Kelson rattled through his current inventory of bird skins: the Banded Chatterer (now endangered), the Great American Cock, the Nankeen Night Heron, the South American Bittern, and the Ecuadorian Cock of the Rock. But there was one skin that Kelson prized above all: “The greatest find that has fallen to my lot is the Golden Bird of Paradise. May this luck be your luck, brother Fishermen, as it has been mine! It will only cost you £10!”
He acknowledged that the dyed feathers of common birds could be used when exotic ones were out of reach, but stressed that “however well hackles may be dyed . . . they never look so well, even when fresh, or are so effective in the water as natural ones. Take, for instance, the hackles of a Golden Bird of Paradise . . . the best dyed orange hackle in creation would simply be nowhere in competition with it.”
Kelson and his book were so influential that even before he died in 1920, he’d become a brand name. Burberry’s offered a waterproof Kelson jacket, featuring large pockets for fly boxes and special flies. C. Farlow & Co. created a custom Kelson rod, and the Kelson Patent Silent Aluminum Salmon Winch. Morris Carswell & Co. sold Kelson enameled salmon fishing line.
Kelson knew he had his detractors—fishermen who were skeptical of the need for such prismatic creations—but he brushed them off as “narrow-minded enthusiasts—piteously hoodwinked on an exceptional day by getting a fish or two with the wrong fly presented the wrong way.” Galileo had been similarly doubted in his time, he noted.
* * *
–
Over the course of the twentieth century, scattered pockets of fly-tiers followed the recipes of Kelson and his peers, but fly-tying didn’t truly reemerge until the final decades, thanks in part to the influence of Paul Schmookler. In 1990 a Sports Illustrated profile of his salmon flies—which were being snatched up by collectors for two thousand dollars apiece—began with this: “If Donald Trump continues having trouble making interest payments on the Taj Mahal, maybe he should call up Paul Schmookler, one of his old schoolmates from New York Military Academy, for some moneymaking tips.
“To dress one fly,” marveled the author, “Schmookler will use up to 150 different materials, ranging from polar bear and mink fur to the feathers of wild turkeys, golden and Reeves pheasants, the African speckled bustard and the Brazilian blue chatterer.”
“The materials I use are not from animals on the endangered species list, or were collected before the Endangered Species Act was passed,” said Schmookler. “When you tie artistic or classic-style Atlantic salmon flies, you not only have to know materials but you have to know the law.”
Throughout the 1990s, Schmookler published a number of coffee table books with titles like Rare and Unusual Fly Tying Materials: A Natural History and Forgotten Flies, which sold for hundreds of dollars, with special edition leather-bound books with limited print runs going for over $1,500. His books appeared at the dawn of the Internet age: before long, eBay and Victorian fly-tying forums would usher in a new wave of feather addicts, hoping to tie just like Schmookler, Kelson, and Blacker.
Unlike their forebears, most of the new generation of tiers didn’t even know how to fish: salmon flies were instead treated as pieces of art. But as far as materials were concerned, the new tiers were marooned in the wrong century. There were no more stevedores in London and New York unloading shipments of Bird of Paradise skins. The tackle shops advertised in Kelson’s books were long gone. Feather-filled hats had been out of fashion for more than a hundred years. Many of the birds required in Kelson’s recipes were endangered, threatened, or protected by the CITES convention against trafficking. The new tiers were dedicated to an art form that could no longer be legally practiced without great difficulty.
The arrival of the Internet triggered a brief flood of rare birds, as enterprising eBay users rummaged through their grandmothers’ attics and uncovered Victorian hats to sell. There were online auctions of nineteenth-century cabinets, filled with curios of the natural world, including the occasional exotic bird. Offline some wealthy tiers had luck at estate sales in the British countryside. One resourceful fly-tier made off with a number of stuffed birds that he rented from a company specializing in movie props.
But there were only so many attics to explore, only so many feathers that could be plucked from 150-year-old hats. The price of a pair of feathers from the Blue Chatterer, Indian Crow, Resplendent Quetzal, or Bird of Paradise—some of which were protected species—climbed as the practice grew in popularity. The lucky few who happened to have rare bird skins were on top, idolized by the pining mass of featherless newcomers below: by virtue of owning such exotic materials, they alone could tie the most beautiful flies.
