by David Joy
Zac pulled a black plastic case from the tub, set it on the table, and adjusted the blinds until there was just enough sunlight to illuminate the desk. He unlatched the case revealing a metal contraption like nothing I’d ever seen pressed into thick layers of black foam. Pulling out each part, he connected the metal pieces and tightened screws and clasps until a gorgeous vise was stationed on the desk.
“Pretty nice, ain’t it?” Zac asked, almost bragging, but definitely not snobbish.
“Hell, yeah. How much did that cost you?”
“It was about three hundred, but I had to pay a little extra to get a pair of midge jaws for it.”
He ducked under the desk and went back to digging through the contents of the tub. When he found something he was looking for, he took it from the container with one arm and placed it on the desk, never lifting his head, steadily searching through the pile of bags and organizers. Looking inside the blue tub I could see all sorts of animal hides: rooster capes, hen saddles, squirrel tails, hares’ masks, buck tails, and a whole pheasant—if PETA ever got hold of a fly tier, there’d be a disgruntled fisherman arguing on network news for sure. He placed strung peacock herls, a long coarse pheasant tail, brown and white goose biots, a clear plastic container with compartments full of various-size hooks, a bag full of golden tungsten beads, and a spool of gold wire onto the desk. With all of the materials he would need lying on the desktop, he snapped the lid onto the tub and pushed it back under the desk.
“I’m going to show you how to tie a Pheasant Tail and a Prince Nymph,” Zac spoke teacher to student. My eyes were steadied on the size 12 nymph hook he clamped into the vise’s jaws. A golden bead was already strung onto the hook and pressed against the down-set eye. I didn’t say a word. Later, folks told me that most beginners start by tying a Woolly Bugger, a simple pattern with a marabou tail, a spun chenille body, and palmered hackle, but Zac was teaching me to tie the two patterns that we used most often, two patterns that would always catch fish. With the hook securely fastened in the vise, Zac reached for a gray foam block with tools sticking out of the top. He grabbed a tarnished brass bobbin, spooled with 8/0 dark brown Uni-thread, held the dangling thread between his left thumb and index finger, and angled the waxed line around the hook. Wrapping quickly, he doubled over the thread, secured it to the hook, and cut the tag end with a pair of sharp sewing scissors. The bobbin clanked against the vise as he pulled the scissors away. He hadn’t given me any instructions up to this point, but I hadn’t missed a turn. My eyes sucked up every wrap of thread and instantly transferred the information into memory.
“Now once you got the thread on there, you want to wrap back to the bend of the hook,” he instructed as his hands went through the motions of every step. “Once you got the thread to the back, you got to grab some pheasant tail.” He grabbed the long tail, plucked a few mottled strands from the boney quill, evened the edges of the strands, and added, “and tie it in to make the tail of the nymph.”
Holding the thin ends of the coarse strands tightly between his fingers, he eyed the length of the nymph’s tail and began wrapping thread around the base of the bunch, the white line which had held the strands to the quill still attached to the thickest ends. He whipped tight wraps around the pheasant strands, the thread cinching down the material as the wraps moved up the hook shank. Leaving the tag ends of the strands sticking straight up off the hook, he released his fingers and revealed the hairy tail of the nymph.
“When you got the tail on, you want to wrap back down to the bend and tie on some wire for the ribbing.” He twirled the bobbin around the clamped hook, the thread quickly wrapping back to the bend. “Now some folks like to tie on the wire first, but I always done it this way and there ain’t no need to change now.” He grabbed the spool of copper wire, rolled out a two-inch piece of thin metal and clipped it.
With the strip of copper wire parallel with the hook shank, he spun a few quick wraps around the wire with the bobbin, securing the malleable metal, the wire sticking straight off the back of the fly past the tail and wobbling over the material clip on the vise. “Then you move the thread up the shank and start wrapping the rest of the pheasant tail up to make the abdomen.” Zac grabbed the pheasant tail strands, the ones that stood straight up from the hook like a few sprigs of hair standing on a kid’s cow-licked head. I still sat quietly, occasionally sipping the dark beer, which had grown warm.
