Fly fishing is enough like art that aesthetic satisfaction is an important ingredient when you total up its delights.
What’s more, there’s a mechanical satisfaction that comes from the execution of perfect technique, the intellectual satisfaction that is similar to solving a hard chess problem, the athletic satisfaction that—with the hand-eye coordination involved in casting—is similar to shooting baskets. When things go right, that is. What a day on the river usually becomes is an amalgam of mechanical triumph and mechanical fiasco, aesthetic disaster and aesthetic bliss, and it’s this dizzying roller coaster that resembles art most of all, so defeat is there in all our minor victories, victory there in all our major defeats.
8. Toys
It’s hard not to get carried away here. Is there any adult pastime that brings with it such a delightful treasure chest of toys as fly fishing? Reels that go clickety-clackety-clack, rods that whip the air about and magically extend our reach, waders we go clomping around in, hooks adorned with feathers (feathers of guinea hen, fur of polar bear, tinsel from a Christmas tree!), little springy things, pastes and scissors and sharp instruments our mothers would have in no circumstances let us touch . . . the playroom was never as good as this.
Fishing tackle brings us back to the days when our only work was play, our toys the means by which we explored our limited and infinite world. Toys, and yet there’s more to it than that; reels not only go clickety-clack, but purr exquisitely, and there are satisfactions in owning a fine bamboo fly rod that mimic the satisfactions in owning a Stradivarius; indeed, there are people who don’t fish at all, but spend many hours and dollars assembling collections of rare rods and reels.
My own passion is for lures; I don’t think there has been a time in my life when I wasn’t enamored of one variety or another. When I was younger it alternated between River Run Spooks, those scoop-nosed, hook-festooned plugs that resemble aquiline minnows, and Jitterbugs, the platter-faced marvels I spent too much of my allowance on when I was twelve. Since turning flyfisher, I’ve run through a whole parade of favorite flies: Muddlers, Honey Blondes, Brown Bivisibiles, Gray Fox Variants, Royal Wulffs. It’s no exaggeration to say I can stare at a perfectly tied Royal Wulff for minutes at a time, delighting in the deer-hair puff of it, the crisp red and white color. Just the word lure is alone enough to fascinate me; how many lures of any kind does man have in his arsenal? And how many of those are as bright and purposeful as a number-sixteen dry fly?
There are fishermen who overdose on tackle; almost all do during some stage of their fishing career, and what is means can too easily become ends. Winter is the time to indulge this passion—late winter when the tackle companies are canny enough to send out their catalogs. Once the season comes it’s best to simplify things as much as possible. Anyone who’s been a kid knows the very best thing to do with toys is make a cache of them, a chest or drawer no one else can touch, and I advise the same for the novice fly-fisher; buy all you want, but when you go out to the river, leave all but the essential tackle at home and concentrate your passion on the fish.
9. Solitude
In this day and age solitude runs to two extremes. To people who are locked in by it, unable to make contact with any human no matter how ardently they try, it must seem an evil spell they would do anything to shatter; to those caught up in the vortex, physically and psychologically hemmed in and supported by a network of friends, relatives, lovers, and colleagues, with all the mental battering that happily and unhappily results, solitude must seem an impossible dream, something longed for with just as much intensity as the lonely bring to its detestation.
So it’s a condition to speak about carefully, lest its gate abruptly swing down and block our retreat. Suffice it to say that here in the industrialized West, solitude, spatial solitude and silence, is next to impossible to find; we retreat to our homes, but the television lies waiting; we try to find it in sleep, but outside the horns keep blaring, the sirens rush past. Fly fishing for trout, done properly, requires much time alone on the stream; one of the few rules that seems to hold true in all circumstances is that the farther from the road you go, the better the fishing becomes. Countless times I’ve followed trout from pool to pool, catching one here, one there, until I’ve been led deep into the forest like Hansel and Gretel toward the witch’s house, only it’s a good witch this time, and, when I remember to break for lunch, I’m amazed at what silence I’ve managed to reach—how between one pool and the next the sounds of the mechanized world have dropped away and I’m as isolated and solitary as if I stood on a peak in the Hindu Kush.
But perhaps even this experience is too solitary and enchanted to speak of in print. Just say that being alone is a rare pleasure to those lucky enough not to be alone, and fly fishing, notwithstanding entry number ten, is still best pursued in as much solitude as you can stand.
10. Lingua Franca
While I don’t have any statistics, fishing must be responsible for more cross-generational, cross-occupational, cross-societal, cross-geographical, and cross-just-about-any-boundary-you-can-mention friendships than any activity you can compare against it. Golfers tend to golf with people from the same office; bowlers bowl with people from the same plant, but fishing friendships seem to flourish amid what would seem the unlikeliest of dissimilarities, and there’s no better tribute to the richness of our sport. What I’ve been struck with time and time again is how two very different people, united by this one passion, can begin talking in a common language from the first sentence of their conversation, exchanging secrets, trading battle stories, instantly getting to a stage of intimacy that would take many hours if not for this key. I don’t speak French, yet I still feel certain that if I were plopped down next to one of those patient Seine fishermen I could have a pretty good conversation going inside of minutes, even if it was exchanged solely with our hands.
