An angler learns the water piecemeal, beginning in each new spot by shrinking even the largest river to the compass of a cast, measuring out the boundaries of a space that, for a time, exists to the exclusion of all others. What lies inside so fully captures your attention and engages the senses that whatever takes place outside those borders is beyond awareness. This contraction of the world, concentrating it to a local and immediately present space, sometimes furthers the catching of fish, but beyond that it is, simply in and of itself, one of the best parts of fishing. A good fisherman can create such spaces anywhere.
………………
Everything in a spring creek, the constancy of temperature and flow, the chemistry of the water, the meandering shape, the streambed geology, terrestrial and aquatic plants, zooplankton, insects, crustaceans, predators and prey – all condense to one trout holding in a shady bend.
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To wade a freestone stream is to walk on the crust of the earth; step into a spring creek and you may find yourself knee-deep, and still sinking, in loose suspensions of sand and silt that make it difficult to say what or where the bottom is. A spring creek has boundaries but not barriers; at its edges, the water does not suddenly stop but shades to wetness in tangles of roots and rootlets and in masses of half-submerged watercress, and then becomes mud that trails off to dampness in the soil beyond. In there somewhere, dry lands begins.
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Fishing, like fish, and like much in the natural world, flourishes at the edges of things, and on a good spring creek, there are trout almost everywhere.
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Nature is nowhere inherently beautiful; we only invest it with beauty – a fact that by no means reduces the power or pleasure we feel, but one that raises questions about why we distribute those investments unequally.
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Water is an ancient emblem of spiritual purification, and its symbolic power to absolve is as old as the need to be forgiven.
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A spring is the past unearthed, issuing from a crack in time. In its waters old stories are told, a disclosure of hidden workings flowing like an open vein or welling up to the skin of the earth like blood in a bruise.
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There is no essential difference between the intimacy of occasion and the intimacy of place. They share the same secret interior, and it has never appeared to me that it could be otherwise.
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It is a truism among anglers that the deepest affections attach to first waters.
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Fishing
becomes a form of memory, and memory a form of return.
(On fishing first waters, treasuring the unique familiarity, memories
created, experience gained, and depth and richness of association rooted as a result of angling such a location.)
………………
Fish
the places that other anglers overlook.
(On inexperience, or learning to employ that “scrap of wisdom”
learned of reading the published writing of angling “masters.”)
………………
The
rock remembers and writes its history on sheets of stone, imprints it in
fossils pressed like leaves in the pages of an old book, etches its story in
the cursive of a spring creek inscribed on a valley floor. The land is memory and the water is remembering,
breaching time to unearth the past.
(On the topology and geology of an eroded valley floor, carved of
running water, exposed “half a billion years high” of “all the landscapes it
has ever been” as stratified layers of stone sediment.)
………………
I
still value above all the kind of fishing day that passes in the alternating
rhythm of being alone and being in company.
Both solitude and society are improved on a trout stream.
………………
I’ve
always imagined that viewed from a height, our movements had a certain antlike
quality to them, the stoppings and startings and brief touching of antennae,
each individual creature moving with at least distantly discernible purpose,
while any logic of their collective activity remained a mystery.
(On the “thoroughly and happily disorganized affair” of “wandering
up and down the stream looking for good water,” passing one by one, the individual fishing companions of your party's outing, scattered over the length of a waterway.)
………………
Possession,
even if it is only symbolic, lurks deep in the heart of every angler, or at
least those who are any good at it.
………………
In
fishing, you can be shown how to cast, to set the hook, to maintain a tight
line and play a trout – but these are only mechanics, and their mere
implementation cannot be called fishing any more than vibrating air can be
called music. The fishing exists
elsewhere, in the cracks between these other things or somewhere underneath
them: in the capacity to imagine in three dimensions, to infer the details of
current and streambed from the character of the surface; in finding fish and
reading their moods from the language of position, attitude, and movement; in
sensing the take of a nymph or interpreting the drift or drag of a dry fly; in
always having another idea; in a hundred other subtleties so automatic that you
come to regard them as instinct, and only in retrospect realize that there was
a time when you did not know them.
………………
Every
fisherman reinvents the sport in just the way every child reinvents the
language or every storyteller the story each time it is told. To fly fish a spring creek is to rediscover
the modern origins of the sport, to recapture the logic of its form by
reproducing the circumstances that first gave it shape. It is the reinvention of a method precisely
calibrated to a place, the redrafting of an architecture, not merely through
imitation but by rebuilding its very rationale.
………………
The
trout struck in an unnecessarily violent slash-and-turn rise that left us
mutually astonished. I had never seen
such a thing happen before; the thrill was stunning and electric – like being
struck in the zipper by lightning – and even now, the surface take of a trout
still generates this same sensation, though in somewhat lower voltages.
