Big Bad Wolfe

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

A challenge with chili 'n poetry

There’s this guy I know.
You may know him too, or you might not.
My guess is there’s not many like him.
He’s a combination of Peter Pan and Ben Hur, Marty Robbins and Pablo Neruda and he writes for a newspaper in Montana that is a short drive in any direction from some of the finest trout water in America.
He fishes the rivers there with a regularity that makes chronic insomnia seem frivolous, but he has never succumbed to the cliché of trout snob.
You can tell by his Farm Supply waders, tattered wading shoes and the little, out of date vest he wears to keep the sun off his back that he fishes for trout, not prestige. His shades are Ross Dress For Less, and the car he drives has the nicks and bumps of some serious battles with ruts, slushy roads and impious neighbors.
Among pals and children, he is known for the challenges that he presents without authority, just tossing them out like a San Juan worm in high water to see what becomes of them.
He calls them by his name.
I’ll call him Johnny Webster.
“It’s Johnny Webster challenge time,” he might say and rub his hands together.
I have seen children mow lawns, pick up grass clippings, do piles of dirty dishes with soap in a cold water bucket in the rain just to live up to a Johnny Webster challenge.
They parade around him as if his pockets are full of sugar, waiting for a challenge to gather firewood, climb spindly trees to the breaking point and to ford cold stream in flip flops to bring back berries one at a time from an overhanging bush of wait-a-minute vines.
If you can’t get your kids to wash the car, call Johnny Webster. He’ll make a game of it.
Or, of anything.
They return to their nest smiling, with knees nicked and bruised, black eyes and the lumps and lacerations of Ranger School graduates.
Before bed time they ask to do it again.
Adults are lassoed too.
I know of adult males, hefty fellows in woolen coats and high top Romeos who leg wrestled on a sticky floor in a Butte tavern to live up to a Johnny Webster challenge.
Winners received back slaps, everyone smiled even the losers, and Johnny Webster disappeared in a trail of pixie dust-like foam from whatever was on tap to a lone seat at the end of the bar, his wheels churning, the whiff of gunfighter ballads dancing in his head as poetry, thick as chili, slipped from his tongue.
“This is America!” he will say, often and loudly,
He lives there. Western Montana, especially Butte, is as America as it gets. He travels alone to small towns like Glen, Pony and Basin, dragging along copies of Trout Fishing in America and something by McGuane.
He’s betting on horses.
He’s sipping long necks and studying for the Foreign Service Exam.
He’s standing on the edge of stream with a Kmart kid pole.
“Alright, Johnny Webster challenge time!” He’ll say. “Who can catch a 16 inch brown trout using this Batman pole and 12 feet of line!”

Ralph Bartholdt

A Good Hat (is hard to find)

Ron Meek and I stood on the banks of Boulder River near Big Timber and watched a jet boat the size of a Florida shrimper power up the roiling water that dumped from the Absoraka Range into the Yellowstone.
The Boulder is a rocky stream with silver water pounding large, washed stones and the boat’s gunwales could have notched the trees on both sides.
On her bow was a bikini blond in Farah sunglasses and the man behind the wheel had a serious, oh-oh look, like maybe he had taken a wrong turn in his quest for the Yellowstone Club.
Meek, a lanky mid-50s fly fishing guide with a beard going gray and eyes that said he’s seen his share of asininities, looked at me and smiled.
He mouthed something, holding his 9-foot, 5-weight fly rod, but the words were lost in the weight of the engine’s roar.
Afterward the boat came back down.
When its noise disappeared, we settled in for some nymphing and he told a story of how guiding Sandra Day O’Connor in Mongolia the then-Supreme Court justice took him to task for misidentifying a taimen.
“That’s a rainbow, Ron,” she told him. “I have caught a lot of fish and I know a rainbow when I see one.”
Meek, who falls asleep counting trout, agreed with her.
There was no reason not to.
“I’m a humble man,” he said.
He gave me a yellow hat with the name of the guide school on it that prompted me to drive that far east to fish for trout.
He taught me how to make indicators out of yarn and small rubber bands, how a river ticket was something you couldn’t use twice and how, when it comes to fishing, ignorance can sometimes be the mother of a keen invention.
We caught rainbow trout shiny as a cutlass that day .
I have used what he showed on several rivers for several years, usually while wearing the yellow hat, which is nicely sun faded and form fitted.
Last week on the Interstate heading to a new trout haunt, one that I was assured was severely under fished and little known, the yellow hat leapt from my head and spun behind me on the asphalt.
Several semis and the usual summer throng of traveling families in minivans, SUVs and Winnebagos bore down on it.
I watched it disappear in the rear view.
I wanted to stop, but danger said no.
There were other reasons.
My instincts told me keep driving.
It was time to let go.
To move on.
To wear one of the other hats that I keep in a pack and don’t wear for reasons I’ve never addressed.
Despite the fishing at the new spot, which required a long trek on a two-track over BLM land that seemed ideal for the cacti that grew there, I couldn’t stop thinking about the hat.
“It’s just a hat,” someone said. “I’ll buy you another.”
It’s true, but I looked for it anyways on the way back without sighting it.
It's just a hat, I told myself, a material thing. Who cares.
It was identical to one that Tracy Peterson of the Umpqua school wore on the Yellowstone when he told me to run the drift boat straight through a gantlet of rocks that had a rainbow of spray on the other side and a wall of foam for an encore.
“I came through that once,” he said after we made it to soft water. “I stuck the nose of the boat straight down and capsized.”
He grinned.
Memories like that, the love of the sport and that particular summer, prodded me to go back looking for the summer-bleached cover.
Next day as dew kept down the dust and the sun barely crested a butte, I rolled up the highway and instead of heading home I took a detour.
I counted antelope above what’s become a familiar river.
And I saw my hat kicked in the sage.
I stopped.
I walked across the 4-lane and listened to a meadowlark. Saw the flickering tail of a deer. I picked up the hat and set it on.
Good hats are hard to find.
Then I went back to the truck, cut across the grassy median and trundled north to home.

