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

by Ian Frazier

other flies—the Parmachenee Belle, Lord Baltimore, Yellow Sally, Adams, Rat-Faced McDougal, Woolly Worm, Hare’s Ear, Humpy, Royal Coachman, Hair-Wing Royal Coachman, Lead-Wing Coachman, Queen of the Waters, Black Prince, Red Ibis—of which it is hard to say just what they are supposed to imitate, and which are sometimes called attractor flies;

  big, colorful salmon flies, with names like Nepisiquit, Abbey, Thunder and Lightning, Amherst, Black Fairy, Orange Blossom, Silver Doctor, Dusty Miller, Hairy Mary, Lancelot, Jock Scott, Fair Duke, Durham Ranger, Marlodge, Fiery Brown, Night Hawk, Black Dose, Warden’s Worry;

  flies that he invented himself—Deren’s Stonefly, Deren’s Fox, Deren’s Harlequin, The Fifty Degrees, The Torpedo, The Black Beauty, Deren’s Speckled Caddis, Deren’s Cream Caddis, Deren’s Cinnamon Caddis, Deren’s Grey Caddis;

  feathers for tying flies—rooster (domestic and foreign, winter plumage and summer plumage, dozens of shades), ostrich, goose, kingfisher, mallard, peacock, turkey, imitation jungle cock, imitation marabou, imitation wood duck;

  fur—Alaskan seal, arctic fox, mink, beaver, weasel, imitation chinchilla, raccoon, ermine, rabbit, fitch, marten, gray fox, skunk, squirrel, civet cat—also for tying flies;

  hair—deer, bear, antelope, moose, goat, elk, badger, calf—also for tying flies;

  scissors, forceps, pliers, razors, vises, lamps, tweezers, bobbins, bodkins, floss, thread, chenille, tinsel, Mylar, lead wire, wax, yarn—also for tying flies;

  chest waders, wader suspenders, wader belts, wader cleats, wader racks, wader patch kits, wading shoes, wading staffs, hip boots, boot dryers, inner boot soles, Hijack brand V-notch boot removers, insulated socks, fishing vests, bug-repellent fishing vests, rain pants, ponchos, head nets, long-billed caps, hunting jackets, thermal underwear, high-visibility gloves, fishing shirts;

  ice augers, dried grasshoppers, minnow scoops, fish stringers, hook disgorgers, rubber casting weights, gigs, spears, car-top rod carriers, rubber insect legs, fish-tank aerators, English game bags, wicker creels, folding nets, hand gaffs, worm rigs, gasoline-motor starter cords, watercolor paintings of the Miramichi River, sponge-rubber bug bodies, line straighteners, knot-tiers, snakebite kits, hatbands, leather laces, salmon eggs, plastic-squid molds, stuff you spray on your glasses so they won’t fog up, duck and crow calls, waterproof match cases, lead split-shot, collapsible oars, bells that you hook up to your line so they ring when a fish takes your bait, Justrite electric head lanterns, dried mayfly nymphs, rescue whistles, canteens, butterfly nets, peccary bristles, porcupine quills, frog harnesses …

  The truth is, I have no idea of all the things Deren has in his shop. Just about every item he sells is appropriate to a particular angling situation. In addition to the part of the shop that the customer sees, the Angler’s Roost fills a couple of large back rooms, a lot of space in an office on another floor of the same building, and space that Deren rents in a warehouse in New Jersey. I have not yet encountered, nor would I encounter in several lifetimes of angling, all the different situations for which the different items in his shop are intended.

