Jackson, Wyoming, Sept. 18, 2008
The Passion of Dick Cheney
The Weekly Standard: Fishing The Snake River With The Vice President
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Vice President Dick Cheney (AP)
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Interactive Second In Command A closer look at Vice President Dick Cheney's career and his much-publicized health problems.
It was a lightning round of fishing-talk. Cheney could even have passed as excitable. Though even on excitable, his voice doesn't vary much from the low hum of a room dehumidifier. I ask him if he's worried that our fishing trip will infringe on him getting back in time to watch that night's festivities at the Democratic convention. He smiles an unregretful smile, and says, "It's been my good fortune to go fishing at crucial times in my career."
One of those times was before the vice-presidential debate in 2004, when he and his debate-prepper, Rob Portman, decided, in Cheney's words, "to hell with it," and instead went fishing on the South Fork. "The most important thing you can do before one of those debates, is to be relaxed. I couldn't think of a better way to relax than to just tune it all out and go spend a day on the river." (Cheney also skipped the 1996 Republican convention, because he was, in his own words, "probably fishing.")
Cheney inherited a love of angling from his family. His grandfather "was a nut on going after catfish . . . one of these guys who was a great believer in stinky, smelly bait." He mixed his own, says Cheney: "chicken guts marinated in blood for a week, or something like that." Once, his grandfather took a trip some place and left his bait mix locked in his old Buick. "He took the keys with him, and we couldn't get it out. . . . The whole neighborhood was rank by the time we got through."
Both of his parents were avid "worm fishermen." His dad, he says, "propagated nightcrawlers. He had--probably dangerous as hell, but he did it--a copper rod that was wired to an electric cord, which you could stick into the socket and a rubber hand line. He'd jam it down to the ground, and nightcrawlers would just pop out."
Cheney first fly-fished when he was 16 years old. Just before football season started, he and three friends threw their bedrolls into a 1948 Ford and took off for a week to the Middle Fork of Wyoming's Powder River, which cuts through a deep canyon. He went down to the hardware store, picked out a fiberglass rod and a half-dozen flies, made the steep descent, and set about "catching trout . . . in this deep canyon. I couldn't even get into it today. But it's a beautiful stream."
Years later, as a congressman, he became much more serious about fly-fishing. According to my colleague Stephen F. Hayes's recent biography of Cheney, one day the congressman was interviewing Merritt Benson for a state rep's job in his office. Benson had worked for Outdoor Life magazine before taking a Wyoming Department of Fish and Wildlife job. Cheney glanced at his résumé and got down to real vetting.
Cheney: "I bet you know a few fishing holes in this state."
Benson: "Yeah, I do."
Cheney: "Well I never travel anywhere without my pole in the trunk."
The job was Benson's without delay ("He had some special qualifications," Cheney told me). Under the tutelage of Benson, he started fly-fishing with conviction. Benson introduced him to the legendary guide Don Daughenbaugh, a former ranger at both Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Daughenbaugh used to guide Jimmy Carter, and up until this year, still rowed Cheney when he hit the Bighorn, though Daughenbaugh's now in his 80s.
I ask Cheney if fishing was ever a consideration in selecting his "undisclosed locations."
"No," he says. "But I have my regular schedule. . . . Your undisclosed location could be a secure facility some place, or it could be a corn field in South Dakota where you're hunting, or the South Fork of the Snake."
Being the second most powerful person in the free world has its drawbacks, and work does tend to make its way to the river. His people ask me not to reveal security specifics, but I beg off when I'm told there are divers in trailer boats, as they could interfere with our fishing. I ask him if they're there to sweep the river for possible explosives. He's amused by the paranoia. They're rescue swimmers, he tells me, "in case I fall out of the boat."