Ralph Bartholdt

Peeling pulp

They peeled the bark off of logs in a water-filled vat where the wood rolled around and men with draw knives pulled long strips at a time.
As a kid I longed to do that for pay and when I graduated from school I asked Bud Holmes for a job.
What for? He asked.
To peel pulp, I said.
Bud lived in a home on the lake with a new wife and a vaulted ceiling and a view of the sun as it painted everything orange and then sank.
He was a Marine in the Pacific and when he came home as a kid after many treks up the beaches facing Japanese guns his hair was snow white.
He owned Holmes Logging and he and his son had an enterprise that stretched across the entire Lake Country. Loaded with pulp, their trucks were always parked in the lots of cafes.
We don’t do that anymore, he said. It’s all machines now.
I bought my first draw knife at Zetterberg’s, an old store that sold Frisco jeans and tractors and jacks and where 12 penny nails were weighed and dropped into a paper sack, and the floors were all wood and they creaked.
I was on my way to Talkeetna to a wage job building log homes and figured my own tools were a wise investment.
The job fell through. I ended at a gravel company in Southeast Alaska instead, with my caulk shoes and the draw knife still cosmoline-slick, wrapped in my pack. Where dredges dumped sea bottom on the shore and crabs skittered and snails crawled before the sun took its toll. We used front end loaders to drop the stuff in a shaker that sorted the rock into piles.
I took the draw knife out of its paper at night sometimes and thought about smoothing the edges of counters, stair treads and doors.
I peeled the bark from cedar logs to use on a dock years later.
And chunked the bark from the logs of P-pine that were cut for my home.
Last week, I dug in the shed for the knife, 25 years almost gone.
It lay under a sack of turkey feathers full of beetle husks and next to a framing hammer I hadn’t seen in a while.
The edges were rusted. I got a file and shined them.
I fell some peckerpole trees from behind the barn and dragged them to the road with the ATV.
Then I knelt over the work like a clergyman, but instead of held high with palms out and eyes closed my hands were low clenching the knife handles, drawing the blade to my waist.
The peeled logs are meant for the old home’s interior, to add to the décor of this Idaho farmstead.
The pine bark came off in strips revealing white wood, the glistening smooth underneath.
Peel away the rind and you’re left with the vascular and gleaming truth of all trees, so shiny and slick and sweet.
Peel the bark away and you're left with the wood's yellow rays, the fire scars and beetle borings that pitch covered and healed.
And the draw knife easy in your hands.
It’s just bark; there’s nothing more rudimentary. The smell of pitch in your nose.
Peeling pulp.
Ralph Bartholdt

Portraits of people, North Idaho mishmash, summers and our Marines in Iraq

Girls, boys, plastic toys

She wants to take them to day care.

Daddy, she says, just two?

OK, of course. What am I thinking?

