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: