101 Favorite Dry Flies: History, Tying Tips, and Fishing Strategies
By David Klausmeyer. Published by Skyhorse Publishing, 2013; $14.95 softbound.
Inspiration comes to fly tyers in many different ways. Some evenings, it comes from the bottom of a glass, although the results usually tend to look seriously weird in the sober light of the next day. And sometimes, the muse of fly tying actually inspires someone to create something new, beautiful, and — better yet — effective as a way of actually catching fish.
But sometimes, the muse, though bidden or though invoked by libations, refuses to descend and whisper in a tyer’s ear. That’s where a book like Dave Klausmeyer’s 101 Favorite Dry Flies comes in. Basically, it’s a compendium of interesting ideas for creating variations on existing dry-fly trout patterns and a source of unusual approaches to the concept of the dry fly. The book consists of a picture of each fly, a fly recipe, and a very short text that relates a tying tip, a factoid of angling history associated with the fly, or a fishing strategy for using the fly. War and Peace it ain’t, but if you’re a fly tyer, paging through it is a stimulating experience. It makes you go “Hmmm.”
Anyone who actually has 101 favorite dry flies must suffer from a severe inability to make decisions, but what the title refers to here is not Klausmeyer’s own list of favorite dries, but the favorite patterns of a number of folks from around the country who contributed their preferences, plus a few of his own. It’s a diverse collection of tyers that ranges from East Coast traditionalists such as Mike Valla and Dave Brandt, through innovators such as Jay “Fishy” Fullum, to Westerners such as Craig Mathews, Al and Gretchen Beatty, and Al Ritt. Klausmeyer is the editor of Fly Tyer magazine, and he’s clearly made use of his Rolodex.
As a result, there’s a lot going on, and what makes you go “Hmmm” may be different from what interests me, but here’s a quick overview. There are a fair number of traditional Catskill patterns among the 101, but they’re interesting as provocations to innovation because many of them riff on the established Catskill formula, rather than just rotely repeating the canonical ties. Valla’s Spirit of Harford Mills, a variation on the classic, palmered-bodied Spirit of Pittsford Mills, is one example. And there are riffs on other, more recent patterns, such as Dennis Potter’s Opal series, which uses opal Mirage tinsel for bodies on flies like the X-Cad- dis. There are patterns that exemplify interesting fly-design or ty- ing twists, such as Gary LaFontaine’s Royal Double Wing, and there are patterns that push the envelope for how to think about tying a dry fly, including Sam Swink’s Transducer, which takes the two-tone-body concept of Cutter’s E/C Caddis to the extreme of building both a nymph and an emerging mayfly dun on the same hook — in size 16, no less — and Al Ritt’s Struggling Green Drake, which builds a separate, articulated abdomen for the dry fly on a Wiggle Shank.
If you tie trout flies, you’ll probably find something here that makes you go “Hmmm,” too. As a source of inspiration, 101 Favorite Dry Flies is worth having in your library And it’s cheaper than good scotch.
Bud Bynack
Eight Points of Light: Eight People Who Changed Fly Fishing Who You Probably Do Not Know Very Well
By Victor R. Johnson, Jr. Published by EP Press, 2013; $27.50 softbound.
Vic Johnson has been a quiet, but significant voice in sport angling over the past decade or so, writing well-researched and readable books that chronicle important aspects of the fly-fishing world. He’s done a fine history of the Fenwick rod company, another on fiberglass fly rods, and two more on fly lines and waders. They’re indispensable sources of information on those subjects. His most recent work, Eight Points of Light, is a warm and detailed look at eight people who indeed changed fly fishing, and it’s also probable that at least a few of them are folks you don’t know very well.
The idea came from Johnson’s research for his other books, when he realized that “some of the people who made major contributions to our sport did not get the recognition that they deserve.” I’m not so sure that’s true as far as at least half of the eight are concerned, though perhaps I’m too immersed in the arcana of fly fishing to be a fair judge, but in any event, the stories of John- son’s eight contributors make for rewarding reading, if you care as much about the context of our sport as about practicing it.