Add fishing partnerships to this entry, those happy combinations when to the instant communication of the above is added long shared experiences on rivers and ponds. For many fishermen it will come first in the fishing motives, and should I ever come back to revise this list, I would hope—if present trends continue, if people continue to ignore my foibles and invite me out—that it would be first on mine.
11. Retribution
There can’t be many activities where sins of commission and omission are punished as instantly and inevitably as in fishing. A hasty knot in a leader will surely find a trout to snap it; an unsharpened hook will find a bass’s jaw too hard to penetrate; a clumsy step in a deep pool and over our heads we go. I am just enough of a Puritan to find this comforting; again, it goes against the grain of our century, where the wages of sin are higher than the rewards of virtue. Keenness of attention, discipline of method, fussiness over details—these are dull attributes to list, but every good fisherman has them, so there you are.
The only thing better than being a Puritan, of course, is being a lapsed Puritan—to not give a damn about knots or imitation or prudence, and just chuck the fly out there. Make that number eleven and a half on the list—a halfway step to:
12. Chance
The throw of the dice, the spin of the wheel, the play of a card—fly fishing is as chancy as one of these, and gambling is unquestionably one of its delights, and goes far to explain the compulsive ardor many fishermen bring to its pursuit. To anyone who’s made the high-wire gamble of a writing life, any lesser chance, by a cautious backlash, seems unbearably risky, and I’ve never been one for football pools or raffle tickets or bingo. Still, when I go out on a river I like the fact so many chances are taken—taken in big ways when the wading gets dicey or a thunderstorm brews up; taken in lesser ways almost continually: the chance there may be a trout lying in that riffle where none has ever lay before; the chance he might be in the mood for a Blue Winged Olive; the chance we can land him if we pare down to a 7X leader with a breaking strength of less than a pound. The best fisherman I know giggles a lot when he fishes—giggles, I susp
ect, at so many of his risks coming off. We all do this at some level—laugh at our good luck, curse at our bad, so that a day on the water is a kind of catharsis, and I often come back home at night with a throat scratchy and sore from sheer exclamation.
13. Hope
Mountain climbing has been described as “the alternation of hope and despair,” and while flyfishers in the ordinary course of their game do not risk rockfall or avalanche, this definition still goes a long way to explain the intensity of the fishing passion. Despair—well, there’s plenty of that, even on a good day. Small tangles become monstrous backlashes; leaders snap from the clumsiness of our knots; trout are rising to a hatch that is unmatchable, until we’re locked out by our ineptitude from the moment when nature exhibits itself at its very richest.
But even that maddening, unmatchable hatch fulfills one of the hopes we bring to the river in the first place: to see it at the peak of vibrant life. Hope is the one prerequisite in angling, the best part of the sport, and, I’d like to think, the coda that has underlined this book all along. In a century where hope has pretty well had its face smashed in, even to wear the small hope of a fisherman is in its way a victory—to hope for anything at all. And further—where in this age can even small hopes be satisfied as readily and innocently as in fishing? Estranged from nature, what other portion of it responds even occasionally to our coaxing?
Coming to the end of Walden Thoreau summed up his experiment in living thus: “That if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams . . . he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” This was written from an optimism that seems amazing to us now, and yet there are people who every day learn the truth of this, and among them are fishermen, who, in their precious hours on the water, possess an optimism and strength of purpose worthy of Thoreau. Try it the next time you go out on your favorite river. See how the four-count rhythm of fly casting synchronizes itself to the surge of hope welling up in your chest.
I . . . fly off the water . . . real Ay . . . line uncoiling back of us . . . HOPE . . . line shooting forward.
I . . . real-ly . . . HOPE.
That the twelve-inch rainbow there ahead of me sees the Spent Wing Adams floating down past his sheltering log.
I . . . real-ly . . . HOPE.
That the rain lets up. That the wind doesn’t collapse this cast around my head. That the Hendrickson hatch starts at two o’clock on schedule.
I . . . real-ly . . . HOPE.
That my daughter and son will learn to love fly-fishing. That I introduce them to it with the right measure of gentle patience. That they find in it what I have found and more. That they remember to take their old man out with them when the passion takes hold.
I . . . real-ly . . . HOPE.
That they decide not to build a freeway across the river. That the state institutes a catch-and-release stretch before the trout disappear. That the coal plants cap off their emissions and reduce acid rain. That the farmers stay in business. That flood plains are not built on or developed.
I . . . real-ly . . . HOPE.
That trout streams run pure and wild forever. That trout and bass and every fish that swims flourishes mightily in the coming century. That man calls a truce with nature, starts the long patient healing and rejoining the lack of which dooms us all. That in the future even to talk about a separation this way will seem an ungrammatical impossibility. That the lion of man lies down with the lamb of nature, not in an allegory, but in a new realistic symbiosis.
