IF my grandfather wasn't gone fishing, he
was taking us kids fishing. One of my first memories is of being carried
on his high shoulders to go see what kinds of fish lived below the dam in the
Mississippi River at the end of our street in Coon Rapids,
Minnesota. When I was four we moved to Alabama where another early memory
is of going with my grandfather to the Marion County Lake in Pikeville to see
what we could catch, or throw back in the case of the catfish the county
stocked the lake with. Trash fish he said, Bottom feeders. Memories of our annual trips back to Minnesota
include aluminum boats, a big aluminum tackle box with a dent in one corner and enough yellowed plastic trays to hold my weight in lures, an
optimistically sized nylon net the color of green easter grass on a cheap
aluminum frame, a whole lot of fishing poles with Zebco 33 reels, spare
Zebco 33 reels, wooden docks, splinters, rusty hooks, orange and
white plastic bobbers, a blue Snoopy or Smurf themed pastic fishing pole with a
white reel that only worked for my sister for one cast, rocket hot plastic
cushions meant to protect your butt from rocket hot boat seats, life-vests,
mosquitos as big as the horse flies that bit us on the backs of our
arms, cheap styrofoam containers full of worms or minnows, the same cheap
containers floating broken in clumps against the reeds at the edge of the
lake, moody used Mercury outboard motors, several blackened spark-plugs in
the puddle in the bottom of the boat that sometimes got tried one more time,
sunfish, squabbling with my brothers, hearing the Tetris theme music fade while
watching an expensive new Gameboy sink out of sight, the stench of dead stuff
in stagnant water and the words "That Damn ..." followed by the
name of either a piece of gear or of a kid.
My first memory
of my cousin Vanessa is of a golden haired little girl standing on a dock with
sunlight reflecting off the water behind her telling our grandfather that she
didn't want to stab any innocent worms on hooks or kill any fish and yes they
did too have feelings, thank you very much.
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When I moved to Delaware where I made
friends with Cory and Michael who I like to talk about outdoorsy stuff with
because they actually get around to doing those things and I don't.
Michael is from Ohio but he's lived in Maine for the last few years.
He makes lithographs of fish he'd like to catch and paintings of
mountains that have been removed from West Virginia by the coal industry.
Cory lived in California for a long time and he once told me about being
on a surf board on a moonless night so dark that he wouldn't've been able to see
even the water without the phosphorescent algae glowing underneath him.
He said that unseen fish would swim through the algae and make them swirl
and it was like he was floating above a galaxy. When they invited me to
go fly-fishing with them, I said something lame and noncommittal like,
"Sure, sounds like fun" with the hope that the invitation would be
forgotten about but that we could go hiking soon. A couple days later
Cory told me there would be fishing in the morning. I don't know
why I said I'd be there.
Although he was
eager to try anything that might land a fish, as far as I can
recall, my grandfather was never a fly-fisherman. He lived in the
land of a thousand lakes and very few rivers. He was the other, more
masochistic kind of fisherman who sits quietly watching a bobber bleach in the
sun with the hope that some non-existant underwater carnival worker might
attach a prize to the other end of his line, preferably a pike or a walleye.
My cousin, my brothers and I would bicker and roast in his little rental
boat for what seemed like the rest of our lives and not catch the fish that hid
in our shadow from the sun and the fish finder because the damn kids were
making too much noise. If it ever rained there was no relief in its
cool because my grandfather believed that fish bite better when it's raining
and we knew we would have to wait for our sunburned fingers and toes to turn
white before the boat took us back to the cabin where our parents were enjoying
not going fishing.
When he got
desperate to catch something he would take us on a long drive outside of the Twin Cities to a place called
Trout Air which was several water-filled holes in the ground on the side of a
fish farm close to the road. This was as much like shooting fish in a
barrel as catching starved rainbow trout out of a ten-foot-diameter-back-hoe-dug-hole in
the prairie can be. My grandfather called it "the
best fishing in Minnesota". The first time I saw anyone trying to
fish with flies (I won't call it fly fishing) was at Trout Air. I
remember clearly guys wearing full-on chest waders to stand on mowed grass and
scare the hell out of everyone as they heroically whipped lures that must have
weighed whole pounds and failed to flick them onto any one of the ponds
within easy reach where dozens of people in shorts and flip-flops dodged
blindness to pull out fish after fish on cheap worms and Huck Finn-style bamboo
poles.
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When I can get myself up and moving, I love
the morning. Maybe because I rarely see one. It's the only time of
day I always romanticize and think about in poetic terms. The morning is
dramatic in phenomenological you had to be there kinds of ways.
