The Passion of Dick Cheney
LABASH, MATT
The Passion of Dick Cheney Fishing the Snake River with the vice president BY MATT LABASH I fi sh because I love to . . . because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing...
...I fl oat a hopper over him, he explodes on it, then books down-current with line screaming off my reel behind him...
...What would happen if I wasn’t...
...When I suggest to him that such secrecy and circumspection is precisely why his media image is in the crapper, he is unconcerned...
...Dennis has fi shed with Cheney often over the years and has seen him at some peculiar times...
...Cheney goes back to catching fi sh, I go back to getting skunked...
...Especially in August...
...I remind Cheney and Kelly that I’d had a 15-fi sh outing on their river just yesterday...
...Many held that a reflection in Cheney’s sunglasses revealed not a hand casting a fl yrod, but a naked woman...
...because maybe someday I will catch a mermaid...
...Where’s David...
...He takes both fi shing and solitude seriously, and the river is his place to escape...
...That’s 26...
...Perhaps he sensed a kindred spirit...
...It goes fi ne,” Cheney says with the air of a man itching for faster, more interesting water...
...Because it’s his pond...
...These aren’t the SNIT’s (standard 9-inch trout) I’m accustomed to back east, either...
...It’s hard to recall now...
...I step into the White House photographer role when Bohrer isn’t present with my CVS disposable camera (“Let Matt get a picture of this,” Cheney takes to telling Kelly) and start a loud patter of bellyaching about my bad turn of luck (refraining from the usual string of expletives, out of deference to Cheney’s offi ce...
...The job was Benson’s without delay (“He had some special qualifi cations,” Cheney told me...
...Cheney inherited a love of angling from his family...
...No,” he says...
...Liz, says Dennis, asked her father if he was ever worried about a plane like that coming to hit him...
...Not that he doesn’t talk any smack...
...He’s been unable to join them for years, but “They’re still saving my slot,” he says, chomping at the bit...
...Though even on excitable, his voice doesn’t vary much from the low hum of a room dehumidifi er...
...First of all, he gets the front of the boat,” says Pruett, meaning Cheney’s fl y gets fi rst pass at all the fi sh...
...We actually carry a satellite dish with us so we can pull over and set up on the sandbar...
...Benson had worked for Outdoor Life magazine before taking a Wyoming Department of Fish and Wildlife job...
...I’ve always liked his ruthless non-sentimentality in an age of lip-biters and tear-squirters...
...He asked where I fi sh, and, when I gave generalities, he pressed for specifi cs...
...There are lush, leather and gilt-edged collectibles with gorgeous frontispieces of men in tweeds casting bamboo rods on placid streams, and dog-eared paperbacks intended not for decoration, but to acquire hardcore fi shing knowledge...
...As I said, there were two open bars...
...We bid each other adieu...
...The group calls itself “The Great Release,” though Jay Kemmerer, a member and owner of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, originally pushed for “The Rainbow Coalition” (after rainbow trout, of course...
...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...
...At one point, when Kelly is netting one of Cheney’s fi sh and about to cut it loose, Cheney says, “Wait a minute, do you want to let Matt get a look at that so he can see what he’s missing...
...He used to fi sh the Babine River for a week every year with a group of friends who live in the northwest...
...But Cheney evidenced genuine curiosity...
...I’ve gotten it in the ear before.’ And he just went on fi shing...
...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...
...The Passion of Dick Cheney Fishing the Snake River with the vice president BY MATT LABASH I fi sh because I love to . . . because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fi shing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion...
...While what goes on at the South Fork Hilton is supposedly cloaked under a code of silence, a few details are forthcoming...
...I go fi shless all morning, as Cheney hits for the cycle: browns and rainbows, cutties and hybrids...
...How could someone who spends so much time seeking out beautiful creatures in beautiful places not have the sensitivity of a naturalist and the soul of a poet...
...He is very, very good...
...For one, my drifts are getting screwed up by the oar and Cheney casting at too high an angle into my water, forcing my fl ies to drag more often than they should...
...Cheney is dressed in zip-off cargo pants and a fl y-fi shing shirt given to him by one of the lodges where he fi shes...
...It’s okay, I can afford it,” he says...
...It’s probably the more important reason: He’s a lot better fi sherman...
...But he’s got about four months left,” says Scarlett...
...I didn’t come out here to piss and moan,” he says...
...Remaking the Middle East as a Western democracy vs...
...Cheney popped open one eye and asked, “What are you doing...
...The fi sh has to be a 19-incher, though since I’m the only witness, I’m going to call it 20...
