Story and Photos by David Zoby
For 98-year-old Fred “Fritz” Behring, there’s one fish that still stands out.
“We were fishing in Pine Creek—me and my friend Pat—and I hooked a really nice fish. The reel came off my rod. I kinda dropped my rod, and I was pulling it in by the line. And I got it right up in front of me. The fish wiggled a little, and the line broke. And it was gone,” said Behring. For decades, he’s remembered that trout. He’s told and retold the story. Pretty soon, his childhood friend was telling the story, too, but in his version, it was Pat McFadden battling the large fish, not Behring. Fishing stories are like that—they are transferable. After a while, it’s impossible to know who hooked the fish, who lost it and who was president at the time. Though after he thought on it for a while, Behring decided President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in office when the line broke up on Pine Creek.
We were seated at an oak table in Ashton, Idaho. Though he lives in Idaho now, Behring told me he always considered himself a Wyomingite. It was July, a box fan doing its best to cool the three-bedroom house. It seemed he had dressed for the occasion—a long-sleeve, button-up shirt, jean shorts, crisp white tennis shoes. He wore a hat that detailed his service in Korea.
Outside, a scouring breeze raked over the croplands. In every direction, potato plants bloomed with little yellow flowers. Behring’s property borders a potato field that blazed in the scorching sun. It received great blasts of ancient water from a pivot irrigator. The plants seemed to steam when the water struck them. Natalie, Behring’s daughter, set out two plates with tuna sandwiches. A black cat, Lizzy, weaved between our legs, as Behring continued his stories about a Wyoming that no longer exists.
In a few hours, as soon as the hottest part of the day passed, we were taking Behring out trout fishing, possibly his last fishing trip of his life. He chuckled a little at the idea of catching his final fish. On one of his walls, he had affixed an antique bamboo fly rod, an overture to a bygone era. Half of the eyelets were missing. On the opposite wall was a spinning rod that looked rescued from the trash. When I asked him if he could still fish with a fly rod, he was quick to tell me that he never learned to fish with spinning rods. Fly fishing is all he did. He knew how to operate both types of reels, manual and automatic. He was referring to the old Pflueger Automatic fly reels, the popular model in the mid-1900s that has gone out of style. He described catgut leaders and flies, anachronistic patterns—Royal Coachman, Muddler Minnow, Gray Hackle—already tied to the leader. You had to soak your leaders in water before you used them; otherwise, they would be brittle, he told me.
Most of Behring’s stories involved the McFadden boys. There were three of them. Their father owned a warehouse in Rock Springs. He had trucks and old roadsters they could borrow. The boys would steal away in the Wyoming landscape for weekends. Backpacking with nothing more than a few blankets and some meager rations, they fished with fly rods in the Sweetwater Gap and other locations in the Wind River Range, where they could catch their limit of brook trout and native cutthroats. How did they spend the night?
“We just laid on the ground close to the fire, and drank beer,” he said.
This was way before the modern ethos of catch and release. Behring described keeping his limit of trout in a wicker creel, covering them with grass to keep them fresh. When he returned from these adventures, his mother cooked his catch in a hot skillet of lard. When I told him we’d have to release all of our fish that day—if we got any—he frowned.
Behring grew up in a Wyoming that is impossible to find these days. He describes the Rock Springs of the 1930s as a raucous place with immigrant neighborhoods. The Chinese arrived to work the mines. Most of the restaurants in town were Chinese. Italians, he said, would purchase a boxcar full of California grapes in the fall. They would process these grapes in their basements. Later, they would sell the wine around town.
“There were two kinds of wine. The first was genuine wine. The second was—they put water with it—and got a second go at it,” he said.
As a young man, his adventures in Jackson Hole and the Wind Rivers left an indelible mark on him. As a teenager, he ventured out into the wilderness to fish and “raise Cain” on Saturday nights. He said that, in Pinedale, if you were tall enough to look the bartender at the Stockman’s saloon in the eyes, and you could keep a straight face, he’d sell you beer and whiskey and not bother with asking for an ID. Jackson had a population of 300 people. After serving in the Korean War—he was drafted by Truman, he said—he returned to Wyoming to get his degree in engineering on the GI Bill. And then he worked to build the roads and bridges in some of our most cherished national parks. He specialized in timber bridges, some of which can still be seen today.
“My fingerprints are on damn near everything in Yellowstone, the Grand Teton and the Wind River; I spent 35 years with the federal highway administration. And that’s where we worked mostly—in the parks and on forest roads.”
He was working in his office at West Thumb the night of Aug. 17, 1959, when a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the area, causing catastrophic damage and killing roughly 28 people. The tremor also created Quake Lake just outside the Park in Montana.
