The American Fly Fishing Experience: Theodore Gordon, His Lost Flies, and Last Sentiments
By John Gubbins. Published by Brule River Press, 2019; $18.00 softbound.
You’ve probably heard the story of Theodore Gordon, who is said to be the father of American fly fishing and of the Catskill style of dry fly that today is the iconic image of the sport. As the story goes, Gordon adapted the dry flies of the sedate English chalk streams that he received from British dry-fly authority Frederick Halford so they would work on the more turbulent freestone streams of New York’s Catskill Mountains.
Although he was a prolific writer of articles for fly-fishing and sporting journals such as the Fishing Gazette, beginning in 1890, and Forest and Stream, beginning in 1903, Gordon himself has been called “reclusive” and “secretive,” and despite the publication of John McDonald’s The Complete Fly Fisherman: The Notes and Letters of Theodore Gordon in 1947, he has remained something of an enigma, known if at all by a couple of photographs every American fly fisher probably has seen, one in which Gordon is dressed in a snazzy striped suit and is posed with a hunting dog, the other in which he is standing ankle deep in a stream with a woman in a dress who has hooked a trout — “the Mystery Woman,” as she is inevitably known. The enigmatic quality of his personal life has contributed to Gordon’s mystique and mythic status.
As the late historian of fly patterns Terry Hellekson pointed out in the second edition of Fish Flies: An Encyclopedia of the Fly Tier’s Art (Gibbs Smith, 2005), a lot of that story is indeed a myth. No one individual can be singled out as the progenitor of fly fishing in the United States, and the writings of several Americans, among them works by John Harrington Keene, author of Fly-Fishing and Fly-Making (1887), George M. L. LaBranche, author of The Dry Fly and Fast Water (1914), Mary Orvis Marbury, author of Favorite Flies and Their Histories (1892), Sara McBride, author of “The Metaphysics of Fly Fishing” (1876) and “Entomology for Fly Fishers” (1877), and Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, author of Superior Fishing; or, the Striped Bass, Trout and Black Bass of the Northern States (1865), “were already available in America when Gordon wrote for the Fishing Gazette, and dry flies were being offered commercially on both coasts as early as 1888.” Consequently, “To single out Gordon as being the ‘Father’ of any segment of this sport in America is inaccurate.” In addition, Hellekson argues, if anyone should get credit for the development of the Catskill-style dry fly, it’s not Gordon, but Reuben Cross, a young friend of Gordon’s who became a professional fly tyer and the precursor of the Darbee and Dette families whose flies are considered the paradigms of the style.
Myths, though, have a way of surviving being busted. They are stories that fill a need, after all, and the need for an origin story is a strong one. Fly fishers are as susceptible to their appeal as anyone else. And indeed, we know very little about Theodore Gordon the man, beyond some basic data. Originally from Pennsylvania, where he began fishing, he and his mother moved to Savannah, Georgia, where they had relatives, after his father died. He worked briefly as a stockbroker there and for another relative in New York City, but suffered financial setbacks and was an early victim of tuberculosis, which led him to the Catskills, since mountain air was thought to be a cure for the disease, or at least to be a palliative.
The blanks in Gordon’s life offer an opportunity for a novelist to fill them in imaginatively, and that is what John Gubbins has done in The American Fly Fishing Experience: Theodore Gordon, His Lost Flies, and Last Sentiments. Previously, in Profound River, Gubbins performed a similar imaginative reconstruction of the inner life of another notable figure in the history of fly fishing, Dame Juliana Berners, the author of A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle (1496), the first known work on the subject in English. For his book on Gordon, Gubbins did his homework, traveling to the Catskills, where he fished flies as Gordon tied them on the rivers where Gordon fished — the Neversink and Beaverkill and Willowemoc Creek, though the Neversink is now a tailwater, and the part where Gordon often fished is under a reservoir that delivers water to New York City. Gubbins also read all the writings, and he formed a guiding idea of Gordon’s character.
For Gubbins, the central fact of Gordon’s life was his tuberculosis, a bacterial infection of the lungs that in the 1880s killed one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe. Today, it really does take an act of imagination to enter into a life of someone stricken by TB, because it is one of those diseases that antibiotics seemed to have eradicated, until strains resistant to them began to show up. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, “lungers” were shunned as infectious and pitied as doomed. Gubbins’s Gordon is indeed reclusive, but it’s because his self-awareness as someone regarded in this way has made him so. He’s also a downright unpleasant person, and he’s aware of that, too. The book is set in 1915, the year of Gordon’s death, and his life appears in recollections and flashbacks that allow for both self-justifications and honest self-assessments. “I traded in deception,” he says, beginning as a sickly youth who “faked” signs of “vigorous life,” concealing as best he could the TB that marked him, ultimately making his living — and his mark on the world — by “fraud,” “making lifeless feathers and fur appear alive,” because “in fly tying, the trick is always the same: to imitate life.”
He is also secretive, guarding his hard-won knowledge of fly-fishing and fly-tying techniques from the public that he courts via his writing and his commercial fly tying, withholding his real secrets, but practicing what he’s learned in ways that enhance his reputation as the foremost angler in the Catskills — building his brand.