Zac pulled the pheasant tail down to the underside of the hook with his right hand and began turning the handle of the vise with his left index finger. The rotating cam on the vise turned the strands around the hook shank as Zac created the tapered abdomen. With the fat abdomen constructed, he wrapped the thread around the pheasant tail strands and cut the tag ends.
Zac was skipping steps now, not telling me every detail, and assuming I was picking up the gist. He felt no need to tell me to tie things off or to trim the tag ends. His mind was on cruise control, doing what he had done a thousand times before, his hands going through the motions almost effortlessly. I swallowed a big chug of beer, finishing off the glass.
*****
Once I’d learned the basics of tying from Zac, I learned to apply the techniques to other patterns. After I’d been tying flies for a couple of weeks, I could pump out certain patterns with considerable ease—not to say that my hands could whip finish a Royal Wulff while I watched TV, but with time the process took less concentration. In John Gierach’s Trout Bum, he talks about having to tie 160 dozen flies, all of the same pattern. Gierach was tying flies to pay the bills, but still—160 dozen, that’s 1,920 flies, all Adamses!
Gierach said that he never got into cruise control until after the first couple dozen. He said that by the time he got to that point, his fingers automatically angled wings perfectly so that when he tightened the thread, they would be positioned identically to the fly before, each fly mirroring the last one out of the vise. I’ve never gotten to that point, but I have learned where to place materials so that they turn perfectly when tightened by the cinch of wrapped thread. To be honest, I don’t know if I’d want to get to the point where I’m tying 160 dozen flies. Hell, I haven’t tied 160 dozen flies in the entire five years that I’ve been tying, much less that many of the same pattern. Gierach made his passion his work. Although I completely understand his desire to do so, I don’t think that’s a point I’m willing to get to. For me, fly tying has become more therapy than anything else. Tying is a practice that has a definitive beginning and end. I start from the bend and attach materials until I get to the hook eye, at which point I cut and am done. In a chaotic world of perpetual brain teasers, I need something that doesn’t require much thinking, something with a product that I can see, touch, hold, and use when I’m finished. The satisfaction I get from tying patterns to mimic drowning stoneflies, emerging caddisflies, and flashing minnows is something that further connects me to the place I’m in love with. My enjoyment doesn’t stem from any monetary gain, but rather connects to a firmer immersion into the wild. My flies mimic the bugs that fascinate me on the water and, hopefully, I create the trout’s next meal.
*****
“You can move pretty fast. How many flies can you tie in an hour?” I asked, amazed by how smoothly Zac’s hands worked from bend to eye.
“Ah. If I’m in the zone, I can probably kick out about a dozen or maybe fifteen if I’m really flying. But on a day like today, I ain’t quite sure. It should take me about six minutes or so, but the time starts going downhill the deeper I get into a six-pack or a bag of weed.”
I was amazed at the time, but now that I’ve been tying for four or five years, I’m even more stunned. I can still only finish one every ten or fifteen minutes. Zac really was a master of his craft. He could wrap tight bugs with the best of them, but he was even more amazing on the water. Even as I broke his routine and asked questions, his hands never quit working. He probably could have done it blindfolded.
Zac once told me that he used to tie flies wit
hout a vise when he worked in a fly shop in Morganton. He and his peers would challenge each other to see who could tie the best whatever without a vise, with only their fingers pinching the hook. Now, I never saw those flies, but I imagine that they still looked better than my first couple of attempts.
“Now, once you got the thorax done, you’ll want to grab the wire with some hackle pliers and wrap it up the thorax. This’ll give it some weight, a segmented body, and some flash.” Just as fast as I had gotten a word in, Zac was back to teaching. He held the wire tight with the pliers beneath the fly and used the rotary cam to wrap perfectly symmetrical bars of copper wire up the pheasant tail thorax. With the wire tied down at the same point where he had trimmed the pheasant tail fibers, he clipped away the excess.
“The next step’s probably the hardest. You got to take another bunch of pheasant tail and tie it in so you can make the wing case, but the hard part is measuring it out so that the ends are long enough to make the wings.”
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but I watched as he pulled away a few strands of pheasant tail and measured them against the abdomen and tail of the fly. He didn’t tell me how to measure; he just went to tying the strands in, the tapering edges angled back toward the tail, the thicker tag ends immediately cut off.