“I was just finishing up the work for the next day, and the old shack started shaking. And I thought it was a bear. I thought, Goddamn, that’s a bear trying to get in here! Then it dawned on me that it was a quake.”
Rich Paini, owner of the famous Trout Hunter Lodge in Last Chance, Idaho, agreed to help us take Behring out for his final trout. He offered to drive us to a private stream full of willing rainbows. Paini and his wife, Millie, met us at Last Chance. She teaches casting lessons to traveling anglers who want a touch-up before their big adventures on the Henry’s Fork.
After a few introductions and a quick pop-in to the fly shop to pick out some dry-fly patterns, Paini had me jump in with him and Millie. Behring and Natalie followed us north into the spectacular cattle country adjacent to Yellowstone. Summer tourism was in full swing. SUVs barreled by with luggage pods strapped to their roofs, and many vehicles towed campers and trailers. Kayaks rode atop trucks, and guides hauled drift boats. This rush to get to the next place wasn’t exactly harmless. There was roadkill—fawns and young raccoons—along the roadside. There were wandering lines of cars waiting for the next available pump at the gas stations.
This close to Yellowstone, you can’t ignore the frenetic vibe of tourists packing into the Park or dashing from town to town in search of the perfect Airbnb. Add to all of this the construction projects that crews work to complete before the weather goes sideways, and you get a taste of how dependent the local economy has become on our National Parks and the surrounding areas. It was dusty, and the gravel stretches of roadwork extended into the distance. We waited for a pilot car. Finally, we veered off the main road and entered the ranch.
As we drove over Sheridan Creek, I noticed that the water was alarmingly low, and the streambank looked like a treacherous place to bring an older person. Paini saw it too. He asked how well I thought Behring could cast.
“Well, Herbert Hoover was president when he was born,” I said, “so I think his casting has suffered a bit.”
Behring admitted earlier that fishing had faded in his life. Most of his best trout stories occurred 85 years ago. He had mentioned that he hadn’t bought a fishing license in 40 years. But Natalie and I exhumed his antique tackle box from his chilly garage and found his Idaho license from 1998. The trays were full of the usual suspects—calcified PowerBait, jars of salmon roe, medal spinners lost to rust, a stringer still in the package and an undecipherable tangle of Eagle Claw snelled hooks. Nearly every garage in Wyoming and Idaho has a neglected tackle box such as this.
The first task was getting Behring to a place where he could see the fish. We hatched a plan to set up a chair at the streambank. We would cast to fish and run the rod to Behring so he could fight them from his chair. He was shaky as we explained to him how it would go down. It occurred to me that when I invented this whole “Last Trout” scheme, I didn’t think it through fully.
It dawned on us that just getting Behring to the streambank would take some maneuvering. Paini drove on a two-track that ended at a fence. The stream was still 100 yards away. So, Natalie and I buddy-carried her father along the trail. He moved along with us and kept the mood light with his frequent jokes. Sometimes he wobbled, or his white tennis shoes seemed to search for ground that wasn’t there. I held on to his arm and could feel that he still had good muscles and strength. “He lifts weights,” she said. “He sits in his chair at home and does exercises.” Millie went ahead and carried a green plastic chair. She planted it on terra firma every 25 yards or so, so Behring could rest. The stream was just out of sight, but we could hear it. We could smell it.
This ranch allows people to purchase day passes and fish along the banks. Paini, having an established relationship with the owner, explained the idea of taking an older man on his final fishing trip. This gained us free access. I could see, by the fresh boot prints and crushed grasses, that a gaggle of fly fishermen had been here already. From the looks of it, they had pounded the banks and thoroughly worked these fish over. Still, the pool was full of jumbo-sized rainbow trout. Some were the size of steelheads. Carnaval trout, trout pond monstrosities. The generals in the pool stirred at our approach. A few lazed in a back eddy. The rest finned in the current, occasionally rising to take some microscopic fly none of us could identify. This is where we’d try for Behring’s last trout. It would be too much of an ordeal to relocate and try another spot. I submerged three cans of beer in the stream, hoping the cold water would cool them to a drinkable state. Millie settled the green chair streamside so Behring could see the trout. But he couldn’t quite see them. I asked if he wanted to try my polarized sunglasses. He took off his glasses and put on mine.
“Sure, I see them now,” he said.
