The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors

by Ian Frazier

  Since that day I have always loved the Red Quill dry fly, and particularly the Red Quill that Deren sells, which is the most elegant I have ever seen. For me, the Red Quill is a shamanistic medicine bundle that called forth the strike, the flash of belly, the living palette of colors from that spring day, and years later, even in situations where it is not remotely the right fly, I find myself tying it on just to see what will happen.

  Also since that day I have believed that Jim Deren is a great man. He is the greatest man I know of who will talk to just anybody off the street.

  In appearance, Deren is piscine. He is stocky—probably about five feet ten inches tall. His hair is in a mouse-brown brush cut, about half an inch long. His forehead is corrugated with several distinct wrinkles, which run up and down, like marks of soil erosion on a hill. His eyes are weak and watery and blue, behind thick glasses with thick black frames. There is a large amount of what looks like electrical tape around the glasses at the bridge. His eyebrows are cinnamon-colored. His nose is thick, and his lips are thick. He has a white mustache. His direct, point-blank regard can be unsettling. People who have fished their whole lives sometimes find themselves saying when they encounter this gaze that they don’t know a thing about fishing, really. Deren has a style of garment which he loves and which he wears almost every single day in his shop. This garment is the jumpsuit. For a long time, he wore either a charcoal-gray jumpsuit or an olive-green jumpsuit. One or both of the jumpsuits had a big ring on the zipper at the throat. Recently, Deren has introduced another jumpsuit into the repertoire. This is a sky-blue jumpsuit with a green-on-white emblem of a leaping bass on the left breast pocket. Deren’s voice is deep and gravelly. I can do a good imitation of him. The only sentence I can think of that might make his accent audible on paper (in the last word, anyway) is one I have heard him speak several times while he was talking on one of his unfavorite topics, the “flower children”: “In late October, early November, when we’re driving back from fishing out West, with the wind howling and huge dark snow clouds behind us, sometimes we pass these frail girls, these flower children, standing by the side of the road in shawwwwwwwwls.”

  I say Deren is probably about five feet ten inches tall because even though he often says, “I’ve been running around all day. I’m exhausted,” I have actually seen him standing up only a few times. Like a psychiatrist, Deren is usually seated. I have seen him outside his shop only once—when, as I was leaving, he came down in the elevator to pick up a delivery on the first floor. (Ambulant, he seemed to me surprisingly nimble.) It is appropriate for Deren to be seated all the time, because he has tremendous repose. There is a lot of bad repose going around these days: the repose of someone watching a special Thursday-night edition of Monday Night Football; the repose of someone smoking a cigarette on a ten-minute break at work; the repose of driving; the repose of waiting in line at the bank. Deren is in his sixties. The fish he has caught, the troubles he has been through, the fishing tackle he has sold, the adventures he has had lend texture to his repose. On good days, his repose hums like a gyroscope.

  Deren talking about the Angler’s Roost while sitting in his shop on a slow afternoon in March: “It seems only natural that I would have gravitated to this business. I’ve been tying flies ever since I was in short pants. When I was in grade school in New Jersey, I used to go without lunch because I wanted to save my money and buy fishing tackle. I remember fashioning a fly from a jacket of mine when I was a kid just barely big enough to be let out of sight. I tied it out of a lumber jacket that my mother had made for me—”

  The phone rings.

  “Hello. Angler’s Roost.”

  “ … . … . .”

  “Christ, I don’t know a thing about Chinese trout fishing, Doc.”

  “ … . … . .”

  “Well, they gotta have trout fishing. The Japanese have trout fishing. Just the other day, I sold some stuff to Yasuo Yoshida, the Japanese zipper magnate. He’s probably got more tackle than I got. He’s kichi about trout fishing. Kichi—that’s Japanese for nuts.”

  “ … . … .”

  “Well, I think the Russians should open one or two of their rivers for salmon fishing, certainly. They just have to have terrific salmon fishing.”

