I worry about my son. We all know someone like him—maybe we are him. He’s the person who sees a fish in each body of water he passes, whether it be puddle or Pacific. He practices his cast with everything from alder branches to his dinner fork. He sees fly patterns in the dryer lint. Right now he’s standing in the driveway talking about where the fish might live; each rock, every bit of sage, the depressions in the gravel are all potential ambush points. Without exception, he would almost always rather be fishing.

I’d let it go, let him move through his life as a fishing bum, become a trout guide in the Rockies, row drift boats on the Olympic Peninsula, or maybe pole a flats boat in the Keys, but I can’t. George, my son who has taken on the name “Gus” after the fishing-obsessed main character in David James Duncan’s The River Why, is not quite 2 years old, and all of this—this obsession with water, the casting practice, the ability to name all the fish in our freshwater almanac—is our fault...

I picture him in first grade staring out the classroom window trying to guess if the rain will bring the salmon in when he should be reading Dick and Jane. Then in high school ditching calculus to float the Gorge and spending his lawn-mowing money on pheasant tail and peacock hurl. He’ll have a boat before he has a car. Probably three boats. Heck, last night he was attempting to row the laundry basket into a better casting position. I couldn’t make this up.

When Gus was 6 months old and still developing a personality, we decided to sell nearly everything we owned, move out of our home and spend a year traveling the United States in a fifth-wheel trailer and fishing for every major game species that can be caught on a fly rod. We could do this not because we’re professional flyfishermen or trust funders, but because both Mike, my husband, and I are able to work remotely as long as we have reliable phone and Internet connections. We could also do it because we planned the whole trip on a shoestring budget, one that did not involve any sort of childcare, guided trips, dinners out or extraneous spending. Lastly, we could do it because we both thought it sounded like a good idea.

When Gus was 6 months old and still developing a personality, we decided to sell nearly everything we owned, move out of our home and spend a year traveling the United States in a fifth-wheel trailer and fishing for every major game species that can be caught on a fly rod.

We picked a start date of Jan. 1 and planned a convoluted route around the nation. For the first two months of the year, we’d stay largely in the Pacific Northwest with a short, 10-day sojourn to Nevada to fish for Lahontan cutthroat at Pyramid Lake. With family in Oregon it was a choice that would provide a small safety net should the trip prove a disaster before it had even really begun. We packed the trailer, made sure Gus was current on his vaccinations and hit the road.

The Pacific Northwest

It’s been 21 days since I touched a fish. I’m not even talking about a “nice” fish. It’s three weeks since any fish, and we fish every day. I remember the last time; it was a male steelhead on Oregon’s north coast right as the rivers were clearing from a week of torrential rain. He took the fly below a pour over then ran like Prefontaine. Mike, with Gus riding shotgun on his back, landed a monster of a native a few days later, but ever since we drove north to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, a rain forest where it’s 55 degrees in February and it hasn’t rained for more than a month, we’ve been batting zero.

After swinging flies all morning, I put Gus in the backpack and walk down to a takeout not far from the campground to talk with a state fish checker. Looking at her clipboard, the checker reports she’s interviewed nearly 100 anglers representing a total of about 520 fishing hours. Ten fish were caught, all of them from boats, the majority as part of guided trips. “There just don’t seem to be many fish in the river,” she says.

With our faith destroyed, we start hiking upstream. Our rationale is simple: Either fish that came in earlier have already pushed past the lower and middle reaches and are likely higher in the watershed, or fish that are coming in now are being faced with less-than-ideal conditions and are rushing full force upriver with their jaws clamped tight. If both ideas are wrong, at least we’ll get some exercise.

We hike for miles. The moss hangs off the trees like Christmas tinsel thrown by a preschooler. Nurse logs sport ferns and small saplings. Banana slugs ooze across the trail leaving behind glistening slime trails. We eat lunch on a gravel bar and afterward Gus alternates his efforts between trying to make a fast crawl for the river and seeing how much sand he can get in his mouth. I rig a rod and start the slow dance of working an emerald-colored run. There’s a light tug then a release. A rock, maybe. Then it comes again. Just the slightest pressure. I don’t set. I wait. The swing stops. Ten to one I’m snagged on the bottom. I start stripping in line, the line starts swimming but it’s weak. Finally, I see the flash. Gus crawls over to see. He doesn’t seem to mind that after 24 days all I’ve caught is a whitefish.

