For me, those long hours hunched over a tying bench are a little too similar to the long hours hunched over a writing desk, a little too much for my back, eyes, and nerves to handle. But as something to tide you over between seasons, I don’t see how it can be beat.
Neither ice fisherman nor fly tyer, I’m left with a lot of winter hours to fill, or at least would be if it wasn’t for the fact there are plenty of other fishing surrogates, stopgaps, and pacifiers waiting on line. The following is a short list, both of the kinds of things I personally find helpful in waiting out March and suggestions for anyone faced with the same predicament.
1. FORM RESOLUTIONS
I have this terrible habit I’m half-ashamed to admit: I’m the kind who keeps their New Year’s resolutions. Of course this is absurdly anal of me, priggish, straight-arrowish to a fault, and wins me more suspicion and disgust than it does approbation. So I’m always careful with my resolves, since, as with wishes, they very well may come true.
I think I’m on safe ground this year, at least with fishing. For I’ve formed two resolutions, one on the practical side, one on the practical-spiritual.
The first is never to lose a fish this season through a badly tied knot. Adding an extra half-hitch when you tie on your fly; sitting down out of the wind and concentrating as you fashion a blood knot; checking the breaking strength of your tippets. In theory, these are the easiest preventatives in the world—and yet how tedious and slow that extra care can seem when actually fishing. The trout are rising, your hands are shaking from excitement or cold, you realize it’s been a while since you last checked connections, but. . . . No, it’s simply one task too much, like getting back out of a warm, cozy bed to floss your teeth. Trout, of course, ask for nothing better, and will undo a bad knot with what always seems a particularly gleeful, tah-dah kind of flourish—trout as disappearing act, trout unbound.
The second resolution may be a little harder to keep, for all my self-discipline. Last year my friend Tom Ciardelli and I finished salmon season up in Maine, fishing the Rapid River for landlocks. What with logging roads going everywhere now, four-wheel drive and ATVs, the lower Rangeleys aren’t as remote as they once were, and we had more company than either of us would have liked. So, with no alternative open, we pretty much stayed on one pool, the one neglected pool, the entire day.
This was something of a precedent for a fisherman who, like a salmon himself, always forges relentlessly upstream. A revelation, too, since I discovered how rewarding it can be to concentrate on one small stretch of river and yet concentrate on this intensely, getting to know it in all its moods—the different ways the sunlight comes off the water at dawn, midday, and dusk; the movement offish within a pool, their feeding cycle so exuberantly on and so stubbornly off; insect emergence and how much life comes off the water if you have the patience to sit and watch. And narrowing the focus paid off in fish—we learned that too, sight-fishing for salmon who came up to small gray midges with interest, respect, and, finally, acceptance.
Hence my resolution. To slow it down this year, my fishing, my pace upstream. Not go chasing after the river, but, waiting patiently, to let the river come to me.
2. FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT
Conservation groups like to hold their annual banquets in March, the month when their members are unlikely to be off fishing and are most eager to hear a speaker wax informative on the subject. And while I’m not a banquet type of guy, I do try to send in money for raffle tickets, donate a book or two, help out where I can. If nothing else, the invitations that come in the mail are good reminders of something I think should become the off-season activity for all devoted flyfishers: working to make sure there is a trout stream to go back to when the snow disappears.
This winter several such campaigns have concerned me enough to warrant my involvement. Across the river in Vermont, trout fishers are fighting the ski industry again, this time over the industry’s plans to loot water from headwater streams to use in snowmaking, and to make snow from treated wastewater (conservationists, prompted by this last folly, have bumper stickers reading Effluent for the Affluent!).
I’ve departed from my usual shyness about such things to go to a meeting on the subject, give a talk. At the same time, I’m talking to people here in town about saving a remote pond at the base of our local mountain. Grunt work mostly, stuffing envelopes, writing appeals, asking for donations. There’s a land trust that owns it now, having obtained it in a complicated three-way trade, but they’re holding it only temporarily, and it’s up to the town to raise the funds to preserve it forever.
That’s locally. Nationally, I’m distressed to read about the gold mine planned on the Blackfoot in Montana and on other mountain streams, the poisonous leachings and what they would do. With less of a direct role open for me, I’ve ponied up the fifty dollars for membership in a coalition fighting the threats, trying via this modest but necessary means to lend my support. Again, it feels right to do so; when I wade into my own river this spring, I want to be able to look it in the eye.
3. PERUSE CATALOGS
Not quite the off-season activity it used to be for me, since with great effort I’ve gotten past the acquisitive, tackle-mania stage everyone goes through at least once in their fishing career. Between a back-to-basics mind-set, a longing to continually simplify, a bank account that is always challenged, skimming through fishing catalogs has become mostly a spectator sport for me. Still, I spend some time at it, since the mail carries them in on a springtime freshet of gloss, hype, and exaggeration, and I’m still not immune to being swept along.
