A few days ago I was back home on the Plains, managing a spring heatwave air conditioning free. By Monday, I was at Rogers Lake, looking for grayling but finding only lingering winter.
I needed fish, a magnificent lavender sailfish. What I got was a gathering puddle of rainwater on the port side of my drift boat, the direction this imperfectly made wooden dory tilts toward when we float.
It’s been several years since I’ve been on Rogers Lake. When I lived in the Flathead, Rogers was my favorite spring fishery. The twins and I would sneak out there on bright spring afternoons and row across the lake to see the spectacle of spawning grayling in the tiny creek that feeds the lake on the east shore.
Grayling gather around that inlet and jet upstream, trying to spawn. It’s unclear if any are successful. The fish in Rogers are planted, Arctic grayling and westslope cutthroats, but the stockers are fingerlings and that spawning spectacle attaches an illusion of wildness to the fishery. Throw in a few loons, night herons and bald eagles, and you’ve got a fins-and-feathers wild-animal safari 20 minutes east of Kalispell.
Unfortunately, there’s no overlap in the Venn diagram of my out-of-state teaching schedule and the grayling spawning season. The creek was fishless.
We almost didn’t go. The weather on Monday wasn’t promising: overcast and threatening rain most of the morning. But I’d made the long drive, and everyone had the day off, so heading to the water seemed the right choice.
We caught one, a first-cast grayling, and were then untroubled by fish the rest of our brief visit.
Even in the bad weather, our trip to Rogers wasn’t pointless. We heard wailing loons before we even got out of the truck. I hadn’t heard a loon, in person at least, since I last visited Rogers. I follow the Instagram pages of some fabulous wildlife videographers, so I can listen to fresh loon calls whenever I’m on my computer.
But that’s no replacement for the real thing.
As we launched, the resident pair of bald eagles flew above. Their love chatter reminded me why Hollywood always dubs in the screams of red-tailed hawks whenever a bald eagle appears on the big screen. Eagles call in the most unmenacing way. They sound more like an alien species from another galaxy, rather than fierce commanders of the sky or symbols of national pride.
Once we crossed the lake, a bald eagle demonstrated why Benjamin Franklin considered the bird a poor choice to represent national virtue.
An osprey had taken up a hovering position not 50 feet in front of the boat, then dove with surgical precision, talons first into Rogers Lake. A moment later, it extracted itself from the water’s grip, with a fish. The bird labored into the sky, shaking off water like a Labrador who’d just discovered an unexpected puddle, then made a bee line to an unseen nest.
That’s when a bald eagle raced into view, chasing the smaller, more industrious osprey across the lake. By the time the eagle caught up, the birds were on the far side, too far for us to see what exactly happened, but it appeared the osprey escaped with its lunch.
This is the sort of behavior that led Franklin to write, the “Bald Eagle … is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly … [he] is too lazy to fish for himself.”
We were a little lazy, too, fishing for just a bit. When Zoe asked for another fleece and mentioned she was cold, that was Dad’s cue to head for the boat ramp. It rained again as I rowed across the lake, but not so much that we were soaked.
It was worth it to visit Rogers again, even if the grayling’s ardor had petered out before my return.