We eat lunch on a gravel bar and afterward Gus alternates his efforts between trying to make a fast crawl for the river and seeing how much sand he can get in his mouth.

We have better luck in Nevada than in Washington, picking up several fish over two feet, but struggling with truck and trailer issues, including an electrical problem that forces us to start the truck by bypassing the glow plug relay with a Phillips-head screwdriver. By the time March rolls around, we are feeling confident enough to head toward Colorado to fish a few famed tailwaters before continuing to Texas. Our work schedules require that drives be done in big pushes on the weekend, so from Oregon to Colorado we average 12 hours per day in the truck. Colorado to Texas is about the same, not counting stops for fuel, sanity and diaper changes. We listen to “Old MacDonald” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” on repeat, sleep at rest areas and pray for clear roads. Twenty-two of 48 hours in the truck with a baby who hates the car seat is not romantic.

Texas

We pull into Houston and the warm arms of extended family. It’s a temporary stop before we head for the coast and our first foray into tailing redfish. As Mike unhitches the trailer, he’s bombarded by the males in the family asking questions and giving directions. With all the extra help, we skip putting down the trailer’s landing gear and the whole thing drops onto the truck’s bed rails. No one is hurt, but it’s embarrassing and we feel like idiots. Maybe to make us feel better the aunts and uncles volunteer to babysit Gus and we head out first to try our hands at fishing for alligator gar in an inner-city bayou, then to a fancy dinner.

Getting down to the bayou requires climbing below a bridge then scrambling down a steep embankment covered in thick underbrush and dotted with old shoes, abandoned shopping carts and fast-food containers. We’ve been warned that water moccasins often sun themselves along the bank and to watch out for anything that looks like a bike tire tube. The water is running high and chocolate, but we see something that is likely either a gar or an actual alligator rolling in the back eddy. Our most conservative estimates peg it at six feet. Mike starts casting immediately, but I take my time in picking out a fly.

Five minutes in, Mike hooks something. It quickly comes unbuttoned, and when he checks his fly the hook has been straightened like a safety pin. I spend the next 20 minutes making halfhearted casts and seeing poisonous snakes in every shadow. When we decide we’ve had enough, I’m relieved to have not caught anything. After we get back from dinner, Mike’s cousin tells us about the eight-foot-long gar he caught from the beach we fished. His bait was half a raw chicken.

We spend a week in Houston soaking up family time and catching up on work. Gus says his first word, “hi,” then follows it quickly with “blue” and “bird.” By the time we’re on the road to the Gulf Coast he’s added “fish.”

We stop at the fly shop in Rockport, TX, just north of where we’re staying in Aransas Pass. We buy a couple of flies and some materials, and Dave Hayward, the shop’s manager, walks us through our options for access even after we tell him that a guided trip is not in our future. I chalk it up to Gus’ chatter about fish, but more likely it’s that Dave is a nice guy.

Dave’s directions lead us down a washed-out road and soon the inside of the truck cab is coated with the broken bodies of mosquitoes. After 10 minutes we get to the end of the road, pull on our Converse All Stars and make our way out for our first flats walk. We quickly blind cast our way into several speckled trout, but it takes another few days before we find our first redfish. When we do, they’re the smaller versions that many locals refer to as rat reds, but we’re happy to have them. Most of our fishing experience has been in freshwater chasing anadromous fish and trout, so being able to simply wet wade in the salt, on beautiful beaches while pelicans and roseated spoonbills wheel overhead is all time. Add on sighting and catching aggressive fish with very few other people around on flies we tied after the baby went to bed and it’s a win no matter how you look at it.

