The John Day is one of the longest undammed rivers left in the country, which is a fact that sounds noble right up until you are standing in it in the middle of August. Undammed also means nobody upstream is releasing cold water to make your afternoon pleasant. The river runs low and warm and clear through a basalt canyon in eastern Oregon where the hills are the color of a paper bag, the sagebrush smells like the inside of a spice drawer, and the only shade for eleven miles belongs to one juniper that is already occupied.
What the river has instead of comfort is smallmouth bass, in numbers that stop being impressive and start being funny. They are not big. Anybody who tells you they went to the John Day for a trophy is telling you something else. A twelve inch fish is a good one, a sixteen is a story, and the thing you are actually buying is the sheer relentlessness of it. Every seam, every basalt ledge, every submerged car-sized rock has one on it, and they hit a popper with the enthusiasm of a dog hearing a bag of chips open across the house.
We floated two days out of Clarno in a borrowed drift boat with a cooler that was doing most of the emotional labor. There is no cell service in the canyon and no reason to want any. You see chukar running along the rimrock, a few mule deer standing in the willows pretending to be invisible, one bull snake sunning on a gravel bar that caused a brief and undignified reorganization of the boat, and almost nobody else. In two days we passed three other boats and a man on a paddleboard who appeared to be genuinely lost and seemed content about it.
The trick, if there is one, is patience about the hours. Midday in that canyon is a punishment. The fish go sullen, the wind comes up the canyon and pushes the boat sideways, and everybody has an argument with the sunscreen. So you eat lunch in the water, wait it out, and start fishing again around five when the shadow of the west wall finally reaches across the river and the whole thing turns on like somebody flipped a switch. From that moment until dark it is a fish nearly every cast, and the arm you are casting with begins filing grievances.
The best one came about four minutes before we lost the light, off a ledge in maybe three feet of water, and it jumped four times and came in fatter and darker than anything else all weekend. Somebody put a tape on it, called out eighteen and a quarter, and then had the tape taken away from him for a full inspection by two other adults. It went back in the river as an eighteen. He has been telling people nineteen ever since, and honestly, at that hour of that canyon, he had earned it.
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