Quotes from Ted Leeson's "Jerusalem Creek"

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.

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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.)

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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.”)

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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.)

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.”)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I have hooked my share of large fish, and my share has been, in all justice, small.

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During the course of every angling life, the image of a few, particular fish are inscribed on the fleshy tablets of the brain.

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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.

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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.

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Fish care nothing for your self-esteem.  It is one of their best qualities.

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If individual trout snub you, a trout stream itself is nothing if not an endless series of second chances.

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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.”)

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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.

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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. 

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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.”)

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A good fishing partner is the human equivalent of home water.

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To fish home water with home companions is to inhabit one of the most agreeable of all spaces.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.”)

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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.

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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.”)

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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.”)

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“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.”) 

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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.”) 

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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.  

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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.”)

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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.)

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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.

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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.) 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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It is not enough to catch the fish – we must know why.

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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)

Master Of The Striper Fly

That was it.  I decided at long-last to just do it, even setting a reminder into my phone's calendar.  This time, I wouldn't forfeit to the coming, onset, and passage of yet another winter season in having never acted to redeem opportunity sunken beneath the darkening depths of flowing time ebbed years prior.  Some long-running tide showed hints of slowing, perhaps even coming to slack, such that with any coaxing gravity of my motive, would soon reverse state, flooding entirely anew.  I could no longer float some buoyant, subtle sense of regret left otherwise unchallenged by action or remedy.  After all, the solution was quite simple enough.  Every January, for a sudden and swift three days, the man from Massachusetts conveniently makes himself accessible to one-on-one, vis-à-vis visitation within the very state I live.

A Wawa coffee was poured, an address entered into GPS for easy E-ZPass passage up the GSP, and with the smeared ink applied of a rubber stamp rolled against the back of my hand, I strayed for the first time about an aircraft hanger-sized venue in peripatetic pursuit of a renowned author and Striper fly-fishing authority by the name of Rich Murphy.  Somewhere among the vast commercial channels of vendors and churning volume of shoulder-bumping passersby sweeping through aisle inlets, he was here, poised and positioned at a table blanketed by a sheet of white poster paper being tattooed with a graffiti of illustration.  At a trade show workstation, weighed-down by tying vises clamping at the hooks of his original, hand-tied creations, precise foils of feather and flash posed on-display and buttressed end-to-end between stacked hardcovers irrefutably recognized the sport over as the man's distilled, encyclopedic anthology of experience, here bound as the inviting inventory of his weighty book, Fly Fishing For Striped Bass.  It was then, that a saltwater fly-tyer and expert stalker of M. Saxatilis lifted his downward-turned eyes away from the attention of his working fingers to curiously glance above a plastic rim of bifocals where he focused instead unto a Fly Fishing Show attendee who suddenly appeared standing before him.

Rich Murphy's tying table at the Edison, NJ Fly Fishing Show.  His 2007 publication, Fly Fishing For Striped Bass, is widely recognized as "encyclopedic" in coverage; an "immediate bible" on the subject of Striper fly-fishing strategy.  Angling author Dick Brown penned it as "the distilled wisdom of an expert stalker of Striped Bass.. a celebration of one man's love affair with a great game fish."  Agreeably, the book's comprehensive and prudent content promptly won my heart.  That afternoon, after a smile and handshake, Rich's parting words to me were "everything in it is the truth."         

RM's Conomo Special, a large streamer fly that proved innovative in its inception at the imitation of the Clupeidae family of finfishes (alewife, blueback and Atlantic herring, Atlantic menhaden, threadfin, gizzard, and hickory shad).  It's Rich's #1, single-most productive, and universally-adaptable Striper fly pattern, named after Conomo Point on the Essex River in Essex, MA.        

The venerable vanguard of the vise was quick to use a pen in illustrating on his table how the profile depth of the Conomo's spreader cone could be manipulated with finger pressure into a shape that bears to appropriate an overall length-to-height ratio to the cross-sectional body profile of prey a tyer intends to imitate.