A few of the figures that Johnson discusses have strong California presences. Jimmy Green of Fenwick invented the first blank-to-blank ferrule and was the guiding design force behind Fenwick in the years when it was arguably the major U.S. player in the fly-rod game. Myron Gregory, an angler and tournament caster, was responsible with Art Ag- new of Sunset Line and Twine Company and a few others for developing the numerical system by which we describe fly lines. Hal Janssen, best known to some of us as a ridiculously good fisherman, is also someone whose fly patterns and behind-the-scenes work with line manufacturers made a real mark on modern fly tackle.
The histories of the remaining figures in Johnson’s book are rooted in other places. Theo Bakelaar is a Dutch angler and tyer who was the first to see the advantages of and to promote something that’s now so common that new fly fishers think it’s always been that way: beads on the heads on sinking flies. Michigan’s Art Neumann was a fly-tackle dealer and rod maker and the major force in starting Trout Unlimited. Tom Whiting, a Ph.D. poultry scientist who didn’t fly fish, is responsible for developing and promoting most of the high-quality fly-tying hackle on the planet. Dick Posey still runs Lami- glas, a company whose fly-rod designs were right up there with those of Silaflex and Fenwick in the 1960s, who briefly ran both that company and Fenwick in a tumultuous period in the 1980s, and whose company still prospers while many other U.S. rod makers have disappeared. Cecilia “Pudge” Kleinkauf, is an Alaskan “trail-blazer for women in fly fishing.” Interesting stories, all of them.
Johnson points out that some readers will wonder why he didn’t choose others instead of the eight he picked. But John- son points out that he wasn’t looking for the best, or for the first to do something, only for folks who he thought weren’t as well known as they should be.
The text of Eight Points of Light is ably supported by scores of good photographs, by reprints of old advertisements, and by copies of letters to and by the principal characters. And in a nice touch, the book also comes with a CD that includes video and audio footage of the eight. All in all, it’s a great tripleheader of text, images, and electronics that in focusing on the ideas, inspirations, and sacrifices of some very normal extraordinary people, puts a human face on a sport that too easily can be seen as little more than fancy gear, ar- cane flies, and distant waters.
Larry Kenney
Cowboy Trout: Fly Fishing as if It Matters
By Paul Schullery. Published by Montana Historical Society Press, 2006; $17.95 soft-bound.
By “Western” fly fishing, the historian-angler Paul Schullery means the northern Rockies, and not the West Coast. Californians might as well be Martians as far as real Westerners are concerned. When I was doing a lot of fishing in Montana, a popular putdown was to call someone a “California caster.” Never mind that Californians invented long-distance fly casting and hold most of the records. There’s a certain mindset out there in Big Sky Country. Cowboy Trout: Western Fly Fishing as if It Matters is about how the Rocky Mountain West became the “philosophical home” of fly fishing.
The soul of trout fishing moved from the East to the West — everybody knows that — and most people assume it happened overnight. One day the Catskills and Poconos were the capitals of American trout fishing, and the next day it was Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, and the Colorado Front Range. “We don’t have any history in the West; we’re just making it now,” is something Paul Schullery heard all the time from Western fly fishers. But the historian knew better, and he wrote this book to set us straight.
The paradigm shift from East to West has been going on ever since the last half of the nineteenth century. Contrary to popular belief, the first prominent novelist to arrive in Livingston, Montana, gripping a fly rod wasn’t Tom McGuane, but Rudyard Kipling. Kipling judged Livingston to be “a grubby little hamlet full of men without clean collars and perfectly unable to get through one sentence unadorned by three oaths.” Kipling’s account of catching trout in vast numbers in Yankee Jim Canyon on the Yellowstone River in the summer of 1889 was published in his volume American Notes. Schullery points out with some satisfaction that the first book devoted exclusively to Eastern fly fishing and the first book devoted to Western fly fishing were published within eight years of each other, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. And the first book on fly fishing in Yellowstone Park was published way back in 1910. In short, the Western scene has been around a lot longer than most people realize. There have of course been a few changes over the years.
