feet, the air smelled of fall, crisp and cool and faintly dusty, without the scent of growing things. To the east: the hulks of Druid Peak and the Thunderer glowering in the smoke of a late-season fire. To the south: forests of pine and fir like a ragged pelt on the flanks of the mountain, meadow grass gone golden with August, the Yellowstone River meandering through the Hayden Valley, and, creeping alongside the river, the glint of aluminum travel trailers in the setting sun.

Their sheepish procession reminded me of another day of fishing with Marina, on a stretch of the Madison that runs alongside the highway to West Yellowstone, when she was still in diapers and her mother still kissed me awake in the mornings. It was a warm, breezy afternoon and I was wading wet, flipping a big caddis nymph into the deep runs, while Marina watched over my shoulder from the safety of the baby pack. As we worked our way downstream, a cow elk walked out into the water below us, her neck and ears twitching with flies. She dipped her muzzle in the water, tossed her head at the shimmery surface, scratched at her neck with one sharp hoof. In minutes, the road was lined shoulder to shoulder with license plates from Illinois and Washington and California. Camera shutters shirred like locusts. The cow took a couple of prancing steps toward the far bank and shook with annoyance. Marina and I turned our backs to the crowd and kept fishing. I heard a splash nearby and to the right, like the swirl of a trout, and pivoted on the mossy rocks. Did you hear that? I asked her. Was that a fish? No, she said, then fell silent. I cast, letting the fly drift under a bathtub-sized patch of river weed and into a dark hole of water.

I was picking up the fly to cast again when Marina whimpered: My sandal. I repeated the word dumbly—sandal, sandal—before remembering the nearby splash. I reached behind me and tickled her right foot. It was bare. When I finally looked downstream, her sandal was bobbing twenty yards away and gaining speed, on a collision course with a fully grown and fully aggravated cow elk. I tried a couple of quick shuffling steps in that direction, then sent the fly out after it. But the beloved sandal was a small, rapidly dwindling target that changed course with each little finger of current. I threw a couple of big mends into the line and still missed by a foot. Marina’s whimpering was more insistent now—Get sandal, get sandal. I took another look at the elk and decided she wouldn’t much appreciate two humans churning downstream into her bath. So I made for shore and the camera-wielding tourists, charged up the bank, then shouldered my way onto the path that parallels the river. The wind was blowing up and across the current, slowing the sandal’s progress enough for us to pull ahead, but also angling it into the deeper water midstream. Fifty yards behind the elk, I picked a gravelly spot and splashed in. The river was belt high. Frightened trout fled for cover as we thrashed through ribbons of weed. My feet had just reached the lip of a dark trough when the sandal floated into arm’s reach. I leaned over and gathered it in like a catcher pulling an outside pitch back towards the strike zone. Marina thrust her hands into the air and cheered loud enough to turn a few cameras from the elk. I cheered too. The nearest onlookers gave us those benign and disconnected smiles that most folks reserve for fools and crazy people. But what did we care? We were flush with success, proud conspirators in a small but significant victory.

I remember wishing that Laurie could have been there to share it, but she had decided to work upstream with a brace of dry flies, toward the junction of the Gibbon and the Firehole, and later only rubbed Marina’s head in a distracted sort of way when we tried to describe the scene. Then she asked about you, wondered aloud why you never wrote, and said that she could never come to the park without thinking of that summer we met.

Hard to believe that we came here in 1978 with nothing but our fly rods and a jar of tartar sauce, two college roommates from Philadelphia, babes in the woods. Is it guilt that makes me scan the faces at every fishing hole and geyser basin, looking for the wisps of blond hair feathered shyly over those raptor’s eyes, your shoulders hunched slightly, as if preparing for flight? I looked for you in the fall of 1982, when a September snow blanketed our favorite camp at Heart Lake; in the smoke of 1988, when that tangle of lodgepoles upstream from Tower Falls burned right to the bank; and in the drought of 1994, when the river showed its bones—smooth black rock and water-polished deadfalls left gleaming three feet above the ordinary water line.