For some time, I had finally stood present, in-the-flesh, before the enthusiastic character of a man whom some distant six winter's time earlier, I grew to know only in my mind, page by carefully turned page, under the illuminating light of a reading lamp.  Having been befriended by a printed wisdom of words that flood his 457-page saltwater atlas, this same hardcover that I awoke from its bookcase and deliberately accompanied to the show, I imagined it reasonable to possibly personalize our friendship with just a few more - those that I would value as penned-privilege of a master's autograph.  His inscription advancing one last personal cast of wisdom - "Let the big ones go."  Five simple words that mean so incredibly much, and serve equally as important as the backing packed deep onto your arbor, waiting for some day to be revealed to the silence of night as you turn hard to stop your personal best from running-off without first inscribing your excited eyesight with the size and color of her splendor.

"Without this book, an angler can still catch Striped Bass.  But with it the reader will gain a hard-earned advantage in the quest to catch a knee-knocking trophy striper.  The author and I both started fly fishing for this magnificent fish at about the same time and with the exact same tackle.  He became a true gourmet, while most of us are only gourmands.  Rich rose from student to professor.  Now all this knowledge is at our fingertips." - C.M. "Rip" Cunningham, former editor-in-chief Salt Water Sportsman magazine

The event's encompassing parking lots were generously-stocked of clever, fish-inspired vanity plates.  Clearly, this last one I chanced upon, served as a rendered reminder of Rich's drying penned message within the bound covers I carried.  Just do it.

Quotes from "The Habit of Rivers"

The Habit of Rivers, written by Ted Leeson, offers one angler’s work of words transcribed from the very homewaters he heeds descending seaward of the Pacific Northwest.  His portrait of language, weaved of and wound in accordance with any fisherman who seeks and values a lasting connection far greater than that of his taught line, are inspirations made clearly of those insightfully-reeled of the intoxicating virtues of Nature and his perennial pursuit for those “sources of hidden significance” that only angling may be lured to reveal of life at-large.  Riseforms of reflection, for what exists beyond the reach of one’s cast and always ahead of his finding footsteps.  Fundamentally, they are the striking moments of recognition one only finds first-hand within the quaking, cork-wrapped grip of a fly rod or witnesses as the breathing, hand-held opalescent afflatus imparted as habit of floating flies through stream shallows for that sudden “surprise out of nowhere.”  Altogether, the book’s pages are the treatise of a retired college English professor, a memoir of the life-long and remarkably-storied revelations – philosophically-minded, historically-measured, and poetically-painted - of an angler aloft in thought, acquainted knee-deep to running water, fishing somewhere and somehow for “points of fixity and pattern in our involvement with rivers and landscapes, with trout and fly fishing, as a way of plumbing their peculiar sustaining power.”  There is always more to fishing than meets the eye, and often enough the invisible parts are the most compelling.

The dozens of quotes and passages listed below are those I chose to share from having read this book.  If not for their linguistic elegance alone, I believe most can be admired for a relatable, innate, and habituated commonality found in the familiar and irreducible practice of angling, whether waded in fresh or saltwater, by means of fly rod or surf-stick.  I hope you can enjoy reading some of them as much as I did.  Then, if you haven't done so, do yourself the favor of reading the book.  Cover to cover, its pages serve as the best $4.18 I’ve ever paid for the pleasure of owning a used paperback on freshwater fly fishing stories.

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ahead lies an apparently simple geometry – the salmon migrate upstream, the fisherman down, and somewhere along this thin ribbon of water, the opposing vectors converge.  It’s astonishing, though, how much more complicated the matter can become.

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Even conscientious catch-and-release fishermen, if they’re honest, will admit the difficulty of handling a big fish without a momentary, impulsive desire to possess it.

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Salmon don’t pause here; they just pass through, which means that most casts fall on empty water and you’re fishing mainly for a species of coincidence.

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The river is a flux, the salmon a counterflux.

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To those who pay attention, the coming of the salmon has as much to do with a world view as anything, with a cosmos in or out of kilter.  This, I suppose, as far as I can explain it, is the reason I’ve coaxed myself out of bed long before dawn, managed just enough coffee to simulate consciousness, and driven in a half-sleep for over an hour to arrive at the river before sunrise.  

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The salmon run is a confluence of origins and eventualities when, for a moment, life wraps round and touches its own tail.  The countercurrents of river and fish, of beginnings and endings, of ancient days and new ones, are briefly contiguous.  Still at sea, the salmon sense home rivers on the faintest dilution of fresh water and know its significance with the certainty of instinct.  But a fisherman must work to unravel the meaning, and finally his fishing is only an argument, a studied drawing of inferences about undisclosed things.

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The salmon move gracefully, are perhaps even beautiful, but what holds you to a spot is their perfect visibility.  The fish you can believe; it’s the fact of your seeing them that seems incredible.

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To catch a river unguarded is less a matter of where to look than of when, and so while other fishermen have secret places, I have a secret time.

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Most fishermen find better footing in the shifting forces of current than on what is called solid ground.

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Fishing in general has always seemed to me a form of subversion anyway.  In a world that insists upon “means” and “ends,” that dooms every path to a destination, fishing elides the categories and so slips the distinction altogether.  You become engaged in the nonterminal, participial indefiniteness of “going fishing.”

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To go fishing is essentially functionless, though that’s not at all the same thing as saying it is without purpose.

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The craft of angling is the catching of fish, but the art of angling is receptiveness to those connections, the art of letting one thing lead to another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realized some small completeness.

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In a world that rolls ceaselessly underfoot, rocking and lurching like a subway car, I’ve found that the cork grip of a fly rod offers a pretty steady handhold – an unremarkable fact that becomes interesting only when, one day, you look up and ask just what the other end of that rod might be attached to.  Though I can’t prove a thing, I trust that it’s something solid.

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No two anglers I’ve ever fished with defined their boundaries in quite the same way or devised quite the same rationale for what they did.  We each map the borders of a world and fish in an envelope of our own making that is both intensely personal and flagrantly arbitrary.  If pressed, we can give “reasons” for where we drew the lines, though often enough these are equally capricious and persuasive only to the likeminded.  Our private strictures answer to a vision that encompasses a practical conduct, an aesthetic, and an ethic – which is to say, I suppose, that it is a philosophy. 

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The darkest water is usually best, and coming upon it gradually from the edges, shading from the visible to invisible, sanctions your anticipation.  Only an understanding of shallows entitles you to depths.

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The earth swims through space in the narrowest band of possibility circling round the sun, not all that different, really, from the trout stream at my feet, travelling its own ecliptic between lifeless banks.

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It takes good river eyes to see them through the wrinkled crosscurrents that cast fishlike shadows on the bottom.  But if you wait, in time a billowy upwelling from beneath the bridge smooths the surface into perfect uniformity, as though a window pane were laid on the water.  It drifts downstream and slowly dissipates, a momentary lens fixed on the secrets of the river.  Before the window closes, I count four rainbows.

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A running river is not the uniformity we see.  Near the bottom is a chaos of eddies and whirlpools, backwashes and dead water and pillowy cushions.  The flow is laminar with current layered on current, each a different configuration of effects, a different landscape for the fish – fierce hydraulic winds, jagged seams and breaks, shifting edges and dynamic, twisting columns.  What we see as only water, the trout must sense as a vibrantly textured world.  Current and obstruction sculpt the river into strata of force, fantastic canyons and rugged crags, deep washes and cliffs of turbulence, and the trout shapes its existence around them as closely and surely as an Anasazi.

(The Anasazi being an ancient Native American Indian people of the southwestern U.S. – Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado - renowned for colonizing an extensive network of cliff-sited dwellings)

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Seeing the first trout of the year was more than a relief – it was a form of spiritual survival.  The trout were still there; something important had continued.

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Every angler is an expert in the husbandry of hope, doling it out one spot, one cast, one fly at a time.

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Catching is not all of fishing, nor size the whole story in catching.

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There are places in a river that must simply be stumbled upon.  Their logic, if it is ever understood at all, comes only after the fact.  Refusing to advertise themselves, they remain hidden and so remain yours, at least as far as you can tell, which is far enough.

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I make the first casts to the tail end, less in anticipation of raising a fish than in raising the pleasure of anticipation.

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The gear is of little help; it is built by summer, rigged for seduction rather than struggle, its employment a slender insinuation into the ways of the river.  A looping fly line transcribes the contour of the breeze.  Feathers and fur take the shape of an afternoon hatch.  A fly rod curves with the trajectory of a June twilight.  Each implies the other.  But on a raw winter day, the tackle in the trunk seems far less substantial than it did six months ago, not so much inadequate as insufficiently material for what’s ahead, and you wonder if maybe you made a mistake.  Everything – the weather, the water, the fish, the absurdly tiny dry flies in a brittle plastic box, your own better judgment, all argue against your being there.  But somehow there you are, urging private folly against prevailing wisdom, leaving others to wonder whether you know a little more or a little less than they do.  Which is precisely the case.

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Lovers, poets, religious madmen, and anglers seem to me to have this in common – they live for the impassioned anticipation of an uncertain thing.

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Few of us would fish if the object were perpetually unachievable, if fish were caught only rarely and then with extreme difficulty.  If anticipation were largely vain, it couldn’t sustain us.  But it is equally true, I think, that few of us would fish if trout were caught on every cast.  Reduce anticipation to certainty, and there’s little left to appreciate.  Catching fish is undeniably a pleasure, and I’d rather do it than not, but there is a pleasure too in fishing, the savor of pure possibility always on the brink of realizing itself – or not – and the attraction of fishing has much to do with the keenness of expectation and desire urged against the uncertain and unpredictable.  That is, it has much to do with the peculiar pleasure of hope, which balances on the slightest of perches between unfulfillable wishfulness and foregone conclusion, and looks precisely like a trout fly.

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As both commencement and terminus, as the point of departure and culmination, the trout fly is the nexus of the sport, a tiny point from which radiate a thousand strands of our engagement.  Despite its reliance on the line, fly fishing is not linear.  It is radial and weblike.  At the center is a rising trout, and millimeters above its nose is the fly.  From it, paths trace outward to the engineering and art of tackle making, to geology and hydrology, botany and birds, aquatic and terrestrial insects, landscapes, books, history, photography, and a thousand other intersecting filaments that lead just as far as you wish to go.

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To make a thing by hand and in so doing give it the imprint of yourself is a distinctly godlike activity.  You sit down, deity of the vise, and from bags of feather and fur, people the world of your fly boxes with creations made in your own image, that answer only to the design or delusion of your own mind.  That the final products turn out as equivocally as the creations of other gods at other times merely reinforces the connection.

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A fly that takes shape from feather, furs, and hairs may be an imitation, but it is not faked or ingenuine.  That a trout believes a trout fly to be something alive comes as no surprise to the tyer.  There’s life in the materials, and that we catch trout on feathers and fur, lure one animal with another, strikes me as a perfectly proportioned and symmetrical idea, and also an ancient one. 

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(On the “potent, mystical material” that is grizzly hackle, “or any of the variant hackles that are barred, flecked, or figured with the alternating patterns of life.”)

Its long, narrow feathers, tightly banded in honey and cream, droop like tendrils, lush as an orchid.  It deserves its own bodyguard – to protect it from me if no one else.

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Catching fish is, often enough, simply not that difficult, and to hang your hope on it is to make the universe play by your rules for a little while.  This, I think, is the unconscious genius of the fisherman and the brilliance of fishing. 

(“it” being, tying a fly and fishing one)

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To find wild geese, you must seek them where they live, which is almost always a place called “the middle of nowhere,” whose only known approach is the highway of excess.

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Their angling lives were molded from the conviction that it’s infinitely better to be on the water than not, and on the water you fish, and when you fish, you fish for whatever is there.  The fact of the fish is secondary, its particular denomination something to be dealt with only afterward.

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All other divisions aside, I think in the end there are but two kinds of anglers – those born to fishing and those not.  It has nothing to do with expertise or determination or enjoyment.  A born fisherman has a soul that wiggles, and though he may be temperamentally inclined to this species or that method, beneath it all is the simple, overriding compulsion to be connected to a fish.  If need be, any fish, any way.