At one time, fly fishing for trout was something that a Westerner might do on his day off from mending fences or working on the railroad. Nowadays, according to Schullery, the act of fly fishing almost defines being a Westerner. Even people who don’t live there think of themselves as Western fly fishers. “A curious thing about visiting fly fishers in the West,” Schullery writes, “is that it is extremely likely that most of them don’t even think of themselves as tourists.” Schullery asks in the subtitle of the introduction, “Can Fly Fishing Make You a Westerner?” In many minds, the answer is yes.
Schullery takes the story all the way back to the Grant administration, when at least one member of the Washburn Expedition got in a bit of fly fishing as the group was surveying the Yellowstone region in preparation for turning it into the nation’s first national park. The Washburn party was soon followed by well-bred Eastern dudes and remittance men eager to see the geysers and other splendors of the West. They brought their split-cane rods to the high country and preached dry-fly codes developed on faraway British chalk streams. The hidebound traditionalists soon learned that the bigger and brawnier rivers of the Rockies required longer casts, larger flies, and a more muscular approach to the sport.
The pastime’s popularity grew, and by the time the Great Depression came around, Don Martinez was seeing two kinds of anglers walking into his fly shop in West Yellowstone, Montana — Eastern dry-fly purists decked out in fishing’s fashionable livery and “club-footed peasants” hailing from closer to home. Schullery de- votes a chapter to all the cross-pollination that went on between Eastern and Western fly tyers, the development of the “Bun- yan Bug” tied by Norman Edward Means that figured so prominently in A River Runs Through It, the historical roles played by George Grant and other practitioners of the Montana “hair-weaver” school of ty- ing, and the shifting emphasis from traditional mayfly patterns to caddisflies and especially stoneflies, which are so abundant in Western rivers. No doubt this will be of much interest to all fly fishers except me. All I took away from it was that trout will rise to anything.
Of more interest to me was the chapter devoted to the folklore and traditions behind Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. Schullery agrees that the novella is a masterpiece, but thinks that Norman’s younger brother, Paul Maclean, was a major asshole. Schullery notes that every river in the West must have produced a fly-fishing wizard like Norman’s younger brother. But Paul Maclean is too driven, intense, and competitive onstream, a fish hog not above spoiling a companion’s sport. Offstream, he’s violent and self-destructive. All true, but he’s the only one in the book who’s rammed with life — un-less you count Rawhide, the equestrian whore. I found Paul to be a lot more fun than his boring brother Norman. The only criticism I have of Maclean’s story is a charge I would level at both Maclean brothers: their regional chauvinism and tough-guy posturing is unconvincing. Norman takes great pains to point out that his home river, the Big Blackfoot, is a big-fish river, which would come as a surprise to any West Coast steelhead angler.
A River Runs Through It is a fishing story that is about something other than fishing. Maclean said in an interview that he set out to write “a modern high tragedy.” But it is fly fishing that gives meaning and form to his tragic story. Schullery says that this slim novella marked the beginning of a trend in regional fishing literature that he calls “Big Sky Angst.” These are fishing stories in which educated, healthy, well-fed white people live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, do a fair amount of fly fishing on transcendently lovely rivers, and are, of course, miserable.” But Schullery says that is precisely “the kind of classically trained misery we require from major literature.” Maclean’s story has that “fine and graciously tuned sense of hopelessness about life that is almost a requirement for important fiction.” Maclean tells us that life is numinous, but tragic. Schullery gripes that not all great literature has to be dark — it’s one of his pet peeves. I myself would rather read P. G. Wodehouse than Dostoyevsky. But much of the great music is composed in the minor keys. Just try to tell Beethoven to be cheerful.
Schullery notes that God’s name keeps coming up a lot in A River Runs Through It. And that the frontier has shifted from a Rocky Mountain high to a much higher plane. This kind of embarrasses him. Yes, he gets it — the whole idea that fly fishing is a spiritual quest — a “Taoist catching/not-catching state of being in which the fish becomes less than the fishing, and the fishermen becomes one with some greater or finer something: the line, the fly rod manufacturer, the fly tier, the trout, the river, the watershed, the cosmos. The authors of these spiritual exclamations are in fact on to something important. I admit that there are parallels between a purely spiritual quest and the pursuit of unattainable perfection that fly fishing can become.” But it’s all so “self-congratulatory” and “embarrassing,” this whole “river as church” idea. Aren’t fly fishers, Schullery asks us, just setting ourselves up for the kind of ridicule now being heaped upon the nature pantheists in the environmental movement?