If you had been here then you would’ve noticed the changes. The marina at Grant Village is long gone, only the two breakwaters to remind you of otters swimming sleekly from dock to dock. The tackle store where Laurie played cashier is now a waterfront steak house, and the meadow above the lake has been replaced with a hotel and restaurant complex, where you can order herbed chicken breasts and chilled Chardonnay. Our favorite stretch of the Yellowstone River, above Tower Falls, has become a certified hot spot, recommended at fly shops and touted in guidebooks. On a typical summer day the parking lot overflows with rental cars and motor homes for at least a hundred yards uphill of the Hamilton store, forcing traffic to a crawl. The trail to the base of the falls has been redone with post-and-pole fences to keep over-enthusiastic sightseers from cutting switchbacks. What you might remember as a claustrophobic stand of lodgepoles crisscrossed with down timber is now mostly open, with tremendous views of sulfur-tinged canyon walls and blue-green water. There are no longer enough shadows to hide the bears that we imagined lurked in wait for college students, and no longer enough privacy to entice those students to roast trout on a stick over a small, smoky fire. There are still a few trees left, of course, as well as some charred snags and tangles of wild roses, but a two-foot wide path now parallels the bank for miles upstream. At every obvious pool, other paths split off the main trail and head for the river’s edge. The last time I walked it, the water seemed as blank and lifeless as a mirror. I would cast, the fly would drift aimlessly with the current, no trout would move to break the surface, then I would cast again.

I let that pattern of failure repeat itself for several hours, thinking of Laurie gone and the trout too, thumbing through my book of failings like a sorry preacher with his Testament, snatching the fly from the water lest a fish hook itself and break the spell. As had become my habit in the months after Laurie took Marina with her to Livingston, I told myself that I deserved every blow that bad luck could deliver, that I had no right to expect something good to come from the way I’d acted, although of course something had. Did you know that I was in love with her—not afterwards, I’m sure that you guessed afterwards—but before? On that night of her farewell party, that night when I saw the two of you underneath the lodgepoles, just beyond the reach of the firelight, when I announced that I suddenly needed to go back to Philadelphia and would catch a ride with Laurie if she didn’t mind? What matters, I suppose, is that I knew—or thought I knew—that you loved her, and that I waded in anyway, and now that river has washed me here, a thin stick of dead wood drifting in the current.

I continued to flog myself with those thoughts all that long afternoon, and to flail pointlessly at the water, until at last a little gray caddis flew up underneath my sunglasses and I had to stop to wipe my eyes. After that, I could no longer ignore the hordes of caddis on the bankside willows and thickets of wild rose. I tied on a caddis emerger and turned back downstream, this time paying attention to all the little pockets and eddies that others might overlook. I lingered a while in each one, steering the fly through the deeper cuts and then slowly raising it to the surface, like a swimmer nonchalantly looking for air. More often than not, the shadow of a trout rose after it—looming into view like a ribbon of gold in the green water. No monsters came to the fly, but the action was steady and the fish beautiful—with sleek flanks and a certain firmness you could feel in your hands, a limber strength that trout raised in warmer, slower water can’t pretend to own.

Back at the confluence of Tower Creek and the Yellowstone, I looked longingly at the sharp, steep bend in the canyon wall, no trail visible in the soft earth. Since the river was low, I figured I could sneak along the ankle-deep ledge and get downstream to the more lightly fished water. But the afternoon sun was wearing on into evening, and the back of my throat was dust-dry, and the image of a double-dip ice cream cone suddenly appeared in my head and remained there, perfectly frozen. I snipped off the tattered emerger, stowed my reel in a vest pocket, and started up the hill.

On the canyon rim, two mighty tour buses had just pulled into the parking lot and disgorged their charges. The trail was flooded with tourists: mothers, fathers, children, grandmothers. Judging from the conversation, they were mostly Americans, though I also caught snatches of accented English that reminded me how little I know of the world. Inside the Hamilton store, the line for ice cream wound up and down the aisles like a New Year’s parade. I swallowed hard, and bought a six-pack instead.