Through the first weeks in April we practice our casts and work on spotting fish. As the water approaches 70 degrees, the fishing picks up and Gus adds “windy” to his vocabulary. Just after tax day, we hitch the trailer and head for the Florida Keys.

At each spot we visit, we only have so many days to figure things out, to find fish, to learn the hottest spot might be the public flat behind the Home Depot that you can’t get to unless you trespass on private land. We fish regardless of weather or water conditions, and, more often than not, it seems we spend days simply taking the rods for a walk. The adage “just being happy to be there” is great, but we’d like to see a few fish.

The Florida Keys

We’re lost on a flat. The wind is blowing 25 mph. Instead of clear blue water over white sandy bottom we’re walking through silt-filled muck. The visibility is maybe 10-inches. Gus’s toes hang a handspan above water as he sits in a pack on Mike’s back. Every 30 seconds Mike stops and looks toward the horizon.

“Do you see that?” he asks after a few minutes.

I don’t see anything.

“About 60 feet straight out from where you are. You really don’t see it?”

Mike is nine inches taller than I am. It gives him an advantage in these types of situations.

“Big, dark shadow. It just turned toward the beach.”

Toward the beach is toward us. I look at Gus’t feet, then at Mike’s face, then back out to sea. I’m blind out here, not dumb.

“Maybe we should get out of the water.”

Mike is already walking toward dry land. I follow while still searching for the shadow. Finally, I see it. It’s the size of a refrigerator and while it does seem to be stalking us, it’s also moving about as fast as a Volkswagen. We reach shore and walk along the highway back to the truck.

Driving back to camp we see a sign identifying the beach as viewing area for manatees—an animal renowned for its curiosity. We were runoff by the majestic sea cow.

While we’re in the Keys, I connect with the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust. We talk about the state of the Keys and the challenges of habitat loss and degradation. The staff paints a dire picture suggesting that fishing in the area is rough and getting rougher. Dan Dow, the BTT’s communication manager, later calls me and offers some beta on techniques and areas to fish.

At Dan’s suggestion we purchase a 13-foot canoe with a wide, flat bottom off Craigslist and start paddling our way through the mangroves. We rig a push pole out of a 10-foot-long wooden dowel with a PVC U-joint glued to the bottom. In calm water we take turns poling, wrangling Gus and fishing.

It takes two days for me to hook a tarpon from the canoe, and another two before Gus goes over the side. The tarpon is a juvenile, but without effort it straightens my 10-weight and, before I can react, it climbs a mangrove and snaps the leader. Gus going over the side happens almost as quick. He leans down to try and splash in the water but can’t quite reach. A little hop sends him headfirst over the gunwale. He’s in a life jacket and Mike manages to grab him before his feet are even wet, but I still feel like the worst parent in the world. Three days later, he goes over again, this time laughing. We fish him out, set him in the bottom and keep casting. Silently I thank the inventor of life jackets.

We spend a month in the Keys but could spend a year. Gus turns 1 and we celebrate with key lime pie. I get so many no-see-um bites on my feet and legs it looks like I have chickenpox and I’m forced to wear long pants in the tropical heat. We tick off several new species from out list including bonefish, shark and barracuda. We learn that everything eats a crab. Three days before we leave, we sell the canoe for $20 less than what we bought it to a couple from Maine. I tell Gus’ grandparents he’s now been baptized in both the Atlantic and the Gulf.

Before we started on the trip, we sat down with an atlas and the Internet and mapped out where we wanted to fish based on optimal—or at least decent—migration, spawning and hatch patterns of the species we wanted to catch. This became our map for the year, but even with the blueprint we still had to make a few unplanned stops and turns.

New England

I’m running a fever and every time I swallow it feels like a cheese grater is being pulled across my tonsils. The swab at the urgent care clinic shows positive for strep throat. The doctor prescribes drugs and warns that I’ll be contagious for the next 24 hours. We’re scheduled to begin a four-day trip on Maine’s Rapid River tonight, and in the mercy of all mercies, Gus’ grandparents have volunteered to watch him so Mike and I can have our first nights ever away from him. We’d arranged to stay in the guide’s cabin and help with client and staff meals in return for access; even if the fishing was awful, it was going to be amazing. It also wasn’t going to happen. It’s irrational and ridiculous given that we’re on a yearlong fishing trip, but I spend the next few hours feeling deeply sorry for myself.