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At some level, all fish and fishing, like all gods or powerful emotions or other forms of intoxication, are more alike than not, and it may be that the only difference between a passion and an addiction is the worthiness of its object.  I wouldn’t know.

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According to Jung, crossing a river represents a fundamental change of attitude.  Pity he didn’t fish; he would have recognized that rivers are far more powerful as agents of transformation than symbols for it.

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In fishing (among other things) style and technique are important only insofar as they define the shape of one’s appreciation.  Alter the style, and you change as well as the nature of your pleasure. 

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You fish, in essence, for surprise out of nowhere, for an instant in which you suddenly become aware that you’re attached to a heartbeat. 

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You want to catch the fish, but you want more to figure it out, and the particular satisfactions stem less from the eventuality than the process by which the whole thing unfolds.

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Rumors take on a life of their own whenever big fish are involved.

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Every angler radiates a force field, a little zone of sovereignty he carries with him up and down the river, shrinking or enlarging it according to the character and promise of the water he’s fishing.  The slightest trespass on the farthest limits reverberates faithfully to the center, like a moving magnet inducing current in an electrical wire.

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A river, like the aurora borealis or a landscape or a radish, is only itself and has no way to resist being channeled into preconceptions or filtered through assumptions that falsify what it is.  Come upon a river with purpose, or desire, or ideas, or even words and you merely make it into these things.  We have overlooked countless rivers by seeing them just this way – that is, by not really seeing them at all.

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(On the anthropomorphism of Nature and how a writer’s use of words “giving shape to what we see, preempts what it may actually be.”  Specifically, “as many fishermen know, and many writers seem not to” that “despite what you may read, rivers can’t “sing” and they don’t “dance;” they can’t “chatter merrily” or “rush with impatience;” pools don’t “brood” and riffles don’t “laugh.”)

Investing the natural world with human behaviors has become suspect.  The whole enterprise attempts to make something more out of something already whole – and ends up making it less.

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Catch-and-release may be good conversation, but it is ethically ambiguous.  Between the man who kills and eats a fish and the man who derives pleasure from a trout’s panicked struggles, it’s worth asking who occupies the moral high ground.  Or if there is any.

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(On harvesting fish, and how “on a purely biological level, we must kill to survive.”)

Stripped of the opaqueness of euphemism, a central truth of fishing emerges – nothing, not fish, not fisherman, just lives; they all live at the expense of something else.  To continue living at all requires certain insensitivities.  Ritualizing them doesn’t change the fact, though ritual may help to forgive it. 

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Fishing is not apart from life, nor like life, and is no more a “metaphor” for life than a pregnant woman is.  It is the thing itself.

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If you can forget what others have said or written, and resist their efforts to transform a river into something else, the river will transform you.

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I don’t think I’m stretching the matter at all to say that given half a chance, a trout stream can make you a better person.  This isn’t particularly a reason that I fish, but certainly one of the things I like about it. 

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A river is only itself.  If forced, the water will mirror the likeness of an ego; on its own, it reflects only sky and clouds, and readily rewards those who approach it with humility and wonder.

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The irreducible constant of fishing is water.

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With a few firm exceptions, fishing from boats holds little appeal.  It has a certain industrial quality about it, a no-nonsense fixation on the business of catching fish, and I’d much rather drift from place to place, working the promising water on foot, which brings you closer to everything.

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When the fish don’t come, as sometimes they don’t, you grasp, all at once, the comic sense of scale, the cosmic disparity between the volume of water in front of you and the ridiculously small fly with which you are attempting to “search” it.  In the mind’s eye appears an aerial photograph – a vast expanse of blank water surrounding a randomly placed, subatomic speck.  In the face of that kind of futility, another cast is almost unbearable.

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A point arrives when fishing turns into casting, and casting devolves into empty and mechanical reflex that barely registers on consciousness.

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(On the “pervasive attitude, relentlessly vented in magazines and books and fly shops, where the only trout worth mentioning run so many inches or pounds, and the failure to catch them is attended by the subtle guilt that you’re not ‘doing your best.’”)