...He has pinpoint precision with his fl y, throwing sliders under branches, lopping flies over tree limbs, dropping his hopper just off the bank’s edge, making it look extra susceptible to a trout mugging, like a drunk falling off a curb...
...There, the relative scarcity of good water means that our overpressured streams hold fi sh that are bombed with so many fl ies they ought to be issued hardhats...
...But Cheney is also known as a fi sherman, and I am a fi shing slut with little or no moral center...
...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...
...The place they go is reachable only by air...
...I believe the same is true of talking about fi shing...
...He fi nally snaps off after nearly fi nishing my twiglike 4-weight rod...
...I’ve always got a communicator with me...
...There are no catastrophes, ? la the hook in the neck, unless you count me wrapping a fl y around the guide’s glasses...
...It was a lightning round of fi shing-talk...
...Oh, I think so...
...The hook did not set,” says McCormack...
...He is a stalker of fi sh...
...Rich Santore, an orthopedic surgeon and chief of staff at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego, became a member of the group after replacing Scarlett’s hips...
...But I wasn’t back...
...I’m checking to see if you’re breathing,” Dennis said...
...I wrap up with Dennis and realize I have a few hours left of daylight, so I ask him where I should fi sh...
...And he suspiciously eyes my beyond-raggedy, lucky fi shing cap, which I have on backwards...
...Even the park rangers don’t know where Dennis’s spot is...
...His people ask me not to reveal security specifi cs, but I beg off when I’m told there are divers in trailer boats, as they could interfere with our fi shing...
...The whole neighborhood was rank by the time we got through...
...I’m low-tech,” I tell him, by which I mean I’m cheap—though the fi sh don’t seem to know the difference...
...Cheney laughs readily as an observer at this campfi re Friar’s Roast/Gridiron Dinner and is open to the same ribbing as everybody else...
...I came out here to fi sh...
...Kemmerer says there have been hanging chads strewn about the grounds, and that he personally has played John Kerry and John Edwards...
...Plus, he adds, “It’s a small price to pay for bragging rights...
...From there, we were off...
...I couldn’t even get into it today...
...For the next hour plus, his motorcade will retrace the trek I made the day before...
...I’m in the back of the boat saying, ‘What the hell did I just do?’ He turned around, and looked at me...
...In fact, many of the parts of Cheney’s public persona that repel others, I rather enjoy...
...As we break for a fried-chicken boxed lunch on a gravel bar, I start feeling desperate and am thinking about turning to my big gun: the Pistol Pete, a woolly buggerlike fl y that effectively mimics baitfi sh, but that has a little extra action with a propeller on front...
...He has gotten out with the president in Crawford...
...His fl y is inhaled by a greedy rainbow...
...I don’t know how exactly one describes a vice presidential yelp...
...He catches more fi sh out of his pond than I do...
...There are worse things to wish on a man...
...And though Dennis is indeed a verbal fi rehose of stories, recollections, and trivia, he also has a melancholic streak...
...Red-tail hawks and bald eagles patrol the skies overhead...
...Cheney fi rst fl y-fi shed when he was 16 years old...
...He’d jam it down to the ground, and nightcrawlers would just pop out...
...A cutthroat explodes on it, and moments later I am holding this gleaming, brilliant, orange-hued fi sh in my hand, as the setting sun crowns the Tetons above me...
...By the time Cheney arrived, I had a bellyful of truth serum...
...Pruett says that the sight of Cheney on the river is so unexpected to some that, once, he even saw a young man who worked for Idaho Fish and Game, who was checking fishing licenses, “but in sneaky spots,” head out of the brush, walk right up to Cheney, ask to see his license, and still never put together to whom he was talking...
...I take a backseat with him in a black Suburban...
...He looked at her and said, ‘Why would they want to do that...
...As Kelly rows us alongside a steep rockface, with tiny crevices at the bottom where the current swirls by and fi sh are likely holding, Cheney perfectly sidearms a cast right into the pocket...
...It’s basically a sea-run rainbow trout,” Cheney says...
...Perhaps it’s because of the heartfelt piscatorial nature of the request...
...The guides here double as rowers for the ClackaCraft drift boats which, in addition to the middle bench for the oarsman, have swivel chairs for two fi shermen in the bow and stern, along with leg brackets so you can stand and cast without falling into the drink, as the river is often rough...
...and, fi nally, not because I regard fi shing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant—and not nearly so much fun...
...Members ante up 10 bucks a day, and the biggest fi sh takes the pot (Cheney used to pay by check, but since Scarlett kept one as a souvenir, refusing to cash it, Cheney will now only pay in cash...