Stoneflies, midges, caddisflies and all varieties of mayflies boiled up from the stream. Large green drakes, the size of almonds, hovered over the pool and dipped down to lay their eggs on the water’s surface. But, remarkably, the trout did not rise. They were showing the telltale signs of having recently been hammered. Paini cast a tiny caddis up to the top of the pool. The trout ignored these first casts. If Paini, a guide and fly-fishing expert who had fished all over the world, couldn’t get a trout to strike, we might not have any success. I worried that this could be a bust; we dragged an ancient man out of his house for a road trip on an impossibly hot day, only to have finicky, worked-over trout turn us down. I stood beside Behring and asked if he was comfortable.
“Sure,” he said. It occurred to me that the equipment—the high-end fly rods, the vests and packs, the fly boxes with their multitudes of patterns—confused him. Fly fishing has become complicated since the days when Pat McFadden and Behring borrowed the company truck and headed for the hills. In the 1930s, fly rods were not status symbols; they were the best tools for the job. You could dip your fly or bait in between root balls and pools choked by willows. In those days, they belly-crawled up to the stream. They used two or three tested patterns, or, better yet, impaled grasshoppers or worms on their hooks and simply dipped them into the cold streams to catch their limit of 16 brook trout. It was the preferred method.
To pass the time, Behring and I talked about his early life in Rock Springs. We shared a slightly cold beer while he described an earlier Wyoming. In Rock Springs, he often went out hunting with a .22 rifle. He simply walked out the back door and into the surrounding sage-covered hills. The bars along Frontier Street were where the action was. Behring told me how, at 14, he and a buddy dared each other to get tattoos in the basement of the Smokehouse Pool Hall.
“I was the only kid in high school who had a tattoo; I always thought that the reason I couldn’t make the basketball team is because the city officials and the school board didn’t want any tattoos,” he said. He grinned at the memory.
Suddenly, Paini hooked a nice rainbow at the top of the pool. He secured the fish to the reel and sprinted over to put the rod in Behring’s hand. The rod bowed deeply as the fish ran across the pool and wallowed on the surface.
Behring wanted to stand. With the help of his daughter, he stood up and pulled against the weight of the trout. At first, he turned the reel in the wrong direction, paying out line. It was a decent fish, perhaps not as impressive as the one that broke his line 80-some years ago on Pine Creek, but a trout nonetheless. I worried the tippet might break. We advised him, all of us, probably too enthusiastically. Let him run, keep the rod bent, don’t horse him. Behring steered the trout toward where Paini waited with a net.
“I’ve got too many coaches,” Behring said.
When the trout struck the net, the hook slipped out. Behring held the long-handled net and admired his last trout. We made him sit for a few photos, but I could tell he wasn’t into it.
“Too bad we can’t keep this one,” he said. Never a subscriber to catch-and-release, eating trout was a theme of his. Or maybe he was hungry. Maybe he wanted to slide the Last Trout into a frying pan.
It was time to get him back to Ashton. There were pilot cars and traffic cones to navigate. Behring was beat. He still wasn’t quite sure what all of this was about—having someone else cast, hauling in a trout only to let it go, endless photo ops. But he said it was nice just to get out and be by a stream.
Natalie and I steered him back to the car. We used the green chair, but he said he didn’t need it. Paini and Millie cleaned up. Anglers from Utah watched us go from the AC of their white SUV. As soon as we pulled out, they swept in and retook the pool.
The Behrings sped off. I hopped in with the Painis. We traded stories about fly fishing as the traffic eased and we hit the blacktop. At the Trout Hunter, we decided to stop in for a beer and recount the day. The sun was dipping its wings into the Henry’s Fork. Customers lounged here and there, leaned against the bar and the topic was most certainly centered on what bugs were hatching, what the trout were doing. In this setting, it seemed that there was nothing more to the world than trout and bugs.
I still had a long drive ahead of me, but I wanted to sit with the Painis and decompress. I told them that when I first got into fly fishing, I was so bad at it that I’d often use worms and grasshoppers instead of flies.
“And I kept everything I caught,” I confessed, “Like Fritz, I wasn’t big on catch and release.”
We recounted the day and wondered among ourselves if anything had been accomplished. We agreed that Behring seemed to have a little fun. Maybe he’ll look back on this and say it was a great day. We didn’t know.
With the light angling through the huge glass windows and the Henry’s Fork gliding by, we talked about some of the shortcomings we’ve found in the sport, but agreed that fly fishing was better than staring at a phone all day or playing video games. It was dark outside, and a family of five was waiting for their to-go orders: burgers and fries in clamshell containers. They had a ways to go to get to West Yellowstone. I had to travel too, but I just sat there as the room darkened. The three of us fell silent. It felt, just for a moment, that there was no real hurry, that we had all the time in the world.
