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I walked down one morning from Steelhead, following the Klamath River that was high and murky and had the intelligence of a dinosaur. Tom Martin Creek was a small creek with cold, clear water and poured out of a canyon and through a culvert under the highway and then into the Klamath.
I dropped a fly in a small pool just below where the creek flowed out of the culvert and took a nine-inch trout. It was a good-looking fish and fought all over the top of the pool.
Even though the creek was very small and poured out of a steep brushy canyon filled with poison oak, I decided to follow the creek up a ways because I liked the feel and motion of the creek.
I liked the name, too.
Tom Martin Creek.
It's good to name creeks after people and then later to follow them for a while seeing what they have to offer, what they know and have made of themselves.
But that creek turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch. I had to fight it all the God-damn way: brush, poison oak and hardly any good places to fish, and sometimes the canyon was so narrow the creek poured out like water from a faucet.
Sometimes it was so bad that it just left me standing there, not knowing which way to jump. You had to be a plumber to fish that creek.
After that first trout I was alone in there. But I didn't know it until later.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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