In Idaho: The hatch of the Green Drake

By Russell Leavitt

Up ahead, the Snake River spooled around a long, grassy bend and then out of sight. From where Bing Lempke stood, waist-deep in the jade current, he had an uninterrupted view of several hundred yards of open water. His eyes had settled there, sweeping across the riffles and eddies for the dimple of a rising fish.

Suddenly Lempke broke out of his semicrouch into an exaggerated stride against the current, which translates roughly into a 440 run in JellO. As his body moved upstream, he worked the rod in his hand in metronomic double time, back and forth, back and forth, inching toward the trout, which had broken water again just a few feet forward of the last rise. As Lempke cast, setting down the fly, an imitation of a green drake May fly, a couple of yards above the rise pattern, his words came drifting on the wind: "My wife never has to worry about me being out in a bar or chasing women, because I'm always out here chasing fish. But this green drake gets a lot of fellas in trouble. I've got laid off three jobs because of that damn thing."

Only a few days before, the May flies had been sighted on the river. Their appearance was a cause for some jubilation in Last Chance, Idaho, a village in the resort area of Island Park (pop. 154) that is perched along the banks of Henry's Fork of the Snake River, or the North Fork as it is known locally. Every summer, the green drake--large and preposterously dandified, resembling, with its translucent upright wings, a miniature clipper ship--makes its appearance on the Idaho stream in an event that is enshrined in fly-fishing mythology. For a few days, scattered green drakes appear in the area, until finally one day the temperatures of the air and water reach critical mass and for perhaps an hour the drakes appear in huge flotillas on the water.

In every fly-fisherman's mind there exists a small repository of dates that mark the calendar. Each commemorates a day immutable as spring: the rise of larvae, or nymphs, from the bottom of certain streams and their emergence as May flies on the surface. But there is no date more important than the hatch of the fabled green drake on Henry's Fork. When the first of the insects is sighted on the Snake River, Henry's Fork and the whole town of Last Chance, as well as all the motels, gas stations, restaurants and tackleshops in between, come alive with their own hatch: trout fishermen.

It has long been so: Ernest Hemingway and Charles of the Ritz used to gather at the streamside Last Chance Bar to hoist a few to the quest, and scores of more or less notables have continued to do the same. Most believe the rainbow trout that has eluded them until now will succumb to a perfectly presented green drake under a cerulean Idaho sky. Some fishermen actually catch their imagined fish. Most do not.

When they do not, they often gravitate to one of the two tackleshops in Last Chance, or perhaps to the dining room of the Chalet Restaurant, and there, seated against the wall in a booth upholstered in red vinyl, they might find Bing Lempke. And whether they are plumbers from Cleveland or industrialists from Los Angeles, they may ask Lempke, who has fished Henry's Fork for a half-century, a litany of questions that run like this:

"What do you think of this green drake imitation, Bing?"

Bing: "I'd put a yellow feather in there to imitate the color of the drake's legs. Some people say the fish can't tell the difference. But those fish know the brand name on your waders and even how many patches you got on 'em."

"Why are those fish so slow getting on those drakes today, Bing?"

Bing: "Damn if I know. Just throwing us curves, I guess."

Lempke remembers his first fly-fishing trip. It was 1929, and an old fellow in Idaho Falls had given him some flies. Lempke caught 26 fish that day and was, he recalls, "proud as a peacock." He was also hooked. He left school shortly thereafter, worked at an assortment of jobs and ended up a pipefitter in Los Angeles. But every time the green drake made its appearance, its siren call prompted him to drop everything; hence those three lost jobs. Eventually, Lempke came back to Idaho Falls and devoted himself to fishing his river, while doing enough pipefitting to pay for it.

When the fish are hitting, boiling and slapping the surface for the green drakes, Lempke is just another fisherman. But when the action slows, and fish are harder to catch, he is a good fellow to know. Says Lempke: "I've met a lot of people, because if you're on that river and catching fish, and other people aren't catching fish, then you're going to meet people." As the locals like to say, "Bing just has plain good fish sense."

The Lempke fish sense is combined with a mischievous sense of humor, and a studied disregard for the pretensions and conceits affected by adherents of the sport. He uses an automatic reel, for instance, considered quite gauche by purists. He blends a mixture of gasoline and an oily substance called Mucilin to use as dry-fly ointment. He stumbled on his own version of the green drake when he noticed the rubber mat unraveling from an old throw rug and worked it into his fly to give it body without adding significant weight. When he is suited up for fishing, his short-billed pipefitter's cap, pulled down over the half-moon of white on his forehead, and the crisscrossing of jerry-rigged gear on his chest make him look like a paratrooper ready for a midnight drop into Normandy.

Fly-fishing is the coming together of many different disciplines: casting, reading a stream's currents and knowing fish and insect habits. Lempke's cast, perhaps, is merely functional, but, says his fishing buddy Don Laughlin of Idaho Falls: "I've seen him catch a lot of fish. He may not have the prettiest cast, but his bugs look just like what's on the water. And he runs around this stream like an elk."

The only thing that disturbs his local fishing pals is Lempke's recent habit of referring to May flies in Latin. Some years back, he decided to learn the Latin names to keep the myriad May flies straight in his head. He began reading up, and with periodic trips to his doctor in Idaho Falls, who helps him with Latin pronunciations, Lempke can now roll off the names with ease. He often prefaces a sermon at the local filling station on this or that May fly with the words, "Well, I hate to say this, but I don't believe those were Baetis propinquas." Or Ephemerella infrequens. Or Epeorus albertae. But Lempke reserves his finest pronunciation and greatest admiration for Ephemerella grandis, a.k.a. the green drake. "They're damn pretty, for bugs," he says.

As the anointed curator of that insect and related matters, Lempke each day gives advice to fellow fishermen on everything from his wife's recipe for barbecued brook trout to the best rooster necks to use for dry-fly hackles. He serves up his opinions with conviction but also with a gentle good humor, a high threshold for fools and the open-mindedness of an expert. At 66, he says, he still has plenty to learn from the river. "There are no set rules," he says, standing in the Snake, eyes darting upstream. "These are living things. I really think fish are individuals. They have some way of communicating with each other. People want to make fly-fishing complicated. I've read books that make it seem like you've gotta be a Ph.D. to go flyfishing. Everybody's looking for the secret. I don't think anybody will ever find it. At least, I hope they don't."

Lempke casts, and his fly lands just above the spot where a fish has left widening ripples. He picks up his line and casts again. Three times, four times. On the fifth cast, the green drake just barely nicks the surface when an olive back emerges, and with an almost imperceptible disturbance, the fly vanishes. It is a big fish. Lempke sets the hook.

Alongside the stream, the neon lights of the handful of motels and restaurants wink on. A heavy truck, loaded with cut pine, rumbles past on U.S. 20. Off to the west, Bishop Peak turns indigo. As the darkness unfurls, Lempke stands in a spot he has stood in a hundred times before, watching his fish move downstream. He pauses for a moment, then, feeling the pressure on the line, moves downstream. "Look at the son of a gun go," he says to no one in particular, and pulls his hat closer to his skull.

--By Russell Leavitt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.