His friends say that even on the South Fork Hilton trip, Cheney digests intelligence and wakes up before the rest of the camp to make secure calls back to Washington, never telling them of what transpired before he shows up to breakfast. Cheney admits, "I was over here on the South Fork when the Russians invaded Georgia, so I got word on the river that day. I've always got a communicator with me. . . . We actually carry a satellite dish with us so we can pull over and set up on the sandbar. . . . Stuff happens. Especially in August."
Because of his workload, Cheney can't fish nearly as much as he'd like. He has gotten out with the president in Crawford. "We fish for bass on his pond down there. It goes fine," Cheney says with the air of a man itching for faster, more interesting water. Cheney stays on the fly rod, while Bush chucks "bubba bait," as Cheney calls it, not so masterfully suppressing a fly-fisherman's elitism. I ask Cheney who outfishes whom, and he looks slightly insulted. "He catches more fish out of his pond than I do. Because it's his pond."
Cheney sticks with a fly rod at all times (he has so many, he's lost count), because "to do it well, you have to concentrate. It's a way, when you get out there on the river, to sort of cleanse your mind of whatever other cares or concerns you've got. It's a place I [can] go and totally relax, set aside whatever issues I'm working on at the time and just focus on fishing."
He speaks wistfully of fishing for sea-run browns in Tierra del Fuego and taking a rickety cargo helicopter, with benches for seats and all the luggage piled in the middle of the floor, to pull salmon out of the remote and untouched Ponoi River in Russia. There, with the sun not setting north of the Arctic Circle, a fisherman can put in a good, clean 16-hour day.
But it's steelheading in British Columbia that is his absolute favorite. He likes the challenge--you have to work, and you can go all day without a strike. "It's basically a sea-run rainbow trout," Cheney says. "I have a lot of respect for the fish, the acrobatics--a 10- or 12-pound steelhead tailwalking down the water, taking out all your line. Catch them, and you're a serious fisherman." He used to fish the Babine River for a week every year with a group of friends who live in the northwest. The place they go is reachable only by air. "They've got about 25 or 30 miles of the river all to themselves," he says. He's been unable to join them for years, but "They're still saving my slot," he says, chomping at the bit.
Our convoy reaches the South Fork, where we put in next to what feels like a wind tunnel right beneath Palisades Dam. Cheney changes into his chest waders, hauls all of his own gear and rigs his own rods, one of which is a fine Sage 6-weight, with an ivory inlaid trout on its reel seat. His Abel reel, too, is a thing of art, decorated with the colored spots of a brown trout.
"What do you fish?" he asks, curiously.
I tend to go with the ghetto set-up: dull black, retro-looking $20 Pflueger Medalist reels--turned backwards because I'm too lazy to switch them from right-hand to left-hand retrieve--and my beat-up L.L. Bean 6-weight, which has plumber's tape secured around a hairline crack under one ferrule. "I'm low-tech," I tell him, by which I mean I'm cheap--though the fish don't seem to know the difference.
He winces when I pull my tape recorder out of my chest-wader pouch. "I don't want to be on all day," he says. And he suspiciously eyes my beyond-raggedy, lucky fishing cap, which I have on backwards. "They ever offer to buy you a new hat, Matt?" Staying on the theme of my employers, he adds, "You know the only reason I agreed to this? I wanted to see what kind of reporter had the cojones to convince his editors to pay for him to come fish the South Fork."
Our guide, Pat Kelly, shoves us off into the chop, and despite all the forewarnings of sacrosanct Cheney silence on the river, he keeps up a steady patter over the next eight hours. He inquires about my kids and asks Kelly about his offseason employment. He tells me what he likes to read (Fly Fisherman, Gray's Sporting Journal, the Economist, raw intelligence), as well as what he doesn't (the blogs). "I don't blog," he says, as if clearing up a misconception. In April, though, the blogosphere was obsessed over a photo of Cheney fishing on the Snake. Many held that a reflection in Cheney's sunglasses revealed not a hand casting a flyrod, but a naked woman. When I ask Cheney about it, he breaks into a trouble-making grin. "I had a great guide that day."