If nothing else, they’re a good way to keep up with the state of the sport, what’s in and what’s out. Thus, going through this year’s batch, I see that the once humble fly reel has now been elevated to equal status with the fly rod, with prices to match (insane in my view); that saltwater fly fishing is exploding in popularity (good! spread everyone out!); that videos have shoved aside books (reading being an endangered activity); that fly-fishing luggage has become a serious status item (no one fishes at home anymore; the trout are always two thousand miles away); that the commercialization and deification of Norman Maclean proceeds apace a decade after his death (enough already!); that it’s getting harder to find flies with barbless hooks (bring them back, please); that women are being looked upon as the new frontier by the merchandisers (designer waders, special rods, vests with tampon pockets: male condescension at work here, or sensible adaptations?); and that whoever is writing catalog copy should in the name of truth and decency be hung.
A healthy corrective to all this and a far more interesting pastime is going back to look at fishing catalogs from an earlier era. Beside me as I write is something I’ve saved for thirty years: a catalog from Norm Thompson Inc. in Oregon back in the days when the company still sold fishing tackle.
A couple of things are at work here. First is the price of bamboo rods (pre-graphite days these), which sets my mouth watering with retrospective greed. A Winston eight-footer with two tips comes in at an even $100; an Orvis seven-footer at $67.50 (postpaid!). New fly lines are $11; a Hardy silk line is $19; a Hardy LRH reel, $27 (extra spools for $10). It only gets better as the pages go on. An assortment of dries tied by the famous Art Flick is $4.50 for ten; Muddlers tied by Don Gapen, their inventor are $6.50 each. The catalog is printed with a kind of modest, understated dignity; it includes, among other interesting pieces of advice, an excellent article on casting by the late great Jon Tarantino.
A golden age, surely, but in truth the prices were just as out of reach for me as a teenager as today’s are out of reach for me as an adult. I did manage to save $39 for a Hardy fiberglass rod, which has served me well ever since, but I don’t remember ever having enough for anything else.
Nowadays what I mostly order from catalogs are flies, since, as mentioned, I’m no tyer. This year I notice, scanning back over my list, that I’ve pretty well abandoned standard mayfly imitations altogether, except in their parachut
e versions, the rest of my dries trending toward caddis patterns, midges, and attractors. For nymphs, I favor Pheasant Tails, weighted mostly, a few with bead heads, most without. In streamers, Woolly Buggers have pretty much replaced traditional patterns for me, except for the Golden Demon (death on brookies up here) and the Muddler. The chief oddity on my list are wet flies; I’m one of the last to fish them with any frequency, and I have to scrounge around some before finding catalogs that stock them.
When I added up this year’s total it came to $253—a little too much, what with my daughter needing braces, my son wanting to go to soccer camp, various bills becoming due. I went back to the drawing board, crossed out ruthlessly. This time, I told myself, I would scrape it down to a bare-bones essential list, no vagaries, no experiments, no gambles, just the working everyday flies I absolutely needed. . . . Did so, added them back up, came to a grand total of $346.68.
4. DO LUNCH
Talking about trout fishing has always been a substitute for the actual act; some people are more adept at the former, some are good at both. I enjoy it under two circumstances: trading battle stories with old friends who share many memories; and talking with complete strangers, seeing how quickly we can find common ground in rivers, landscapes, and fish.
It’s a large and complex subject, conversational fishing, but here 111 say only this: how endearingly eager so many of my friends are to launch right into their latest fish stories, to the point where even the usual conversational staples—how’s the family? how goes work?—are skipped entirely. One of my friends, having returned from fishing in Argentina, called me up the other night with a full report, in the course of which it became clear that he had been home only seconds—that his very first act when the taxi dropped him off wasn’t playing with the kids or checking in with his wife, but calling a buddy with all the glorious details.
So, come March, I’m more than ready to go out to lunch with anyone who calls, knowing full well what the agenda will be, willing to do my share of listening, expecting some patience in return. There’s a lot of planning and scheming that goes on during these lunches. I’ve noticed the deeper in winter the date is, the wilder and crazier are our schemes (We’ll fish in Bosnia, take advantage of those brown trout streams no one’s fished in years), and that the closer to spring we get, the slightly more realistic they become (Hey, rainbows feed on walleye eggs, right? We tie off some egg imitations, head right down to Kenny Dam, and—bingo!).
But lunches can booby-trap you, too. Last week a friend who never steers me wrong called with an interesting proposition. He was sponsoring a Russian fishing guide who was in this country for a month-long internship at a tackle shop, the better to learn about the business end of fly fishing and acquire lessons he could apply to his budding capitalistic enterprise back on the salmon rivers of the Kola peninsula.
Would I have lunch with him? my friend wanted to know. He wouldn’t be able to stay more than a minute himself, but he was certain the two of us would hit it off.
All my fishing lunches are at the same venue: a large, friendly Chinese restaurant one town south of here. Two minutes after sitting down, my friend arrived with Andrey. He was a stocky man with a drooping mustache, dressed in a leisure suit of black denim. With a smile that was more of a grimace, he shook my hand—with his left hand, his right being stuck, like Napoleon’s, at a right angle into his jacket.
My friend grabbed a wonton and left, leaving Andrey and me alone.
“Have you enjoyed your stay here, Andrey?”
He scowled. “Of course,” he mumbled, with great sarcasm.
Whoops.