He grabbed for a plastic Ziploc bag that contained the strung peacock herl and plucked a few pieces from the white twine that held the clump together. The peacock herl’s iridescent hairs glowed green, yellow, and blue as the thin feathers twisted in the light. I’ve read that the iridescent plumage of birds such as peacocks and hummingbirds is not actually colored at all, but rather is clear with spaces within the hairs that refract light like a prism. Whatever the case, those strands of peacock herl put on a lightshow in the August sun.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is about the best material you can use on a fly,” Zac informed me. “See all them colors? Trout love that shit.” Zac’s squinted eyes, still half-baked from smoking pot, opened a little as a smirk spread across his slender face. “This stuff’ll make a fly dressier than a ten-dollar hooker on Broadway.” He laughed.
“Now you use this to make the thorax,” Zac instructed as he tied in the small bunch of herl above the pheasant tail strands. “I like to make my thorax big ’cause I tend to believe trout are more apt to bite a fly with a big profile.”
He spun the herl thickly around the shank, making a plump belly on the half-finished fly. Then he tied off the herl just behind the golden bead head and trimmed the excess from the hook, the snip of scissors cutting hair sounding softly.
“We’re almost done. Just got to make the wing case and the wings.” Zac pulled the pheasant tail fibers (which till this point stuck out behind the thorax) over the herl, the fibers layering a thin line of mottled brown on top of the glowing green herl. He wrapped the thread over the pheasant tail, securing the fibers just behind the bead, and spread the tag ends with his index finger.
“All you got to do is spread these pieces of pheasant tail to both sides, pinch them back, and tie them down.” His instructions made it sound much easier than it looked. His fingers quickly spread the strands evenly to both sides and pushed them back. Before I could blink an eye, Zac had wrapped the wings down, let go of the bobbin, and the shining jaws of the vise held a perfect Pheasant Tail Nymph.
*****
The first time I caught a trout on a fly that I’d tied, I was fishing on Caney Fork Creek. Attached to my tippet were a broad-winged Stimulator, the elk-hair wing sprawled out like a porcupine’s quills; and a messy-looking Prince Nymph, the wire ribbing loosely spiraling around the peacock herl body, and the white biot wings rolling on the body when I twisted the materials against the hook. Both of the flies were train wrecks, but I cast them anyway.
With the elk hair riding high on a seam of current, a native brook trout appeared off the pebbly bottom and engulfed the drifting nymph. I set the hook high into the fish’s jaw and lifted the gorgeous mountain trout from the riffles. Something that I had created had looked enough like a meal for a fish to rise, feed, and be hooked.
The feeling of fooling a fish with your own design is an emotional experience that all too many fishermen will never achieve. When other fishermen are running a sharp point through the thin flesh of a night crawler, I’m cinching the knot on a Caddis Pupa. While bass fisherman hunt through shelves of brightly colored crankbaits, I’m wrapping furry dubbing on the thorax of a Golden Stonefly. Through fly tying, I’ve come to believe that these other means of luring fish to bite only distance the fisherman from the fish they love. Personally, I want to get as close as I can get, with my arm, the rod, the line, and the fly the only things separating me from the trout that I pursue.
*****
“Just got to whip-finish some knots on this bad boy and I’ll be done.” Zac twisted the dangling thread into a triangle around an oddly bent tool and spun the knots behind the bead head. As he tied the last wraps of thread around the fly, the tight line securing the buggy Pheasant Tail Nymph reminded me of the last strands of silk being spun by a spider around a trapped moth. He cinched the wraps, cut the thread, and the fly was done.
“I’m going to put a little epoxy on the wing case to give it some shine, but that’s it.” I was almost brain-dead from soaking in so much information so fast. Although it’s taken me a couple of hours to write out what happened, the actual event occurred in less than twenty minutes. Dumbfounded is not quite the word. I was a vegetable.
“Now you go ahead and try,” Zac said, getting up from his chair and heading back into the main room. “I’m going to go roll a blunt. You just holler if you got any questions.”
