
He’s wearing the white T-shirt and baggy logging jeans he always wears with his suspenders and Romeo slippers.
The sun is like a paper cut, stinging the asphalt alongside his single-wide trailer.
I drive up and park. His 7-year-old lab who I remember from a pup doesn’t bother barking.
Rodney Wolfe wears a baseball cap he got from his kids or grandkids with a fishing logo that reads Old Anglers Don’t Die They Just Lose Their Action, or something. He’s got a pantry full of them.
“Just the man I been looking for,” says Wolfe as he sees me walk alongside his house that is isolated on a ridge with a view of the valley near St. Joe City.
I called twice as I approached but he didn’t hear.
“Lost my damned hearing aid,” he says.
“Move this battery for me, Stud,” he commands. “Set it right there.”
Rodney Wolfe is working on his boat again.
“Can you get that johnboat down from the rafters?”
“Help me load this here pontoon.”
Boats are a lot of what I’ve helped Rodney Wolfe with over the years at his home on the hill and as a reward he’s always given me a liberal fly dubbing and a raft of, well, you know.
“How’s your love life, Stud?”
It’s ah….
“I had three wives, but only two were any good.”
One ex-wife for me.
“How many kids you got, again?”
5
“Boy you beat me. You hit a homerun at every bat, didn’t ya?”
Not really.
“How’s the fly tying coming?”
Never graduated the blue dun, that he calls a Big Bad Wolfe. A fly he uses in slow water, in the heat of the day to catch what he calls beautiful fish.
“I always caught my biggest fish in the heat of the day,” he will tell.
He calls the Big Bad Wolfe his trout weapon. It was the first fly he invented long before he enlisted in the Big One and was sent to be stationed in the jungles of the South Pacific.
“Before WWII we had very poor tying materials compared to now,” he wrote in a column called Fishing, Hunting, Lying that appeared for years in the St. Maries Gazette Record, a local weekly newspaper.
“The neighbor's rooster, JC Penny buttonhole thread and salvaged sweater yarn made up our supplies.
“Tyers with money could purchase hooks and better quality materials from Herter's. We had our own Rhode Island Red and cross roosters with ginger grizzly hackle.
At that time, in the late 1930s, there were giant mid-morning and early evening hatches of the spotted mayfly.
“After driving through the hatches, windshields would look as if they had fruit salad on them and the river would come alive with rising fish.
“After the war, when I started selling flies, the Big Bad Wolfe was my best seller. At Trummel's Service Station I could sell all that I could tie. The station was the hangout of most fly fishermen. The flies sold for 35 cents apiece, or $3.50 per dozen.
Good flies were difficult to come by then, and although mine were not very pretty and rather crude they did catch the heck out of the huge population of trout we had in the St. Joe and St. Maries rivers.
Once I was fishing in the nice hole just before Flemming Creek and caught a fine trout on nearly every cast.
“I broke the barb of my hook and those trout were so greedy for that Big Bad Wolfe fly that I had to hide behind a drooping cottonwood to change hooks.
Hard to believe.”
He still writes columns in long hand and sends them in to be typeset, which invariable prompts an intercom call.
“Can you help me decipher this chicken scratch?”
He blames the scriggle on bad eyes and a hand unsteady at the pen, but still deft enough to tie a Big Bad Wolfe.
“It’s hard to write when you’re seeing double,” he said.
Wolfe is 84. He has fished North Idaho’s St. Joe River before it was given the moniker “Shadowy St. Joe,” and long before a man named Duane Hagadone penned “North Idaho” in his newspapers. A term as common now as Keystone cans along any highway up here.
Anyone who has waded the St. Joe River to cast caddisfly imitations into runouts in an effort to catch the river’s ample cutthrout, has heard of Wolfe.
Anglers who cast bead-head nymphs, or streamers or some other sinking variation of fake trout food, may have heard from him as well.
Wolfe is a dry fly purist who has worked flies on the more than 100 miles of fishable trout waters of the St. Joe since he was old enough to get his feet wet.
For Wolfe, fishing started as a necessity. He and his brothers caught trout to feed the family in the latter years of the Great Depression and he learned to tie flies from a riverboat gal who was 15 years his senior who he had a crush on. He coaxed her with the flies he made.
"But Maggie's love wasn't for sale," he will tell.
Fly fishing too grew into a passion.
In 1971, when he worked as a boiler attendent at a local mill Wolfe wrote a treatise on cutthroat trout.
It wasn't well received.
The longtime fisherman and fly tyer was asked to present to a University of Idaho fisheries class the 17-page document, which called for a catch-and-release trout fishery on the upper St. Joe River, and chided the Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game for stocking rainbows in waters where the fish weren't indigenous because, according to the thesis, the stocking program would ruin the river's pure strain of Westslope cutthroat.
The lecture he said was a lesson in humility.
"I was almost laughed out of the classroom," he said.
The professor, he said huffed at his lack of a biology degree.
“I never came so close to hitting a man with glasses,” said Wolfe, years later.
But, like a hook before the barb is bent down, the management Wolfe asked for, stuck.
Almost 40 years later much of what he wrote has become policy on the St. Joe River.
Within the last decade the Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game, citing cost and limited survival rates, quit stocking rainbows in the St. Joe River. The state of wild, Westslope cutthroat trout in waterways where they once were as common as caddis flies, has become a regional priority as well. Several organizations call for tighter cutthrout trout take-and-keep regulations to assure the survival of the native fish that has been relegated to the small tributaries of rivers like the St. Joe.
"You can't hardly find them anymore," Wolfe says.
This day, he plans to fish for bass, he says, and wants to be on the water by noon.
The sun bristles.
“Bass don’t bite when it’s hot like this, so I won’t have to clean any,” he says.
I hear later that he broke the transom off the motor when he rolled the boat and the trailer off a too-steep launch.
I call him and exclaim “Jeezis Chr..., Rodney!”
Without missing a tick he quips.
“He had nothing to do with it.”
There are many solid, and some expert fly fishers on the St. Joe, but most of them hit the waters weekends a time that Wolfe won’t go near the river.
“There isn’t enough room to put my boat in,” he says.
They don’t know the intricacies of the water, every mile that Wolfe learned as a boy fishing by himself, hopping the Milwaukee Line that used to skirt a great length of the St. Joe.
Wolfe is getting a pacemaker, he says.
He plans to fish by August when his strength is back.
As I turn to leave, he calls out to me.
“If you can get in any trouble,” he chortles. “Well, go ahead.”
Ralph Bartholdt




