Catching 22

By Zach Christiansen

Catching 22 is a story of a trout bum dropping everything to embark on a quest in search of something greater. Zach Christiansen wrote this memoir to release an untold story buried deep within, to express the raw emotion of a depressed college graduate, and to br

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885048491

Book preview

Catching 22

Zach Christiansen

new degree press

copyright © 2022 Zach Christiansen

All rights reserved.

Catching 22

ISBN

979-8-88504-644-2 Paperback

979-8-88504-962-7 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-849-1 Digital Ebook

Contents

Author’s Note

Chapter 1

Quarter Life Crisis

Chapter 2

Home Waters: Colorado River Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 3

Living in a Trap: Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 4

Unusual Water: Gila Trout

Chapter 5

Acceptance: Apache Trout

Chapter 6

Staring at an Indicator: Bonneville Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 7

Distractions: Kern River Rainbow and Little Kern Golden Trout

Chapter 8

Coffee Pot Trout: California Golden Trout

Chapter 9

Easy to Lose, Hard to Gain: Eagle Lake Rainbow Trout

Chapter 10

Small Fish Fatigue: McCloud River Redband Trout

Chapter 11

Nobody Targets Those: Coastal Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 12

Diamond in the Rough: Lahontan Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 13

Trout in a Trickle: Whitehorse Basin and Humboldt Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 14

It’s Just Fishing: Snake River Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 15

Spoiled Appetite: Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 16

Unfinished Business: Westslope Cutthroat Trout

Chapter 17

Elusive Eight-Second Ride: Bull Trout

Chapter 18

Mountain Men: Arctic Grayling

Chapter 19

Leopards and Bears: Alaskan Rainbow Trout

Chapter 20

For Dad: Dolly Varden

Chapter 21

The Wobbly End: Arctic Char

Chapter 22

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Author’s Note

At twenty-three years old, I was already feeling stuck. Just six months into my first real job after college, I hated the politics and processes of the marketing world. How had I been so naive to choose a career that felt utterly unfulfilling? As I attempted to juggle my client’s marketing budgets, I longed for opportunity to make an authentic and purposeful impact.

The company I worked for emphasized culture, which meant I could throw a football around the office and nobody would get upset. Executives even rode bikes and scooters around the building during phone calls. But despite everything the company did to appeal to the younger workforce regarding the laidback environment, holiday parties, and decent benefits, I couldn’t help but wonder how sustainable this career was for me.

In writing, when quantity has precedence over quality, the fun quickly disappears. I was on a team of copywriters, or "Search Engine Optimization Specialists’’ as I would classify myself on LinkedIn. As copywriters, our paychecks were based on how much content we produced in a forty-hour week, leaving us no choice but to hammer out pages of nonsense stuffed with keywords. Rarely did anyone double back to confirm return on investment.

Maybe the abhorrence for the work was a testament to the generational laziness and entitlement everyone my age supposedly comes programmed with. Maybe it was my hesitancy to move on from seasonal work, an abandonment that felt like a sacrifice of authenticity. Or maybe the job was soul-suckingly unfulfilling.

You would think introverts like me rejoiced when the entire country worked from home during the pandemic. But the limited amount of human interaction in my work routine left me feeling empty, and the long hours spent staring at a computer screen weighed heavier on my back after I moved into my parents’ basement. This weight was the beginning of a backbreaking time in my young life.

COVID-19 arrived that spring along with other complications outside of work. The year before, I used a combination of immature fear and ignorance to turn a promising relationship into a tangled disarray, which manifested in continual heartache and false hope with a girl I was still in love with (we’ll call her Delaney).

Delaney and I dated in college before I spontaneously ended things. Even after the breakup, she held on to me tightly, and our relationship carried on in the dark after I had graduated and moved to the west slope of Colorado to open a new fly shop and live out my trout bum dreams. Even though we were no longer together, she visited often, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I had given fishing precedence over love. I felt even more regret when the angling skills I taught her began to approach my own.

As the rivers froze over that winter, I settled into my new SEO position, swimming through a sea of new adjustments and lonely emotion. Delaney and I talked about starting over when she returned from a semester abroad, but we both knew a lot could happen in five months. As I grew accustomed to the salaried world outside of fly fishing, I began losing contact with her and eventually started seeing other girls. The failure to light a spark with anybody else let me know I still wasn’t ready to move on.