...Me: 2. He doesn’t give me that stingy, trademark lopsided grin that looks like a broken egg sliding off a rock...
...All those people on that plane wanna live...
...Pruett is generous about the few fi sh I catch that come off as he’s about to net them...
...I made a beeline for him, squared up, looked him in the eye, and said, “I understand you’re an avid fl y-fi sherman...
...Scarlett heads up a group of eight friends, including Cheney, who for over a decade have annually put in two days on the Bighorn River in Montana, before coming back to Jackson for a few more and then a two-day fl oat down the South Fork, while camping overnight in the canyon...
...The fi sh defi cit is starting to grow ridiculous...
...We fi sh for bass on his pond down there...
...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 let’s just say I haven’t cared for many of his signature projects as vice president...
...They ever offer to buy you a new hat, Matt...
...Once, when fi shing, Dennis says, Cheney asked him, “How do you think fl y-fi shermen view me...
...I learn from current and former aides just how obsessed the man whose Secret Service handle is “Angler” actually is...
...They’re rescue swimmers, he tells me, “in case I fall out of the boat...
...He grabs my notebook and draws a map to an unmarked creek in Grand Teton National Park...
...Pruett is not just a guide, it turns out...
...Cheney: “I bet you know a few fi shing holes in this state...
...A really good fi sherman...
...It makes perfect sense that this is one of Cheney’s favorite runs...
...There, with the sun not setting north of the Arctic Circle, a fi sherman can put in a good, clean 16-hour day...
...There I will launch with the same outfi t that we will be using the following day (and which Cheney has been using for years), the pristine Lodge at Palisades Creek...
...Stuff happens...
...I showed up early and, seeing there were two open bars, availed myself of both...
...He mixed his own, says Cheney: “chicken guts marinated in blood for a week, or something like that...
...But say he fi shes thoughtlessly, and one might wound him irreparably...
...Current events are often discussed, though there are no prosecutorial arguments, as his friends reason Cheney gets roughed up enough in the outside world...
...I’m not a baby kisser,” he once said on the campaign trail...
...While his friends say Cheney isn’t a trash-talker like some, they concur that he takes the Big Fish contest very seriously...
...Well,” he says reluctantly, “that was one...
...Cheney isn’t some fussy streamside entomologist, either, sifting water with a cheesecloth to see if he can match the hatch...
...I catch a smattering of cutthroats, browns and rainbows, along with several whitefi sh (which the locals derisively call “Rocky Mountain bonefi sh...
...I had a great guide that day...
...I told Cheney this was my fi shing widow...
...Don’t believe anything he tells you,” Cheney offered, when fi nding out where I was headed...
...Dennis replied: “ ‘I don’t think they view you very well, as a lot of people don’t...
...This doesn’t include whatever books he has in Wyoming or at his weekend place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore...
...because bourbon out of an old tin cup tastes better out there...
...But these are all sideshows to the competitive main event: the daily Big Fish contest...
...Our convoy reaches the South Fork, where we put in next to what feels like a wind tunnel right beneath Palisades Dam...
...Benson: “Yeah, I do...
...Second, this is pretty much his backyard...
...Former aide Brian McCormack, now special assistant to the president for strategic initiatives and external affairs, says several years ago Cheney took him fi shing on a drift boat on the Snake River...
...He went down to the hardware store, picked out a fi berglass rod and a half-dozen fl ies, made the steep descent, and set about “catching trout . . . in this deep canyon...
...It’s all right, I got him,” he says...
...His dashboard is carpeted and stuck with many of his sentimental-favorite fl ies...
...That’s what they all say,” said the clerk...
...For another, the guide seems to be setting him up on all the fi sh when the boat holds position...
...As I place the cutthroat back in the cool water, watching it dart away as it realizes it’s regained its freedom, I’m reminded of all the Cheney haters, who hope to God that when his stint ends in four months he permanently hangs out his “Gone Fishing” sign...
...Even Kelly, who is no purveyor of fl attery, says, “Now that was a cast...
...Ken Adelman once wrote, “Despite pleas over the years, [Cheney] adamantly refused to take me fl y-fi shing in Wyoming...
...In several decades of watching him, I’ve never seen him smile this big...
...Some speculate that the reason Cheney gets along so famously with Dennis is that Dennis does all the talking...
...Cheney does not count his fi sh, though I do, obsessively (I’ve caught 869 so far this year, back when I used to catch fi sh...
...What’s six inches between friends...
