by Ian Frazier
—he’ll never die, the Devil wouldn’t have him.”
—he tied saddle hackle on streamer flies with greater intensity than any man I ever knew.”
—don’t ever let him around a car, he’ll destroy it in a second.”
—he was a real screwball, a big, tall, good-looking guy. Slept with, lived with, married I don’t know how many women.”
—did you know he invented the après-ski boot?”
—I’ve seen drunks dive under the table when he appeared on the scene.”
—he’s a pinko crêpe-hanger of the first water.”
—he married a girl in Greece.”
—he’s basically a correlator. He’s not an originator. He doesn’t have spontaneity. Spontaneity is what advances the sport.”
—he fathered half the illegitimate children running around [a large American city].”
—he had a compass in his head.”
—he would have made a great President, but he wouldn’t touch it.”
—he could tie flies down to size 28 in his fingers without a vise.”
—he was incredible. He’d make bets he could sight a rifle in to zero in three shots. And do it, too.”
—he was always into me for something, as well as I knew him.”
—he asked me to be the best man at his wedding, and when I got to the wedding he told me to put on my waders, and he was married in a pool on the Ausable River.”
—he asked me to sign a bank note for him when he bought a new car, and then he skipped town and I had to pay the bank, and meanwhile, I’m getting these postcards from him, he’s out in British Columbia, and he says he’s having the best salmon fishing of his life and he wishes I was there!”
—he’s a very enthusiastic angler. It’s the Indian in him.”
—forget it. He’s a three-dollar bill. He’d write any kind of angling misinformation he could think of. He prostituted his sport for money. He’s not a sportsman.”
—he’s an enthusiast of an extreme caliber. He won’t eat, he won’t sleep, he lives by the goddamn tides. This lends him a cloak of irresponsibility, but he is responsible—to the striped bass. He was fishing on the bridge out at Jones Beach, which is illegal, and he had just hooked a big striper when the cops came along, so he jumped over the bridge and hung from the railing with one hand and held all his tackle and played the fish with the other until the cops went away. He’s an angler at heart.”
In Deren’s world, an angler at heart is the best thing you can be. He describes many people as competent anglers or good anglers; he describes some as enthusiastic anglers; only a very few does he describe as anglers at heart. When I asked him what distinguishes the few anglers at heart from the fifty-four million other people who fish in this country, he said, “It’s the call of the wild, the instinct of the hunt. It’s a throwback to the forest primeval. It’s the feeling of being in a state of grace in a magnificent outdoor cathedral. Either you have it or you don’t—it’s inborn. The first time I went into the woods, it was as if I had been there before.” He looked at me significantly.
“You mean … like in a previous life?” I asked.
“Well, that would be stretching it. Let’s just say I didn’t have too many surprises. I could sit all day and watch a field mouse fifteen feet away, watch a bird in a tree huntin’ bugs—sometimes they’re comical as hell. People would say to me, ‘What in the world do you do in the woods that long?’ Well, Christ, you never run out of things to do in the woods. The woods are a constant unfolding story. But it wasn’t the same if there was anything man-made in view. If you thought of man at all, it was a man who had gone through there silently. Maybe in some long-forgotten time an Indian who went to join his ancestors long before the Norsemen came to the American coast set foot on that same spot when he was following the buffalo. Or maybe it was pristine, the way the Lord of the cathedral made it. The romance of fishing isn’t all just fish.”
In The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton says, “For Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice, but 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.”
More men than women fish. Sometimes this works out fine, but other times the shadow of angry excluded wives and girlfriends falls across the sport, and things get depressing. About women in angling, Deren says, “The Angler’s Roost was the first place I know of that trained women. We pioneered in that field. A lot of women were getting fed up with this business of getting left home on the weekends, and so their husbands brought them to us and we trained them. Later on, the women we trained became the nucleus that infected a lot of other women. Of course, you had to indoctrinate them properly. Sit them on a rock and let the bugs chew them up and then ask them if they like it and you’re going to get a negative answer. But if you can inculcate the angling mystique into them, you’ve got yourself a hell of a fishing partner. Some parts of some rivers had places where a female couldn’t manage, and they needed different equipment sometimes, because their muscle structure is different from men’s. But they became good casters easier than men, and they became experts with flytying and flies, because of their inherent gentility.”
Deren’s wife, Catherine, is a nice-looking woman, who was wearing slacks and a blouse and had her hair piled up in a bouffant hairdo the one time I saw her in the shop. She was as nice as pie to me then. Her perfume was unusual in that room filled with the smells of fly-tying cement, rubber, canvas, and True cigarette smoke. Another time, I saw her on the street, and she had just had some dental work done and she was really in pain and did not want to talk at all.
