You cannot cast a fly anywhere in the
river without the conviction that it’s drifting over fish. That you may know better counts for nothing
in the overpowering impression of possibility, one of the pleasant illusions
from which an angling life is built.
………………
Any enterprise centered on angling
automatically forfeits any pretense to seriousness in the ordinary world.
………………
Fishing is at heart a form of
play. I have always assumed this much to
be obvious, but judging from the current trajectory of the sport, evidently it
is not. Modern angling is uncomfortable
with the idea and prefers to regard itself more along the lines of modern
medicine, as an acutely specialized body of knowledge dispensed by a priesthood
of experts.
………………
Wade fishing rests on the deep
psychology of righteousness and all the props available to the Man of Virtue in
a classic morality play – self-denial, sacrifice, steadiness of character,
endurance of hardship, humility, and the abnegation of worldly comforts.
………………
To wade a river is to participate in
the ritual purification of bathing, one of the oldest and most widespread of
metaphors, though ideally without the getting-wet part.
………………
People being what they are, conflicts
inevitably crop up between those in boats and those not. Usually avoidable but not always avoided,
they generally take the predictably American form of one indignant sense of
entitlement confronting another, and sometimes you wonder whom to pull for.
………………
Fishing on foot has a microscopic
character and makes small things into larger ones.
………………
Boots and boats represent as much
instruments of observation as methods of getting around.
………………
Fly fishing is not one of the eternal
verities, but it can bring you closer to a few, the stream itself foremost
among them.
………………
There is a certain and distinct
pleasure, the source of which I cannot pinpoint, in simply watching water run
downhill, an endless scroll of current on which the river inscribes the
complicated history of itself. And it
reads equally well whether you choose to be in the water or on it. It merely comes down to a matter of what
pleases best, and once that is resolved, no other relevant questions remain.
………………
Looking forward to a fishing trip and
preparing for it bestows a happiness of its own, and the flies I tie represent
the material form of my private anticipatory pleasure.
………………
No one should kill a trout without a
sense of having diminished the world’s quotient of wildness. This isn’t necessarily a reason to renounce
the practice, but if it doesn’t give pause, you have some things to think
about.
………………
(On any “surplus” of anglers crowding a
preferred portion of water, and the “annoyance and disappointment you are
unentitled to feel at seeing your favorite reaches of water occupied day after
day.”)
It may rain on your expectations, but if the
presence of other fishermen ruins your day, the problem should be reckoned
yours, not theirs.
………………
I doubt there’s an angler alive, at
least one with any imagination, who hasn’t at some time or other trespassed on
posted land or snuck onto private water.
………………
I have always favored morning fishing
anyway. The first hours of light on a
river are the most gracious of the day.
Cool night air still lingers over the water, and there is seldom any
wind. Shadows stretch out as the day
uncurls in the yawn of morning sun, and the river is never more quietly
spectacular nor the landscape more vividly limned than in that slanting
light. Nocturnal creatures wander home,
diurnal ones take their place, and there is much to see at the change of shift,
as in truth there is at dusk. But the
sun sets with a sense of time seeping away, of attenuation and impending
conclusion; with dawn, the day just keeps getting bigger, and for several hours
the far end of it is quite invisible.
The fishing prospects, as yet uncorrupted by the fish, are envisioned
through the purities of early-morning hope and its innocent interpretations of
the future. At sunrise on a trout
stream, every man is an optimist.
………………
Human beings in general seem
constituted to want it all, but fishermen believe they can actually get it.
………………
The soul of an angler embraces a
collection of unquestioned convictions, foremost among them the faith that a
trout could take on any cast. Deprive
him of that assumption and only a perplexing sense of waste remains.
………………
Trout always lie in the direction of
greatest hardship.
………………
It is an old truism that the best
fishing takes place in spaces of transition, on the edges between current and
obstruction, shallow and deep, warm and cool, fast and slow, day and night.
………………
Fly fishing cannot be called, in any
important construction of the term, an “art.”
It is only a medium.
………………
Any conception about a favorite place
to fish cannot be separated from an idea of why you fish to begin with, of what
you go to the water looking for and what, having been there, you come away
with.