As I watched my coworkers get furloughed left and right throughout the first month of the pandemic, I felt myself digging deeper into a sorrowful pit of depression. During my privileged life of plentiful opportunity, I couldn’t pinpoint the moment when these feelings began, but the worthless darkness had hung around for so long I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the light. I wanted to feel connected, to envision a future for myself, and to go fishing again. Waiting for Delaney to come home was something to look forward to. When I reached out, I was disheartened to learn she had moved on to someone else. This moment is when I discovered the true extent I could feel physical pain in my heart.

I wrote her a letter telling her I wanted to marry her. After several days of not leaving my bed, she called to tell me she had found someone who could love her better and Could I please stop trying to contact her? My parents’ basement was the last place I wanted to be, and I felt the nauseating twist in my stomach one feels when they know they’ve hurt someone they love, coupled with a pessimism about ever finding purpose and joy again. I wanted to call a friend but I had also pushed many of them away. Thoughts of suicide crept in without warning, and I became terrified of how plausible of a fix that seemed to be. I realized I needed some serious help.

I wondered if I would be stuck in the status quo forever, unable to find fulfillment through mutually conflicting sectors of life that included romantic relationships, financial security, mental well-being, and my greatest passion. (If you were beginning to wonder if this is another corporate escape book or sappy love story, I promise it’s actually a book about trout.)

The wheels had been turning in my head for years about all the different fish I would love to target with a fly rod. A quick glance at my summer work calendar quashed most of these dreams, and as much as I wanted to wade out into a river and let the white noise of flowing water wash away my problems, the mental state I was in let me know I first needed to get my foot in the door with a professional counselor.

Our first two meetings primarily consisted of me pouring my sob story on the table through teary eyes.

I don’t know how I got here. But I can’t get out.

I couldn’t figure out why I had made life so hard.

In our third meeting, I worked up the nerve to tell my counselor I was considering quitting my job to road trip for the entire summer while attempting to catch twenty-two different species of trout within their native ranges. It was a dream expedition I used to tell Delaney about, to which she would respond, What will I do while you’re gone? I didn’t think I would ever make it happen, but surprisingly, my blunt statement was met with extreme enthusiasm from my counselor. He had been giving me tactics to find—what he referred to as an exit to the loop, an escape from the catch-22 I found myself in. While fishing would not be this direct exit, it lit up an appealing avenue that might eventually lead to that door.

Since I began fly fishing, I had been far more interested in the wild and native trout of the Rocky Mountains that require long hikes to reach than the stocked rainbow trout dumped in my local river by a hatchery truck. Inspired by my uncle, who paints watercolors of wild trout, I began researching all the different species and strains of western trout that can still be targeted today, driven by a competitive edge to catch them all in one summer. I wanted to escape the crowded tailwaters and freestone rivers being exploited on social media, to get away from the burnt-out guides I worked alongside, and to catch a fish that hadn’t been caught before. I wanted to get lost and not return home until I had crossed all twenty-two of the lesser-known species off the list.

In my head this task sounded easy. But the more I read about these native trout, the more concerned I was I wouldn’t find them all. Seven of the twenty-two were listed as threatened species through the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and several others were left off my list due to recent extinction. What could be done to save these fish? Have wildfires, water use, and global warming really been as detrimental to trout populations as I read they were? How do anglers like me toe the line of supporting small populations of native trout while learning to love the non-native species that drive the economy of fly fishing? Surely trout management is more than artificially raising fish and releasing them into a river. These questions fueled my desire to learn more about the historic state of the western species and derive my own concept of conservation (Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Services, 1973).

The following pages contain a story of a trout bum searching for something greater—a young man seeking to affirm his masculinity and identity in the wilderness. With the great days of fishing for twenty-two different trout species come the inevitable mishaps of living out of a truck, run-ins with the law, flat tires, broken gear, and building relational equity with friends and family. It is also a narrative of conservation and the underrepresented species of trout that are hanging on to their genetic purity by a thread. All throughout, it is a coming-of-age story where the decision to quit a corporate job and go fishing sets me down a new path. I hope this book inspires you to experience wild places and think deeper about the things that truly matter to you.

Chapter 1

Quarter Life Crisis

If I threw a rock as far as I could from my parents’ back porch, it might land in a nice fishing hole on a modest trout stream. I grew up in Colorado, where spending summer days on trout rivers was a regular part of my childhood. But it wasn’t until high school, when I started working in a fly shop, that I really started fishing like a madman.

At first, working in the shop was just a way to gain retail work experience and save up some cash—at least that’s what I told myself. In reality, my uncle handed me the job after I failed to land any summer work that year (more on him later).