………………
I do
not fish for them deliberately but am delighted whenever I catch one, not
because of their rarity but because they are a reminder that the past is not
necessarily gone simply because it’s behind you.
(On the scarcity of natural existence
of the most “beautiful of all trout species,” brook trout – fontinalis, “of the
springs” – “the only species of freshwater fish I know of that would not look
out of place among the phantasmagoria of a coral reef.”)
………………
Depending
upon your point of view, it is a sign of maturity or arrogance or decadence
that there comes a point in an angling life when a fisherman abandons the quest
for size and numbers of trout and insists instead only on their
difficulty. The brown trout obliges.
………………
When a
brown trout levitates from the streambed, slowly and balloonlike, and drifts
downstream eye to eye with your fly, you get the distinct and uneasy impression
that it’s not just looking, it’s thinking.
………………
As each
fly fisherman reinvents the sport, so the sport in turn invents each fisherman,
its particulars shaping the outline of the angler he will one day be, piping
the tune that first set the atoms of the brain to dancing.
………………
If you
don’t care about catching fish, you have no business fishing in the first
place. I do have my vanities, but
catching a lot of trout is not one of them.
………………
Trout
are loveliest when viewed from above, where the brilliance of their design and
the logic of camouflage is most apparent.
A fish in hand is like a jaguar or zebra in a zoo – out of context, its
patterning is an absurdity – but against the background of its habitat, the
coloration and markings are unexpected genius.
………………
I have
hooked my share of large fish, and my share has been, in all justice, small.
………………
During
the course of every angling life, the image of a few, particular fish are
inscribed on the fleshy tablets of the brain.
………………
Each
angler, I think, constructs from the stuff of his experience a Platonic trout
stream that winds through the landscape of his imagination, the place against
which all others are measured, the water he hopes to go to when he dies.
………………
There
are big trout here, but not many, and they are not the kind you simply fish
for; they are the kind you mount a campaign against.
………………
Fish
care nothing for your self-esteem. It is
one of their best qualities.
………………
If
individual trout snub you, a trout stream itself is nothing if not an endless
series of second chances.
………………
All
streams flow backward, and reflected somewhere in the surface of every river
you fish are the images of those first places.
(On a philosophy of life, and a
life spent fishing, in that the body forms we occupy are an “architecture of
our own recollection,” our memories of angling waters and places, ones that we
“can never leave.”)
………………
Even
the most genial of anglers can get pretty testy if you start talking out loud
about their favorite waters, particularly when many of those places are obscure
and have so far escaped the calamities of a reputation.
………………
In many places, fishing the spring
creeks depends upon the dexterity with which you can climb over, wriggle under,
or slip through barbed wire and the ease of conscience you can summon on the
private property beyond.
………………
To look to the natural world for moral
instruction is a dangerous business at best, for much of what you find there is
antithetical to the best impulses of human culture.
(In nature, “the strong
dominate the weak, charity and sympathy have no place; infanticide, thievery,
self-interest, and opportunism are commonplace.
The dynamics of the natural world are neither evil nor ethical – they
are morally unaligned, merely the ongoing adjustments by which things are made
to work; they simply are what they are.
Nature is an excellent teacher, but it teaches mostly about itself.”)
………………
A good fishing partner is the human equivalent of home water.
………………
To fish home water with home companions is to inhabit one of the
most agreeable of all spaces.
………………
For better or worse, one’s personality, life experiences, and
general makeup assert themselves indiscriminately, and there is no reason that
fishing should be spared. The sentimental
drunk, in my experience, is still sentimental when he’s sober, and I’ve never
seen a fistful of Valium, a dose of the spirit, or a pool full of rising trout
transform an asshole into Mother Teresa.
………………
There
is an angling maxim, one I have seen attributed to everyone from Confucius to
Herbert Hoover, that claims the hours spent fishing are not deducted from one’s
allotted span of life on earth. And
though I put no stock in the sentiment, as with many adages the truth resides
less in the statement than in the perception that gave rise to it, and I
suspect that this sense of being located outside time is familiar in some form
to nearly everyone who has ever fished.
………………
Like most fishermen, we gauged the excellence of the water by the
number of fish we took, which is a poor yardstick to begin with and
particularly so when wielded by poor fishermen.
Looking back now, I suspect that this water was well supplied with trout
of the usual two varieties: the kind we could catch, which were scarce, and the
kind we could not, which were abundant.
………………
Like many fly fishermen, I enjoy watching another angler fish nearly
as much as I enjoy fishing myself, and on some occasions even more. It is the most contemplative version of
something I find contemplative to begin with, and its rewards lie in the
observation rather than the action.
(Especially, as the author upholds,
“if that someone is any good, watching him lay out a cast and drop the fly and
work the water feels very much like fishing, even though you’re not holding the
rod.”)
