There’s a knock on the door at 3:00 a.m., barely loud enough to register. I turn back in bed and begin to drift, but a subtle rap-rap-rap follows. Cody gets up from the other queen bed and walks across the room to check the motel room peep hole. He cocks his head and turns to me, confused.
“There’s a guy out there in his underwear…?” Cody says, his voice rising with the last word, as if caught halfway between a statement and a question. I get up from bed to offer a second opinion. Looking through the peephole, I confirm that we do have a visitor; he is wearing nothing but a pair of tighty-whiteys; and he apparently cannot help us understand why.
The knocking continues unabated, persistence that only a handle of whiskey might muster, while Cody and I attempt to negotiate in vain. We’re in Trout Town for two nights, staying at our usual motel of choice, and we had not planned on having a third party along for the weekend mission. Behind the underwear man, a few feral cats scurry around a fish-cleaning station and a crusty hot tub. A Denny’s sign in the background gives the man a holy aura, but savior or not, we decide to keep the door shut and locked.
I’ve been coming to Trout Town for 11 years. Before I came here, I’d stare out at the hills from the window of my office job, straight out of college in a strange city, wondering what lies beyond them. Eventually, I found out, arriving here by accident, as most folks do, on the way to somewhere else. “Somewhere else” shortly became just that, and the destination instead became Trout Town. A two-lane highway doubles as the main road through town, a sleepy corridor lined with fast food joints, gas stations, motels ranging from $70 to $200 per night, local eateries and two dive bars, only one of which you’re actually supposed to go into (I can never remember which). At night, you can walk the entire length of the downtown section, the neon lights of motel billboards and vacancy signs guiding the way. I consider walkability a key requirement for any town carrying the title of Trout Town. Other requirements exist, not the least of which is access to cold, clean water and wild, willing trout.
You probably have your own Trout Town, even if you don’t know it yet. I’ve been to others and love them all dearly. I do not name them here, because half the fun lies in discovering them on your own. But they share a certain quality beyond food, drink, lodging and fishing that often becomes clear only in time. They feel like home. Not necessarily like where you live or where you grew up, but familiar and comfortable like a well-worn pair of boots. They lack all the burdens that ski resorts might bring to a small town, namely inflated lodging, wait lists at restaurants and propane fire pits.
I considered moving here many times over the past decade. It certainly would cut down on the four-hour weekend commute. When the pandemic began and the great urban exodus ensued, I had pangs of regret watching the real estate values here climb and climb. But underneath that indecision, I harbored the anxiety that if I moved here, it would cease to be Trout Town. Instead, it might become what it already was to most—just a regular (lowercase) town, in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of feral cats and a few beautiful fish that I might start to take for granted. Years ago, three weeks into a multi-weekend carp bender on a nearby reservoir, my friend and I began to joke that we only drove back to the big city to find enough money to come back—as if our time here depended on some perverse form of foraging among the concrete.
Despite never having lived in Trout Town, I’ve forged some of the most important friendships of my life here, often through an odd combination of circumstance, fate and a shared love of fish and feathers. All said, every trip here seems to include some unforeseen side-quest, which has only served as a catalyst to fish-based friendships.
There was the fire seven years ago that torched the entire riverside campground on the outskirts of town, leaving the status of my buddy’s trailer and all our belongings in question for almost 24 hours. We drank away our sorrows together in town, making small talk with our fellow campground refugees and plotting late night reconnaissance to assess the status of the vehicle. Ultimately, the trailer survived, as did my camp chair, which had thwarted the flames by blowing into one of my favorite holes on the river.
There was the snowstorm on Thanksgiving, when we snuck to the river before they could close the roads and sat on the banks eating turkey stuffing from a local Mexican joint and still caught fish on dries. Or the many times we got lost on the backroads, one locked cattle gate away from a new pond or riverbend, Google Maps and false optimism having led us astray. In Trout Town, I’ve learned that consolation prizes are always close in hand, whether they be alternate waterways, warm showers or just cold beverages shared on a tailgate.
This might be a better story if these friendships came to include our aforementioned underwear-clad visitor, but unfortunately, that turns out not to be the case. In the morning, we wake late, barely in time to check out. The kid at the front desk apologizes profusely for the late-night interruption—apparently, the other guest was in room 115, next to our 113. A simple mistake, one anyone with some liquid confusion could make. Questions remain, namely why he was outdoors in his underwear the first place, but we decide to leave it at that. Carrying our rods and bags to the truck, we see a “Do Not Disturb” sign on room 115 and briefly consider knocking.
Instead, we grab coffee and drive down the main drag of Trout Town, hoping to sneak in a few hours on the water before the long drive home. Still fog headed from the evening visit, I try to decipher the logo on the side of an official-looking pickup truck stopped at a red light in the lane next to us. In the process, I barrel through the red light, avoiding collision but finally managing to make out a Fish & Game logo on the truck door. The warden flips on his lights and pulls me over into an Arby’s parking lot. We chat about the river conditions, then about an off-season goose hunt kicking off in the valley. We chat about the underwear man and my crappy driving performance that morning. He lets me off with a warning, and I, in turn, promise to always pinch my barbs, but I don’t think the joke really lands. We wave an awkward goodbye, I say a quiet “hallelujah,” and Cody and I continue on our way out of Trout Town.