The only way most fly-tiers could see such birds was to ogle at them behind the display cases at natural history museums like the one at Tring.
6
THE FUTURE OF FLY-TYING
In 1705, just outside the Hudson Valley burg of Claverack, 120 miles north of New York City, a five-pound mastodon tooth, disinterred by the spring floods, rolled down a steep hill and landed at the foot of a Dutch tenant farmer working the fields. The farmer brought the fist-size tooth into town and traded it to a local politician for a glass of rum. The first remnant of an extinct animal discovered in America, nicknamed Incognitum, set off a frenzy of theological concerns: how could something vanish from God’s earth? Had Noah forgotten to load Incognitum onto the ark?
By 1998, when the Rist family decamped from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Claverack, another hundred species—seventy of them birds—had disappeared, hunted into extinction.
Many other things had vanished from the small town over the years. The town’s grist- and sawmills, powered for a century by the 150-foot waterfall of the Claverack Creek, had shuttered. Gone too were the cotton and wool factories. A few thousand brown trout, stocked into the creek each year by the Columbia County fishery, fan in its pools and riffles, eyeing flies and dodging anglers.
Ten years old when the family moved north, Edwin was no field and stream child: the mere sight of red ants sent him bolting for higher ground. He spent most of his time indoors, doing his homework, practicing the flute, and playing with his younger brother, Anton.
The boys were homeschooled by their parents, Lynn and Curtis, who were both Ivy League graduates and freelance writers. Lynn taught them history, while Curtis covered mathematics. By day, Curtis wrote pieces for Discover magazine on an eclectic range of topics—from the physics of the basketball foul shot, to the molecular chemistry of fine art conservation and the planetary movement of Neptune. By night, he read his sons The Iliad. The television was rarely on.
Instilled with a love of learning, Edwin leapfrogged through his lessons, devouring new subjects. On Mondays his mom would deposit him at the nearby adult-education Spanish class, where he practiced conjugations with forty-year-olds. When Edwin developed a fascination with snakes, his parents enlisted David Dickey, a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History, as a biology tutor. During a family vacation to Santa Barbara, they visited the Sea Center, where a naturalist introduced the boys to camouflaged decorator crabs and a bright-orange sea slug known as the Spanish dancer. “Now that is what I want to be for Halloween,” marveled Edwin.
His parents nurtured whatever new interests he formed. So when Edwin’s first-grade music instructor told them that their son demonstrated an innate talent on the recorder, they signed him up for private lessons. He swiftly graduated to the flute, practicing with such devotion that Anton soon followed suit, taking up the clarinet. The brothers, lovingly competitive, spurred each other to new heights of achievement. Edwin took first place in the Uel Wade Music Scholarship competition and enrolled in the international master class of Jeanne Baxtresser, the principal flautist for the New York Philharmonic.
Even at a young age, perhaps as a result of the unstructured nature of homeschooling, Edwin understood that his potential in the flute would be limited
only by his ability to focus. Anyone could learn scales or arpeggios: true mastery would require conquering techniques like multiphonics and flutter-tonguing.
But one day, late in the summer of 1999, Edwin wandered into the living room and became transfixed by what he saw on the television screen: his obsession began as a hobby but quickly grew so feverish that the eleven-year-old would soon be able to focus on little else.
* * *
• • •
As research for a piece on the physics of fly-fishing, Curtis had picked up a video called The Orvis Fly-Fishing School. In a segment on the rudiments of tying a trout fly, the Orvis host demonstrated each step on a thumbnail-size hook clamped between the jaws of a tabletop vise. Halfway into the process, he held up an ordinary hackle feather, harvested from the neck of a rooster. Like all feathers, hackles have tiny barbs that branch out from the feather’s shaft, which is known as a rachis. But when he wound the feather around the body of the fly in a helix-like wrap, a technique known as palmering, the barbs splayed out in every direction like hundreds of tiny antennae. A palmered rooster feather helps the fly float atop the river’s surface: to the hungry fish below, the barbs resemble wriggling insect legs.
Edwin was so captivated that he grabbed the remote and rewound the VHS, watching the sequence over and over, spellbound by the transfiguration of the simple feather. To tie a basic trout fly, the instructor employed a number of implements that looked as though they had spilled out of a Victorian surgeon’s bag. There were spools of fine thread, clamped between the two prongs of a stethoscope-looking tool called a bobbin. To make precise midcourse adjustments to the fibers of a feather, there was a needle-shaped device known as a bodkin. To grab hold of the narrow shaft of a feather, he used a tiny pair of hackle pliers. In the final stage of the tutorial, the instructor twisted the thread into a tight knot with a quick flourish using a whip finisher, an elegant device that resembled a deconstructed paper clip.
Edwin had a habit of diving into things, so he raced down to the basement in search of materials. After uncovering a few hooks, he rummaged through drawers for thread, but the closest thing he found was a fistful of pipe cleaners. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t any rooster hackle lying around, so he pulled a couple of feathers from his mom’s down pillows and hurried back to his room to tie his first fly.
Over the coming weeks, he tied flies with Mardi Gras beads and aluminum foil, winding whatever was at hand before untying them and starting over. But nothing came close to resembling what he saw in the video. Knowing his son was chafing for proper materials, Curtis drove him to Don’s Tackle Service, a fly-fishing shop a half hour away in Red Hook.
Don Travers, a gruff septuagenarian, wasn’t thrilled to see an eleven-year-old in his store, which was lined with trays filled with carefully organized flies, but the well-behaved boy quickly won him over, returning to the register with all the tools he’d need to get started: bags of hackle feathers, hooks, thread, bobbins, and a fly-tying vise.
Like most households at that time, the Rists didn’t have Internet at home, so Edwin relied on the Orvis video and a subscription to Fly Tyer magazine to learn the basic techniques. His brother Anton became interested, and the two were soon begging for proper instruction. In 2000 the boys began taking regular fly-tying classes at Don’s, where they met other tiers and discovered new feathers and techniques. The materials required for trout flies weren’t particularly costly: a pinch of elk hair, a couple of inches of thread and tinsel, and an ordinary hackle feather tied to a basic hook amounted to about twenty cents.
Their first instructor was a seventy-five-year-old Princeton-educated evolutionary biology professor named George Hooper, an expert on insect life and an avid fly-fisherman. He approached tying like a biologist, using head-mounted dissection magnifiers and microscopes, referring to fish by their Latin binomial names, and selecting from among what seemed to Edwin like ten thousand colors of wool to fill out the bodies of his flies.
Under Hooper’s tutelage, Edwin tied piles of flies that he had no idea how to cast: he didn’t even own a fly rod. He just liked the challenge of replicating what he saw in the Orvis video and in his magazines.
Impressed with their budding talent, Hooper urged Edwin and Anton to enter fly-tying competitions, which took place at conventions throughout the country as well as Europe, where hook makers, specialized booksellers, feather peddlers, pelt hawkers, and the stars of the show, tiers, met to sell their wares and show off their talents. The competitions had a straightforward format: entrants must tie a particular fly pattern three times in a row in front of a panel of judges, who graded for quality and consistency.
Always willing to encourage their sons’ passions, Curtis and Lynn loaded the eager boys and their gear into the car, driving to shows like the Arts of the Angler convention in Danbury, Connecticut, where Edwin tied an astonishing sixty-eight trout flies in an hour to take the title. At the Northeast Fly-tying Championship in Wilmington, Massachusetts, Anton was assigned the Hellgrammite Fly, which mimicked the look of an underwater centipede-like insect known in the Ozarks as a Devil Scratcher. He tried his best to replicate the hideous fly but was frustrated with each attempt. The boys were perfectionists at the vise and fixated on the slightest inconsistency or inaccuracy.
It was at that moment, awaiting the judges’ verdict, when Edwin saw the glimmering thing that would take a hobby and distort it into an obsession. As the brothers wandered the aisles of fly-tiers and feather dealers, Edwin’s eyes came to rest on a huge display of sixty Victorian salmon flies, all painstakingly tied according to the nineteenth-century recipes found in George Kelson’s The Salmon Fly.
Edwin had never seen anything like these spectral bursts of iridescent turquoise, emerald, crimson, and gold: compared to the ugly brown and black Devil Scratcher fly, they seemed to belong to some other planet. Many trout flies were the half the size of a penny; salmon flies were huge, tied on jet-black hooks up to four inches long. Edwin could tie a trout fly in under a minute; a single salmon fly demanded ten hours or more behind the vise.
The man who’d created them was standing nearby, watching as the boys examined each fly with reverence. He tried not to eavesdrop on their hushed conversation, but he grinned when he heard them murmur about the structural complexity of the flies. These weren’t normal kids. They were tiers.
And so it was that the brothers met Edward “Muzzy” Muzeroll. Muzzy, a marine designer who worked on Aegis-class destroyers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine, spent most of his spare time hooking trout and salmon in the Kennebec River. When it was too cold to fish, he tied flies and was considered a master of the Victorian salmon fly—his work had even graced the glossy cover of Fly Tyer. (The accompanying article was entitled: “Tying with Exotic Materials: Avoiding the Long Arm of the Law.”)
The judges announced that the boys had won first place in their respective categories, but Edwin was so entranced by Muzzy’s creations that the world of drab trout flies was rapidly losing its hold on his attention.
Edwin pleaded with his dad to arrange lessons with Muzzy. By a happy coincidence, Muzzy’s hometown of Sidney, Maine, happened to be the site of the New England Music Camp for gifted young musicians. The boys were accepted, and Edwin began counting down the days until he could learn to tie his first salmon fly.
* * *
• • •
On the day Curtis and his boys headed over to Muzzy’s for their first lesson in salmon flies, Edwin wore a bright red novelty T-shirt depicting a “Note from the desk of Toto,” the terrier from The Wizard of Oz: “Dear Dorothy: Hate Oz, took the shoes, find your own way home!” He was only thirteen, with oval-framed glasses and a spiked crop of hair, but as Muzzy escorted him through the fly shop toward the small table set up for tying Victorian salmon flies, he had the brooding quiet of a reverent pilgrim.
Next to the vise, George Kelson’s The Salmon Fly was opened to a
recipe.
THE DURHAM RANGER
Tag: Silver twist and yellow floss
Tail: One topping with indian crow over
Butt: Two turns of black ostrich herl
Body: Two turns of orange floss. Two turns of orange seal’s fur followed by black seal’s fur
Ribs: Silver lace and silver tinsel
Hackle: Over the wool only a red-coch-y-bondhu hackle
Throat: Light blue hackle
Wings: A pair of long jungle cock feathers with double tippets on both sides. Outer tippets reaching to the first dark band of the inner tippets with a topping over all
Cheeks: Chatterer
Horns: Blue Macaw
Head: Black Berlin Wool
The Durham Ranger, introduced in the 1840s by a Mr. William Henderson of Durham, England, demanded the crest feathers of the Golden Pheasant from the mountain forests of China, black and fiery orange breast feathers from the Red-ruffed Fruitcrow (known to fly-tiers as Indian Crow) of South America, ribbon-like filaments of Ostrich herl feathers from South Africa, and tiny turquoise plumes from the Blue Chatterer of the lowlands of Central America. The fly was like a snapshot of the British Empire at midcentury: employing plumes shipped up by Ostrich farmers in the Cape Colony, Blue Chatterer and Indian Crow extracted from British Guiana, and Golden Pheasant crated in the port of Hong Kong.
But Edwin would not tie with rare feathers that morning. Muzzy laid out a series of substitute feathers, or “subs,” from game and breeder birds. Instead of hard-to-get Indian Crow or Blue Chatterer, there was Ring-Necked Pheasant, dyed Turkey, and feathers from the more common Kingfisher.
The Feather Thief Page 7