I’m not a planner. I’m impatient and hard on my limited and not terribly expensive equipment. I don’t tie the right knots or tie them well. I can’t for the life of me decipher illustrations and descriptions of a Bimini Twist. I don’t know the Latin names of many mayflies.
These things used to bother me deeply, and I’d make resolutions and feverishly read through essays on fly tying table organization, micro-drag, the floating properties of cul du canard. I’d practice reach and pile casts for hours out on the lawn till my wrist ached. I’d blow the dust off my Matching the Hatch and stare down at those intricate and subtle shades of incrementally changing colors and sizes. But soon, always, my mind would start to drift….
Right now, watching the rain come down in a calm, steady mist I think back to the Westfield River, Massachusetts, a rainy day a decade ago and the stillness and quiet and that black-flat fast slick of water where a 20” brown moved on a #12 March Brown—that soft take, a slight interference in the quiet momentum of the river, or time, and then the white crashing turbulence of his fight and his pliant deep green-brown, red spots haloed in blue, soft smooth strong hook-jawed, somehow identical to the whole tone of that misty early summer day. And letting him go, disappearing beneath the glare into the off-colored water. Then the family of hooded mergansers moving by without seeming to move, the hard work of their feet invisible, mama and seven or eight miniatures of her strung along behind.
These flashes come to me, invariably, when I start feeling guilty about how poorly I manage my passion for catching fish on the fly, my subconscious reminding me that I’ve always managed to lead a rich and rewarding angling life despite everything.
Maybe it’s just that so many fly anglers are such meticulous organizers—planning and strategizing and collecting and studying, painstakingly building their collections of rods and reels and flies, tying with all the latest, space-aged materials and sparkling, wind-tunnel-tested, or so they seem, tools. Maybe the industry itself is somehow complicit, here, the constant need to find good magazine copy, the new twist, technique, material; which is the tail and which is the dog? Have you ever noticed how often the rattiest, most chewed up fly catches more fish than the pretty (to human eyes), professionally tied fly (what do fish know of professions?) does?
I’m really not bad-mouthing this; don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fishing Luddite longing for a return to wet flies, gut leaders and bamboo (well, OK, maybe bamboo). In general, I yearn for that kind of knowledge, discipline, precision, order…in my fishing life (and I guess in my life in general).
But unfortunately, here’s how it usually works. The day of my trip—at best the night before—I feverishly tie up what I hope will be enough flies, rummage through my worn gear, throw together a few leaders….
With cold March rains falling here in Connecticut as I write the first draft of this essay, I remember this time of spring in Michigan, the steelhead already moving into the rivers nearby in numbers, and I stayed up late tying egg flies and nymphs (simple green caddis and small black stones and hexes, the three that seem to work consistently on the Michigan steelhead streams I came to know pretty well in my near decade there). I finally gave in when the nymphs started looking too ugly and sloppy, my eyes getting heavier and heavier, and knowing there would be plenty of cold fast-water wading on the Pere Marquette and, oh yes, the two hour drive each way.
Sure enough, at the end of the day, on that last snag, there I was down to my last fly, again. Back at the car, I pulled the waders off and one cold, soggy sock, remembering the leak I never bothered to seek out in my neoprenes over the long winter. In the left pocket of my vest I found a stogie from a late fall smallmouth float down the Kalamazoo River.
Still, it’s the other memories from that day that come to me here in southern Connecticut, no steelhead in striking range, the stripers just starting to think about chasing the herring up the rivers, and the nearby ponds and streams choked with ice. There’s that last steelie of the day, finning with two other males right above the crossing where the trail heads back up the hill and through the leaf-bare early spring trees and the light fading fast and the big silver female turning sideways and shaking all over sending dozens upon dozens of eggs into the gravel, and those males, black-backed and red streaked and on fire with the need to procreate, dashing around, shadowing her every motion. The old man fishing to them said he’d tried everything. “They’re just too horny to worry about what I’m offering,” he said before giving me the spot. I’d just about given up hope, and all but the last of the light had gone (and as I already noted, I was down to my last nymph/egg fly rig) when I thought I saw a big white mouth flash, a head turn, and I lifted, and everything stopped. Until the rod jerked, unmistakably fish-hooked-heavy, and he made that first reel-screaming run upstream, hesitated, came several feet out of the water, then crashed down hard on his side, somehow held firm right where he landed, then ran again…until I slid him to the sandy bank and slipped the incongruously small nymph from the V at the corner of his mouth and revived him, as long as a limb, and he skulked off into the deep calm and the late light gave way to early dark.
These moments are mine now, ever accumulating, somehow answering my half-assed technique, my raggedy gear. Again and again I encounter something every time I fish that nurtures me, that engages me on multiple levels. Maybe it’s just that I’m too connected at the deeper, poetic, aesthetic levels of the pursuit to bother too much with the more mundane necessities many fly anglers spend too much of their time fussing over. Or maybe I’m just lazy. Yeah, that’s it, for sure. And right now I’ve got to stop all this pondering and see if the gears on my disc drag reel have corroded themselves together again from lack of thorough fresh-water rinsing then rip off some clousers and rabbit strip and slab flies for the stripers who will start making their way up the Connecticut River any day now.
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