I start on penicillin to knock out the strep and Mike borrows an old-school bass boat. Mike’s parents live on a lake and we re-rig our trout rods for smallies and bluegill. Gus and Grandpa Pops walk down to the dock to cast off us, and before we’re out of range I can hear them banging out “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” on the piano. While a few hours of babysitting are not the same as an overnight, it’s still a gift, and one we’re more than glad to accept. By the time we have several fish apiece under our belts I’ve mostly gotten over missing the Rapid and am excited about spending a couple of days with indoor plumbing, happy grandparents and hungry bass.

Three days later, Mike, his brother, Chris, and I are waiting for the Dunkin’ Donuts in Ipswich, MA to open. When the doors finally crack, the smell of fried dough and sugar hits us like a wall. We order breakfast sandwiches, throwing in an extra for Eliot Jenkins, who we’re meeting at the docks. Eliot owns Greasy Beaks flyfishing, and today he’s offered up his boat and experience in finding striped bass. It’s the closest we’ll come to a guided trip this year.

Before the sun is fully up, we’ve all brought fish to hand. At lunch, we tuck in behind a rock outcrop. Mike and I stand on the bow, Chris stands in the stern and Eliot perches on the cooler in the middle of the boat. Mike sees the stripers first and puts down a long cast that gets munched on the third strip. The rest of us put flies in the water and there are four fish on four rods. An orchestrated chaos ensues. I take endless heckling when my fish spits the hook and the quadruple turns into a triple. We spend the next several hours swapping positions on the boat like we’re playing baseball. Mike wins the day when he gets an eat on a frog top-water pattern we’d been using in the lake. When we make it home, Gus is out fishing with Pops and doesn’t seem to have missed us at all.

Mike sees the stripers first and puts down a long cast that gets munched on the third strip. The rest of us put flies in the water and there are four fish on four rods. An orchestrated chaos ensues.

Our plan for the year included fishing for more than 20 different species of fish. When we added in by-catch, our species list quickly topped more than 30 unique types of fish. We were more excited about some than others.

Michigan

It’s like trying to turn a Mack truck. Unlike a steelhead or a salmon there are no acrobatics. The run isn’t even especially fast. It’s just unstoppable. For the first time I see backing, and instead of fighting I’m forced to hold on and hope for the bell. Inch by inch I reclaim my line; each revolution of the reel is a grind. I’d use my feet to gain ground but I’m thigh deep in the middle of a white-sand-bottomed flat. Eventually I’m able to grab the leader, but now the question is, “What do I do with it?”

“It” is a nearly 30-inch-long common carp with so much meat on its bones that its gut spills over my fingers when I try to hold it. A fish that I sighted from nearly 80 feet away because of the black torpedo-shaped profile it casts against the bright bottom. “It” ate my crawfish pattern like it hadn’t been fed in a month. “It” is a fish I hadn’t been especially excited to target, and “it” proved me wrong.

We spent two days fishing the wrong side of long point on Lake Michigan, picking up smallmouth bass by the crateful before we rounded a corner, walked down a beach and saw the outlines of 20 carp swimming parallel to us and well within casting range. They looked like small logs, or the kind of mailboxes you see on country roads.

It took us another day and a half to figure out how to get them to eat. By then we were walking four miles a day, carrying Gus on our backs through sand and mosquito-infested swamp while trying not to step on breeding pairs of endangered piping plover—a bird that builds its nest among jelly-bean-sized rocks then lays eggs that look almost exactly like those same rocks. After that, the carp disappeared for a day, only to be back the next. Then we’d see one carp, or three. We’d spot a school, but couldn’t get a follow. On a rainy day with winds pushing waves into the two-and-a-half-foot range we spotted them for each other and chased them up and down the beach casting like you would for roosterfish.