Drank dinner last night in the high-ceilinged lobby at Lake Hotel, gazing out the picture window while a string quartet sawed away at the evening. Do you remember the time some park service employees dug a charcoal pit in the gravel beach near Fishing Bridge, buried a whole pig in the hot coals, then got too drunk to eat and just left the carcass roasting in the sand? By the time we stumbled onto the scene, only a half-dozen stout souls were still awake, lounging against two unopened cases of barbecue sauce while the stars spun in their orbits. I can still see you and Laurie pulling the succulent meat from the bones, as soft and sweet as cotton candy, while white-winged pelicans ghosted across the full moon like pterodactyls.

For some reason, that memory made it impossible for me to eat or sleep. I lay awake all night remembering how happy we felt, how impossibly lucky to roam the beach of Yellowstone Lake under a full moon in July and catch the scent of keg beer and slow-cooked meat. At that time I thought that it had everything to do with the three of us together, but now I recall that Laurie had rousted us from our beds after midnight, just to share the moon, and neither one of us could resist her.

In the morning, I checked out before breakfast and drove southwest along the lake shore, then turned west along the Grand Loop Road to cross and recross the continental divide. A cold front had blown the smoke out of the park and the western horizon looked sharp and blue. I fought the urge to turn in at Old Faithful for a bloody mary at the Bear Pit, stopping instead at the Lower Geyser Basin, taking the bridge over the Firehole and making my way through the crowds to the end of the boardwalk. As I peered into the crater of Fountain Geyser, an old man in a soft canvas hat, a disposable camera dangling from his leathery neck, croaked It’s gonna blow. Sure enough, several standing waves appeared in the turquoise pool, then a tidal surge, and then the sky filled with steam and water, great blasts that frothed thirty feet into the air, splashed onto a floodplain of white sinter, then ran downslope to pool about the hooves of grazing bison. Above the slosh and grumble of the geyser, I could hear the shouts of children, cheering with each burst of water as if they were riding in the front seat of a rollercoaster. For a moment, I wished that Marina was small again, riding in the backpack with her warm arms around my neck, until I remembered the deft motion with which she unhooked a sixteen-inch rainbow without lifting it from the water, then stood straight-backed again and smiling, a loop of line already rising into the air. Maybe next year, I thought, we would take our own trip south—to Belize maybe, or the southern Yucatan—we’d even invite Laurie, if she wanted to go, and I could watch the two of them stalk bonefish and marvel at both the one who used to love me and the one who always will.

By the time the geyser roared itself dry again, I was hungry. I drove straight into West Yellowstone and bought a bag of cocktail shrimp, a hunk of blue cheese, a loaf of sourdough bread, and a flask of bourbon. I spent the rest of the afternoon prospecting the Madison, fishing offhandedly upstream until I encroached on another angler or strayed too far from the bourbon and the shrimp chilling in the cooler. By sunset, I had worked my way to within a mile of the junction, where the river meanders weedily through a broad meadow of sedge and thistles. As soon as I parked the truck, two cow elk and their calves crossed the river above me and bent their necks to graze. I had an hour of twilight left and knotted a black marabou fly as long as my thumb to the leader. Big fish or no fish. I dropped the fly alongside the shadowed banks and inched it leechlike towards the main current; flipped it behind boulders and under deadfalls; cast it into the current and pulsed it back towards the bank. No sign of trout. As I splashed through a backwater to the next bend, a ten-inch rainbow fled before me, pushing a small wake that creased the fading light. Twenty yards farther downstream, a frightened minnow skittered into the air and fell back again. I watched for the telltale swirl of a big brown but saw nothing, gave the pool a couple dozen careful casts just in case. Still nothing. I stood in the middle of what seemed like a lifeless pool while the water broke behind my knees and rejoined below them, a soft sound that I suddenly wished would drown the endless thrum of cars on the road to West Yellowstone, travelers turned away from the park’s chockfull hotels, or employees out for a night on the town. I fished hard for a while, casting steadily, moving two steps downstream with each cast. The dark crept into the water first, so that slick moss and shallow gravel and shoulder-deep holes all began to look dimly alike. The rush of engines grew louder and the glare of headlights brighter. I snipped the fly from my tippet and wound the leader onto the reel. When I shuffled at last to shore, the elk had worked in behind me. If you will forgive me, I thought, I will abstain from fishing tomorrow, and from catching and killing fish, and forgo the satisfaction of watching that delicate orange meat of a Yellowstone cutthroat flake from the bones. The nearer cow picked up her head and turned her big ears toward my sigh. Not the worried, ready-to-bolt look of elk in hunting season, but a gesture of interest. Her calf took two bouncing steps then melted in behind her, aligning legs with her mother’s so that they seemed to become a single alert and yet unconcerned animal. I spoke to them, quiet reassurances and words of small praise. They were beautiful. A half-mile upstream, I could see the bleached shell of the pickup glowing in the pale light of the moon.