In The Origins of Angling, the author, John McDonald, says that angling existed in the ancient world, and that our knowledge of modern angling dates from 1496, when A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, by Dame Juliana Burners, was published in England. He says that hunting and falconry were the sports of medieval chivalry, that books on those sports had existed for centuries, that the publication of the Treatyse occurred at about the same time as the decline of chivalry, and that the Treatyse is addressed to all who are, in its words, “virtuous, gentle, and freeborn,” rather than just to the nobility. He says that it cannot be definitely proved that Dame Juliana Berners wrote the book, as people say, or that she was a nun, as people also say. He says that people fished with tackle that was basically the same as that described in the Treatyse until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the invention of a better reel, of upstream fishing, and of the trout fly that floated rather than sank changed the sport tremendously. He says that over the centuries there has been much argument about trout-fly patterns, that the Treatyse presented twelve trout flies, for the different months of the year, as if they stood for immutable truths, that these twelve ruled for a hundred and seventy-five years, until Charles Cotton’s Instructions How to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream introduced sixty-five new fly patterns, that in the eighteenth century Richard and Charles Bowlker entered the discussion with their A Catalogue of Flies Seldom Found Useful to Fish With, and that the dispute continues to the present. The idea is that some anglers like to use the flies that have always worked, while others like to experiment. McDonald says, “The trout fly is still subject to a constant pull between classicism and innovation. In recorded history, the score is now even: three dominantly classical centuries—the fifteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth; and three innovating—the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.”
So when Deren says, as he often does, “What in the hell is the point of using a famous fly that is some imported concoction from some Scottish salmon river which is probably the result of some guy having a couple of martinis a hundred and
fifty years ago, which doesn’t look a thing like any insect on any stream in this country, and which never looked like any insect in the British Isles, either, when you can pick a bug off a rock and copy it and catch a fish?” he speaks in the voice of his century.
Much of angling today is disappointing. Some of the best trout streams in the country are now privately owned, and it costs a lot of money per person for a day of fishing, and you have to get your reservations a long time in advance. The health advisory included in every copy of the fishing regulations for the state of Michigan says that because of the high PCB, PBB, and mercury content of fish from Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and many of their tributary streams, no one should eat more than half a pound per week of fish caught in these waters, and pregnant women or women who one day expect to have children should not eat any at all. The acid rain that falls in the Catskill Mountains is bad for fish, so now fisheries biologists in New York State are trying to breed a strain of acid-resistant fish. In the absence of clean streams that are nearby and uncrowded and full of wild trout, the modern angler often concentrates on a particular aspect of his sport—one that does not require such a rare set of circumstances. Some people like to cast, and they become tournament casters; some people read about fishing all the time; some people write about it.
Deren concentrates on tackle, of course; he also concentrates on information. Information is vital to angling. The fact that anglers are always hungry for information is probably one of the reasons The Compleat Angler has gone through over three hundred editions since it first appeared. Anglers are always trying to find out how to fish, where to fish, when to fish, what to fish. They always want to know about new killer lures, new techniques, new hot spots nobody else knows. Nowadays, it is often easier to buy the most esoteric piece of equipment than it is to obtain a really great piece of information. An angling writer will tell about the tremendous fishing on some tremendous stream, and then add that he’s not going to give the name or site of the stream, for fear that all his readers will go there and ruin it. Most angling information is subjective. A theory that one person puts into practice with confidence works fine for him but may be worse than useless to the person with no confidence in it—sort of like literature or medicine. Every angler knows one fishing secret that he thinks nobody else knows. One person will say he’s just discovered the greatest fly or the greatest technique of all time, then another will come along and say it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard of, and so on. It is a cliché that fishermen are big liars, but some fishermen actually are. Sometimes the land of angling information is like that land in the riddle where half the inhabitants tell the truth all the time and the other half lie.
All day long, Deren hands out and receives angling information. People are eager to share with him the one thing they know. Sometimes he will throw cold water on them by giving them an answer that begins with his standard “That’s one of the great misconceptions of fly-fishing.” Sometimes (less often) he will tell them they are absolutely right. His agreement or disagreement is never less than vehement. A very large number of people, in his opinion, have no idea what they are talking about. He says, “You follow something long enough and you realize you know as much as—or more than—anyone else, and that opens up a door. Most of this knowledge is based on having the problem yourself and solving it. A guy can come in here and ask me a question and I’ll know I can answer his Questions 1, 2, and 3. But it might be two years before the guy comes in and asks Question No. 2.” And when Deren is right (as he was when he told me how to catch a trout on that April day) he’s really right. In the world of angling information, he gives the impression of knowing everything, and it is this impression that’s important. If the stream of people who flow through New York bring Deren sustenance, then it is the weedy tangle of angling information, of statement and contradiction and myth and old wives’ tale and supposition and theory and actual fact growing out of five hundred years of angling, that provides him with cover.