However, since we are privy to his self-confessions, we get to hear his secret theories of successful angling and imitation: “To succeed, the angler must put the right color fly in front of the trout. Color precedes all other considerations, including size and profile.” And while he gives those who buy his flies what they want and what they think he fishes — well-hackled flies with upright and divided wings, supposedly the adaptation he made so that dry flies could ride America’s more turbulent waters — what he fishes with real success are flies with a single, cocked-back wing and a sparse hackle tied only in front. Today, we call them “emergers.”
His angling technique follows from his belief in the primacy of color in fly patterns: searching for “the effective fly” by “ringing the colors,” changing different color flies until one works.
The strength of ringing the colors is that it expects failure. The overwhelming likelihood is that no one cast will produce a strike. Failure is endemic to fly fishing. If neither the first, nor the second, nor the third fly succeeds, ringing the colors will give the angler more choices above, in, or below the surface, as needed. Sooner or later, by a process of elimination, ringing the colors will put the angler into the effective fly.
A chapter lists Gordon’s most frequently used flies, complete with tying recipes (and tying comments in Gubbins’s own voice), but this is a historical novel, not a fly-tying book, and it is peopled with others in Gordon’s life, some actual historical personages, such as Roy Steenrod, George M. L. LaBranche, and Edward Ringwood Hewitt, originator of the Bivisible — a chapter is devoted to a dinner with LaBranche and Hewitt, which enables Gubbins to have Gordon explain some of his angling theories. That actually is a basic strategy in the book — it is quite “talky.” Invented characters include the snooty Mrs. Henderson, who serves to put in play criticisms of Gordon and his writings, some of which he’s able to rebut. And of course, there is “the Mystery Woman.”
Gubbins calls her “Gail.” She’s a child of the Maine woods, the self-willed daughter of a successful logger and as vital and self-assured as Gubbins’s Gordon, at his worst, is weak and weasely. It’s hard to grasp what she sees in Gordon (she calls him “my man of mystery”), but they take up and fall in love, only, in the end, to break up when Gordon can’t find the gumption to act and stubbornly guards his independence against her forceful personality when she proposes a life of vigor and health and financial security with her father’s new logging company in Michigan, practicing the sustainable forestry advocated by Gifford Pinchot.
And yes, since this is an imaginative construction of the lives of actual human beings, there is a sex scene. It is not overly graphic, and it is conditioned by what would have to have been on the mind of any TB sufferer in such a situation: How can you even kiss someone you love when you know you have an extremely communicable and ultimately fatal disease?
Faced with the task of imaginatively constructing Gordon’s consciousness, Gubbins does a good job of putting the reader inside Gordon’s head at moments such as that, when his self-consciousness is at the fore. As I said, there is also a lot of talk that is basically just an expository device, and a reader catches on pretty quickly that it’s being used in that way. In addition, viewed simply as a book, a material object, it has the defects of self-publication, the lapses in proofing and layout that are characteristic of what has become a common mode of authorship. But if all you know of Theodore Gordon is the myth about that guy in the photographs, you’ll find this a compelling reading experience.
That’s because Gubbins’s Gordon gets it. He says, “Fly fishing demands that its adherents work at being worthy of it. It demands that fly fishers develop the highest skills and greatest understanding, and only when they do will it reward them by drawing them deeper and deeper into wonder I will never understand anglers who promise to make fly fishing totally predictable. Without wonder, fly fishing becomes just one more joyless engineering project.”
— Bud Bynack
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
The Angler’s Coast
By Russell Chatham. Published by Clark City Press, 1990.
Most good artists — and all great ones — show skill in mastering technique, and all good craftsmen use the right tools. Nowhere is this more evident than in the art and life of Russell Chatham. He never set out to become rich or famous. Painting and fly fishing were things he did out of love and passion. His life could have been a shambles, but an inner drive for excellence put him on a path to grace and beauty.
He was a renowned landscape painter, angling author, and fly fisher — probably among the world’s best in all three disciplines. He never went to college. He maintained a D average in high school. “Every teacher I had wrote the same thing on my report card: not working up to capacity.” Yet he rose to the top in everything to which he put his hand. “I have life-long attention deficit disorder and this prevents me from doing anything which doesn’t excite me emotionally,” he once explained in a magazine interview. Maybe that was a gift.
What excited him most was fishing and art. As a painter, he was essentially self-taught. As a fly fisher, he was inspired by all the great angling he witnessed firsthand in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout Northern California. And he had the good fortune to have grown up at midcentury, when it was an angler’s Valhalla. He wrote a memoir about that world called The Angler’s Coast. It is among the two or three finest angling books ever written. He had no formal training as an author. He learned to write by reading as avidly as he fished. For a time, he fished every day of the year. There is something to be said for obsession. “I’ve fished obsessively since I was ten,” he told the Bloomsbury Review back in 2003, “so much so that the habit has become like breathing or a heartbeat. Years ago, I fished full-time, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter days. I very much doubt that there’s anyone who’s put in as many hours at the end of a fishing pole or caught as many f ish as I have. I can think of a couple people who are dead, but I can’t think of anyone living.”