Looking Forward

In mid-month we set out for Maine, leaving Montana as parched as it has ever been in July, the rivers too warm to fish.

We took with us our ice skates and our winter clothes, two bicycles, a turkey call, and a circular saw. Also our noisy, bent-tailed cat, fresh off the plane from China, who had become very much attached to Montana after just a few weeks of mouse hunting in our ungrazed pasture. He mourns his loss daily, hours of low- and high-pitched keening, which reverberates from the car windows like the sufferings of souls in hell.

The warm weather limits our visits to parks, diners, and other roadside attractions, because it is too hot to leave the cat in the car. But we drove through Yellowstone from west to east, and made a quick tour of the boardwalks that surround Fountain Paint Pots and Clepsydra Geyser, where I once taught a writing workshop as the Moran artist-in-residence.

For dinner along Interstate 90, we can recommend the Winchester in Buffalo, Wyoming (117 Highway 16 East, 307-684-8636), which offers good steak dinners and an iconic chicken pot pie, and warn against Emiliano’s in Appleton, Wisconsin (3025 West College Avenue, 920-739-6186), where the linguine was overcooked, the pizza bland, and the salt shaker must have fallen into the lasagna.

Before I Went

After two years in Shanghai, I'm back in Montana. But, only temporarily, as the mail reminds me. Another letter from an editor, expressing regret, for not publishing a story that I wrote just before leaving here in 2005. This piece was written on assignment, lost in a shuffle of editors at one magazine, landed (safely, I thought) at another, then fell from the calendar like a leaf from a beech, tenacious but not, in the end, enough.

[Note: This piece, much revised and now retitled "When You Must Go," is forthcoming in the May 2013 Gray's Sporting Journal.]

Before You Go

What will you do when your time runs short? Let's say three months—and you're out. Not dead exactly, but gone away from the landscape you love. Gone from Montana.

. . .

Which, in fewer days than I dare to count, will become our former home. Not permanently, but for at least two years, and perhaps longer. In the metropolis where we will soon take up residence, everything will be different: the faces, the food, even the language. I am decidedly not looking forward to the move but am admittedly fascinated by the dislocation.

. . .

Perhaps that's why my next excursion had nothing to do with hunting or fishing. I wanted something to shake me up, a destination where I could not hide behind the familiar cloaks of silence and solitude. Mark Twain found an enthusiastic audience in this city's Grand Opera House—"compact, intellectual, and dressed in perfect taste"—while Jack Kerouac wrote that his whole concept of On the Road "changed and matured" there.

On the weekend of my visit, the same town, though not perfectly desolate, appeared so unpopulated that my eyes were drawn to any agglomeration of people: a foursome of travel writers laughing beside a rental car, a throng of grim-faced men quitting the Independent Order of Odd Fellows' Hall, a girl's 400-meter relay team in the window of the Uptown Café, each with a plate of chicken cacciatore.

This was Butte, of course, and the object of my pilgrimage was the M&M. Sam Martin and William Mosby opened the landmark saloon in 1890. Until just a few years ago, its only recorded closure had occurred in 1989, when the flow of alcohol was interrupted for two hours during a gambling raid orchestrated by an attorney general named Marc Racicot. Kerouac paid his respects in February of 1949, after checking his bag in a bus-station locker. He called it "the end of my quest for the ideal bar."