I switched seats and stared at the gorgeous nymph he had tied, the fly lying on the heavy pedestal base of the vise. There wasn’t a chance in hell I could tie anything like that, but I put a hook in the jaws, grabbed the bobbin, and gave it a go. After a few minutes, Zac came in with the frosted growler, poured me another stout, and sat down beside me to eye my progress.
“Looks like hell, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? For your first time, that’s a damn nice fly.”
His encouragement was helpful, but I knew that his comment was merely something friends say in order not to break a friend’s confidence. When I was finished, Zac helped me whip-finish knots to seal the job, and then I cut the thread. What hung in the vise was a scraggly bug with an uneven abdomen, loose ribbing, a thin thorax, and awful-looking wings. In the process of tying the fly, I had learned what Zac meant about measuring out the pheasant tail to make the wing case and wings. I had overshot my measurement and had to trim the excess from the wings, which gave them a blocky, unnatural shape, unlike the tapered wings of Zac’s fly.
“That thing ain’t worth a shit,” I fussed.
“But it’ll catch a fish.” Zac urged. “Now, do it again.”
That fly had taken me at least forty-five minutes to tie, but in the end he was right. My Pheasant Tail would catch a fish and later, on the water, it did. After a couple more attempts at a Pheasant Tail, Zac showed me how to tie a Prince Nymph. Surprisingly, I was a lot better at that pattern than I was with the first. People later told me that a Prince is a lot harder fly to tie than a Pheasant Tail because you have to match up the goose biots, which are difficult to work with in the first place; however, my Princes turned out nice, and I caught fish on them as well. Now when I look at those first couple of flies (which I’ve stuck into corks resting by my tying desk) and compare them to the ones I’ve tied recently, I know that I was on point when I said, “Looks like hell.” Then again, they did catch trout.
Zac reclined in the wooden chair by the fan in the main room and lit the end of a fresh blunt, while I sat in that tiny nook, hunched over his vise. The pungent smell of reefer crept over the threshold as I tied fly after fly, getting better with each one. The empty growler finally caught up to me and my fumbling hands were no longer sober enough to make precise wraps. With a
belly full of heavy beer and five or six loosely tied nymphs in my jeans pocket, I headed for my dorm room across campus. There was no question I would tie again. All I hoped was that my next attempt would bring buggier imitations, flies that I could be proud of—meals for trout, fish-catching feathers, lies a brookie would believe.
The Liar
The smell of freshly cut grass hung on the humid air of the July afternoon in Charlotte. Every man in the neighborhood had spent the Saturday grooming his yard. My father was no different, and he steered a circle into the grass with a rusted-out Murray mower. My job was to make sure rocks and fallen tree limbs didn’t chop nicks into the sharpened blades of the riding mower. Dad mowed in a spiral, leaving one small patch of shin-high grass in the center of the backyard as he spun to finish. His head, with little hair remaining on top, was broiled red, his gray T-shirt was sweated to his torso, his glasses glued firmly to his nose, and beads of sweat glistened and rolled down every inch of exposed flesh. As the last blade of grass shot from the discharge chute, I had already predicted Dad’s request and was on my way into the house to grab him a cold Cheerwine.
Almost three thirty and I didn’t want to be late getting to the water. I grabbed my rod by the kitchen door and headed back out through the carport. Dad quieted the rumble of the small gasoline engine, and I handed him the drink.
“Thank you, son.” Dad popped open the aluminum can and drank fast. I nodded and was already halfway across the yard when I heard him call. “Where you going?”
“Fishing with Darryl!” I yelled back, only turning for a brief moment to aim the words in his direction.
“Be back by supper,” he said, but I was already gone.
The heat radiated off the blacktop as I ran toward the trailhead, a small opening in the woods on the right of the road. When I stepped onto the clay path, I could see Darryl up ahead standing in front of a large tangle of honeysuckle vine. Hidden from sight of the road and fathers, he was blowing cigarette smoke into the air, the cloud dissipating through the sweetness of summer. The burning cigarette was the last of a pack of promotional Winstons we’d stolen from a neighbor’s mailbox. We didn’t greet each other, he just passed the smoke, and we disappeared into the brush.