  Deren likes to recite certain fishing maxims over and over, and although he says his intent is purely educational (“We don’t sell anybody. We advise, and then they do their own buying”) I have seen his maxims work on customers’ wallets the way oyster knives work on oysters. One of these maxims is “Ninety percent of a trout’s diet consists of food he finds underwater.” A customer who hears this often decides he has to have a couple dozen stone-fly nymphs—weighted flies that imitate the nymphal stage of the stone fly, an insect common in rocky streambeds. The stone fly that Deren sells is two dollars, which makes it one of the more expensive trout flies he sells. Another maxim is “Trout don’t always see a floating mayfly from underneath; when a trout is taking a fly he will break the surface”—here Deren does an imitation of a trout regarding with bulging eye a fly at eye level—“and when he does he sees that the back of the insect is darkly vermiculated.” A customer who hears this may conclude that he cannot be without several flies—in the pattern called Deren’s Fox, as it happens—that have across the back a number of stripes made with a bodkin dipped in lacquer, to suggest the dark vermiculations. (Deren’s imitation of a trout breaking the surface and seeing a fly is itself worth the price of a lot of Deren’s Foxes.) Another maxim is “People always say that a fly reel is nothing more than a storage case for line, but this is not true. A fly reel has many functions it must perform. It has to be the right weight, it has to be the right size to hold the proper amount of line, and it has to have a smooth drag”—the mechanism that controls the amount of resistance offered to a fish pulling line off the reel—“which can be adjusted to the various situations you may encounter.” Another maxim, one of Deren’s most serviceable, which often comes up when a customer is contemplating an unusually expensive purchase, is “The money may not seem worth it, but when you run across a fish you’ve waited your whole life to catch and then lose him because your equipment was substandard—well, then the money becomes immaterial.”

  One spring, just before I was going to Key West to visit my grandmother, Deren got me in the pincers of the last two maxims as I was deciding on a new fly reel: people say a fly reel is just a storage case for line but you need a good reel with a good drag, etc.; and if you buy a substandard (i.e., cheaper) reel and because of it lose the fish of your life, etc. I was planning to wade the tidal flats around the islands fly-fishing for bonefish and permit (a kind of pompano), of which the first is supposed to be very difficult to catch and the second is supposed to be about impossible to catch. Like a lot of people before me and after me, I cracked. I spent $110 on an English-made reel with level adjustable drag, which came in a fleece-lined suede case. The first day, I fished with it at a fishing spot that had been recommended by a guy behind the counter at a bait-and-tackle shop called Boog Powell’s Anglers Marine (it is owned by the former baseball star, but I have never seen him in there), on Stock Island, the key just up from Key West. This fishing spot was a long sandbar behind the Boca Chica Naval Air Station, the military installation that sometimes used to appear on TV as a piece of runway and an airplane wing and some heat shimmers in the background of news stories about Cuban refugees. My cousin dropped me off there. She had to take the car back to get the seats reupholstered. (My grandmother spends a lot of time driving people in wet bathing suits around, so her seat covers always fall apart.) I hid my lunch, which my grandmother had packed for me, in the mangroves. Black mangroves, since they grow in or near water, have hundreds of little breathing tubes that aerate their roots and look like Bic pen tops sticking up from the mud. As I waded out, I scared up a couple of shore birds, which made regularly spaced splashes with their feet on the surface of the water as they took off. The sandbar, a line of white between turquoise water and dark-blue water, was maybe a quarter mile out. I had to wade in up to my armpits at one point. I was nervous. I had never heard of a wading angler being eaten by a shark, but I didn’t know why. It seemed as if anything that wanted to come in and get me could. At one point I almost stepped on a ray, which stirred up big clouds of mud as it winged away. I was doubly scared when I realized that my fear was probably releasing chemicals into the water which would call predators in from all over the ocean. On the sandbar, the water was ankle-deep. I worked my way along, casting to the deep water on the ocean side of the bar. It was very windy, and I kept hitting myself between the shoulder blades with the weighted fly when I cast. I saw one fish over the half mile of sandbar that I covered. I’m not sure what kind of fish it was—I don’t think it was a permit or a bonefish. It was about two feet long. It wasn’t expecting to find anybody standing in the water out there. About ten feet from me, it saw me, and it did the closest thing to a double take I’ve ever seen a fish do. Then it disappeared like the Road Runner in the cartoon, with a ricochet noise. I waded back to shore, stepping on crunching white coral and then slogging through a long patch of grayish-white ooze—the kind of muck that
dinosaurs left footprints in. I was quite a distance from where I’d left my lunch. I began to walk back along the road. As I came around a bend in the road, I saw a camper parked. It had Alabama license plates. About the same time I saw the camper, I heard the jingle of a dog collar. With one bark, a Great Dane plunged out of the bushes toward me. A second later, a dachshund and a border collie, both barking a lot, came out of the bushes. The Great Dane came up to my shoulder, and had a mouth—filled with yellow, pointed teeth—that could have eaten a clock radio. A man and a woman were sunbathing on deck chairs near the camper. The man did not get up. The woman told me to hold still and the dog wouldn’t bite me. I held still, and the dog bit me in the right shoulder. I told the woman that the dog was biting me. The border collie was nipping around my knees, the dachshund around my ankles. The Great Dane bit me in the right buttock. The woman was putting on her sandals. The Great Dane bit me hard next to my left shoulder blade. The woman came up and pulled him off. I walked a distance away, and then I raised my shirt and turned my back to the woman and asked her if I was bleeding. She said I wasn’t. I walked on up the road. The dachshund continued to nip around my ankles for a way up the road. The woman was calling him. His name was Fritz. I got to the place in the mangroves where I’d left my lunch, and I found my lunch and sat down on a mangrove root. My shirt was not torn where the dog had bitten me in the right shoulder, and my pants weren’t torn where the dog had bitten me in the right buttock. But the lower back of my shirt was torn, with several long tooth holes. I felt my back. I had two puncture wounds, and they were bleeding. I walked back to where the camper had been parked, shouting for the people to hold the dog. The camper was not there anymore. (I later found out that the state of Florida requires that anytime a dog bites a person it must be locked up for ten days to see if it has rabies. The Alabamians, possibly having had this kind of experience before, and not wanting to change their vacation plans, may have left the minute I was out of sight.) I ate my lunch and thought about what I should do. I decided that the dog probably did not have rabies but was just crazy and overbred, like many Great Danes. I decided that it would not be worth it to try to get back to Key West—that it made more sense to wait for my cousin to come and pick me up. I wasn’t going to bleed to death. I went back out and fished some more, seeing this time not a single fish. However, I did spot a yellow object floating by me and snagged it with my rod, and the object turned out to be a plastic toy man—part of the Fisher-Price toy dump truck recommended for ages two to six. I put it in my pocket, because at that time my cousin’s daughter really liked Fisher-Price toys. I kept hearing voices shouting back and forth along the shore. When my cousin finally blew the horn for me and I went in, I learned that the voices had belonged, probably, to whoever had been engaged in stringing coils of barbed wire along the shoreline. (Probably it was the Seabees putting out the wire for airfield security.) This barbed wire had barbs on it shaped like little meat cleavers. I made it through the first two coils, but I got tangled up in the third coil, cutting my legs in several places. When I got to the car and dismantled my fly rod, I broke off a line guide. My cousin’s daughter was with her, and she was very happy with the Fisher-Price man I’d found. My cousin took me to the de Poo Hospital, in Key West, where a twenty-nine-year-old doctor with long hair, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who had decided to practice in Key West because he hated the winters in Ohio, told me that there hadn’t been a case of rabies in Florida in a really long time and that house dogs like Great Danes almost never got rabies anyway, but that I should have a tetanus shot, so I did, and it cost thirty dollars. I didn’t go out fishing, or even think about fishing, for a few days after this, with the result that I forgot to rinse the salt water out of the works of my expensive new reel, with the result that the works corroded to the point where the reel would turn approximately as much as the Chrysler Building turns on its foundation. Now the reel sits on my desk, proving Deren’s maxim; more than a storage case for line, it is also a paperweight.

