Why We Fish

Because fly fishing is such a peaceful pastime, pursued on quiet, beautiful streams and lakes, many non-anglers carry an almost mystical impression of the sport. I am frequently asked what I get out of fly fishing; I think those people really are asking, "What would I learn if I took it up?"

A lot. It's a sport that combines serenity, triumph and frustration in exactly the right proportions to teach lasting lessons. Time on a stream can include a mix of wily fish, un-imitable insects and wild beasts such as bears and other anglers. Here are the first four-and-a-half things I learned from all that.

One: Old trout don't rise quickly to the fly. This is how they get to be old.

To the frustration of anyone who has painstakingly matched size, color and pattern to actual insects on a stream, old trout will watch flies drift overhead only to noisily gulp down a living look-alike. These fish watch for anything — a wake or ripple— that flags the fly as artificial.

Aesop could draw multiple morals from this: That anglers must show the patience of old trout, that even one odd ripple in a stream full of eddies and bubbles can portend danger, or that it's sometimes wise to keep your mouth closed, lest you end up looking supremely foolish.

Two: We are not always at the top of the food chain.

I turned around one time in Yellowstone backcountry and saw that a grizzly bear had sauntered near and was evidently critiquing my casting technique.

When I'm more than 75 feet from a road in grizzly country, I carry bear repellent mace. In fact, I carry the Papa Bear size, which is slightly larger than a home fire extinguisher. It supposedly will deter the angriest of bears. But, as one fly shop owner told me, there may be unreported cases in which it failed. I didn't ask why they were unreported.

Books advise not to look a grizzly in the eyes, to speak gently, to back up slowly and to not use the mace unless they charge. Books don't mention freezing in place and begging the bear not to attack while trying to control your shaking hands long enough to disengage the safety on the can of mace, which is what I did. A ranger later told me, "It didn't maul you, so you did something right."

Meanwhile, my fishing buddy hid in the tall grass and hissed a series of contradictory suggestions such as "get down" or "don’t move." I didn't mace the bear. It moved along after 10 years or, as my friend called it, 30 seconds. He triangulated the bear's position, walked it off, and said that the grizzly was no more than 30 feet from me. "He could have been on you in half a second," he said.

Turns out that no one has anything comforting to say about grizzly encounters.

Two and a Half - A Corollary to Lesson Two: Trust but verify.

This friend had told me that he also was carrying mace, 
a comforting thought during my grizzly face off. After the bear left, my friend whipped out a mace container the size of a roll of pennies. It wouldn't have discouraged a petulant child, let alone an adult grizzly.

Three: Seek the truth but respect the narrative.

Fly anglers tell stories about events that could — except for the lack of believability — be regarded as miracles. One cool night around a fire outside a lodge, listening to funny scotch-fueled fishing stories, I decided to pull out my digital camera and show a photo of a small but nice trout that I had caught, photographed and returned to the stream earlier in the day.

The other anglers had been telling stories about their arms growing tired from catching so many fish, or hooking trout big enough to spit up Jonah. When I showed the photo the stories ended. The evening turned ruminative and quiet. The guy with the single malt turned in early and took his bottle with him.

And I no longer confuse Story Hour with Show and Tell.

Four: Rivers really are the perfect metaphor for life.

At least once in your life, you should wade into a fast-flowing river and look upstream. All of the visible landscape — cuts, creeks, draws, hills — is a giant system to deliver water precisely to where you are standing. Waters from multiple sources — springs and small creeks, smaller rivers, distant clouds — are joined right at your feet.

Turn downstream and you suddenly yearn to find out what else will add to this river as it continues on. This fits nearly any aspect of your life: Family, learning, career, politics, and money. Rivers provide the perfect reason to go fly fishing.

An Anniversary of Sorts

An anniversary that I don't want to forget is that 20 years ago this summer I took up fly fishing. My father had died in December 1992 and my brother I found an assortment of fly fishing gear in his workshop. Dad had built a number of niche casting rods for friends and family who fished for crappie and bass on TVA lakes but my brother had no recollection of his ever using a fly rod. 