  “ … . … . .”

  “Look at it this way—next time you’ll know.”

  “ … . … . .”

  “Whatever you find out, Doc, let me know when you get back. Have a good time.

  “Anyway, I had this blue-gray lumber jacket, and there was this little blue fly on the water. The goddamn fish weren’t considering anything but this fly. Well, between the lining and the thread of my jacket, I made a fly that looked something like the insect, and so, glory be, after some effort I caught a fish. The fish made a mistake, and that did it. This was on a little stream in Pennsylvania, a little tributary of the Lehigh. It was a day as miserable as this, but later in the year.”

  Deren picks up a package of Keebler Iced Oatmeal and Raisin Cookies, breaks it open in the middle, and dumps all the contents into a white plastic quart bucket—the kind of bucket that ice cream comes in. He starts to eat the cookies.

  “After that, I was really hooked. I collected all kinds of items for fly-tying. Cigarette and cigar wrappers, hairs from dogs. Christ, I cut hair off every goddamn thing that was around. Picked up feathers in pet shops. I was always raiding chickens or ducks. I remember I tried to get some feathers from some geese and they ran me the hell out the county. Horsetails. Anything. It wasn’t long before I was selling some of the flies I tried. As far as I know, I was the first commercial nymph-tier in the country. I was selling flies in New York, New Jersey, and fairly deep into Pennsylvania. Fishing was a great thing for me, now that I look back on it, because in a lot of the contact sports I was always busting my glasses. But row a boat—I had a pair of chest muscles, looked like a goddamn weight lifter. I was very well coordinated. I had coordination and timing. That has something to do with fishing. I was a good wing shot.”

  Deren reaches under the counter and produces a banana. With a table knife he cuts the banana in half. He eats one half and leaves the other half, in the skin, on top of a pile of papers. Later, a customer will find in the pile of papers a copy of a fishing magazine that he has been looking for. He will take it out from under the half banana and buy it.

  “I spent all my time in high school fishing, and one day I noticed this guy was watching me. He’d been watching me a few times before. He’d ask me questions. Well, it turned out this guy had a radio show about fishing and hunting. I think he called himself Bill the Fisherman. He started telling people about me—called me the Child Fisherman Prodigy. He told the proprietor of a fishing-tackle shop in the heart of Newark, right by Penn Station, and the man hired me, and eventually I became the youngest fishing-tackle buyer in the country. Not long after that, I was imported by an outfit in New York called Alex Taylor & Company, on Forty-second Street. I put them in the fishing-tackle business—”

  The phone rings again.

  “Angler’s Roost.”

  “ … . … . . .”

  “We’ve got all kinds of hook hones.”

  “ … . … .”

  “Fresh and salt, both.”

  “Yes, some of them are grooved.”

  “Two different grooves.”

  “ … . … . . .”

  “Each one comes in a plastic case.”

  “ … . … . …”

  “Different lengths. I think two-inch and three-inch.”

  “ … . … . . .”

  “What the hell do you mean, who makes it? It’s a goddamn hook hone! What the hell difference does it make who makes it?

  “Guy wants to know who makes the hook hone. Wants to know what brand it is. Christ. Anyway, after that I became a buyer and salesman for another house, called Kirtland Brothers, downtown. They’re now extinct. I advised their clients on the technical aspects of fly-fishing. Mainly, I handled their fly-tying materia
l. About this time, I began my mail-order business, selling fly-tying material through ads in different magazines. I was working all day for Kirtland Brothers, then staying up all night to handle my mail orders. Finally, it got unmanageable as a side business. I wasn’t doing justice to either job. I finished my obligations to that firm, and then I opened up the first Angler’s Roost, at 207 East Forty-third, above where the Assembly Restaurant used to be. I dreamed up the name myself. You had the roost connotation because it was up off the street and you had guys that hung around all day with the eternal bull sessions. (I was thinking of selling coffee and cake there for a while.) Then you think of birds roosting, and of course, a lot of what we sold was feathers. And a lot of the feathers were rooster feathers—capes and necks.”