He also offers several candid, and often funny, impressions of current political figures. Then immediately puts them off the record. Trying to drag them back on the record, as I attempt to do several times, proves futile. When I suggest to him that such secrecy and circumspection is precisely why his media image is in the crapper, he is unconcerned. "If I was interested in servicing my image," he says, "I wouldn't have become vice president. I had a good job."
That much-discussed job was one he was offered after impressing Halliburton executives while chewing the fat with them in the mid-90s at a fly-fishing camp. Loyal to his friends--some say to a fault--he gives a spirited defense of how unfairly his former colleagues have been publicly denigrated from their association with him. But he doesn't want me going into the particulars. "I didn't come out here to piss and moan," he says. "I came out here to fish."
And fish he does. Kelly feeds us many different flies throughout the day, but the money set-up seems to be a Rainy's hopper pattern on topwater with a lightning-bug nymph dropper dangling beneath it. (Pruett calls these the "Coors Light Cans," as its red and silver sheen looks like every college girl's favorite beer.)
Cheney is a good fisherman. A really good fisherman. We're not in the water 10 minutes before he's already had two hookups, while the only thing I've caught in the same duration is a stick that I mistook for a whitefish and the vice president's line.
As I'm in the back of the boat, it's my job to time his backcasts so that we keep firing like alternating pistons--a rhythm that takes some getting used to in such tight quarters, especially since he is a fast and frequent caster. There are no catastrophes, à la the hook in the neck, unless you count me wrapping a fly around the guide's glasses. (No skin was touched.) Another time, trying to set the hook on a fish and missing--something Cheney rarely does-- his Copper Bob rubber-banded out of the water and came within inches of my face before wrapping around my rod as I was trying to get out a tangle, nearly turning me into the fly-fishing equivalent of Harry Whittington, Cheney's less-fortunate hunting partner.
I go fishless all morning, as Cheney hits for the cycle: browns and rainbows, cutties and hybrids. It makes me nostalgic for the day before, when I had the front of the boat. I remind Cheney and Kelly that I'd had a 15-fish outing on their river just yesterday. Nobody seems remotely impressed.
By Matt Labash
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See all 76 Comments*** Cheney deserves exactly the same kind of "going away party" when he leaves office that Benito Mussolini got when he left office.
Cheney represents all that''s wrong and corrupt and bad about America.
The democrat war is afganistan.
What''''s the difference?
Is that NOT within striking distance of Iran.
Iran is the ral target baby!
We should smoke them
So....get YOUR submachine guns out of your precious gun collection and go smoke em!! Oh............I see......you would rather send some teenagers to go and fight for you. You are disgusting in your rhetoric!!!
He''''s is the Boss.
She has been out of media.
Vote Obama if you want a Racist, Socialist, Communist
Your stupidity is astounding!! Michelle stays home with her children. So when she does go out and trys to help occasionally, Obama gets blamed for that?? Gaaaaag@repub slimers. How much is Palin the good mother of 5 staying with her kids? Super mom my arse. Not many moms can afford nannys, cooks etc. And don''t say the Dad is tending them...he is in every event with her........gaping and grinning like the true stoodge he is.
"Fishing The Snake River With The Vice President"
Should read:
"Fishing The Snake River With A Snake"
''One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.''
~ William Shakespeare
NO FISHING IN JAIL AFTER THE WAR CRIMES TRIALS!
Look at the damage he%u2019s done to the world.
....and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from D.ick Cheney, amen.
I haven''t read this story but I don''t have to in order to know that Cheney is a bloodthirtsty, murdering war profitereer with the blood of almost a million humans on his hands.
I''m counting the days till he''s out of office and thus fair game for war crime trials for genocide around the world. He won''t be able to find a hole deep enough to hide in.
Posted by notfooled at 03:27 PM : Sep 18, 2008
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