Spirit-Fried No-Name River Brown Trout : A Fly-Fishing Addict Wrestles With a Realization: How Can One Kill and Eat Beauty?

Like Christ (a.k.a. Ichthus) and unlike the rest of us, a pan-fried trout is utterly forgiving. If you use too high a flame, the skin takes the abuse and the flesh is still delectable. Use too low a flame and it still makes decent sushi. Even under-fried for hours in the British, Babette’s Nightmare, Simmer Everything Senseless style, the structural integrity of muscle that spent its whole life fighting river current is almost impossible to reduce to inedible mush.

Secret ingredients? There are none. Pariah ingredients? Just one: honest butter. Forget margarine, forget “lite” butters, forget olive oil (the cultural dissonance!), forget I Can’t Believe It’s Not Coagulated Petroleum With Yellow Dye, forget cholesterolic and caloric paranoias, period. Wild trout frying is not a meal, it’s a rite. You are preparing to eat an animal that gave up its beautiful river and only life for your pleasure. Pleasure ought, therefore, to be maximized. Open your heart to the trout and its river and your spirit will charge through you like spring runoff, flushing every artery you’ve got. It is never “heart-smart” to refuse to open your heart.

Butter aside, there are no Trout Frying Commandments. Almonds, garlic and cornmeal offer interesting counterpoint if you like fried almonds, garlic and cornmeal--but needless distraction if you don’t. The flesh under discussion requires no trick additives. If you opened your heart and used enough butter, a trout fried in a dredged-up chrome fender over an acetylene torch is going to be worth eating.

Due to this chef-friendly equation between ease of prep and splendor of result, trout are considered by many to be an easy fish to fry. They are not. The reason they are not is that butter is only one of two essential ingredients, and the other is frequently overlooked. What is this mystery ingredient? The trout itself. The cause of this shocking omission is a mass delusion that those blotchy, cellophane-and-Styrofoam-swaddled, dented Grumman-canoe-colored fish corpses at the local chain supermarket are, as the label claims, “rainbow trout.” Don’t believe it. The supermarket product is mass-manufactured, half-embalmed pond spawn. Raised on industrial pellets, toned by flaccid water, genetically violated to begin with, these hapless victims of technology bear as much resemblance to wild river trout as does a drug-addicted feed-yard cow to a wild bull elk.

True trout frying cannot possibly take place until a food-worthy species has been identified and a choice specimen taken. The frying of trout can begin, in other words, only with the catching of wild trout, which can begin only after a journey to wild water. We have of necessity moved, in just under five paragraphs, from a tube-lit supermarket refrigeration unit to the most unspoiled lake, river or stream within range of our homes. This is the kind of “progress” I believe in! We’re still not quite ready to catch a fryable fish. But we’re now safe to begin considering their variety.

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Trout species vary widely from drainage to drainage, like Native American tribes once did and like many North Americans still do. (All that separates a New Yorker from a New Jerseyite is the Hudson; all that separates a Mexican from a Texan is the Rio Grande.) Even the same trout species takes on different characteristics and flavors from river to river. The reasons for this are myriad, sometimes holy, and far beyond the scope of a single human mind, let alone a single human recipe. Suffice it to say that in my little niche in Montana, I catch six kinds of wild trout with regularity (the brook, the cutthroat, the rainbow, the bull, the cutthroat-rainbow hybrid and the brown). Two of these are native, three introduced, one (the hybrid) a little of each. All six are sufficiently well-adapted to sustain themselves without human assistance, if human ignorance and avarice only give them the chance. It is this self-sufficiency that has earned them the beautiful designation of “wild.”

But the indigenous bull trout is endangered, the west slope cutthroat threatened, so both of these I release. And I’m so stunned by the blazing colors of the occasional brook trout I catch that I’m about as likely to kill one as I am to kill a mountain bluebird or a western tanager. And almost every time I set the hook to a bread-and-butter rainbow or hybrid cut-bow, it pirouettes skyward, and so does my heart, so that by the time I land one of these I’m as likely to kill it as I am to kill a member of the Joffrey Ballet.

Five of six species landed, five of six released, and my frying pan still empty. The reader begins, perhaps, to see the difficulty in obtaining that second trout-fry essential. Who wants to kill and eat beauty? Who wants to kill and eat one’s dance partner? I am one of those people who find American rodeo clowns wildly more admirable than Spanish bullfighters. Rodeo clowns practice--with far bigger, far more dangerous bulls--both the art of self-sacrifice and a form of catch-and-release. But I am also one of those people who, like Brother Wolf, eats flesh. In honor of this unanimity I now turn, with all the appetite that’s in me, to the sixth and last local wild trout possibility: the brown.