I . . . real-ly . . . HOPE.
Add your own here—add the minor and major hopes that go into the fishing passion and so unite us once and for all. “Our tradition,” wrote Roderick Haig-Brown, “is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need a fish, a tradition developed for us through thousands of years and millions of river lovers. We fish for pleasure, and fishing becomes pleasure from within ourselves in proportion to the skill and knowledge, to the imagination and flexibility of soul, that we bring to it.” This is correctly and splendidly said, and the only thing left to do in finishing is to wish you all the best fishing in the world—wish, as intently as it’s possible to wish something off the page, that once in your life the fates conspire in your favor, the planets pause in their circling, the waters part, and there beneath your uncoiling line will rise something miraculous, something worth all your longing, something extraordinarily fine.
One River More
Part One: Early Days
The Waiting Game
Every flyfisher knows there are two fishing seasons: the official one set by the fish and game department, and the richer, more fluid one set by your heart. In most northern states the first comes in mid-April, which is a joke for everyone except the worm fishermen, and with the streams so high and cloudy, not a particularly funny one even for them. The second starts—Well, take your pick. When the first tackle catalogs come in January, just when you’re at your weakest, so spending money on equipment seems a plausible substitute for actually fishing? Sometime after Christmas when, using that new vise Santa brought, you tie up your first pattern for the coming year? When brochures are sent for from Montana, Alaska, Argentina, or, better yet, when a deposit is actually mailed? Everyone picks their date, and for me, though I’ve tried every psychological trick there is, every coaxing, I’ve never been able to get the season of expectation to open any sooner than the first week of March.
January and February, the long weeks leading up to the equinox. These are strictly working months here, the time I earn my fishing time, literally put it in the bank—and not only a real bank, but that more complex lending institution that revolves around family goodwill. When I do go outdoors its usually to ski through the mixed softwoods that start behind our house, and the only thing this has to do with fishing is that occasionally I’ll catch that low, throaty surge of water as I cross a frozen stream—a sound no river lover can hear without sensing a matching pulse coursing through their blood. I’ll even try poking at the snow with my ski pole just to see if I can’t liberate some watery brightness; once, doing this on a day of extreme cold, I pulled back out a perfect popsicle, my pole frozen from the tip over the basket into a clear blue ball of ice.
Other than these little foretastes, there’s not much going on. The sun gets brighter, the days get longer, and if you wake up early enough you can see Vega and the summer constellations rising over the low mountains to our east like coming attractions scrolled over a dark orange screen. But when you live in northern New England as long as I have, you develop a little damper on your hope, try not to get excited. Another month until fishing is even a remote possibility; two months until I’ll actually venture out; three months until hatches start and conditions become halfway decent; four months until the glory days of June and early July. It’s simply too much hard time left in the sentence, so, like a prisoner facing freedom, I find its better not to think about it at all.
If I do give in to temptation, it’s still retrospectively; it’s last year’s fishing from remembering, getting out the pictures, glancing at my fishing calendar, taking solace from modest triumphs that have only been enhanced by the intervening months. I notice the same backward inclination in talking with my fishing partners. Meeting in January, we’re still talking about last summer on the Yellowstone, not next summer on the Androscoggin.
As I said, all this changes around March first when I start giving myself permission to think about the coming season. The winter seems endless at this stage, the storms we always get around town meeting day being among our most ferocious, and what robins or blackbirds manage to find their way up here are often blown right back to Massachusetts by the frigid northwest wind. But still, there’s something in the air now—a vague earthy scent, little trills and whispers from meltwater, a growing confidence in the sun—that at least enables you to pronounce the word spring, not like a remote, half-imagined abstraction, but as a reality, the appearance of which won’t be spoo
ked by mentioning its name out loud.
In short, late winter is very much a waiting game, one every flyfisher has to play as best they can. There are time-honored means for doing so, of course, some of which I take part in, others I prefer to sit out. One of these is ice-fishing. Our local pond will have its little village of companionable shacks most winters, at least when the ice has a chance to thicken before being covered by an insulating blanket of snow. The fact I’ve never actually gotten up the energy to dig a hole, let a line down, hoist a flag shouldn’t obscure the fact I can understand perfectly the motives of those doing so. The hard crystalline beauty of a frozen pond in winter; the polar bear companionship of people who are as thickly booted, mitted, and hatted as you are yourself; the restorative dashes back to the shed for whatever is in the thermos or flask. Dig me a trench, get a hatch started, oil a fly line with antifreeze, and I’d be out there in a second.
Fly tying is another form of winter fishing, one I have all the respect for in the world, but don’t have the knack for and probably never shall. It’s an art and a demanding one; Carrie Stevens, Helen Shaw, Roy Steenrod, the Darbees: these are great and honored names, and rightly so, for the skill these tyers bring to their work, the combination of preciseness and flair, experience and imagination, can only be compared with the work of the great nature artists or the most skilled jewelers.
A River Trilogy Page 33
