In Case You Missed It...Annual Meeting Readings Part One: Requiem For a River Bend

During KHLT’s 2024 Annual Meeting, we invited four local authors to share readings about “place.” Below is Richard Chiappone’s piece which he has graciously shared with the KHLT community. Thank you, Richard, for sharing your wonderful writing and for your support of Kachemak Heritage Land Trust's work to protect land on the Kenai Peninsula.

 Requiem For a River Bend
(2010)
Richard Chiappone

Last fall, a quarter mile of the river that flows behind our house here at Anchor Point, Alaska vanished. After nearly three decades fishing the big bend that used to lie within sight of our living room, I have to say it was a little disconcerting to find it had become a high and dry oxbow remnant almost overnight when the rain-swollen river blasted a new channel and took its water elsewhere. That river bend is gone.

*            *            *

It’s a ten-minute walk from my house to the now dry oxbow that was once the bend, and only a few steps more to the new channel nearby where the river has relocated itself. When I last saw it, the new stretch of river was still churning through a grid of downed cottonwood trees it had bowled over on its shortcut to the sea—their yellow leaves fluttering madly underwater, roots reaching for the moody autumn sky. I know that, over time, as the spring floods gouge declivities and undercut banks and wash away the fallen timber, new pockets of holding water will form in that channel. New places to fish.

Even so, making new friends does not entirely make up for the loss of old ones.

*            *            *

The Anchor River is home to three species of salmon, steelhead trout, and Dolly Varden char. To protect the highly valued salmon on their spawning beds, salmon fishing is permitted only from the tidewater zone to the first bridge, about a mile upstream. But another three miles upriver and halfway around the bend behind our house was a wide slow run we called the Meadow Hole that was invariably full of small Dollies.
Dolly Varden char—gaily spotted pink and purple creatures, supposedly named after a Dickens character who wore similarly colorful hats—are a lot like brook trout. Only even less wary. Which makes Dollies great fish for new anglers. And the wide-open and brush-free banks of the Meadow Hole made that a wonderful place to introduce novices to fly fishing.

*            *            *

The youngest angler I ever took there was then six-year-old Ross Bass, son of my longtime business partner. Ross showed up wielding a pushbutton spinning rig he was already adept with. So I tied a caddis fly onto the end of his line a couple feet below his huge red and white plastic bobber, and he was soon into squirming, foot-long Dollies. Because Ross was a little too young to appreciate the sublime pointlessness of catch and release fishing, his father and I built a corral of rocks in the shallows and stocked it with the live fish he landed. I told him that we’d take the whole batch home to show his mother at the end of the day. When the Dollies squirmed their way out of their rock enclosure and escaped—as I was almost certain they would—Ross was only moderately disappointed. He’d done what he’d come to do: catch fish. It was a very good day at the Meadow Hole, purposely deceiving a small child notwithstanding.

At the other end of the age range, another memorable first-timer was a woman in her seventies named Cecilia. A late-in-life transplant to Alaska from New York City, Cecilia was a great looking and adventurous spirit with her knee-high Xtrtufs and perfectly coiffed hair. She was talkative and good company and we gabbed cheerfully on the walk down the steep promontory trail from the house and wound our way through a nightmarish jumble of beetle-killed spruce trees stacked like Pick Up Sticks for giants. As we fished—she caught a number of dollies—I thought about her age and worried a bit about the walk home, a lung-straining climb back up the same trail, zigzagging around, over, and under the dead trees. But Cecilia, buoyed by an afternoon of sunshine and fast Dolly action, and probably by the dizzying misconception that fishing would always be this good, marched uphill through the obstacle course and straight to the back porch, chatting all the way. I wheezed out an answer or two, when required. Still, it was another good day.

*            *            *

And then there was Gomer.

Gomer was not a neophyte by any means, but just as memorable.    

A few years older than me, he had what might be called a personality of excess. He ate too much, drank too much, and smoked way too much. He laughed loudly and frequently in a high giggle, like a coyote with hiccups, and kept a line of entertaining (and mostly apocryphal) stories going for hours. He was a blast.
One October, on the Columbus Day weekend, Gomer made the two-hundred-mile drive from Anchorage to Anchor Point to fish. The steelhead run peaks on The Anchor River around that time, and the water can get crowded. All weekend, Gomer and I found ourselves shut out of our favorite holes by strangers.

Gomer, a hedonist to the end, had brought a box of gourmet comestibles from one of the tonier grocery stores in Alaska’s big city. So, Sunday afternoon, tired of being crowded out of the most productive fishing water anyway, I headed back up to the house to start braising some veal shanks. Not surprisingly, Gomer stayed on the river and fished until dark. When he finally arrived at the back porch—gasping for breath between puffs on his cigarette—he ranted about the appalling lack of streamside etiquette he’d suffered at the Lower Bend hole.  

It seems that he had no sooner parked himself in the productive water, when two philistines with spinning rods waded in upstream and down and proceeded to cast hardware across his line. Of course, it wouldn’t be a story unless the bastards also started hauling in steelhead, which—no surprise—they had. Words were exchanged.

Suffice it to say that the Lower Bend Hole was forever after referred to as The Flaming Ass Hole.

*            *            *

Not all the changes in the river have been geological. Enter the internet. If you google Alaskan steelhead fishing, your trusty computer will point you to the Lower Kenai Peninsula and the three rivers here that have wild steelhead runs—including the one in our back yard. There are very few places left to fish for wild steelhead on the road system in America. These days, the Anchor can get more than a little crowded. In response to the ever-increasing pressure on the fish, The Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently shortened the season even further.

More fishermen, fewer days to fish, less good water. Things change.
I grew up in an industrial area of the Great Lakes, nearly devoid of gamefish in the sixties and seventies when I lived there. Maybe that’s why I spent more than twenty years building a house on a wild salmon and trout stream. And now that the work is complete, and I’m retired and have more time to fish, a natural phenomenon has eradicated the best holes within walking distance of the house, and the season is so short a couple good rainstorms can effectively eliminate it. It sounds like the comic restaurant review: “The food was terrible, and the portions were too small.” It’s a good thing I’m a fan of irony.

*            *            *

Gomer now lives in Tennessee where a tumor on his spine has put him in a wheelchair. But when I spoke with him on the phone this week, he didn’t want to talk about that. Mostly he wanted to know how the river fished last fall.

The truth is, I stopped fishing in early October, after only a couple trips. Maybe one of the things that kept me from making the hike was a new awareness that the river valley bottomland is filled with the impressions of much older oxbows, evidence of how dramatically the river has been changing and straightening over time. The very old river channels closest to the foot of the promontory, are most filled-in and only reveal themselves now as crescent-moon curves of willow or twisted black spruce jutting up from the wet grasses. Several more recently deceased channels are now deep trenches with just a trickle of remnant river current still detectable in the tannic water like a weak pulse. Others have become stagnant ponds, their muddy bottoms gouged by moose hooves.

Or maybe I chose to stay at home and watch the river from the comfort of a chair near the wood stove so many days last season because the fused vertebrae in my neck and lower back were making the march through the fallen spruce and across the boot-sucking wetlands more painful than the fishing—such as it was—could make up for. The obvious lesson is: rivers may straighten with age, but men bend.
Yet, now, deep in the dark heart of another Alaskan winter with months to go before the new season opener, I can’t remember the geezer aches and pains as clearly as those sunny days fishing with friends, Dollies flashing in the Meadow Hole like little bolts of underwater lightning, big red-cheeked steelhead bulling upriver behind the house.

One thing I know for sure.

That bend may be gone. But come August, those fish will be out there somewhere, and so will I.