  Deren takes from the pocket of his jumpsuit a new pack of True Blue cigarettes. With a fly-tying bodkin, he makes a number of holes all the way through the pack. Then he takes out a cigarette and lights it.

  “Since its inception, the Roost has been tops in its field. We’ve had every kind of customer, from the bloated bondholder to the lowliest form of human life. Frank Jay Gould, the son of the railroad magnate, once bought a boat over my telephone. Ted Williams used to stop by whenever the Red Sox were in town. He was a saltwater fisherman, but we infected him with the salmon bug. We’ve had boxers, bandleaders, diplomats, ambassadors. Benny Goodman used to come in all the time. I sold Artie Shaw his salmon outfit. So many notable people, I don’t even remember. Engelhard, of Engelhard precious metals. Marilyn Monroe’s photographer, Milton Greene. Señor Wences—the ventriloquist who did the thing with the box. Bing Crosby. Tex Ritter. He was an uncle of mine by my first marriage; I got a lot of other customers in Nashville through him. We’ve had more than one President. Eisenhower came in once. He was a nice guy—didn’t have his nose too far up in the air. We’ve had three generations of people come in here, maybe four. We’ve had some of the very elite. A lot of them don’t want their names mentioned.”

  Deren looks left, cocks his wrist as if he were throwing a dart, and flips the cigarette out of sight behind the counter.

  “We had our own television show, which ran for twenty-six weeks on the old DuMont Television Network. It was called The Sportsman’s Guide. It was sponsored by Uhu Glue—a miracle glue, kind of like Krazy Glue. The announcer was a guy named Connie Evans. I did the lecturing—like on a spinning reel—and then when we did a fishing trip I did the fishing. That television show wasn’t on very long before people started calling me Uncle Jimmy. I don’t know how it got started, but it stuck. I was also a technical panelist on a radio show called The Rod and Gun Club of the Air. The other panelists and I shot the breeze amongst us every week.”

  A blond woman in a beige knit ski cap comes in. She asks Deren if he has an eight-foot bamboo fly rod. He says he doesn’t but he can order one for her. The woman says, “Oh, that’s great. I think he might marry me if I find him that rod.” She leaves.

  “Did I tell you about our television show? The Sportsman’s Guide? Did I tell you about our heavy involvement in the advertising field? Over the years we’ve acted as consultant on hundreds and hundreds of ads. Sooner or later, everybody uses a fishing ad. Also, the slogan ‘How’s your love life?’ started in the Roost. I used to ask my customers that when they came in, and then it became the slogan for a brand of toothpaste.

  “We developed the first satisfactory big-game reel—the Penn 12/0 Senator. I guess there’s six or seven miles of those things now. We also helped develop the concept of R and R—Rest and Recuperation—for the military. The idea was to take these guys who’d been through the horrors of war, get them fishing, get them fly-tying, get their minds off their former troubles. Some of the stuff I wrote on fly-tying for the Navy was posted in battleships that are now in mothballs. We also supplied the cord that made Dracula’s wings move, for the Broadway show. We’ve always been an international business. Anglers come from India, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, South America—so many South Americans you’d think it was just next door, and they’re all loaded. Bolivia, Tierra del Fuego. Any guy who’s a nut about a fly comes to the Roost eventually. Anyplace a trout swims, they know the Roost. Not only trout. Also bonefish, tarpon, sailfish, striped bass, salmon—”

  The phone rings again.

  “Angler’s Roost.”

  “ … . … .”

  “Hello, my little pigeon.”

  “ … . … .”

  “Just a few minutes. I’m leaving right now.”