We put two Barbie dolls into her pink backpack and zip it up.

The liturgy of plastic dolls is without equal: Mermaid dolls and guitar singers, small car drivers, horse gals, legal secretaries, doctors, lawyers and them's got a surfer for a beau.

I know these dolls as well as my own socks.

They are in my underwear drawer, in the towel rack, in the small places were dust bunnies hide when they aren't being swept into a pan.

Each year the ones we have invite more.

They have lines of communication that Verizon wants.

Daughters collect Barbies like wasps in a pop bottle left in the sun.

Buzz.

Call a mother from the Wal-Mart aisle and ask, simply, what shall I get her for the birthday?

This is an experiment.

Do this a day before the event.

Invariably a Barbie product will sit in the back seat as you motor home.

I grew up with Barbies.

Ken was their companion.

I didn't think much of Ken.

He had hair like the bad guy in old James Bond movies or the librarian, downstairs, in the video section.

That's a Wim Wenders film...you like Wim Wenders?

It was almost real but when you held a Bic to it the flames popped and it smelled like plastic.

Ken was the guy who got the chicks, while Ben, his brother, joined the Army and became GI Joe.

I dug that dude.

My daughters, though, prefer the guy with the sculptured abs and blond surfer hair who carries a leash for Barbie's chow, instead of a SAW.

The other day I woke early and tiptoed to the shower.

I had read a piece on the Mumbai shootings.

I was thinking about Iraq and the convoys and the shoes on the side of the road and the pucker factor that went hand-in-hand along with a convoy patrol, until after a while you no longer gave a shit, and you knew that complacency was a bad thing.

I pulled back the shower curtain and before stepping in recognized carnage.

It was the Balkans all over again.

It was Hollywood and hemlock tea.

Guyana and Jimmy Jones.

No, just Barbies.

The lot of them.

Like a small plastic orgy.

Toys.

So near the drain, but no way to get them in it.

Ralph Bartholdt signed his daughter up for the Barbie Fan Club.

High and tidy, Gawd ahmighty

Hoo ah!
High and tight please.
You couldn't see it in his eyes, but the barber on that steaming, sultry day in that air conditioned shop on that shady Washington street remembered a little something from his days in the service.
Sure then, he said, as he had learned to say instead of 'Yessir,' in the many years since he was a kid toeing the blue line, and he slowly lifted the clippers from the hole in the wall and the coily electrical line followed them out into the yellow room like a viper to the flute.
I looked up from a hunting magazine.
No one else did.
We were 8 to the wall and there were 3 barber chairs and ay-ay crew cuts seemed the norm, but when the kid said high and tight like he meant business, like he was about to walk to an interview at the bricklayer's union, something inside me said you gotta see this.
I watched the frail barber with his gray sideburns and the blue tattoos that rode thin arms poking from the starched shirt thumb the button on the clippers and away he went.
Every now and again he'd turn the chair so the kid could catch a glimpse in the big mirror that spanned the wall below the stuffed bass and the one big steelhead and the sign that said Love It or Leave It.
There was a Nixon pin, and a Carter pin and a Reagan pin and now, an Obama pin stuck into the tongue and groove and somewhere I could hear Johnny Cash sing Sunday Morning Sidewalk.
The cut didn't last long.
When the clippers shut off and floor was littered with what were once shoulder length curls, the kid rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if he expected to find a lock on his forehead but there was none.
Just a small dollop of hair on top like the swag for a rumpus room.
The rest was clean as sidewalls.
The barber used a brush on the clippers. The kid dug in his pockets for a 10 spot.
The scenario reminded me of the blue tarp we used to string between trees to keep the Southeast Alaska rain out and we'd pull the greasy electric chord from the shop and take our turns in the big chair and give each other buzz cuts, so the next day on the crew bus to the logging job we all looked different in the same haircut.
I won't make that mistake again, I thought.
It's like going to Eddie Bauer and buying the shirt you saw on the mannequin and realizing too late that instead of looking like the guy in the catalog, you're Al Bundy in a Speedo.
I had come for a trim, just to take the stragglers off. I had a place to be, a business proposal and some fine people to wow.
The kid didn't look too bad with the little carpet sample on his head, though.
He opened the door letting heat in and when it closed the bell went ding.
Next! the barber with the starched shirt said a little too loudly I thought.
He spun the chair for me to sit.
What'll it be? He asked pejoratively.
One of those, I said, pointing.

Ralph Bartholdt hasn't had a haircut since June