………………
A fishing place (and fishing itself, I
would argue) is a kind of shorthand – a metonym that names the container for
the things contained. The particular
ways in which you appreciate a river; the assumptions and intentions you bring
to it; the way you envision what you are doing on the water and what you take
its purpose to be; what you attend to and the person you become while you are
there – all of these, and others, are contained in a space called “favorite”
that we partly define for ourselves by what we choose to invest in it. I doubt that these choices even register on
us consciously. In our minds, it’s just
how we fish, invisibly there, like a form of gravity.
………………
To some extent, and possibly a larger
one, we create the places we fish through the decisions we make about what
matters there. A river, or a lake, or a
saltwater flat is fundamentally itself.
But it also contains the raw material from which to arrange a place of
meaningful occupation, one that grants a temporary autonomy, where the
miraculous in the ordinary is more likely to show itself and where you are more
likely to see it, where you can inhabit a story you fashion that is all about
why you are there.
………………
(On the matter of fly patterns for a sport
“that so openly invites the more analytical forms of observation, so
insistently encourages the construction of hypotheses, and so seldom rewards
them.)
When it comes to flies, the fish have
the advantage. At the end of the day,
only the trout’s opinion counts, though this does not stop anglers from having
plenty of their own.
………………
(On fishermen as “creatures of reason, driven
or inclined to explanatory conjectures.”)
Simply catching fish or failing to
catch them does not serve; the unrepeatable successes and persistent failures
haunt us equally. We must know the
causes, and if they cannot be objectively discovered, we will invent them.
………………
The quality of a day’s fishing,
whether good, bad, or otherwise, can rarely be attributed to a single factor;
almost always it involves a conspiracy.
………………
Fly angling is an occupation of a
thousand variables – water and weather, light and temperature, instincts and
accidents – in which a small alteration in any one of them may rattle down to
the others in a chain reaction and cascade through the system until everything,
most particularly the fishing, changes.
………………
Put a nickel into a fly angler and he
will dispense theories until you put a quarter in to make him stop or, failing
that, manually unplug him.
………………
Fly angling offers little in the way
of absolutes; for the most part, it consists mainly of conjectures forcibly
willed to the status of fact.
………………
We operate under a theory that a
change of fly offers the surest route to a change of fortune. For an overwhelming number of us, of course,
the best way to catch more fish is to become a better fisherman.
………………
Knotting on a different fly requires
infinitely less time and personal effort than learning how to do something new
or better. The fly, we reason, is what
makes things happen, and so using a different one should make them happen
differently.
………………
Blind fishing has as its most immediate
objective a good cast, which after a time becomes its own incentive; you grow
more absorbed in throwing strikes and less concerned about getting them.
………………
Any trout fly that catches a trout
gives some fragmentary hint of the ideal, a partial glimpse into a transcendent
reality that we will probably never arrive at.
………………
We all confront the same observed evidence
of the water, reach into our fly boxes, and, often enough, produce different
solutions to the problem of catching fish.
………………
(On a fisherman’s flies, in “that all of them
signify something we believe in, or used to believe in, or think we might believe
in when we get around to trying them.”)
Dig through an angler’s patterns and
you will unearth a private archeology of shrewd inferences and failed
speculations, unlikely hopes, long-shot bets, the remnants of rivers past,
hatches that materialized or didn’t but still might.
………………
Our fly boxes warehouse our experience
and experiences; they become a form of material memory.
………………
Like pets, fly boxes take on the
personalities of their owners; they house our angling identities, which may or
may not resemble our everyday identities as they exist uncorrupted by
fishing. It depends upon the fisherman.
………………
While a fly pattern obviously has no
inner life, it does have the suggestion of one: a name, a parentage, a history,
an occupation; it can evoke affection, trust, misgiving, prejudice; it has a
finite lifespan and, as with people, its passing is sometimes mourned and
sometimes not. A fly pattern is not a
person, but collectively in our boxes flies do constitute a kind of
population. Because we have made them
and sometimes invented them and so know them in a way that the nontier does
not, we don’t so much use our flies as enter into partnerships with them.