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The Montana brown trout, like most 19th-Century arrivals, began the long journey west by crossing the Atlantic in ships. There were two distinct immigrant families. I call them the McBrowns and the Brauns. The silvery, red-spotted Loch Leven McBrowns originated, like a lot of Montanans (the McClaves, the McGuanes, the Macleans, the Doigs, the Duncans) in Scotland. The buttery-colored, orange-spotted Brauns came from Germany. To this day, if you squeeze the living bellies of the offspring of either, they actually let out a croaking sound that brings Scottish brogues and Deutsch umlauts to mind. What I love best about McBrowns and Brauns, though, is not the Old World heritage or remnant dialect; it’s the fact that they, unlike most Europeans introduced to this land, did not follow the usual Pioneer/Plunderer, Robber Baron, Racist Cracker, English Starling models. Brown trout chose the Native American model. From the moment of their release, the McBrowns and Brauns opted for the indigenous way. And that is what they got.

Moving from oak barrels into America’s sweet rivers, lying deep and still when in doubt, brown trout carved out a niche among the competing species, achieved balance with the food supply, learned to sidestep the pantheon of predators and to migrate, elk or Indian-style, in order to beat the harsh seasons. While doing so they survived ice-outs, droughts and floods, dam building, irrigation over-allotment, placer and open-pit mines, generations of political representation by river-sucking nudniks, generations of bombardment by cows’ butts uncountable and generations of bombardment by Sportfishing Huns. But against these odds, they thrive.

There are rivers and spring creeks all over America that have, in a single century, become as impossible to imagine without their wild browns as the waters of the Pacific Northwest were once impossible to imagine without their salmon. And there is no fly-fisher conversant with the various common species who does not consider browns the coyote of North American trout. The swiftness of this transition from highlander and Deutschlander to ineradicably native American fills me with hope. The brown bypassed completely the usual Outlander phase. They set out not to invade, but to belong, and so became living proof that the indigenous, to the immigrant who daily seeks nothing else, is attainable not just in theory, but body, tooth and soul.

Another thing to love about browns: There are private game ranches in many states, this one included, where you can hand over a credit card, borrow a rifle, use the roof of your luxury sedan to steady your sights, shoot a terrified, fence-bound deer, elk or buffalo, climb back in the sedan, order the beast professionally cleaned if your shot killed it, professionally shot and cleaned if it didn’t, then order a haunch cooked to specs. For the right kind of money you may even be able to order your haunch professionally pre-chewed. But there is no analogous way to pretend to dominate a wild brown trout. They are not for sale anywhere. They’re not even visible 99% of their lives. Hiring an ace angler to kill one for you is illegal. Hiring a licensed local guide to lead you to one suitable for eating is often a good way of enticing that guide into making sure you get skunked. And a pellet-fed pond brown is, as mentioned, a half-embalmed bastardization of the genuine article.

The wild brown, then, is almost as egalitarian a quarry as happiness itself. To catch in order to fry in order to eat one of these beauties, even the most prodigiously portfolioed nabob in America has to slip into a neoprene sweat-sack and stagger out into a cold, wild river. And there, with his brain the size of a cantaloupe and his fiscal grasp of continents, he’ll find the Coyote of Trout, with its brain the size of the peppercorn, far from willing to rise up and die.

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Even for those of us who live and fish here, plying the rivers for Browns over the course of a Montana summer is no way to keep meat on our tables or an ego on our ids. Brown trout happen to be delicious--to my palate the tastiest of the four species that are legal to catch and keep locally. But of the commonly caught river trout, browns wear the perfect camouflage, prefer the deepest and snaggiest lairs, and are the one species that almost invariably, when hooked, heads for the nearest line-breaking snag. They have the teeth most likely to cut through a leader. They seem to have the best trout eyesight and the greatest paranoia about what’s going on onshore. They are often nocturnally voracious, but ascetic by day. They turn cannibalistic upon achieving trophy size, after which they become almost immune to the efforts of us insect-imitating fly-slingers. And even when they are taking flies, they have the subtlest rise-form (that is, they make the smallest surface disturbance when inhaling a floating inset), and so are the hardest to locate and stalk. As a result of all this, those who would consistently catch browns must own more than a pedestrian itch to wet a line. Of fly-fishers especially, these fish demand not just interest, but personal transformation. It’s not a pretty transformation, either. In order to become one of the rare maestros who can deceive these beasts at will, one must immerse oneself for years, and to the eyeballs, in the sort of obsessive fish-speak I’ve been scribbling this whole past paragraph. . . .

. . . . Unless one happens to know a dirty little secret: Even the oldest and most sagacious of browns are crazed by sex. No fooling. Virtually every trout that swims makes a spawning run in early spring or in the fall. This temporary change of metabolic and philosophic purpose transforms the Coyote of Trout into the most imbecilic of Impulse Shoppers. It’s a tragic but all-American malady. You can sell a spawning-run brown damned near anything.