That first summer was so fun I returned for a second, and a third, even after I moved away to college. I built relationships with the wide variety of grimy guides who came through those shop doors every morning and became increasingly attached to the trout bum lifestyle. Eventually, selling flies to out-of-towners turned into taking them on guided trips, and my undergraduate courses couldn’t finish fast enough for me to spend another summer taking people fishing.

A summer’s worth of guiding was an attractive income for a nineteen-year-old, and I probably missed some great internships that could have helped cement a stable career because I was fishing instead. In three months, I earned enough to make some middle-aged men with nine-to-five jobs jealous. Coincidentally, I would find ways to spend it just as fast on the new bells and whistles back in the shop. As the cash tips burnt straight through my waders, fly fishing became my obsession.

It didn’t take long for the local canyon to bore me, where the guides abused the same runs against the constant echo of rental car traffic. I gravitated toward the high country, jumping on the opportunity to take clients on overnight backpacking trips to alpine lakes where fishing pressure was never a concern. Native cutthroat in those lakes were a lot prettier, and if I cooked the meals right and remembered the bug spray, the tips were better, too.

After six years of living this seasonal lifestyle, I felt strangely out of place behind dual computer monitors, a human robot lost against a wall of others performing the same tasks. My manager was a great teacher, passionate and knowledgeable about the work. Yet I speak for those who sat within earshot when I say we were doing well financially but absolutely hating the work.

In 2020, the combined effects of stressing over my job, dealing with a global pandemic, living with my parents, and going through a messy breakup left me in a familiarly scary spot. I took a long hard look in the mirror and decided it was time to go fishing. I don’t mean casual Saturday morning fishing—I was ready to fish until the pain went away.

My parents were less than thrilled when I told them I was quitting my stable job during a pandemic to live out of the back of my F-150 while attempting to catch twenty-two different species of trout and char on a handwritten list. They seemed to appreciate the need for a sabbatical but were skeptical of my choice to chase after small fish, largely on my own. This impulsive decision can be traced back to several events and inspiring individuals who set the trip in motion years earlier.

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Before I became a guide, I paid my dues through long ten-hour days in the shop. Sitting around a fly shop can provide lots of time to get lost in thought—testing rods, reading magazines, and staring at artwork on the walls. Adjacent to the rows of disorganized tippet and leader in our shop, the owner displayed several pieces of art. One of these was a large, framed poster with the heading Trout of North America. This poster is a staple in fly shops across the country, and many readers can likely picture it. It displays thirty-four illustrations (by renowned artist Joseph Tomelleri) of various trout, the vibrant colors of each fish staggered in a perfect aesthetic. Viewing the paintings was a seductive tease that left me desiring something more. I wanted to touch the trout with my own hands, to peel them off the page and release them back in rivers they came from.

During my sophomore year of college, a dream opportunity presented itself: Trout Unlimited was sponsoring a trip for five college students to road-trip across the west and document their journey to catch eighteen trout species I recognized from the poster. I spent weeks preparing my interview materials and walked out of an economics class on a spring day to participate in a phone interview. I was crushed when I wasn’t selected.

For several years I threw native trout to the wayside, distracted by the hustle of life. I feared by the time I could make a species-focused trip happen on my own terms, even more small-stream habitats would be tame, polluted, and over-pressured. I went back to work at the fly shop instead, where my wild trout dreams were slowly rebooted through Uncle Darren’s contagious passion for watercolor paintings.

Along with being the most jolly, purehearted fly shop manager you’ll find, Uncle Darren is an exceptional trout artist and has unapologetically parlayed these two hobbies perfectly together. Replicating his most unique catches with a brush naturally bled into a need to target new species of trout to paint. The artistic results of these new species invigorated my curiosity of the incredibly prismatic salmonids.

One fall, Darren began making trips to southern Arizona to hunt down an Apache trout. On his short weekends he would make the nine-to-ten-hour drive from Colorado just to fish for one day. His goal was simply to photograph one trout that he could artistically replicate on the easel, but the process was turning out to be more complicated than expected. He took three trips over two years before he finally caught his first Apache trout.

This passion got me interested in the distribution of Apache trout. Lack of skill wasn’t the reason he had struggled—they just had to be that damn hard to find. The challenging nature of the scavenger-hunt-like fishing style intrigued me, and I began reading about the other lesser-known species of trout.

Around this time my grandpa handed me a stock of old Trout Unlimited magazines, unintentionally introducing me to the State of the Trout