Everything seems primordial, far off sounds carry close and I feel like
I'm part of the world rather than observing it. Not too long after the
sun came up Cory and I were quietly drinking coffee outside and enjoying that
haiku time when the fog carries the low light and everything is waiting to be.
Michael showed
up and we rode bicycles down the hill and our ears were cold and pink by the
time we stopped on the footbridge over White Clay Creek. Cory and Michael
had already decided that they wanted to try this spot. From the way they
looked it over, you wouldn't have known they'd ever been there before.
The water is very clear and from the bridge I couldn't see any signs of
anything living. Several yards upstream there is a small dam. Below
the dam there are large rocks. The dam creates turbulence which aerates
the water. The rocks below the dam add more turbulence and oxygen and at
the same time give fish something solid to hide behind so they don't have to
fight the current all the time. Cory asked Michael what he thought.
"Looks good. Let's do it."
We stashed our
bikes out of sight. Standing on the foundation of the bridge they turned
their backpacks out. Each of them had a pair of waders, collapsible rod,
reel, spool of line, and a little plastic box with six small compartments
containing about as many different kinds of flies that each imitate several
different kinds of bugs. A discussion about wooly-buggers, surgeons'
knots, the fact that Gerber makes the worst knives in the world, and something called tippet
immediately put me out of my element. I jotted it all down so I could
look it up later.
Michael must have
seen what I was writing and showed me his line. Fly-fishing line is
thicker than regular fishing line but I was surprised to see that it's brightly
colored and about as thick as yarn. It's made of nylon and has a little
loop on the end. You tie a length of regular fishing line to the loop and
you tie your fly to that. "They used to be made of horse hair and
they were a pain in the ass to keep in good condition. They had to be
treated with wax before every time you used them and they still broke a lot any
way." So, fly fishing was originally a gentleman's pursuit, the
first necessities being that the fisherman had access to horses and a lot of
free time.
Even after
looking it up I don't understand what tippet is.
There are many
kinds of flies. The most common are wet flies intended to look like a
drowning bug, nymphs that look like larvae, streamers which imitate tadpoles
and small prey fish and then there are dry flies which are by far the most
commonly used. Cory and Michael were fishing with dry flies. If
you've ever seen a fishing fly, it was probably a dry fly which is meant to
look like a bug floating on the surface of the water. Most of them are
made of rooster feathers tied to a hook with floss (the same as you use between your
teeth), wire, polyester thread or even tinsel depending on the type of bug
being imitated. Rooster feathers are used because they're stronger and
stiffer which helps them take advantage of surface tension and float on top of
the water like a bug would.
My two friends put on
their waders and Michael got into the water and started casting. Cory
walked along the edge of the creek looking for signs of fish. I had been
looking the whole time and still hadn't seen anything other than the rippling
of light through the water and leaves tumbling under the surface. More
leaves floated on the surface and Michael caught a big one on one of his first
casts. Cory disappeared out of sight for a while, came back and fished
above the dam, disappeared, came back again. This was a quiet spot and
Michael and I talked a little bit. He told me that mid-Atlantic
fly-fishing is a totally different ball game and that he was trying to get his
head around it. Maine is really bouldery. Here, there are pockets
of deep water. There's fast water, but then there are really slow
stretches. I guess he developed some ability to think like a Maine trout
and the trout around here had different priorities.
Cory finally came
and fished below the dam with Michael for about three casts before he turned to
him and asked if he wanted to move to the big dam. "Yeah, I think
so, I'm not sure there's anything here." As we packed up and headed toward the other dam I told Cory that I hadn't seen one fish the whole time were were there and asked what made them think there might be fish in that spot. He said there could have been because it had all the right characteristics, but that they had been skeptical because they hadn't seen any fish either. "Do you really even care about catching a fish?" I asked. Cory shook his head and made a face that said something like nah, I just like being out here, but a fish would be nice all the same.
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Rainbows are the most popular trout with
fly-fishermen as they are seen as exciting fighters that jump out of the water
and are strongly biased against being caught. Steelhead, also called salmon trout, are
prodigal rainbow trout. If a rainbow lives in a waterway with access to the ocean
it will go to sea for a couple years where it will grow a lot bigger
and develop more of a silvery color and then come back to settle down and
make babies. Trout don't die after spawning like salmon and can go to sea
and back several times. They are a North American species related to
Pacific Salmon and native to the western side of the Rockies.
Anders Halverson
tells us via his book An Entirely Synthetic Fish that after the
Civil War American industry and agriculture were polluting eastern waterways so
effectively that most fish species, including native brook trout, just weren't
there anymore. Those same industries were creating huge fortunes.