...He’s off home and says that he has some pressing business there: He has to email my friends that he beat me 20 to 2. The next day, I have lunch with Jack Dennis, a longtime friend and fi shing guide of Cheney’s...
...All knotty pine and rustic cabins (decades ago, the laundry building used to be a house of prostitution servicing the itinerant workers who helped build nearby Palisades Dam), gourmet meals and single malts are served up in their Liar’s Den restaurant, and there’s a full-service fl y shop on the grounds...
...It is not a “ranch,” as is often misstated (his neighbors are close enough to hit him with a rock), but rather a tastefully unostentatious place in a zip code where captains of industry often pay for extras like heated driveways so that their car tires never suffer the inconvenience of snowfall...
...It makes me nostalgic for the day before, when I had the front of the boat...
...Maybe Cheney was misunderstood...
...Cheney is a good fi sherman...
...They took my f—ing fi sh...
...I ask him how much I should tip the guide, but he’s already laid one hundred bucks or so on him...
...I tell him what the damage is: Dick Cheney: 20...
...I like that you’re never apt to hear him invoke “the children” as a reason for peddling some unrelated initiative...
...And there is lots of entertainment...
...Maybe he wasn’t BeelzeDick or Darth Vader, as his critics would have it...
...The guides will tell you he’s one of the best fi shermen they guide on the river,” Scarlett continues, and indeed, several do...
...In April, though, the blogosphere was obsessed over a photo of Cheney fi shing on the Snake...
...While fishing doesn’t occupy Cheney’s every waking moment— according to his estimates, he only spends about 10-12 days a year on the water because of his job—it still takes up plenty of space in his consciousness...
...Shamed, I still break out of Kelly’s recommendation cycle, and pick a green Thompson’s Hopper of my own, all foam and hackle and rubber legs...
...The shelves of his library contain the art books, histories, literature, and presidential and vice presidential material (including the complete works of Dan Quayle) that one would expect...
...I ask Cheney who outfi shes whom, and he looks slightly insulted...
...Not because I’ve ever held anything against the guy personally...
...The South Fork of the Snake is a tailwater that runs fast and cold out of the Palisades Reservoir...
...What do you fi sh...
...Leave me alone and whatever happens happens...
...But he tells it straight when I ask him how he thinks I’ll do against Cheney...
...We clearly tell the Secret Service what we’re doing,” says Kemmerer, “because some of it—well, they might shoot us...
...I’m not sure Cheney and his critics won’t fi nally fi nd some agreement...
...You’ve got the same hoppers on that he does,” Kelly offers, perhaps still stung that I briefl y went outside his advised patterns or still ruffl ed that I almost blinded him in one eye...
...Dick Cheney is an excellent fi sherman,” he says...
...You can’t be too careful about such things...
...As Pruett rows and sets me up on fi sh, he speaks of the hazards of being a guide: of the yuppies who spend all this money to come out and avail themselves of his services, but who then spend all afternoon telling him how to catch fi sh in his own backyard...
...Sometimes, he has to teach them a lesson, such as the know-it-all “who thought he was the cat’s meow...
...We hit the end of our 12-mile fl oat and exit the boat onto the ramp...
...I tend to go with the ghetto setup: dull black, retro-looking $20 Pfl ueger Medalist reels—turned backwards because I’m too lazy to switch them from right-hand to left-hand retrieve—and my beatup L.L...
...Cheney admits, “I was over here on the South Fork when the Russians invaded Georgia, so I got word on the river that day...
...In fact, there is an entertainment committee...
...He wears a denim bucket hat from a car dealership, an “Abercrabby and Fish” T-shirt, a red swimsuit, and green Crocs for wet-wading...
...And fi sh he does...
...When pressed, he fi nally explained, ‘You talk too much to go fl y-fi shing.’ ” With an unavoidable stretch of conversation before us (though Cheney did bring two books, which worries me until he tells me they are for the ride home), I probably should have gone the responsible-journalist route and grilled Cheney on matters of electoral politics and world affairs...
...The most important thing you can do before one of those debates, is to be relaxed...
...So I cut the hook off his fl y, and he didn’t know it...
...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...
...Janet Reno...
...Cheney doesn’t have to fi ll in any spaces...
...At the checkout line, after asking the clerk what dress size would be right for him, he felt compelled to tell her “It’s not what you think...
...If I was interested in servicing my image,” he says, “I wouldn’t have become vice president...
...He can place a fl y from 40-50 feet out, into shrubbery, in between bushes where the big fi sh lay...
...You can say many things about Dick Cheney that have no chance of leaving a mark...
...He’s bored, he’s off taking pictures of fl owers,” offers Kelly...
