Two Thirds Water (Part 1)

Excerpts from a long essay on one (complicated) reason I love to fly fish.

We begin as tadpoles, floating in water and blood, transforming steadily into inhabitants of the land.  But we begin as inhabitants of water.  When my children were born, I was struck by the rush of water that preceded each journey.   Gone with a downward squeeze and push was that liquid atmosphere, the only world they knew collapsing, until finally they too were expelled, and lungs took in this foreign, thin substance—air.  They wailed at the light and noise, the sudden absence of the buoyant, dark, comforting world they had left behind.  A few years later I would watch each of them at swimming lessons, always so hesitant at first, struck by how quickly we embrace this, our second atmosphere, forgetting that our bodies are mostly water, the earth itself two thirds water, that most of its creatures reside in water.  As fly anglers, we make a sacramental return to our birth water every time we extend our reach with our long rods and lines and the artful deception of our flies, casting into its mysterious center…

…In many scientific circles, it is now agreed that at some point in time a giant asteroid or comet will again collide with the earth, that the resultant impact may well cause a wave of water as tall as hundreds of skyscrapers moving at nearly the speed of sound across the world.  Some speculate that the story of Noah and other cultures’ “great flood” narratives may have some grounding in such an occurrence, an event of such magnitude it survived hundreds of thousands of generations of oral narratives.  The rise to our supremacy as a species was possible only after a kilometer round meteor struck the modern day Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and ended the reign of the dinosaurs—making it possible for mammals to gain a foothold.  The great mountains of water coupled with the ensuing climate change wiped bare the evolutionary slate, and then life, which cannot help itself, started its patient march forward—this time toward humankind…

…It’s midsummer in New England as I write the first notes toward what has become this essay.  The streams are drought low—our worst drought in decades.  The trout have moved off to deeper holes, congregating around springs and the mouths of feeder streams.  On some rivers, like the upper Housatonic here in Connecticut, they close fishing around stream mouths come late July because they know too many trout gather there for the cool water.  The hatches grow fewer and smaller.  Long gone are the days of fishing a large, #12 parachute Adams fly to accommodating trout.  Now I hold my arms far out to see better with my aging eyes as I tie extra long, light, 8x tippets through the eyelets of barely-there-at-all flies, side arm casting from a crouch, holding perfectly still and not breathing when finally one breaks ranks and comes hard at my fly only to turn back at the last minute…  

… After waiting so long through a snowy, cold winter, almost breaking down and accepting an ice fishing invitation once, now the water is shrinking away.  The small pond in front of my house where in the height of winter I once taught my children to skate now no more than a puddle surrounded by muck.  The reservoirs, numerous in these parts, have been drawn down, so the uppermost ones have no more than a trickle running through their deepest reaches.  I slow to a near stop whenever I happen past one.  While a part of me enjoys seeing the topography of what lies beneath the surface and imagining the places where the bass might lie in wait, another part of me is deeply saddened and disturbed by all these rainless days, and I can’t help but feeling as if something has gone terribly wrong with the world. 

Years ago I remember playing a game with my then six or seven year old son.  It was his idea.  As we drove home from school, he asked, “what’s the most important part about driving?”  

“Knowing how to drive, I suppose,” I answered.  

“Nope,” he said, gleefully, “the gas, because if you didn’t have gas, you couldn’t go.”  We played the game all the way home.  For soccer you need a soccer ball, but you’d better have some knowledge of how to play the game, and to have practiced some basic skills, and a soccer field.  For eating, yes, you need teeth, but you’ve got to have food, and then money to buy food, and how about an environment that’s clean enough and fertile enough to grow food?  Drought hits fly fisherman hard, since the central-most element is missing.  Without water, we are lost…

…Other times, water is abundant, the fish feeding everywhere, but you just don’t have the time to step in and partake.  While teaching hard many years back, trying to do my own writing and research and prepping new classes and advising students and directing senior projects and starting a family and and and….needless to say not fishing often enough or even at all for long stretches of time (this is time as defined by the avid fly fisherman remember, where a month without fishing is an eternity), I became a vicarious angler—the mere sight of a body of water allowing access to my obsession.  That ditch alongside the road by a certain stop light (where I’d actually try to time it so I got the red light), if you imagined it properly, re-scaled your vision, had all the turns and curves and ripples and holes of a full-fledged trout stream.  I’d envision myself, say, a few inches tall, how I’d wade out along the shallow gravel bar of boulders (six inches of pea gravel) and cast an elk-hair caddis fly into the deep run, fishing it first drift-free upstream, then dancing it back to me when it started to swing, and I’d choose in my reverie the exact spot where the rainbow would pounce on it, or no, make that a landlocked salmon like the ones I wrestled with long ago now on the Penobscot, how they’d often come all the way out of the water to land on it from above…

(more to come in future posts) 

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