Large amounts of money and the lack of an environment to get out and
conquer combined to create a new kind of white American male called the wimp.
Halverson cites Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. who defined the problem;
"Such a set of black coated, stiff jointed, soft muscled pasty
complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never sprang from the
loins of Anglo Saxon lineage." Other prominent men of the time
agreed that potential knock-on effects that might even undermine American
democracy. In 1857 a George Perkins Marsh proposed a solution.
Fishing would save white men, America and democracy.
California's
rainbow trout were tougher than the brook trout native to the east coast
and could live with the pollution of the rivers. The first rainbows were
imported to New York in 1875. Before long a man named Fred Mather was
farming rainbows and other game fish to be released into eastern and mid-western
waterways. Then, in 1880, he went fishing in Germany and discovered brown
trout. Browns are the most difficult to catch because they are smarter
and more skittish. In 1883 a German steamship called the
Werra brought fertilized brown trout eggs to America. They have adapted
to life in American rivers and streams very well and do not need as much
stocking as rainbows to maintain their populations.
Also in 1883 Charles Orvis and Frank Cheney published Fishing with the Fly which included writings by fly-fishermen from all over the U.S. and contained passages like this;
Also in 1883 Charles Orvis and Frank Cheney published Fishing with the Fly which included writings by fly-fishermen from all over the U.S. and contained passages like this;
...he that hopes to be a good angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practiced it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.
Evidently enough
young Anglo Saxon wimps received Orvis' book or one like it from concerned
grandfathers that a whole new industry was able to take off and eventually
expand around the world. They may have started out fishing in nearby creeks
and rivers but the best fishing soon became a reason to travel to Montana or
Wyoming. Today fly-fishermen save up for trips to New Zeland and Africa
in search of rainbows.
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A quarter mile down stream from where Cory and Michael had started
fishing there was a bigger dam with fewer rocks below it. The same
unspoken strategy was employed there, Michael picking the most likely looking
water and sticking with it, trying to figure it out, and Cory doing a kind of
overall recon to see if he could spot a fish to throw a lure at.
At first I was
mostly aware of the sound of the water falling over the dam. It's loud
and fills your ears and makes it hard to hear much of anything. You
get used to it pretty quickly and forget that you’re hearing it or missing any
of the other sounds in the world. I sat and looked around. Except
for the crude looking dam, we were in a beautiful place. The low morning
light was shining through the fall leaves, little whips of fog floated above
the calmer patches of water, and there was just enough chill in the air to make
me not really cold but aware of my body so that my mind didn't wander too far
from the present. I spent a long time watching the colors of the leaves
change as the sun rose behind them and burned off the fog.
When I turned
back to the dam I was surprised after to see Cory settled into a spot beside
Michael. I watched them for a while and made a few sketches. Cory
wore a bright orange trucker style hat and a well-worn Northface vest. He
looked like someone who spends time in state parks. Michael wore a knit
beanie and a flannel shirt under his over-pocketed fishing vest. He
looked like he lives in the woods.
I can see that it takes years to hone this craft. That it is an art. Cory has been doing this for a long time and still whips the line audibly. There's almost a WHOOSH and it snaps at the end like a whip. Sometimes he snaps his flies off of the end of the line. Michael's been doing it a little longer, his line is always curved, tracing a drawn out infinity symbol through the air before he lobs the fly where he wants it - more or less.
I can see that it takes years to hone this craft. That it is an art. Cory has been doing this for a long time and still whips the line audibly. There's almost a WHOOSH and it snaps at the end like a whip. Sometimes he snaps his flies off of the end of the line. Michael's been doing it a little longer, his line is always curved, tracing a drawn out infinity symbol through the air before he lobs the fly where he wants it - more or less.
As I watched them Cory suddenly yelled and there was a
confusion of pulling line, bent rod, excited shouts, Michael moving toward Cory
trying to reel in his own line and at the same time trying to grab his net from
the loop on the back of his vest. Before I could get over to where he was
backing onto the bank he had the fish splashing in the inch of water at his feet.
He pulled the line and started to lift the fish. I never saw the
fish break loose. It was just gone. He looked disappointed and
happy at the same time. Michael told him one or two things that he could
have done better. Cory listened with a face full of eagerness, like a kid
who wants to go on a ride again. He shouted over the water as Michael
waded back to his spot "Was that a rainbow?"
"That was a
rainbow."
Cory had a big
grin under his wooly beard.
I remember the sunfish, too.
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