...Many fl y-fi shermen recoil at such an ambition, since telling trout purists you’re chasing lowly catfi sh with a fl y rod is tantamount to telling Heidi Klum that what you’re really attracted to is bearded women with no teeth...
...He authors books, hosts fl y-fi shing shows, and lectures on the sport worldwide...
...He has introduced fl y-fi shing to everyone from Harrison Ford to Arnold Palmer...
...and got down to real vetting...
...When I ask who on earth was being portrayed, Santore says he’d better not disclose...
...he asks, curiously...
...Being the second most powerful person in the free world has its drawbacks, and work does tend to make its way to the river...
...I wanted to see what kind of reporter had the cojones to convince his editors to pay for him to come fi sh the South Fork...
...Matt Labash is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Other than myself,” Scarlett hastens to add, ever the competitor...
...I picked a brownie up near this spot on it the day before...
...laughs Dick Scarlett, one of Cheney’s closest friends and chairman of Wells Fargo, Wyoming...
...He throws a mean dry fl y. He goes in where the big fi sh are in the most diffi cult places...
...Perhaps it’s because after eight years, they were just weary of saying “no...
...But I am beginning to see how it works: Cheney doesn’t need to talk trash...
...Is he competitive...
...Because of his workload, Cheney can’t fi sh nearly as much as he’d like...
...He is a fi erce caster...
...Then immediately puts them off the record...
...But all either of us really wanted to talk about was fi shing...
...I drive about an hour outside of Jackson, through the switchbacks of the Targhee National Forest, to Irwin, Idaho...
...I could candy-coat it, but I’d be lying...
...My guide for the day is Jaason Pruett, a 34-year-old former college hoops player, who is not some delicate Orviscatalogissue trout teapot, but a take-no-prisoners river rat...
...Trying to drag them back on the record, as I attempt to do several times, proves futile...
...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 fi shing on the South Fork...
...His grandfather “was a nut on going after catfi sh . . . one of these guys who was a great believer in stinky, smelly bait...
...Last September, I attended a book party on the roof of the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., which Cheney was to attend...
...This I learn from visiting the library at his offi cial residence at the Naval Observatory...
...His Abel reel, too, is a thing of art, decorated with the colored spots of a brown trout...
...Pruett calls these the “Coors Light Cans,” as its red and silver sheen looks like every college girl’s favorite beer...
...The Great Release even imports its own personal chef...
...Cheney, a surprisingly attentive listener, asked as much as he answered...
...He leaned forward with a grimace, like he got stung by an enormous bee...
...Skues, Lefty Kreh, Roderick Haig-Brown, and the not-so-greats as well...
...Sneaking up in the tall grass along the banks, I see a large cutthroat holding in the lazy current...
...It counts,” he assures, “you had control...
...But he knows his stuff, and when he doesn’t know something, says Pruett, he is eminently coachable and invariably polite, even if he’s not renowned for his smalltalk...
...He said hello to her and that he had one, too...
...Well so what...
...He speaks wistfully of fi shing 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 fl oor, to pull salmon out of the remote and untouched Ponoi River in Russia...
...I don’t blog,” he says, as if clearing up a misconception...
...But there is another reason, of course, that Cheney is outfi shing me...
...He smiles an unregretful smile, and says, “It’s been my good fortune to go fi shing at crucial times in my career...
...The directions are confusing, and I get lost several times...
...Once, his grandfather took a trip some place and left his bait mix locked in his old Buick...
...Another time, trying to set the hook on a fi sh 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 fl y-fi shing equivalent of Harry Whittington, Cheney’s less-fortunate hunting partner...
...Then there is the front-of-the-boat problem...
...So am I,” I responded...
...Most accessible, on the shelves above the television, is a fl y-fi shing library within a library, books on every subject from entomology to minor tactics of the chalk stream to practical dry-fl y fi shing...
...After driving six miles down a dirt path and descending on foot down a steep embankment, which nearly causes a rockslide, I fi nd a huge, slow eddying pool that feeds a faster creek, which itself feeds into the Snake about a half a mile away...
...On the South Fork of the Snake, trout are 15-17 inches on average, with 20-inchers not out of the question...
...He wasn’t just referring to two drunk-driving arrests from over 25 years prior, but also the time he’d been fi ned for fi shing out of season...
...Cheney snapped back...
...He took the keys with him, and we couldn’t get it out...
...According to the estimates I gather from friends and guides, Cheney is the pot-winner anywhere from one quarter to one-half of the time...
...I don’t want to be on all day,” he says...
...He shows backmolars and dental work, everything...
