What I Learned While Trout Fishing in Arkansas
Reflecting on my five days on the Spring River, I realize why I didn't write this story earlier: the fishing was only part of the joy of the trip.
The solution to any problem—work, love, money, whatever—is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be.
—John Gierach, Standing in a River Waving a Stick
Note: This story was updated to its book version in October 2023.
Of course Derrick had to be the one to do it, because that’s what guys who are saved in people’s phones as The Fish Whisperer do: they catch big fish. And not just big ones. They catch the biggest ones. And what’s worse is that they hate to do it; they apologize for doing it. But as the April light dimmed over Arkansas, he just couldn’t help himself.
Knee-deep in the water on the last night of a five-day trip to the Spring River, we were casting our fly rods in search of monsters to hook when Derrick shouted, “Fish!” I turned my head just in time to see his rod tip bend so violently that I thought a cinder block had wrapped around the end of his line. After a good fight, Derrick wrestled a gluttonous rainbow trout to shore. It was big—perhaps big enough to surpass the trip’s largest catch, a 20-inch rainbow I had pulled into our guide’s boat the afternoon before.
Jonathan rushed over and pulled out his measuring tape. “He’s got you beat, Jersey!” he announced as we stood around gawking at the two-foot marker. I didn’t take more than a glance at the black line on the tape before shifting my gaze to the man in the straw hat: a 53-year-old Zen master in prescription glasses who fished a magical fly he named after himself. “Sorry, Jersey,” he said, smiling wide and grabbing the fish around its meaty back to pose for a victory photo.
The trip to Arkansas was my first time venturing from home with a group of men whose sole intention was to catch trout. Besides the Fish Whisperer and me, our crew consisted of Kohl, a filmmaker, and Jonathan, who served unofficially as my trout sensei after introducing me to fly fishing only a year and a half earlier. Before we left, Jonathan had contacted Mark Crawford, the sole fly fishing guide in that part of Arkansas, and hired him and his son, Hunter, to lead us on the second and third days of the trip. For the first and final days, we’d fish alone on a stretch of water in front of our cabin, just a mile downriver from the dam.
The cabin’s owner was a middle-aged man known locally as Busch Kurt. The afternoon he welcomed us, Kurt showed up with a can of Busch beer in his hand, downed a second while making small talk, and cracked open a third, which he left full on the patio table—all inside the time it took me to rig up my rod and slide on my waders. Eager to get my line in the water, I speed-walked to the bank and trudged in. I hooked a smallmouth bass within a few casts; Busch Kurt, elated by my quick success, announced from the porch that he’d been stocking them for his guests. (Mark Crawford later told us that our host was actually catching bass downriver, transporting them in his pickup truck, and tossing them in the water in front of the cabin.)
When I told a friend who grew up in Arkansas that I was heading to fish the Spring River, he asked if I was really going for the trout or if I had come up with a clever excuse for attending one of the many topless summer boat parties hosted by DJ Supermoon. Anyone who drives through Mammoth Springs, Arkansas (population: 935) will recognize the 50-year-old Speedo-clad cowboy whose face adorns approximately 75 percent of the sign welcoming you to town. But we weren’t there for Mardi Gras. We were there to take our shot at some of the state’s finest trout in a place most sober folks had never heard of.
On the morning of our departure, we piled into Kohl’s truck and rode eight hours west from Knoxville, talking fly selection and daydreaming about how many trout we’d each catch: 50, 60, maybe even 100 over the course of the trip. The numbers were preposterous for me. Even though I had grown up fishing with my dad in New Jersey, I was a worm and minnow guy until Sensei Jon, as I’d come to call Jonathan, persuaded me to hang up my spin rod and bury my nightcrawlers in the dirt. “There’s no art in throwing doughballs or worms,” he told me through cigar haze in his workshop late one night while flipping through pictures of enormous fish he’d caught on microscopic artificial flies. “Fly fishing is art. And aren’t you supposed to be a writer?” Jonathan had successfully appealed to my snobbery, conjuring up images of Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It, which I’d seen on TV as a boy.
Over several trips to the Holston, Clinch, and Watauga rivers from July 2019 to May 2020, Sensei Jon taught me how to cast a fly rod, mend a line, and carefully fight a fish, not muscling it onto shore like I could with my spin rod. Twice, desperate to see me land a trout, he hooked into one then handed me the rod to let me fight it alone. Both times, I inevitably did something wrong and it broke me off. Fly fishing turned out to be as hard as it looks. After the eighth skunking in a row, I was deflated and defeated.
Then one morning in June, Jonathan invited me to fish a small stream in Townsend that flows into the Little River of the Great Smoky Mountains. That’s where I learned to use a Japanese cane pole called a tenkara rod. In the midst of the pandemic, I took every chance I got to escape into the mountains. I netted at least a dozen or more trout on two or three occasions. But they were all wild brookies and rainbows under 10 inches long. I’d yet to hook into the kinds of monsters that live beneath the surface of the Spring River.
Things were off to a good start at Busch Kurt’s. We fished until sundown, each member of our party claiming a sliver of a 200-yard section of river and netting at least one sizable rainbow trout. Then we returned to the porch, gorged ourselves on T-bone steaks Jonathan grilled on the fire pit, and packed tobacco pipes while making plans of attack based on what God and the river had revealed to us that afternoon.
Each morning, we woke up with the sun and cast our lines straight into the water. Light beer, beef jerky, and trail mix fueled us. And whether with Mark or learning from each other (though mainly from Derrick), we pulled in all kinds of trout—from the skinny to the engorged, the recently stocked to the well-aged, some mushy and pale, others radiant and robust. Each one we carefully unhooked and tossed back into the water to live another day.