  Although all kinds of people go to Deren’s shop, most of his customers are adult white men. This category is large enough to include many subcategories. Some of these men are technicians; they wear raincoats, gray glen-plaid suits, black-orange-and-yellow-striped ties, and gray plaid Irish walking caps, and the gleam of their metal-rimmed glasses reinforces the expression of scientific curiosity in their eyes. They know no higher words of praise than “state of the art.” When Deren shows them the latest graphite fly rod, they ask, “So is this pretty much state of the art in graphite rods?” Others are rich, and probably social. They bring with them the warm, Episcopalian smell of Brooks Brothers or the Union Club, and they talk like George Plimpton: “An Englishman who fishes in Brazil had this particular kind of lanyard, do you know the kind I mean, marvelous, yes, that’s exactly what I want, yes, good for you!” Others are writers or photographers or painters; they are quiet or loud, hungover or not hungover, and many of them carry shoulder bags and don’t wear suits and look as if somebody had smudged them when they were wet. Others are short, bluff, bald men who look like walking thumbs and laugh after every sentence they speak; sometimes they open the door and yell, “Hey, mister! Got any hooks?” and then they laugh delightedly. Others are terse. That’s what they do for a living. They’re professionally terse: “Jim. Ask you a question. Winchester. Model 21. Twenty-gauge.” Others are executives in the oil business who are leaving tomorrow for Bahrain. Once, I heard the executives in the elevator going up to Deren’s talking about the management characteristics of different oil companies. One of them said that top management at Mobil Oil suffered from “paralysis by analysis.” Others are big, wear size 11 shoes, have red faces, and come into the shop in the afternoon with cocktails and good lunch on their breath, and shoot the bull with Deren for hours.