...A year after the book party, with time running out on the Bush administration, I took another crack at Cheney and proposed to his people that I go fi shing with him on his preferred home water near his Wyoming residence, which turns out to be the South Fork of the Snake River...
...chasing catfi sh on a fl y—each of us is addicted to some pet implausibility...
...Cheney also skipped the 1996 Republican convention, because he was, in his own words, “probably fi shing...
...Other drift-boaters will often fl oat by having no idea that they just passed the vice president of the United States...
...But it’s steelheading in British Columbia that is his absolute favorite...
...It’s not because of your fi shing ability or anything, I think it’s just because of the mood of the country.’ He said, ‘Well, I understand that.’ I said, ‘If they all went fi shing with you, that would be a different story.’ ” Perhaps the strangest moment for Dennis, however, was one afternoon on the river, just days after Cheney had a heart defi brillator implanted...
...Just go,” he says...
...He’s amused by the paranoia...
...Fishing-related happenings tend to occur outside of time...
...I went back to look and see if he was breathing...
...One directs me to a passage in Bob Woodward’s Commanders, which tells how when Cheney was being confi rmed for secretary of defense, he told his vetters in the fi rst Bush administration that they should be aware of some “youthful indiscretions...
...It is wallpapered with wildfl owers and golden willows, mountain maples and cottonwood forests, populated by bobcats, moose and black bears...
...Cheney could even have passed as excitable...
...I have time to think of all the reasons Cheney is outcatching me...
...He has people to do that for him...
...I ask Cheney if fi shing was ever a consideration in selecting his “undisclosed locations...
...Cheney changes into his chest waders, hauls all of his own gear and rigs his own rods, one of which is a fi ne Sage 6-weight, with an ivory inlaid trout on its reel seat...
...No skin was touched...
...When I mention this to Scarlett, he welcomes me to the back-of-the-boat club...
...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 offi ce...
...If it doesn’t matter where you sit, why does he always take the front...
...As one of the unoffi cial heads of the entertainment committee, he takes it even further...
...I tell him he would say that...
...We immediately resumed the fi sh-talk and ignored her...
...Cheney glanced at his r?sum...
...He puts me onto many...
...Then he can do time in the back like everybody else...
...I immediately take a cutthroat out of a riffl e as Cheney is still fi nishing his lunch...
...We do a 10-mile fl oat through what is truly God’s country...
...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 fl y-fi shing camp...
...We might’ve talked fi ve minutes or we might’ve talked fi ve hours...
...He’s going to smoke your ass...
...So much so that I was worried I might show up the next day to fi nd the vice president taking largemouth in my favorite spot...
...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...
...It’s the biggest trout I take during my trip by far, and it’s enough of a fi sh to wipe yesterday’s humiliation off the books...
...Clueless,” says Pruett...
...As I’m in the back of the boat, it’s my job to time his backcasts so that we keep fi ring like alternating pistons— a rhythm that takes some getting used to in such tight quarters, especially since he is a fast and frequent caster...
...His offi ce in Jackson, which is adorned with everything from letters of thanks from baseball legend Ted Williams—who was impressed by his fl y-tying—to landing nets with presidential seals, has a placard on his shelf inscribed with the words of Henry David Thoreau: “Many men go fi shing all of their lives without knowing it is not fi sh they are after...
...But my fi rst cast spooks him, as his shadow shoots downstream...
...Where most people are fi shing two or three feet away from the bushes so they don’t hook up, Dick can place a fl y on a saucer at 40 feet...
...I ask him, fi guring she has even odds if drag is involved...
...There are skits, Kemmerer tells me, often with elaborate props...
...But many of these are shelved high and out-of-reach...
...Everyone calls the vice president “Dick”—even the guides...
...When I pull down an old volume of Ernest Schwiebert’s classic Trout, I fi nd discarded Hershey’s mini-candy-bar wrappers behind where the books sit, perhaps from surreptitious snacking during a less health-conscious time in the now-trim Cheney’s life (friends say he’s lost around 25 pounds in the last year...
...He also offers several candid, and often funny, impressions of current political fi gures...
...Trying to slow him, I’m forced to follow on foot as he’s too strong to reel...
...Is that a 20-inch fi sh, or 26...
...I have a lot of respect for the fi sh, the acrobatics—a 10- or 12-pound steelhead tailwalking down the water, taking out all your line...
...Another aide tells me that early on, those in the administration wishing to cut through the clutter of Cheney’s daily barrage of mail would take to sticking fl ies in the envelopes knowing his staff would make sure he received them...