Resting on the bank, looking back over the photos of our best catches, we wondered why so few others had come from as far away as we had. Before the trip, I’d run some Google searches and couldn’t find a single article in a prominent fly-fishing magazine about the Spring River and the wonders Mark Crawford had shown us. Having grown up in Mammoth Springs and fished the river with his grandfather, he knew it better than anyone. After finishing school, he worked in factories until his first wife left him with Hunter, then just two years old. To turn his attention away from his daily worries, Mark learned to tie artificial trout flies. Eventually people started buying his patterns, which trout went out of their way to chase down, and he went on to earn a reputation for taking people out into his put-and-take fishery to catch and release trout as they do in Colorado and Wyoming.
While eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches during our first float, he told us about his plans to turn the river into a premier trout fishing destination rivaling the White and Little Red. He was already in contact with national conservation groups. Besides having a killer sense of humor and hands that’ll tie on a new fly as fast as a Wild West sharpshooter, Mark makes you feel like a friend when you’re in his boat, even if you’re only there as half of a business transaction.
By the end of our trip, I hadn’t caught anywhere near the number of trout I had imagined on our drive west. Derrick might’ve caught a hundred trout over five days. Jonathan got close, topping 80. I may have netted 40 (though I’ll claim every fish that broke off my fly or freed himself as I reeled him into my waiting net). The good news is that I did at least manage a consolation prize, which I accepted begrudgingly, for catching the most diverse species of fish: a creek chub, shiner, smallmouth, rock bass, long-ear sunfish, and other species that weren’t monstrous salmonids. I guess you can take that, Fish Whisperer.
Before heading to Arkansas, I had planned on taking meticulous notes and recording conversations and dispatches on my iPhone for an essay I’d write and pitch to an outdoor magazine once I got home. I was going to be the first writer to put a spotlight on the Spring River. More importantly, I was going to show the world that I had chops as a chronicler of outdoor adventures.
On the morning of our first float with Mark, he welcomed us to the ramshackle fly shop he and his friends had built by hand. His plan for the day was simple: leading us into trout-rich water, where we’d take so many photos holding large fish that our Instagram follower numbers would skyrocket. He’d then feed us a lunch of roasted groundhog. If we were lucky, we might even find Sasquatch hiding in the bush (the closest we got was another half-naked photo of DJ Supermoon on a sign in front of his riverside mansion). As Mark rowed us out to the first fishable section of the river, I asked about his background and what had led him to a life of guiding tourists, most with no idea what they were doing, to catch trout. I spoke his responses as notes into my phone.
But it wasn’t long before I closed my recorder app and lost my gaze in the tree line. Had I gone to Arkansas to work? Was I probing Mark with questions because I was genuinely curious about his story or because I wanted to create a caricature that might make readers laugh? As much as I wanted to write some beautiful 5,000-word essay to share with anglers across America, the more time I spent on the water with Mark and my friends, the more that urge to write something elegant and celebrated disappeared—as most things do when you’re fly fishing.
When there’s a fly you’ve painstakingly tied using elk hair, pheasant tail, wire, and thread floating just above or below the water’s surface, losing focus for even a split second might result in a missed strike. “A trout can spit out a fly in one one-hundredth of a second,” the Fish Whisperer told us, sharing his ancient wisdom. “Sometimes even faster.” If you do manage to hook one, too much tension on the line or a bad slip on the river bottom that leaves you fully submerged and 20 yards downstream will also result in a lost fish. Focus is essential to success in this game.
But there’s also the solace of fishing: the cool water splashes against your waders, vapor rises from the water, bald eagles fly overhead and nest in a tree 30 yards above you. The sun rises and falls. But above all, there is friendship: a sense of brotherhood with guys who had once been strangers but with whom I’ve now written a real-life story that I’ll retell for as long as I’ve got my head on straight.
Moving into the middle stage of my life—married with young children, a mortgage, debts to pay, a career to grow—the opportunities I’ll have to string together days of fishing with my friends are whittling down. When Jonathan first suggested the Arkansas trip during one of our weekly fly-tying nights, I didn’t think I’d go. I had a young daughter, responsibilities, and no disposable income. But Haley’s willingness to be a single parent for five days, and Jonathan’s leadership over every logistical aspect of our preparation, pushed the obstacles from my path. And because of that, I wasn’t left on the sofa folding underwear, jealously looking at pictures of fish on Instagram. I could marvel in real life at the wonder of a fish glistening inside my net.
Calling this type of trip an escape isn’t entirely accurate. I didn’t need to escape. I needed to be plugged back into the electrical socket, charging life into my ever-draining battery. We all need that sometimes, whether it’s meditating in a yoga class, listening to music on an old record player, joining a pickleball league, or simply spending time on the water with close friends, focused entirely on something that isn’t those things that consume the other hours of our lives.
A year after that April in Arkansas, my son, Enzo, was born. Jonathan had a son, too. Kohl was off somewhere in Europe, riding a motorcycle and taking pictures. The Fish Whisperer was another year older, another year wiser, and still pulling monsters out of whatever stream, river, pond, ocean, glacial lake, or roadside puddle he chose to fish. We haven’t returned to the Spring River. I have no idea if we ever will. But I hope we do. And even if we don’t, I’ll have the stories and images of that one trip, not published in some fancy outdoor magazine but saved permanently in my memory bank.
Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription, buying me a coffee, or ordering a copy of my first story collection, Big Head on the Block. You can also listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.