MONTANA The Other
HE GOES BY “SCOOTER” BECAUSE THAT’S how he got to the river. After the DUI, the jail time, the realization, he tells me, that the path he was walking would lead to either a life in prison or the grave, he moved back home to Bristol, Tennessee, to live with his mother and father. He was twenty-five, broke and broken and fresh out of pride, so he bought a used yellow motor scooter, stuck a Patagonia sticker on the gas tank, and rode to the river wearing chest waders with a fly rod stuck between his legs. He did this most days. For three years.
He tells me this as he changes the fly I’ve been casting to South Holston River trout, in the corrugated Southern Appalachian ridgelines of East Tennessee. Scooter—his given name is Matthew Guinn—is a bear of a man, six foot five, with scraggly facial hair that hasn’t quite figured out if it’s a beard or a goatee. He’d seen a nice brown trout nose up to my fly, then reject it outright. “Umph,” he grunted. “I don’t like how he turned away.” He snips off the Puff Daddy dry fly—a slim silhouette tied to imitate a sulphur mayfly—and swaps it for a crippled emerger, a fly designed to look like a small mayfly struggling to crawl out of its larval shell. “The fish see that crippled fly and they’re not so worried about the bug getting away,” he explains. “It gives the fish a bit of confidence.