I have never fished with Deren, but once (although I did not know it at the time) I fished near Deren. One year I fished in Montana for two months—mostly in the Yellowstone River, near the town of Livingston. Deren goes out to Montana in the early fall just about every year, so when I got back to New York I went to see him. I asked him if he’d ever been to Livingston. “You’re goddamn right I been to Livingston. I was hit by a truck in Livingston,” he said. (He and his wife were in their camper, pulling into a gas station, when a kid in a pickup truck ran into them. Deren was not hurt, but his wife had to have her arm X-rayed. Nothing broken.) I asked him if he had ever fished at a place where I fished a lot, called the Sheep Mountain Fishing Access. “I remember smells, I remember the way things look, I remember sounds, but I don’t remember names,” he said. (I know this is true. Despite the fact that I have talked to him for many hours, and despite that fact that when I first introduced myself to him he said, “That’s a good name for you,” I doubt very much if Deren has any idea what my name is. But when I call him on the phone he always recognizes my voice right away.)
“Sheep Mountain is downstream from the bridge on the road that leads to White Sulphur Springs,” I said. “The river breaks up into lots of channels there. There are a bunch of islands.”
“Yeah, I know the place you’re talking about. I’ve fished there. Not last time we were out. Last time we camped on the river upstream from there.”
“Just this fall?”
“Yeah. We got to the Yellowstone on October 10.”
October 10 was my last full day in Montana. I fished all day, very hard, because I had not caught the fish I had dreamed I would catch out there. The river had filled up with mud and little pieces of moss right after I arrived, in mid-August—a man in a fishing-tackle store told me that a whole cliff had washed away in a rainstorm, up in Yellowstone Park, near the river’s source—and it stayed muddy for several weeks. Then, after it cleared, the weather became hot and the water level dropped, and my luck stayed bad. I threw nymphs, among them Deren’s big stone flies, and grasshopper imitations and bee imitations and ants and dragonflies all over the river every day. I caught whitefish and unimpressive trout. (Just before I left, I told that same man in the tackle store the size of the largest trout I’d caught during my stay, and he winced and went “Oooh!”—as if I had shown him a nasty bruise on my forehead.) On my last day, I took a lunch, drove to the fishing access, fished my way several miles upstream, crossed a bridge, and worked my way more than several miles back downstream. When I noticed that it was getting dark, I was on the opposite side of the river from my car, and miles from the bridge. I started through the brush back to the bridge. The beavers who live along the river cut saplings with their teeth at a forty-five-degree angle. These chisel-pointed saplings are unpleasant to fall on. The fishing net dangling from my belt wanted to stop and make friends with every tree branch in Montana. Occasionally I would stop and swear for three or four minutes straight. At one of these swearing stops I happened to look across the river, and I saw my car where I had parked it, lit up in the headlights of a passing car. I calculated: there was my car, just across the big, dark, cold Yellowstone it was many more miles of underbrush to the bridge, and miles from the bridge back to the car; the river was down from its usual level, and I had forded it not far from this spot a few days before; but then that was during the day, and now I couldn’t even see the other bank unless a car drove by. I waded in. I wasn’t wearing waders. It took a second for the water to come through my shoes. It was cold. My pants ballooned around my shins. The water came past my knees, past my thighs. Then it got really cold. I was trying to keep my shoulders parallel to the flow of the river. The water came to my armpits, and my feet were tiptoeing along the pebbles on the river bottom. I still couldn’t see the bank before me, and when I glanced behind me I couldn’t see that bank, either. I was going downstream fast. Then I realized that, gathered up tight and holding my arms out of the water, I had not been breathing. I took
a deep breath, then another, and another. When I did, I saw all around me, under my chin in the dark water, the reflections of many stars. The water was not getting any deeper. I was talking to myself in reassuring tones. Finally, the water began to get shallower. Then it got even shallower. Then I was strolling in ankle-deep water on a little shoal about a quarter mile downstream from my car. I walked up onto the bank and sang a couple of bars from “We Will Rock You,” by Queen. Then I raised my arms and kissed my biceps. I walked to my car and drove back to the house I was staying in and took an Olympia beer out of the refrigerator and drank it. The motto of Olympia beer is “It’s the Water.” That night, I had a physical memory of the river. It was a feeling of powerful current pushing against my left side so insistently that I had to keep overcoming the illusion that I was about to be washed out of bed.
“Did you fish that day, on the tenth? How did you do?” I asked.
“Oh, that first day we were on the Yellowstone I hardly even got out of the camper,” Deren said. “I was pooped from driving, and I honestly did not think that conditions were at all favorable. The water was down, it was too bright. I did take one walk down to the river, for the benefit of these two guys who were following me. When I’m in Montana, guys follow me wherever I go, because they think I’ll lead them to good fishing. I showed these two guys a piece of holding water where they might find some big trout, and then I went back to the camper. Later that evening, after dark, the guys came to my camper, banged on the door, woke me and Catherine up. They had this goddamn huge brown trout they’d caught, right where I told them. They were pretty happy about that.”
“I didn’t catch any big trout, but that same night I forded the river,” I said.
Deren looked at me. “That’s a big river,” he said.
On the inside of the door to his shop Deren has posted what is probably his most famous maxim: “There don’t have to be a thousand fish in a river; let me locate a good one and I’ll get a thousand dreams out of him before I catch him—and, if I catch him, I’ll turn him loose.”