I’d heard stories, before moving to Montana two years ago, about how aggressive some browns got in October. Being from the West Coast, I imagined this aggression would be akin to that of salmon, which purposefully stand guard, after arriving at the spawning grounds, around their private redds. There is no similarity. Like all but the kinkiest humans, a brown trout wants no other living creature in its bed of love than another brown trout. Unlike most humans, the brown considers its entire world to be its private bed, remains open-eyed and and armed (to the teeth) around the clock, and at the sight of trespassers aims to kill. It’s a strange behavior to transpose into human terms. If my wife and I, for instance, were to become the sexual equivalents of brown trout tonight, our foreplay would consist of attacking and swallowing three pet frogs, two guinea pigs and a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Viva la difference!

I know a gin-clear creek, near a highway I often travel, that meanders through a quarter-mile-long meadow too pretty to pass by. I used to call it Three Fish Meadow, because the eight or 10 times I’d plied it I’d caught an average of three pan-sized trout, none of them browns. One day last October, I stepped into the same meadow, obeyed a bizarre impulse to tie on a fat, orange jack-o-lantern of a fly known as an October caddis, cast it into a pool-table-sized pocket behind a wheelbarrow-sized rock, and immediately hooked a nice brown. After landing and releasing the fish, I cast back into the same spot and instantly hooked another. This happened seven times. Each of the seven browns raised hell in the little pocket, crashing into and dragging line across its cohorts. Unspooked, each subsequent fish still savaged my fly. Continuing through Three Fish Meadow, I caught and released 26 trout averaging 13 inches. All but two were sex-crazed browns. The meadow needs a new name.

I remember, especially, one female brown who had claimed as her boudoir a side-channel so shallow I never thought to fish it, and so nearly stepped on her as I came hiking along full speed. But she didn’t spook! At the sight of a 73-inch human bearing down on her with a 108-inch fly-rod in hand, this 14-inch creature shot to the foot of her bedroom-sized glide, did a 180, then zipped straight back at me as if to scare me off by charging. If she’d been a few inches longer it might even have worked.

Since I didn’t bolt, she halted in eight inches of water not four feet to my left, and proceeded to glower up at me. I tried to glower back, but her eyes began to unnerve me. If I lay some eggs in a nest in gravel here, she seemed to be thinking, will you swim over ‘em and do your part? Deciding we both needed a reality check, I choked up on my fly-rod like a baseball hitter who’s been given the bunt sign and dropped my big pumpkin fly PLONK!, right on top of her head. Any sane trout would have fled miles after this. My flirtatious friend grabbed it as if it were a tossed bridal bouquet. I started laughing so hard I lost her--a relief to us both. But talk about sexual aggression. The Chinese ought to be grinding up October browns instead of elk horn to restore wilted eros.

Much as I enjoyed catching these fish, and much as I would also have enjoyed eating a few, I encounter a culinary and fly-fishing quandary with regard to the brown’s seasonal nincompoopery: What honor is it to me, or any fly-fisher, to catch and eat a creature whose peppercorn outsmarts our cantaloupes 50 weeks of the year by simply waiting for the sex-drunk six weeks when it can’t outsmart us? What honor is it to match wits with and deceive a normally inspired fish while it languishes in a lovesickness so severe that a 14-inch specimen considered me a potential mate? Most of us could beat Bobby Fischer at chess and Shaquille O’Neal at basketball while they were busy having sex, too. Is this any cause for pride? When a Brown in the throes of its own mania to create life slashes my fly, this is simply not a fly-fishing conquest--it’s a biological conquest of the brown trout by the brown trout itself.

That said, I must make a confession. When it comes to fly-fishing, I’m an addict, and addiction makes me, like most addicts, a pretty low-rent guy. My need to fish is so strong that I admit it’s fun for me to have my fly and line attached even to a brown trout’s biological conquest of itself. What I must ask myself, and all fly-fishers, is whether there is a more-or-less honorable way to proceed with this low-rent fun. Is there a sustainable way for us, and for the sex-stoned brown, to each pursue our very different addictions?

I believe there is. I believe the sustainable solution is a recipe. I discovered, just last spring, that it is not only possible, but enormously pleasurable, to spirit-fry a brown trout. It happened like this:

One March afternoon--after five months of fishless winter--I slipped into my neoprenes, drove to a certain brown-trout spawning stream, hiked down to a certain logjam, dropped a fly in the eddy behind this jam, lost sight of that fly when it drifted behind some willows, heard a slurping sound behind the willows, raised my rod at the sound, watched the rod slam downward, and felt the angry head-shakes of a solidly hooked fish. These head-shakes excited me for many reasons. First, it had been five months since I’d felt any such sensation, and I am, as I said, an addict. Second, I recognized them to be the head-shakes of a brown, my fry pan favorite, and after five months of no fresh fish, I was raring to devour one. Third, judging by the slow authority of these shakes, this Brown was sizable. I pictured salmon-sized filets sizzling in the Le Creuset. Fourth, it was an IMBY (as opposed to NIMBY) brown, in that it was hiding in a logjam that I had built myself the previous summer by chain-sawing and dismantling a dry-docked jam and walking its logs a quarter-mile downstream to this deeper site.