  Guy: “Jimmy, let me ask you something and you tell me what you think of this. Last August I was sitting on the bank of a river in Michigan waiting for it to cool off and for the fish to start feeding, and I saw this white thing bouncing along the river bottom, and when it got close enough I saw that it was a peeled potato, and when it came closer I saw that a twelve- or thirteen-inch trout was bouncing the potato along the river bottom with his nose—”

  Deren: “You sure it was a potato?”

  Guy: “It was either a peeled potato or maybe a peeled apple. This trout was bouncing it; I swear, he was dribbling it with his nose along the bottom like a ball. Friend of mine and I followed him downstream a long way. He just kept dribbling that potato. Now, what in the hell could that have been?”

  Deren: “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a trout do anything like that. But that reminds me—did I ever tell you about the time I saved a trout from drowning? The reason it reminds me is that I saw the trout bouncing and flopping along the bottom with the current. Good-sized brook trout. I caught up with him and netted him, and I discovered that he had a caddis case—you know, the protective covering that the caddis worm spins around himself, it looks kind of like a twig—well, he had one of these caddis cases, about an inch long, stuck between his upper and lower jaws. It was stuck in his small teeth, so he couldn’t close his mouth, and if a trout can’t close his mouth he can’t filter oxygen through his gills, and he drowns. I took the caddis case out, and I put the trout in some shallow water, and pretty soon, proud as beans, he swam away.”

  Guy: “I was reading in some sporting magazine about a man who was fishing in a boat and he had his retriever dog with him, and as he made a cast he accidentally let go of the rod and it flew out into the lake, and the dog immediately jumped in after it, and he started swimming to shore and the lure was trailing in the water, and a fish hit the lure, and the dog kept on swimming, and he ran up on the shore and kept on running until he’d pulled the fish all the way out of the water.”

  Deren: “Could happen. Could happen. I remember once I was out in a boat casting a deer-hair bug for bass, and my leader was frayed, and when a big bass hit I broke the bug off in his m
outh, so I put on a new leader and continued to fish, and then a couple of hours later I decided to quit fishing, and I was coming back to the dock, and suddenly there was an enormous splash next to the boat and this big bass came out of the water into the air and landed in the bottom of my boat. It was the same fish I’d hooked earlier—he still had my lure in his jaw. Of course, there’s a simple explanation. The fish was jumping trying to throw the lure. He would probably have kept at it until he succeeded, but instead he landed in my boat.”

  Guy: “That doesn’t surprise me. Did I ever tell you about the time …”

  Other customers are men of considerable personal force, but when they come into Deren’s shop Deren is sitting, they are standing; Deren knows where everything is, they don’t; they are asking, he is telling. After an exchange like “Hi, I’m looking for some leader sink,” “Look on that shelf right next to you—no, not there, the other direction. Second shelf. Second shelf, that’s the third shelf. Move that fly box. Look to the left of that. No, the left. That’s the right. Move your hand back where it was going originally. Right there! Right there! It’s right in front of you! Look right where your hand is! You’re looking right at it,” this particular type of customer’s ears, having heard more sentences in the imperative mood in the last few seconds than they probably hear in a week, turn pink with embarrassment.

  An important customer who has been coming in for many years, or an old fishing buddy, or a fellow angling expert, or any of the guys Deren has got to know over the years, he calls a son of a bitch. If the guy is present, he’s “you son of a bitch”; if he’s not, he’s “that son of a bitch.” Deren says the phrase with mastery, with delicate tonal shadings to indicate everything from a wonderful human being to a horrible human being. He says the phrase with the ease of a man turning into his driveway for the ten-thousandth time. When the subject of any one of these guys comes up, Deren will say, “That son of a bitch.