“It” was awesome.

A highlight of the trip was meeting, and often fishing with, people along the way. Some of these folks we knew, but others we met specifically because of the trip.

Wyoming

Gus took his first real steps along the Fox River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but then didn’t really walk again until three weeks later when he met little Scout Holmes at the fish hatchery outside Daniel, WY. Seeing Scout must have been the push he needed because after watching her bomb around we couldn’t get him to sit down. It was a game changer and, good or bad, we had Scout’s mom, Tara, to thank for it.

Tara emailed me just before we left Michigan. In a simple note, she wrote, “If you need a place to stay in Wyoming, let us know. We have plenty of room.” We took her up on it. Then we went fishing with her, her husband, Kris, and Scout. Later we sat in Tara’s yard, drank a couple of beers and watched the kids pull a wagon up the hill. Tara said it was only the cattle guards that stopped Scout from making it all the way to the Green River. Her feet couldn’t span the gaps. Before we left, Kris suggested some water we might want to check out, with the caveats that “it is a bit of a drive and bears are common, but the fishing should be pretty good.” The same could be said for most of Wyoming.

We take Kris’ advice and after two hours of dirt road and switchbacks we pile out of the truck and into a wide valley filled with dry and active river channels caused by years of runoff and weather events. Gravel bars are everywhere and people nowhere. We load Gus into one backpack and a lunch into the other and start walking downstream.

We spend some time crossing back and forth between channels before rigging up. We quickly figure out that if it looks anything like a small mayfly it’s going to get eaten, and there are so many fish, mostly cutthroat, but also brook trout, that’s it’s stupid. We split the channel down the middle and each take a bank. Gentlemen’s rules dictate we not cast in each other’s water, but we’re not gentlemen—we’re spouses who have been living in 180 square feet for eight months with minimal other adult interaction. Even with fish coming to every cast, I can’t help but poach a pocket on Mike’s side of the river. He responds by picking up a cutthroat practically at my feet.

When we tire of the poaching game, we put Gus down to play on the bank and switch to taking turns fishing a shaded run that pushes up against a rock wall. It’s a three-fish-or-a-lost-fly-and-you’re-out situation. Neither of us goes more than five minutes without fishing.

As we walk back to the truck over the water we’d already fished we continue to see risers, but we never see a bear.

Gentlemen’s rules dictate we not cast in each other’s water, but we’re not gentlemen—we’re spouses who have been living in 180 square feet for eight months with minimal other adult interaction. Even with fish coming to every cast, I can’t help but poach a pocket on Mike’s side of the river. He responds by picking up a cutthroat practically at my feet.

From Wyoming we had planned to head to Montana, but low water, high water temperatures and wildfires prompted us to change our plans and we ended up staying in Wyoming for almost five weeks, by far the longest stretch we pulled in any one place. When we finally rolled over the border, after more than a month of being drunk on cutthroat we were due for a little sobering up.

Wisconsin

A film of milky residue coats the inside of the windshield. Running my finger through it leaves a greasy smear and a paper towel does little to improve the situation. A few days later, the temperature drops and with the windows rolled up the cab reeks of fuel. The only diesel mechanic we can find within 100 miles of Hayward, WI, is at the Ford dealership. We swap them the keys to the truck for a tiny lender Fiesta and transfer rods and baby into the back.

It’s not good news when the phone rings a few hours later. Fuel has been leaking into the truck’s cooling system and the diagnosis is cracked injector sleeves. The solution is a near-complete rebuild of the engine, something we have neither the tools nor experience to do in a campground parking space. The price tag for the fix is almost worse than the problem and will run us close to half of what we paid for the truck.

We debate selling the truck as is, emptying the trailer, shipping all our gear home and hopping a flight to end the trip tomorrow. It’s an attractive, and potentially more affordable, option. But we don’t take it. Instead, we rally the rental across the county searching for musky and wait for the truck to be fixed. When it is, the mechanic tells us it’s set to go for another 100,000 miles, but we really only need it for another 10,000.