A big brown in summertime, hooked in the very same place, would have bolted into the logs and snapped my line in a second. But this was a spawning-run brown shooting directly away from the logs into the snagless center of the run, where nothing good could possibly happen; it proceeded to veer from side to side, not as if looking for escape, but as if looking for something to attach and kill. I walked down to the tail of the hole, forded the little river, waded back up to the pool and waited for the brown to come up with a new idea. It had none. It had sexual desire, sexual anger, beauty, size, and that was it. After five or six minutes of veering, it tired. I led it down to the tail-out and eased it in beside me.

I looked at it. It looked at me. I saw by the oversized, totemic jaws that it was a male. I took him in my hands, turned him on his side, measured him against the marks on my fly-rod: 22 inches. Fileted, quartered and fried with slivered almonds, he’d sate my entire family. Released, he would create his own.

The little stones in the stream were bronze in the March sunlight. The brown, against those stones, was brilliant yellow, white and gold. His pelvic fins, translucent amber, were the size of silver dollars. The orange spots scattered down his side shone, as Richard Hugo once said, “like apples in a fog.” He was so old he’d developed a gaze. One does not capture an animal like this every day. I was able to pluck out the fly, right him in the water and keep my grip loose so as not to harm him. I was not able to make myself let go.

I dropped to my knees in the water beside him, my waders fending off the cold. The current swirled around half of me and around all of the brown, coming in small, uneven surges that gently rocked my body. It felt like riding a quiet horse. Though I held him captive, the brown stayed perfectly in rhythm with this horse.

Since he faced upstream, I turned that way, too. It was an eastward flowing stream, and it was evening. The sun hung right before us in the west. Snow-topped mountains veed down toward the water, the timbered left ridge green with pines, the barren right ridge yellow with last summer’s grass. As the stream flowed and rippled toward us, reflected sun turned its surface into a blinding sheet of silver. As the same surface came closer, reflected sky turned the silver into broken shards of blue. Closer yet the blue vanished, the water went clear as air, and the sunlit stones beneath us became a bed of shining gold. All that beauty, all those riches--and I was still not sure what I would do with my brown. Then I noticed, in the bed of gold right in front of us, a freshly dug, trout-length hole.

It was his redd. Or hers. His paramour’s. And as I stared at this redd, this impossibly cold gravel womb, I realized for the first time in my life just who the animal in my hands was making love to. Not to his mate. She’d dug the redd, had laid her eggs. But he would never touch her. All he would ever touch was this water and these stones. He was making love, as was his mate, to the stream itself: to the blinding silver, the broken blue, the shining gold.

I touched his side with my finger. A drop of milt spilled from his vent and vanished downstream. He was in the throes, even as I held him. I saw why I’d considered these fish stupid. I saw that it was I who was stupid. I saw that, at a certain time of year, the rhythm of the river becomes impossible for brown trout to resist; that the mere act of swimming, mere caress of cold water, becomes a long, slow copulation; that their entire upstream journey is an arduous act of sex. This dip in the gravel, nest of eggs, spraying of milt, was just the culmination of that weeks-long act. I looked upstream. The current flowing past us was made of melted mounds of snow from the mountains. The gravel beneath us was made of fragments of those mountains. The brown trout was making love to the mountains and the snow.

I realized that, in consuming this fish, I would be consuming part of everything that made him. I realized that everything that made him was precisely what, or who, he was making love to. I realized that this same everything is who we, too, are made of; who we, too, are submerged in; who we, too, daily eat; and who we, too, seek to love and honor. The trout in my hands let me feel this. He was, through no intention of his own, a spiritual touchstone. And one takes such stones not to stomach, but to heart.

One doesn’t want to kill beauty, one doesn’t want to kill a dance partner. But one doesn’t want to let them go either. I held that brown way longer than I should have. Held him till my hands began to burn. To 30 miles of river, to the mountains on both sides, to frozen lakes, slowly thawing, he just kept making love. There is a fire in water, a hidden flame that gives not heat, but life. I held a trout, and my own hands, in that fire. The cold flames ran through us and past us. And I was fed, I was sated, I’d had all the fire and fish I needed when at last I opened my heart, opened my hands and let my beautiful brown trout go.