………………
While I like to think of myself as an
equal-opportunity angler, I have limits and draw the line at those increasingly
popular patterns, mostly nymphs and streamers, draped in more flashy glitter
and trashy bling than a pop-star entourage, and dressed with a similar unholy
sense of color. The trout in my universe
have never been interested in sequin-and-paste costume simply because I have
never shown it to them. In making this
choice, and many others, I manage to supervise reality in a way that makes it
conform to my worldview, which I take to be the ultimate theory behind all
flies and fishing.
………………
A trout fly inhabits the space of our
best imaginings and becomes a kind of narrative of its own, a plot we construct
about a character in disguise. In the
end we cast a fly on the water for the same basic reason that we test a
hypothesis or read a story – we want to see how it all comes out.
………………
(On the western fly fisherman’s “disingenuous
contempt” for the species whitefish, these “Montana bonefish” being his “chief
metaphor for disappointment,” and the “more complex relationship” of
“pretending to a greater disappointment than he actually feels” of catching
one, or many more, instead of the targeted species, trout. That “you may not like whitefish much, but
you need them. They are necessary,
answering a call from those murky sectors of the heart that are best left
unexplored.)
I find it hard to imagine that anyone with
angling in his soul would regret catching a fish, at least as opposed to not
catching one. We just wish to remind
ourselves of the simple, animal pull that lies at the heart of the game.
………………
(On a general premise of angling that “fish are
catchable,” even if far from being “self-evident, this assumption must be
granted” or else “admitting the contrary concedes in advance the essential
futility of it all.”)
Whether
you ultimately hook any fish doesn’t matter, but the possibility of it must
exist. That alone gives meaning to your
efforts, even the failed ones.
………………
A
moment will sometimes arrive in fishing, infrequently but unfortunately, when
you can see the day taking a turn, heading south, going sour in ways that you
neither anticipated nor seem capable of stopping. Any number of identical circumstances might
precipitate the decline – bad luck, bad weather, bad water, bad company, or
just you fishing badly – but in time it expands to become a free-floating and
generalized pall of frustration or discouragement or ill humor that descends
over everything. Nearly always, however,
you can trace it to the same cause: you’ve invested too much in too little, of
wanting too specifically.
………………
Define
the terms of success too exclusively and you hang the weight of your
satisfaction on a hook too insubstantial to hold it.
………………
To
stake one’s well-being on catching fish is invariably a fool’s wager.
………………
You
will spend some fraction of your fishing in wait, and when gauged against the
putative aim – catching something – that fraction is large.
………………
(On the
perception of boredom originating “from being attentive to the passage of time
itself.”)
The
angler labors under no such inconvenience and routinely misplaces large chunks
of time, entire afternoons, whole days, significant portions of a life, with no
idea where they have gone or any specific recollection of how they
disappeared. You can certainly become
bored while fishing, but only if you ask too much of it or expect the wrong
things.
………………
(On
the “hallucinogenic properties” of “technical fly-fishing literature”
distorting occurrences of hatching insects and rising fish “which anglers have
been induced to believe are the default condition of the average trout stream
and a routine component of the ordinary angler’s experience in fishing.”)
While
I’ve lived long enough to know better, and though the melancholy truth of the
converse has been repeatedly demonstrated to me, I nonetheless share the
pervasive American faith in pharmaceutical therapies and believe that the
various hatch-related maladies that might afflict an angler can be treated with
the proper prescription of fly patterns.
In this regard, I am a walking drugstore.
………………
The
human imagination gravitates more to the singular than the ordinary, and
exchanges among fishermen typically highlight the atypical, in which both fish
and fishing abound.
………………
I can
only gesture lamely toward the kind of irrationality that underlies much of
angling – how, for instance, we allege to deepen our appreciation of nature by
pestering it, sometimes to death. If fishing
were inherently reasonable, you’d probably see a lot more people on the water.
………………
There
is no significant point to be proved in fishing, unless you wish to demonstrate
that you’re somehow more clever than the fish, a suspect aspiration to begin
with and frequently inconclusive in the end.
Nor will fishing cure what ails you, though I must say it does a
commendable job of treating the symptoms.
………………
Fly
fishing is not a religion. At best it
can bring you to sacred places and show you a small miracle or two.
………………
Waiting
represents just a distilled and concentrated version of the deep uncertainty
that surrounds all fishing – angling, perhaps, in its most abstract form.