With the truck back in operating order we decide to give Wisconsin an extra week. We spend a day floating the Chippewa River in a borrowed jon boat using oars Mike bought at Walmart to occasionally correct our direction, but mostly just going wherever the current pushes us. It’s not a great system for getting in casting position, but it frees up one person to keep Gus entertained in the boat and the other to fish.

On our last day, we head to small, out-of-the-way piece of water a friendly employee at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources calls the “flowage of last resort.” The banks are overgrown with scrub, and to get any sort of distance behind a cast I have to wade waist deep into nearly black water while trying to keep my feet from sinking farther into the muck below. I have a vision of taking a wrong step and disappearing as if in quicksand. I’ve read that in some cases the anaerobic environment of deep mud can preserve a body in such a way it becomes nearly mummified.

I make my way back to the bank as Mike calls out that he’s going to walk up to the pour over and catch a musky. He flicks his fly, a five-inch-long deer-head frog he tied the night before, into a two-foot-deep pool the size of a Jacuzzi tub. It’s more of a dab than a cast, and when he actually hooks a fish, I can’t tell who’s more surprised, Mike or of the musky. The fight takes place in eight inches of water and I’m laughing so hard at the absurdity of it that I can hardly net the fish. It’s almost worth the cost of the truck.

We spend a day floating the Chippewa River in a borrowed jon boat using oars Mike bought at Walmart to occasionally correct our direction, but mostly just going wherever the current pushes us. It’s not a great system for getting in casting position, but it frees up one person to keep Gus entertained in the boat and the other to fish.

Wisconsin was our last big unknown of the trip. From there, we traveled to New York to fish the Salmon River for salmon and steelhead with what seemed like much of the population of the East Coast. While we hadn’t fished the river before, we knew the fish well. Then, for comparison purposes and to end the trip where we started, we drove straight across the country to the Oregon coast where we spent a month and a half chasing Chinook and steelhead.

Oregon

Mike has a fish on. We’re less than a mile from the open ocean, and a quick flash before the fish dives back toward the bottom and stronger current shows a thick body so silver it almost glows. Gus and I are on the bank watching the drama; Gus has a stick in his hands that he’s decided is a rod. Slowly, Mike gains some ground and begins horsing the fish toward the beach. We don’t have a net that will do the job, so the plan is to tail the fish in the shallows. It doesn’t happen. In a flurry the fish spits the hook and Mike’s whole body recoils back as the tension is suddenly off the rod. The beach echoes with his Homer Simpson-esque yell of exasperation.

For the next week Gus spends hours each day with a rod in hand miming the blown fight and the explosive “Doh” that followed. A friend who comes down to fish suggests filming the whole thing and putting it on YouTube. We could have a viral sensation on our hands. Instead we keep fishing.

Some days we catch fish and some days we don’t. Sometimes it’s sunny and the water levels are just right. More often it’s raining sideways and we search for water that’s not blown. On what becomes our last day of fishing for the year, we drive to central Oregon and fish for bull trout in the snow. Gus and Mike build a snowman on the bank, and when I come out of the water, I get pelted with snowballs. Gus yells, “Fishing fun!” as he bounces snow off my waders.

We spent a year fishing all over the United States. We spent more than 300 days on the water and every one of them as a family. Gus now thinks very few purposes in life are greater than casting a fly rod, or rowing a boat. Despite the possible long-term ramifications, we still think it was a good idea.

On what becomes our last day of fishing for the year, we drive to central Oregon and fish for bull trout in the snow. Gus and Mike build a snowman on the bank, and when I come out of the water, I get pelted with snowballs. Gus yells, “Fishing fun!” as he bounces snow off my waders.

above Before a flats trip out of Long Key, FL, George "Gus" Eaton - already a gear head - makes it a habit to check the drag on every reel.

Photo: Aimee Eaton

7.4 Issue Features

ENDING THE CURSE

THIS IS US

WILD CHILD

THE KING'S FISH

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