...But I fi nally fi nd it, after my car nearly plows into a black bear loafi ng off into the woods...
...I said, ‘Sir, I am reeeaallly sorry.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry...
...I’m back,” I say to nobody in particular, as if I’d been there before...
...Benson introduced him to the legendary guide Don Daughenbaugh, a former ranger at both Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks...
...I try to get the vice president back, but he won’t have it...
...But I have my regular schedule...
...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 fi shing...
...They feed aggressively, and they are slutty for dries (fl ies that sit atop the water, which make fi sh rise so you can see the take...
...He likes the challenge—you have to work, and you can go all day without a strike...
...Cheney: “Well I never travel anywhere without my pole in the trunk...
...They’ve got about 25 or 30 miles of the river all to themselves,” he says...
...The bed of his pickup truck is littered with Twisted Tea and Budweiser empties...
...I had a good job...
...My expletives would curl his gills if he were still around to hear them...
...It’s like watching a mailman throw a letter through a door slot from 30 feet away...
...Cheney stays on the fl y rod, while Bush chucks “bubba bait,” as Cheney calls it, not so masterfully suppressing a fl y-fi sherman’s elitism...
...Of course,” he admits...
...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...
...Dennis says Cheney was reclining in the boat with “his head leaned back—he’d never done anything like that...
...His friends take an earthier view...
...There is wine and whisky (Cheney is a Johnny Walker Red man, though these days he rarely drinks more than a glass of wine...
...Staying on the theme of my employers, he adds, “You know the only reason I agreed to this...
...So I lied slightly about the locales...
...But it’s a beautiful stream...
...I jump into the pool and wade down slowly, fi ring a 50-foot cast to drift a hopper past some downed limbs near the pool’s tailout...
...Cheney’s friends let him have the front of the boat since he’s the vice president of the United States...
...Yes,” he replied...
...I like that he doesn’t seem to care about being liked, which is lucky for him, since his approval rating hovers at 18 percent...
...After our conversation, second thoughts started nagging...
...He inquires about my kids and asks Kelly about his offseason employment...
...So we did...
...His is the full-on smile of an ebullient child...
...Bean 6-weight, which has plumber’s tape secured around a hairline crack under one ferrule...
...It has “Vice President Dick Cheney” stitched above a breast pocket...
...His dad, he says, “propagated nightcrawlers...
...I am told how he fi shes in rain and snow, and how once his mind is set on fi shing, he will not be deterred, even by bloodletting...
...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...
...The camp, nicknamed the South Fork Hilton, is hardly roughing it...
...Let me change your fl y out.’ He listened...
...Pruett and his guides have no such problems with Cheney...
...Nobody seems remotely impressed...
...But I’m slow on the trigger today and miss many more...
...He was fascinated by an experiment I’d been conducting for some time: catching catfi sh on a fl y. This isn’t typically done, since catfi sh most often reject artifi cials...
...Will you just not worry about me...
...Kelly feeds us many different fl ies throughout the day, but the money set-up seems to be a Rainy’s hopper pattern on topwater with a lightningbug nymph dropper dangling beneath it...
...Many had warned me of Cheney’s lust for silence on the river...
...When I ask Cheney about it, he breaks into a troublemaking grin...
...Not a catchandrelease man back then (he tells me he hasn’t killed a fi sh on purpose in roughly 15 years), “The $25 fi ne was not the worst part,” he said...
...In all, there are 37 fi shing books on the shelves, and 43 more in stacks...
...We don’t have a sign on him,” Dick Scarlett tells me...
...Dennis, who is a committed environmentalist, says Cheney has gotten a bad rap as a despoiler of the land, since he has often quietly worked behind the scenes, doing things like torpedoing prospective mines in Wyoming that would pollute treasured cutthroat fi sheries...
...Under the tutelage of Benson, he started fl y-fi shing with conviction...
...He winces when I pull my tape recorder out of my chest-wader pouch...
...Catch them, and you’re a serious fi sherman...
...On some of the most productive dry-fl y trout water in the west, the camp contains wall-tents, cots, fresh linens and towels...
...As we talked, my wife sidled up to me, elbowing my ribs for an introduction...
...When I ask his daughter Liz about this, she downplays it, speaking of his grandfatherly attributes: his teaching members of the family to fi sh so they can enjoy “the magnifi cent beauty of the places you get to do it,” showing the grandchildren how to cast, rig their lines and remove their hooks...
...There are inconveniences, to be sure, such as having to sweep his truck and boat clean of any mysterious herbal substances and leave behind his gun, which he otherwise likes to pack on the river—just in case—in order to pass muster with the Secret Service...