………………
Rituals,
even those of loss, are by nature an affirmation, and their significance is
cumulative. In ours, meaning grew along
a trout stream; the landscape gave rise to ritual that in turn conferred a kind
of sanctity on the land. And this is
what it means, I think, to know a place by heart.
………………
It
takes time to know a trout stream, but if you visit one often enough to learn
at least some of its secrets and idiosyncrasies, you begin to fish the water
not only with a greater expectation of success but with an increasing sense of
affectionate familiarity, even on those days when the trout hand you your
hat. After a time, this fondness gives
way to a feeling of proprietorship about the place, which at its best shows
itself in a paternal kind of protectiveness.
(On attachments to certain,
specific waters, and the “step from passion to possession,” especially “when one
angler discovers another fishing ‘his’ water, not water that belongs to him,
but to which he feels entitled by long association. Fishing is essentially a utopian occupation,
and this (feeling) is its natural extension.”)
………………
In some cases the number of frighteningly large trout occupying an
unbelievably small area of water gives the fishing a kind of artificial, staged
quality, like professional wrestling.
(On fishing private water, both “the
kind you pay to get on and that rarer and more mysterious kind that no money can
buy access to, that you get on only by knowing someone or knowing someone who
knows someone.”)
………………
“Each man kills the thing he loves,” writes Oscar Wilde, and one
need look no further than some of the best-known rivers in America to see just
how this paradox works.
(On “preserving the resource”
and “crowds of fishermen that can hammer a place just by being there, no matter
how well-intentioned and careful they may be.”)
………………
To regard a place with wild trout as having
some measure of environmental integrity may just be another form of
self-delusion, but in the end I am a trout fisherman and cannot help but
believe that trout express something about the land. There is a narrow line between indifferent
resignation to a diminished world and appreciating what gifts still remain.
(On the author’s assertion that
“there is no such thing anymore as a nonpolitical trout. Every fish is one that easily might not have been.
Each one exists by sufferance, by virtue of a land-use restriction, a
stream-saving deal, a lawsuit, court injunction, state or federal land
designation, a regulation or statute or someone’s goodwill.”)
………………
The creek runs clear, curling through the meadow, the current carving patterns in the water as varied and shapely as the grain in wood. Spring water spooling through the throat of a pool fans out in the glistening fleck and medullary ripple of quarter-sawn oak. In shallow flats, submerged weeds rumple the surface to a twisted confusion of humps and burls, knots and whirlpools, like a plank of bird’s-eye maple.
………………
More than any other type of water, a spring creek makes you appreciate the fact that distortions are an immense advantage to the fisherman; the pure and plain truth is always the hardest to manage.
(On the fact that a spring creek does not “hide your presence, or your want of skill, or faulty presentation, or the inadequacies of tackle or miscalculations of method, paring away anything that might disguise your mistakes and carelessness and incaution. A spring creek is nakedly simple, and that is precisely where the difficulty lies.”)
………………
Luck and happenstance are always a part of fishing, though for the most part, I think, in small and subtle ways that an angler never notices. But the aim of fishing is to fish well, and the aim of fishing well is to make chance count for as little as possible.
(On “preserving the illusion that we are agents of our own success, that we have orchestrated the whole affair” – of successfully hooking a fish – “that it willingly and predictably responds to our own ideas about how it ought to behave.” That is to say, a hook-up wasn’t a fluke or accident.)
………………
For well over an hour (we) hook eight-inch trout on every second or third cast. It is remarkable how this kind of fishing, fast and effortless, can so rapidly lose its charm. We labor to this very purpose, and when a rare moment delivers the thing we have hoped for, our interest fades. It is another of the fisherman’s peculiarities that bewilder the nonangler, and I am sometimes puzzled myself and left wondering just what we want out of all of this.
………………
You seize those occasions that look like justice because you never know whether another one will come along.
(On the rarest of times when it’s relatively impossible to NOT hook a fish. Think, blitz conditions from your perspective as a surfcaster.)
………………
Old places, even those you once knew intimately and still remember well, sometimes possess a surprising weight when you return to them. The weight that you feel exists in the present, not in the past. You can call it nostalgia or sentimentality, but it is really a kind of mourning, and you are the one who has died. The person you were then no longer exists.
………………
A trout stream might be therapeutic at times, but it is not finally a form of therapy. In the odd and unbidden moment, it may surrender some insight, but if you fish for enlightenment, you better be sure first that you can stand the glare.
………………
Imitation is not the principal end of fly fishing, only a means. The goal itself is deception, the perpetration of a lie, and the more you consider that the trout is not the only creature deceived, the closer this idea comes to the heart of fly fishing.
………………
It is not enough to catch the fish – we must know why.
………………
A trout fly is only a story we invent, a tale spun on a hook shank from the imperfect materials at hand, ordered according to our best guess, an explanation of what we think we understand about a world.
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| ©2002 (The Lyons Press) |