I myself am not too worried about it. Biologists are uncovering in the DNA what primitive people have always suspected to be true. The first, intuitive spiritual beliefs of humankind were that everything’s connected, and it’s all Gaia. It could turn out to be verifiable. And then the metaphysical fly fishers will be seen as the ultimate scientific anglers. If things get any more spiritual out there in the Rocky Mountains, the scene might become less “cowboy” than “West Coast.” And why not? We taught them how to cast.
Michael Checchio
In the Sierra: Mountain Writings
By Kenneth Rexroth. Published by New Directions, 2012; $16.95, softbound.
A while back, in a profile I wrote of Kenneth Rexroth, I suggested that readers of California Fly Fisher might want to toss his Complete Poems into their backpacks on their next fishing trip to the Sierra Nevada. I was being facetious, because at 800 pages, lifting it would give you a hernia. But New Directions has come out with a handy paperback containing Rexroth’s best mountain poems and other writings on the Sierra, and now all that inspiration has become portable.
Rexroth always took his fly rod to the mountains, and he spent as much time up there as John Muir did. He camped for months at a time, writing most of his poems and books under a tarp or in a tent. (How many public intellectuals can say that?) He not only could translate from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, but he could rank over a dozen types of firewood by the rate at which they smoke and burn. His knowledge of star constellations and nebulae was so spot on that you can date his poems by his descriptions of their positions in the night sky. And when it came to fooling trout, he certainly knew the difference between a Royal Coachman and a Parmachene Belle.
In the Sierra: Mountain Writings contains everything Rexroth ever wrote about the Sierra Nevada, both poems and prose. It includes selections from an “autobiographical novel,” his newspaper columns, personal correspondence, and a camping handbook that he wrote for the Works Progress Administration during the Great
Depression. Contemporary readers will be fascinated by his accounts of what it was like to camp and fish in the Sierra in the years between two world wars and in a later era of gas rationing, when people still used packhorses to get up into the high country.
Fly fishers might not believe the size of the trout Rexroth took out of the Merced River in Yosemite Valley and in some of the creeks in Kings Canyon and in Sequoia National Park. That kind of fishing is unimaginable today. It was even on its way out in Rexroth’s lifetime. West-slope Sierra creeks that once yielded lunkers for him in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s were surrendering only small trout to the poet by the time the 1960s rolled around, with its marijuana and “flower power.” “The High Sierra are getting civilized — or at least Los Angelized,” he wrote. Sic transit gloria mundi. But what a world it once was.
Rexroth was the spiritual godfather of the Beats and one of the first poets to write about ecology — the relationship of species to each other and to their environment. He took a biocentric, rather than an anthropocentric view of humanity’s place in the larger scheme of things — but he did not take it to the extreme that California’s other great nature poet, Robinson Jeffers, did, who wrote, “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” One gets the impression from Jeffers that if the human race were to die out and all that was left was a seal or two on the beach, that would be perfectly all right with him. Rexroth had something Jeffers lacked — a sense of humor. “Reverence for life in the abstract is fine,” Rexroth wrote, “but I am willing to let Albert Schweitzer worry about the spirochetes his injections kill. My reverence is for human life. So I am all for the preservation of wilderness areas, but not just so the bears can look at each other.” Rexroth was as well versed in the outdoors as he was well read, a true outdoorsman, and no mere tenderfoot or literary aesthete. And his vast knowledge is on full display in this book — perhaps a little more than contemporary readers might want to know about how to build a lean-to in a snowstorm. Still, it’s a lot of fun to know how it was in the days when people weren’t afraid to rough it.
Fly fishers will be more than envious of the angling. In one account, Rexroth describes how he and his young daughter Marie quickly took their limit of trout on a feeder creek that was emptying into the Kern River — Rexroth on a fly rod and little Marie by dangling a fly over the water with her hand. In those days, a limit of trout could easily feed the crowd that had assembled to hear Jesus preach the Sermon on the Mount, so the poet and his daughter gave their surplus trout to hikers and horsepackers they met on the trail.