“Uh, it’s a shame you’re not here during the trout season. I could have taken you out.”
He shrugged. “On my river, we have salmon of fifteen pounds. The small ones.”
Whoops again. Time to order, try to get communication back on track . . . but we never did. For some reason, he and I started out on different wavelengths and never managed to find a common one. For him, this was one blind date that was obviously a bore, the only redeeming factor being the Chinese food or, better yet, the Chinese service, which amazed him with its attentiveness; he kept glancing at his water glass, amazed to find it was forever filled.
I did my best to carry the conversation along—English wasn’t the problem, since he spoke it perfectly—then we pretty much gave up and ate in silence. The situation was saved by the lucky intervention of my pal Tom C., who happened to come in and did somewhat better with Andrey than I had. We finally managed to learn something of Russian fly fishing; we were interested to hear that, according to Andrey, the same scoundrels who ruled things under the Communists now ruled things under democracy, and that the chances of his getting a fishing lodge established on his river without paying massive bribes was slim. Which explained his gloominess, I suppose.
After what seemed like hours, the waiter brought our check and the fortune cookies. We had to explain to Andrey what they were.
“My future, yes?” he said with the first real animation he had displayed. Breaking the cookie apart he read his, read it twice, then, with a snort of disgust, crumpled it up and threw it at the lo mein.
5. BUY A LICENSE
We usually get a big snowstorm the first week of March, and often we’ll get a second hard upon this, but by the last third of the month winter seems to have broken its back. The robins return for good, ditto the bluebirds; the sap is running, not only in trees, but in human beings, so it’s hard not to feel the anticipatory exhilaration of spring.
You’d have to be made of granite not to give in to this. The new lightness in the air seems to require an appropriate tribute, and one of mine is to stop off at our local country store, plunk my twenty dollars down for a fishing license.
“Early this year, aren’t you?” Tammy says, rustling behind the counter for the proper form.
I shrug. “Figure I’d nudge spring along.”
Tammy, speaking of spring, is very obviously pregnant, happy with it, excited, but a bit on edge as well. Since I’m the first one to buy a license this year, she has some trouble with the new form, and what’s worse, there’s suddenly a long line of customers, the phone is ringing, and there’s no one else to help.
“You want the cold-water species license?” she asks distractedly, searching the form for the right box to check off.
“Yep.”
“Hunting, too?”
“Just fishing.”
“Shellfishing?”
We both laugh.
Finishing, she pushes it across the counter for my signature, then hands it back with the little booklet listing the rules and regulations—and there, Wetherell is official once again.
“When’s the big day?” I ask, tucking it in my wallet.
She smiles at her stomach—a bit ruefully. “Tomorrow!”
Buying a license up here, while I fully support it, is something of a formality, since with the fish and game budget being so strapped, warders at a premium, I’m never checked. Thus, a month later, wading into the cold shallows of a favorite brook trout pond, I was more than a little amazed to see a green-jacketed warden emerge from the puckerbrush behind me. “Gotcha!” his expression seemed to say—or maybe it was just the quick flash of guilt that comes over you in these situations, innocent or not.
“How’s the fishing?” he asked. Then, a second later, “Can I see your license?”
I thought he looked at it with more than usual concentration, glancing up now and then to compare description and reality. Hmmmn. Red hair? Yep. One hundred and ninety pounds? Yep. Six foot three? Yep. That left only one thing.
“There aren’t any clams in this pond,” he said. “Lobster neither.”
Say what?
“Here,” he said, pointing to the upper corner of my license. “You’ve got yourself a shellfish license, mister.” He hesitated. “And I bet you have a story to go with it.”
6. ANSWER LETTERS
One of the best fringe benefits o
f writing about fishing is that you get lots of mail from people telling you how much your book meant, far more letters than you receive when you publish a novel. Flyfishers tend to be literate folk, so enthusiastic about their passion their letters all but bubble over, and of course there’s that ancient and venerable swapping instinct at work as well; since I’ve told a story or two of my own, it’s only fitting that I share theirs.
Fair enough, especially since receiving such letters is one of the real highs March brings (and for whatever reason, late winter is when most of the mail comes in). I always answer each one. I’m pleasantly surprised by how many turn out to be from people who don’t fish at all, readers whose letters begin “Dear Mr. Wetherell, I’ve never fished in my life, but something made me pick up your book and I just want to tell you how much it meant.”
This is not to pat myself on the back, but to try and understand exactly who my readers are. That books are one of the oldest, most successful collaborations in the world—a collaboration between writer and reader—is perhaps so obvious it doesn’t need mentioning, but it’s a blind collaboration, between people who in most cases never set eyes on each other, their only meeting ground being those words.
The people who respond best to the ones I’m responsible for seem to be those who, in loving the natural world, rivers, lakes, and ponds, respond passionately to a note of celebration played even as wobbly and discordantly as mine. Dogmatic, know-it-all flyfisherman, pompous technocrats, the macho boys or jet-setters: I never get letters from these, and I suspect if they read me it’s with a mix of bewilderment, incomprehension, and anger . . . but now I am bragging, wearing their disapproval like a badge.
A River Trilogy Page 34