A brand of gunnysack-ism persists in the era of catch-and-release, and you feel the weight of an unspoken assumption: that the way, the proper way, to go about fishing is to seek out the best water and do what’s necessary to extract its trophies.  Anything less makes you less than a serious fisherman, a lightweight if you don’t succeed, a mere dabbler if you don’t care to try – angling’s version of the “be all you can be” mentality that insists upon its own somewhat diminished notion of being.

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The fish of a lifetime can make your day and spoil something larger.

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A fisherman does well to heed the creatures that fly.  For the fisherman, birds still reenact their ancient role of augury.

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For Aristotle, the soul tends upward; spiritual things naturally rise.  This is the only proposition I know of that broaches a metaphysical argument for dry-fly fishing.

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Few moments in fishing hold the same immediacy and vividness as the rise to a floating fly, and none are endowed with the same satisfying sense of closure.

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A drifting fly is a test, a series of questions inscribed on the surface.  It is the visual extension of our imagination, probing what can’t be seen and charting the shape of human inquisitiveness and expectancy.

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When a fish takes a fly, it hasn’t become more manlike; rather, the angler has become more fishlike.  Each cast tries the limits of the river; each take successfully integrates us into its processes and offers an increment of understanding.

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The surface of the river is a hypothetical fulcrum, balancing the aquatic world with our own imperfect grasp of it.  On this plane of our own invention, we cast our surmise, wonder, and hope bound up in so much feather and fur.

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(On “the fulcrum of seasons” and “the recognition of autumn coming suddenly” in that “one day you first hear the geese, or rather, you first become aware of yourself hearing them.”)

Bound for the south, these birds seem to me a strange point of fixity and resoluteness.  Perhaps geese are the real geophysical constant, for in a sense they don’t move at all.  They take to altitudes to stay in one place, not migrating, but hovering, while the equinoctial tilting of the earth rocks the poles back and forth beneath them.  The geese remain, an index of what used to be where, and of what will return again.  Their seasonal appearance denotes your passing, not their own.

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It is a commonplace of angling that to catch fish, you must think like a predator, a vision of fishing that is really more like hunting, and sometimes true.  To fish trout, you must think like the prey and work a fly in the knowledge of how it feels to try to escape, to shrink yourself to insignificance in the face of impending threat when everything about you advertises your presence.  Being the predator is exciting, but being the prey is a lot more like life and infinitely more interesting, since in the end, the prey sets the terms and so call the shots.

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In the end, to fish well is to cultivate an arrangement of time and place, of circumstance and perspective.  We arrange ourselves into the arrangement, and if the collusion is careful and lucky, we reap a kind of enclosed moment of some sharply felt beauty and significance. 

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Fishing is commonly, and mistakenly I believe, regarded as a form of escapism.  But it seems to me more closely allied with a deeper historical impulse, a submerged conviction in the national consciousness from the very beginning that some new and improved brand of the self can be reinvented in the fresher air of uncorrupted places, where the best things will flourish and the worst die of inanition.

~ Select sentences exemplifying Leeson’s technique of interweaving repetition (anaphora & epistrophe) ~

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I dig the spare keys from my pocket and, twisting around in the seat, looking over my shoulder to back the trailer to the river’s edge, I see on the rear window the first streaks of the first winter rain.

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…where I will watch the last few rises to the last few caddis, down to zero, on a summer-solstice evening, at the best part of the best part of the year.

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A fly tyer’s materials are the anticipation of an anticipation.

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But at certain times, in certain moods, it simply feels better to be moving than standing still.  And rather than go no place, I decided to go no place in particular.

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That something as beautiful as trout inhabit something as beautiful as a trout stream is a coincidence of inexpressibly good fortune, and just the kind of thing you can steer by.

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You wade in the reflection of a reflection, and the coppery water streams against your legs like something molten. 

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And now they navigate seven hundred circuitous miles, 6,000 feet of altitude, and a hundred million years to this spot at the heart of the heart of the mountains, surfacing high in this oldest of places.  Altitude is a fortification, and it is also fortifying.

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A good night’s sleep comes only after the trip – sometimes only after the season.