But it is in his sublime nature poems that Rexroth displays his most dazzling knowledge of the inner and outer life of the mountains. Rexroth was a poet of nature and Eros, and he also wrote about war and injustice, his poems and essays dealing with much of the upheaval and social turmoil of the twentieth century. For him, the mountains of the Sierra were a refuge for mind and body. “So if I go away for a little and associate with rocks and stars and flowers and fish, the living perspective comes back.”
Those mountains can do the same for us today. It’s a pity the trout in the Merced aren’t as big as they once were or that the crowds overrun Yosemite like ants on a marshmallow. Maybe Jeffers, the fierce poet of Carmel, was on the money when it came to the human race. But Jeffers wasn’t a fly fisher, as far as I know. And the old grouch never knew how much fun it could be to tie on an old-fashioned fly such as a Dusty Miller and cast it to a rising trout on an overcast autumn day. If he had, it might have improved his attitude considerably. It certainly improved Rexroth’s, who had a lot of trouble with personal relationships. For an account of how he shipwrecked on the reef of his marriages, you’ll have to look elsewhere, though. In the Sierra is a testament to nature. And it belongs on the bookshelf next to the works of Jeffers and John Muir and the poetry of Gary Snyder.
Michael Checchio
I’ve Never Met an Idiot on the River: Reflections on Family, Fishing, and Photography
By Henry Winkler. Published by Insight Editions, 2011; $14.99 softbound.
Everyone knows the Fonz — that iconic ladies’ man played by Henry Winkler on the Happy Days TV show, which enjoyed a 10-year run beginning in 1974. Like the Fonz, Winkler is a charming, good-natured, happy-go-lucky guy. But according to his wife, Stacey, his disposition changes dramatically when it comes to fly fishing. “Henry’s glass is always half full, and he is always patient and easygoing. Except when he is fly fishing,” Stacey says in the opening chapter of Winkler’s book, I’ve Never Met an Idiot on the River, which was a New York Times best seller. “One year in Montana, my calm and loving husband, who has always been shockingly patient with our children, actually threw a wader boot across the room because our daughter, Zoe, then a teenager, was taking too long to prepare for an afternoon of fishing,” says Stacey, Winkler’s wife of 35 years. “After the boot-hurling incident, we told the children that positioning themselves between their father and the trout was courting disaster.”
The book, which was first published two years ago hardbound, but just released in paperback, contains Winkler’s meandering prose about fishing pristine streams and rivers in Idaho and Montana and his photographs of mountain scenes, his family, and a few big trout. Winkler has published 17 children’s books, but this is his first nonfiction work.
Winkler’s I’ve Never Met an Idiot on the River is what the subtitle says it is: a reflection on family, fishing, and photography. Beginning with the introduction by Stacey, the chapters relate Winkler’s experiences as someone relatively new to fly fishing and are filled with sometimes humorous insights into the romance of the sport. The book includes a candid account of his expectations and weaknesses as a fly fisher and the tribulations involved in dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles for work and Montana for play. And he explains how all aspects of his life, from learning scripts, to taking photographs, to fly fishing, have been more challenging because he was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 31.
Winkler’s writing and humor are at their best when he’s describing his experience of painstakingly mastering his fly-rod casting skills: “With enough practicing, I became so proficient that the herds of moose in the bushes quit snickering. There’s no kidding around when I describe my technique as U-G-L-Y. I don’t have the precision or the economy of movement you see with the most graceful fly-fishing artists. My wrist bends. My timing is off. And my line does not flutter like an elegant waterfowl as it lands on the water.” Winkler says he isn’t quite a “10 o’clock, 2 o’clock” type of caster: “I’m probably at 12:30 and then somewhere around 4:15, but thankfully, trout can’t tell time.”
So Winkler never met an idiot on the river — instead, he found a lot of joy and fun. And even when he’s sloshing around in water-filled waders, he’s reflecting on the higher meaning of fly fishing.
Tom Martens
