"The Truckee, what? are you kidding me, the Truckee"

Jim Mora, a football coach who's famous rant about the playoffs has outlived anything he's accomplished on the field, fills my head. I'm reading in the Drake about some ski bum from Squaw v
Valley fishing the Truckee River, and here comes coach Mora, "the Truckee, are you kidding me, the Truckee!?!".

So of course Montana (not Joe, the state of) is unequivocally the Mecca of trout fishing. But, my fishing roots have periodically been featured in some magazine. A few months ago the ladders of Pyramid Lake were on the cover of TU's magazine, and now this, the Truckee. What next Paradise Pond, Sparks Nevada, that trout haven tucked in-between the drive in theatre and House of Fabrics? Where a stringer of hatchery rainbows and hamster cage full of crawdads could be procured by 6 grubby boys looking for a summer fish fry, carrying rods and booty on their bicycles.

It's kind of legitimizing and mystifying at the same time to read breathless stories in fly fishing rags about the very places you cut your baby fishing teeth. The Truckee River, oh if that river could talk. Now my experiences there are shallow and few compared to Pablo and Loren Mills escapades. But I will tell you there was an afternoon, when I took a blond cheerleader to a favorite spot, not far out of town. I was wearing my green Galena Creek basketball camp shirt from 1979 and a pair of cut offs. I waded out into the pocket water and deftly let my Pautzke's Balls of Fire on a #6 eagles claw tumble down the current and was quickly rewarded with a 12" rainbow and then another. The water was too cold and the cheerleader too hot to keep wading, so I came and joined her on the sandy beach next to a deep green pool. A few split shots were added to the rig and I cast into the middle of the pool hoping the fish action wouldn't be faster than the lip action. My infatuation for the cheerleader grew deeper as I watched her excitedly clean my catch. It was a hot sticky day on the Truckee, I remember smelling for the first time in my life my own BO in the arm pits of that green shirt, probably was during a laundry strike my mom pulled from time to time, and for some reason I couldn't stop sniffing that shirt.

We left there that afternoon deeply, deeply in love like any high school couple and myself particularly bemused by the unlikely intersection of perfume, BO and salmon eggs. I was going to marry this girl and we were going to fish happily ever after.

On the banks of the Truckee river!

"Playoffs!?"