A Different Nation

War music and ‘vibing’ for steelhead with Matt Mendes

By Eric M. Johnson

Published in the 2022 winter issue of the Drake Magazine:

The cabin of Matt’s truck is booming with tribal chants and illuminated only by various maintenance-malfunction lights. It is 5 o’clock in the morning in October, somewhere on the 640,000-acre Warm Springs reservation in the frigid high-desert of central Oregon. Matt stubs out his cigarette and takes the wheel, driving past his child’s mini four-wheeler, antler sheds in the lawn grass, and a porta potty onto unlit tribal roads for several long minutes before feeling the need to turn on his headlights.

I ask him what we’re listening to.

He seems confused. “Indian music.”

“I’m asking…what it’s about, what are they saying?”

“War music,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘let’s swing a steelhead.’”

We laugh. Matt flashes his smile. He is a man of understated looks and gestures. Quick takes and short sentences. He is 6 foot two, with butt-length black hair rolled up under his hoodie, and silver on his fingers and wrist. As a spey guru, Matt seems most interested finding the unconscious repetitive smoothness in the cast-swing-step method – “vibing,” as he would later put it.

The sunlight climbs over the ridge line, opening an endless expanse of beige hills, basalt cliffs, sage, irrigated alfalfa, and sporadic fir or cottonwood stands. Matt periodically stops the truck to glass a draw or saddle for elk.

Our steelhead war music is interrupted by a public service announcement about STDs. Matt switches to country.

We bounce along an anti-road toward the Deschutes River. Matt is putting us in Moody’s first. My friend Chris – a Portland piscator also obsessed with the Buffalo Bills, gastronomy, and America’s fractured democracy – is starting in the riffle, and me in a grease above. I enter the narcotic trance of the dawn swing. At one point, I get a long pull but couldn’t move the fish again.

Back at the truck, I consider how I feel being a white man buying my way back in time. We are not merely fishing on remote land, or on private land, but in a different nation. We could not be here without Matt’s permission. I dwell on the genocidal trajectory of the white man’s exploits in the west.

Then, on solitude. We toggled past some 13 other boats and maybe 30 bank anglers yesterday while floating from U.S. soil; today, we see nobody apart from the occasional long-distance rafter bobbing by, and anglers fishing the white man’s side of the river.

Meanwhile, Matt is discussing with rhetorical authority which swing spot we should try next.

He seems to decide to see whether he can drown us.

He wants to put me in Pitcher’s Mound, which is a patch of elevated mush surrounded in every direction but reverse by a bottomless abyss of moving river. He explains how this works. You slide into the river, immediately chest deep, and shuffle inch by inch for several feet until your toes feel a slightly elevated mound, perhaps the size of an overturned dinner bowl, and step on top of it. “You don’t move,” he says.

“Cast, swing, two more pulls of line, cast again. Jack as much line as you can.” A step beyond the mound, or to either side, you’re swimming.

I make many excuses. Chris takes it, and doesn’t fall in.

Matt then insists I fish Rock Garden, a football field expanse of waist-deep riffle choked by submerged boulders you climb over. Eventually, you make it to a less-terrible spine of rocks you can wobble down until the tail out. “Low body. Slow steps,” he explains. I stumble and twist outward. I laugh – it’s an absurd wade. I make a cigarettes-in-the-hat joke. Matt doesn’t laugh. Asks again if I have cleats.

“You are going to work out to that massive rock,” he points with the net. I squint into the sun’s glare over the endless tumbling white water. I recall watching Chris attempt the same feat last year; he ended up floating down the river like a dropped beer can.

I send a snap T. It isn’t terrible.

Matt gestures for me to venture out farther. I look at him.

“This is a big boy run,” Matt hollers from shore.

“I’m not a big boy. I’m a little boy.”

He doesn’t laugh. He moves off the bank, appears to glide over the rocks to my side, and essentially hoists me up at the back of my waders, moving and placing me downstream between casts like a chess piece, my legs glancing over the rocks in moon-jumping puppetry.

Chris stops fishing to watch this and prepare many insults.

I land a trout by accident.

We hike back to the truck in the high sun looking for arrowheads where a wildfire cleared patch of sage brush. I point out a turkey’s bobbing head in the distance. Matt says it’s just a darkened branch on a small pine. “It’s sleep-deprivation and heat,” Matt says. He is referring to our habit of race-drinking the first night before streelheading, and the vicious solar index reading on his digital watch.

As we drive to the next run, Matt stops the truck to show us a herd of wild horses, resting under the shade of two trees in a sprawling fire-blackened bowl. We marvel at their grace until the giant Appaloosa, his manhood swinging in the great afternoon sun, attempts to mount one of the mares. She rebuffs him by twice by hop-dancing on her hind legs. After a few seconds, the stallion is gathering himself to try again, and Matt drives off to let nature play out.

Our conversation shifts to what things were like here before the collapse of the iconic Pacific Ocean steelhead runs. Matt reflects. His grandfather taught him to swing flies when he was 13. He is now 32.

He says, at the end of the 1990s, he could swing a steelhead in every run he stopped at. “It was 100%.”

His best day was 17 steelhead to hand. He went home and told his grandfather, who chuckled and said his best day was 26. Well.

Given the depressed steelhead runs in Columbia River tributaries, Chris and I are elated with one fish apiece; he plucked his out of a sluggish pool with virtually zero room for a D-loop, mine fell to a black and blue marabou tube swung below a rock in a fast riffle.

Matt says he will join us in the last run. He is throwing with a 14-foot Meiser rod, his tribe’s colors embedded in the cork. Downtempo beats rise from his phone.

His spey casting is uncommonly animated. He pivots and shifts his frame as if executing an easy layup.

His line transitions from air to water imperceptibly. After that, he leans into a Statue of Liberty-like stance as he sets his swing path, holding the cork at times only between his thumb and pointer. On every cast, you can see he expects a fish.

He yells to me that a steelhead rolled downstream. I cover the water, then Matt does. We never see the fish again.

Back at Matt’s house it is 80 F and we’re down to our sun shirts, peeling off waders. We hide from the sun in his garage to exchange fish pictures and payment. A buck’s head on Matt’s garage floor has shed a pool of blood and is starting to smell. Matt’s daughter and son, ages 2 and 5, are eating ice cream and running around the yard. Meanwhile, Matt’s wife assists in freeing the rods I tangled on the hood rack – while Chris marvels in the sun and beauty and peace at how I could have possibly failed at such a simple task.

Two days of steelheading and only a few other things went terribly wrong. I snapped my rod trying to launch a D-loop hooked on a dead branch behind me, and later stabbed by thumb on an exotic riverside shrub. Chris put his iPhone in a coma.

“Did we cover the water OK today?” I ask as we watch fish-release videos huddled around Matt’s phone.

“For sure, guys,” Matt says. “Most of the day, I felt like I was fishing through you.”