  In Deren’s shop, three customers can stand comfortably. You can stand and put your hands in your pockets, but there really isn’t room to move around much. Four is tight. Five is crowded. Six is very crowded. When there are six customers in the shop, one of them has to hold on to somebody to keep from falling over backward into the knee-high wader bin. Except for the small space around the customers’ feet, Deren’s shop is 360 degrees of fishing equipment, camping equipment, books, and uncategorizable stuff. The shop is like a forest in that if you remain silent in either of them for any length of time you will hear something drop.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I think it was a book.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Leave it there.”

  “Better Badminton? Jim, how come you have a book called Better Badminton?”

  “A lot of these things get shipped by mistake, and then it’s too goddamn much trouble to send them back.”

  In Deren’s shop, he has tackle for the three different kinds of sportfishing—bait casting, spin fishing, and fly-fishing. Bait-casting outfits are the standard rod and reel that cartoonists usually give to fishermen. The reel has a movable spool, and both rod and reel are designed for bait or for lures heavy enough to be cast with their own weight. Spin-fishing rods and reels are also designed for lures heavy enough to be cast with their own weight, but because of refinements in the reel—a nonmovable spool that allows the line to spiral off—spin-fishing rods cast farther with less weight. In fly-fishing, the lure is usually nothing but feathers on a hook, so it does not have enough weight to be cast. Fly-fishing equipment consists of longer, lighter rods and a thick, tapered line, which work together with a whipping action to cast the fly. All three of these kinds of fishing can be done in either fresh or salt water. The sea is bigger than the land; saltwater tackle is usually bigger and heavier than freshwater tackle. Deren sells saltwater rods as thick as mop handles, and freshwater fly rods like Seiji Ozawa’s baton. They are made of bamboo, fiberglass, metal, or (recent developments) graphite or boron. He sells reels like boat winches, and palm-sized reels that sound like Swiss watches when you crank them. He has thousands of miles of line—nylon monofilament or braided nylon or plastic or braided Dacron or silk or wire. He has hooks from size 28, which are small enough to fit about five on a fingertip, to size 16/0, which have a four-inch gap between the point of the hook and the shank.

  Deren also has:

  thousands of lures designed to imitate live game-fish prey, with names like Bass-Oreno, Original Spin-Oreno, Buzz’n Cobra, Chugger, Lucky 13, Crazy Crawler, Hopkins No-Eql, Goo-Goo Eyes, Hula Popper, Jitterbug, Devil’s Horse, Creek Chub Wiggle Fish, Flatfish, Lazy Ike, Red Eye, Dardevle, Fluke Slayer, Ava Diamond Jig, Rapala, Dancing Doll Jig, Rebel, Darter, Mirrolure, Shyster, Abu-Reflex, Swedish Wobbler, Hawaiian Wiggler, Golden-Eye Troublemaker, Hustler, Al’s Goldfish, Pikie Minnow, Salty Shrimper, Williams Wobbler, Tiny Tad, Tiny Torpedo, Zara (named after Zarragossa Street, the former red-light district in Pensacola, Florida, because of its attractive wiggle);

  countless trout flies that imitate mayflies at every stage of their life, with names like Quill Gordon, Hendrickson, March Brown, Red Quill, Grey Fox, Lady Beaverkill, Light Cahill, Grey Fox Variant, Dun Variant, Cream Variant, Blue-Winged Olive, Sulphur Dun, Brown Drake, Green Drake, Pale Evening Dun, Little White-Winged Black; trout flies that imitate other insects�
��the Letort Hopper, Jassid, Black Ant, Red Ant, Cinnamon Ant, Black Gnat, Spider, Leaf Roller, Stonefly, Caddis, Case Caddis, Caddis Worm, Caddis Pupa, Dragonfly, Hellgrammite, Damselfly;

  flies that imitate mice, frogs, and bats;

  streamer flies—the Muddler Minnow, Spruce Fly, Spuddler, Professor, Supervisor, Black Ghost, Grey Ghost, Mickey Finn—which are probably meant to imitate minnows;