...he says after one cutthroat...
...Your undisclosed location could be a secure facility some place, or it could be a corn fi eld in South Dakota where you’re hunting, or the South Fork of the Snake...
...Pruett says he’s saved drowning people multiple times, and that less adept civilian rowers see the river eating about four boats a season...
...He let out a ‘yooooowwww.’ The trees came alive with Secret Service...
...Both of his parents were avid “worm fi shermen...
...If I had fi shed every other fl y in my box, and none of them worked, then maybe,” he says, as though I was defi ling his water by chucking the equivalent of bubba bait...
...More important, however, the river is thick with trout—browns and cutthroats, rainbows and hybrid cutbows— about 7,000 fi sh per mile...
...A couple of years ago, he had to buy a whole bunch of dresses, bras, panties, and such for skit-time at the South Fork Hilton...
...Herbert Hoover, a noted fl y-fi sherman, was fond of quoting an Assyrian proverb that went, “The gods do not subtract from the allotted span of men’s lives the hours spent fi shing...
...Back in Jackson the next morning, I drive to Cheney’s house in the golf-course community of Teton Pines...
...Blessed with x-ray vision, Pruett even has me cast to a pet brown he’s been stalking that I can’t see, a 24-inch monster laid up against the head of an island...
...Scarlett, who is equally competitive, and who’s been fl y-fi shing since he was a small child, does not mince praise for the man who is often his boatmate...
...I ask him if they’re there to sweep the river for possible explosives...
...Dennis is a bit of a local legend...
...Cheney later admits to me that, one year, “I had a picture taken of a brown trout I caught up here, blown up, life-size, and sent it to [Kemmerer], as a reminder of who caught the big fi sh that year...
...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 whitefi sh and the vice president’s line...
...You’re losing time...
...But it smacked him on the back of the neck...
...Cheney sticks with a fl y rod at all times (he has so many, he’s lost count), because “to do it well, you have to concentrate...
...I ask Cheney what he thinks and if he’d ever fi sh it...
...I ask him what fl ies I should bring...
...Years later, as a congressman, he became much more serious about fl y-fi shing...
...It is not for nothing that the wags suggest that Cheney keeps George W. Bush one heartbeat away from the presidency...
...Relatively new to the sport at the time, McCormack, trying to adjust his cast on a windy day, ended up hooking the vice president...
...While Cheney is not a braggart in the least, he is a proud fi sherman, and so he appreciates the White House photographer, David Bohrer, following behind in a trailer boat, taking snaps of his catches before he cuts them loose...
...After about the sixth fi sh in a row that he missed, I said, ‘Man, I thought you were good—why aren’t you getting these fi sh?’ He’s like, ‘Jaason, what am I doing wrong?’ I said, ‘Do you wanna listen to me...
...According to those who fi sh with him, Cheney is also quite competitive on the river...
...Don’t get me wrong, I feel sick about it...
...There was the day not long before September 11, when Dennis was rowing Cheney and his daughter Liz, and a passenger jet fl ew close overhead on the way to the airport...
...He knows their names and unlisted addresses, and he constantly says things, like, “We’re gonna get out of the boat here, I have to check on this fi sh...
...But he doesn’t want me going into the particulars...
...But Pruett says the guides regard Cheney as a gentleman without pretense, who’s a pleasure to row...
...You can tell he’s a short-timer,” shrugs Cheney...
...Though Cheney grants few interviews, his people were uncharacteristically agreeable...
...If trout had access to the courts, they’d hit him with a restraining order...
...All the greats are represented: Lee Wulff, Izaak Walton, G.E.M...
...Sensing my work is cut out for me, I head out west a day early to fi sh solo with a guide and acclimate myself to the South Fork, presumably lessening the vice president’s chances of outfi shing me...
...I ask him if he’s worried that our fi shing trip will infringe on him getting back in time to watch that night’s festivities at the Democratic convention...
...It’s probably in the Fishing Guide Rulebook to always give the fi sherman the benefi t of the doubt...
...I can’t imagine a better, more patient guide or teacher...
...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...
...Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Fisherman (1964) At the risk of being publicly ridiculed, quarantined, or stoned, I’ll just say it straightaway: I really like Dick Cheney...
...I was in good standing and hoping for an invite to fi sh his home river, the majestic Snake in Wyoming—an invitation I was convinced was forthcoming, but which never materialized after Cheney was interrupted and pulled away...
...I can’t think of a better place to die than right here...
...because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience . . . because only in the woods can one fi nd solitude without loneliness...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 2