There was a time, as a childless couple in Missoula, when my wife and I truly enjoyed going to bars. We would lean our bicycles against a downtown parking meter and, depending on the mood, proceed from the Rhino to the Iron Horse, from the Bodega to the Boardroom, from Charlie's to Al and Vic's. At the end of the evening, suitably primed, we would ride no-hands along the leafy streets, a trick that I was too stiff to perform sober. Since those years, we also have changed and matured. We have children now, for instance, as well as mortgages: two of each.

Our third-grader, a daughter, accompanied me to the M&M. We enjoyed breakfast there one morning, then went back the next for a beer (me) and a Shirley Temple (not me). After a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and a Hollywood makeover, the M&M is nothing like it was in bygone days. Kerouac described "hundreds of men play[ing] cards in an atmosphere of smoke and spittoons" and declared that, on a Sunday night, in sub-zero weather, "everyone in Butte was drunk."

In Wim Wenders' 2005 film, "Don't Come Knocking," the M&M is transformed into a coffee shop, with Jessica Lange as its sober owner. I haven't seen it (who can find time for Cannes these days?), but Wenders' website bills it as "a farce, a family story, a road movie." Which means, I suppose, that the plot should resemble our daily lives—if our daily lives include entanglements with Sam Shepard and Eva Marie Saint.

The actual owners, though new to the business, are not new to Butte. Bud Walker is a county commissioner and self-described "Butte rat." Both he and his wife Vina stood behind the bar on the days we stopped by. The atmosphere was subdued, with not much smoke and absolutely no spittoons. In an interview with the Montana Standard, Bud remembers the M&M as "a security blanket." And that's what it felt like to me.

Behind the stainless steel façade—an Art Deco embellishment of the original brick—the talk was of education and politics, history and real estate. For example, did you know that Butte once boasted more than a dozen newspapers, including at least three dailies, as well as the Croatian World and Montana Socialist? Or that, two decades before statehood, by official census, the population of Montana territory was no less than ten percent Chinese? Or that the lot now occupied by a franchise pizza parlor was once home to Blonde Edna's House of Ill Repute?

To my mind, such stories are as integral to the Montana landscape as sagebrush and riverbeds. I cannot set foot in a high meadow without scanning the grass for elk sign, nor can I approach the water without searching for riffles and seams. In Butte, no matter how I try to locate myself in the here and now, I can't stop myself from contemplating the past.

The ghosts are everywhere: in a jumble of dusty adding machines, or an array of tinsmith's tools; in a faded sign painted on dry brick, and in the warm dank air that wafts from the mouth of the Orphan Girl Mine, 2700 feet deep. For some reason, I find the ghost signs particularly affecting. I don't know why they should seem any more emblematic than all the other artifacts of lost commerce: the black iron headframes, or the cracked glass of the Mai Wah Noodle Parlor, or the rising, purplish waters of the Berkeley Pit. But they do.

Looking out the ballroom windows of the Finlen Hotel, modeled after New York's Hotel Astor, you can see the mark of the friendly Miners Union Bar. The bar is long gone, and what few miners remain toil in a non-union shop. But there is something jaunty about the sign, defiant even, as if the present burden were no more than a veil.

It cheered me just to see it, in the same way that a sincerely sad song can lift you from despair. Our absence, after all, will be no more permanent than labor solidarity, a vein of copper, or the red-gold flash of a western tanager. With any luck, we'll be back with eyes hungry for the familiar and the changed, with far-fetched stories of far-off places, and with a fresh appreciation of the word urban.

If it is possible to make a career of itinerancy, we must be at least halfway there. Montana has never been our exclusive residence, only our favorite and most steadfast home. In spite of my sniveling, there can be no homecomings without leave-takings, no departures without returns. I am looking forward to this flight.

But first, I think I'll go back to the M&M. Not for the last time, but one more time, on the way to the airport if need be, one more slow beer safe behind that old façade, a tonic against homesickness, a fortification against forgetting.