"I do," I said.

One day after work dad took me, a Sears Ted Williams fiberglass fly rod, a wind-up automatic reel with green fly line and brown leader, and his regular dull aluminum tackle box with his name stenciled on the top, out to Melton Hill Lake, a relative newcomer among TVA reservoirs.

Dad's fishing had a theoretical bent. He subscribed to multiple outdoor magazines, read books about epic fishing expeditions to faraway lands, and posited ideas to his fishing buddies who would sometimes say "Yeah, Ben, that OUGHT to work."

The came the fishing experiments, persistently followed on days off and after work. Dad kept notes in about all his ideas and fishing experiences in handwritten draftsman's lettering, recording all the conditions including temperature, wind, lake conditions, and cloud cover. He meticulously recorded the variables, such as when he switched lures or added shot.

The object was to move the lure out farther into the lake - out where the fish lay in deeper waters. To do that without a boat took a supple rod with a lot of flex and some weight in the lure. That's if you were fishing for bass with a conventional rod and 8-10 pound monofilament line on an older model Garcia-Mitchell spinning reel. You cast a Rapala lure out over still waters and jigged the lure back to attract fish.

There are many exceptions, but for most dry fly anglers the trick is to cast a nearly weightless fly into a cold river or creek and land it quietly on a specific spot slightly upstream of a feeding fish. Skipping the boring charts and graphs, a significant difference is that fly anglers cast the line -- which is heavier near the tip -- and the fly  goes along for the ride. Adding too much weight to the end of the line disrupts the nuanced mix of mass, flex, precision and balance that are the hallmarks of a fly fishing rig.

I am disappointed to report that I have neither his notes for this fishing trip, nor do I have the magazine article that inspired him to walk away from his usual casting rod and reel, buy everything it took to go fly fishing EXCEPT flies, walk out onto a muddy spit jutting into Melton Hill Lake, tie a heavy wooden treble-hooked plug on to the fly leader, and give the whole rig a mighty backcast.

He spent most of the next hour retrieving the lure from way high in a nearby willow, yelling at me to stay out of the deep mud. One cast. And then the sun set and we went home. He bought a boat later that year so that we could motor out to the deeper water and, as far as I knew until after he died, he never touched another fly rod.

In late 1992, I found the rod, another that was imitation bamboo, the still-rigged reel, and a lot of unused accessories and the butt-ends of a few long two-piece fly fishing rods, all ordered from long-bankrupt Herter's mail order catalog.

"It's a lot of gear for just one trip," my brother said. "Oh wait a second." From another corner in the shop he retrieved one of dad's custom casting rods and then matched it to the base of one of the incomplete fly rods. "The casting rod - it's the top half of the fly rod. He used fly rods as blanks to build those casting rods," he said. "That's why you could cast those things for miles. Guess he never got around to these two."

Or maybe there was one world left to conquer, something more than one cast into a willow tree, a follow up trip postponed too long by his arthritis and heart problems. And that second rod - had that been for me? Something to join us after my brother went to college? I looked at the rod and the old gear and resolved to conquer this world for him. 

When it warmed in March, I took that Ted Williams rod, found a book on fly fishing, read about how to cast, updated the reel and line, and bought some real flies that, I found later, imitated nothing that any self respecting trout would eat. I took it all up to Great Smoky Mountain National Park and stood on a rock over a quiet pool on the Little River, let out some line like it said it in the book and gave the whole rig a mighty backcast followed by an overly energetic forward cast, which -- 20 years later -- still plagues my cast.

Beginners luck. The fly went roughly where I'd aimed it, floated for a while, and I tried again. A year later, with help from a couple of guides, a new rod and a new reel, waders and other gear, I duplicated the success of that first cast. Before that spring was over, on my 40th birthday, I pulled in my first trout.  My feet were planted on the sandy bottom of the cold Clinch River, the primary source for Melton Hill Lake where many years before, my father had stood on a muddy streak of land and made his one cast with a fly rod.