The Angler’s Coast is a memoir of those days. But it was not written as such. It is a collection of fourteen stories originally published in magazines ranging from Sports Illustrated to the Atlantic Monthly. Each chapter can be read over and over again with undiminished pleasure. It came out in 1976, and it was the first of two volumes of fishing stories (Dark Waters is the other) that he would pen and another that he would edit (Silent Seasons) before finding recognition as a painter and living full time off his art.
“I turned to writing because I couldn’t sell my paintings,” he said many years later. “I wrote a lot of stuff during those fifteen or so years, but I lost my market, because what I liked to do, which was to tell stories rather than explain how to bait hooks, was unsuitable for the mainstream hunting and fishing magazines, and the others were disappearing or else changing their formats.”
The Angler’s Coast is a song to the great fishermen and rivers of Northern California. It is also a love letter to an anadromous fishery that has all but disappeared over time and to a California that once was. But it is not a weepy elegy. These are robust tales of fishing in the glory years. The author is an action junkie. He casts alongside other slightly deranged, but highly proficient men. They fish for treasure under the redwoods, and explore rivers, estuaries, and bays teeming with anadromous f ish. They scheme to find new ways to take salmon, steelhead, and striped bass on their fly rods. They push the boundaries of their experience by fishing the urban industrial edges of San Francisco Bay, where nature dies hard and the dark shapes of fish come and go on the tides. They are giddy with excitement, and they fish with irrepressible passion, humor, and childlike enthusiasm.
The most impressive figure in the book is Bill Schaadt, an even bigger f ish bum than Chatham. It is mainly through Schaadt that the reader gets the full sense of what the fantastic fishing was like in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Schaadt is the mad monk of California coastal fly fishing. There is nobody like him. Unmarried, he lives in a hovel in Monte Rio that would give squalor a bad name and travels from river to river throughout Northern California in season, catching salmon and steelhead. A sign painter, he works only part time so he can fish every single day in the fall and winter. His second-hand tackle would cause an Orvis salesman to faint, but nobody catches as many fish as this guy. He is a schemer and a trickster. His mania is unrivaled by anyone. He rolls his car over in the Eel River canyon, crawls out, goes fishing, and doesn’t return until evening to summon a tow truck. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and is not at all democratic when it comes to sharing his pools with others. Yet he is not to be judged solely by his competitive streak. “It is his overall sense of understanding, deep love of the natural world, energetic effort and his style, which set him so clearly apart from his contemporaries.”
This aspect is shown best, perhaps, in the book’s final chapter, “The Night of the Salmon,” a story with a marvelous O. Henry ending, a blow-by-blow account of Schaadt’s fight with a superfish on the Smith River. He tries to land a king salmon on an impossibly weakened leader, and the battle goes on for eleven hours and thirty-three minutes, until the salmon finally dies in his arms. Everyone thinks Schaadt’s fish will be a world record — only to discover in the end that he had caught and released it a few days before. “‘How I wish I had let it go again,” Schaadt tell us.
This is what emerges from Chatham’s book. The inherent goodness of the anglers stands out amid all the competition. These are decent and honest men bonding together through friendship and even rivalry. And while sometimes the ties become frayed, they still remain a band of brothers.
Chatham and his friends fish coastal rivers from San Francisco to Vancouver (where he visits his hero, Roderick HaigBrown) in pursuit of salmon and steelhead, their favorite quarry. But the author is not above catching dinky herring on a slow day in the off-season on Tomales Bay. He chases a shad run in the Central Valley and hunts for monster Lahontan cutthroat trout in a lake in the Nevada desert not far from the nation’s gambling dens and vice capitals. San Francisco Bay yields to him innumerable striped bass, and for years, he kept a rowboat chained up by a blockhouse next to the prison at San Quentin, where it was watched over by trustees. One of those stripers turned out to be a fly-rod record (36 pounds, 6 ounces), plucked from his favorite fishing hole by the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge.
His prose is a feast for the senses. Every page seems to contain a miracle. He brings a painter’s tonal palette to the imagery. “The earth was immersing itself into the pearly liquid of dusk,” he says of a winter’s evening on Tomales Bay. On the Smith River, king salmon glide in and out of mysterious underwater grottos. “Its water flows clear as air to later fold currentless into black-green pools that mirror looming redwoods and soaring osprey.” Here is nature at its most sublime. “On the floor of the redwood forest, in eternal silence, mushrooms grew where the sun had not shown for a thousand years.” The riddle of migration from sea to river is evoked thus: “To understand the salmon, it has been said, would be to crack the universe.” But perhaps the most evocative image is the sight of Chatham and a friend bobbing in a rowboat on San Francisco Bay. “We are virtually within sight of well over a million people, yet alone.”
These stories never stray from their straightforward purpose of being angling tales, but it is the intangibles that stand out. Chatham never has to answer the question of why we fish, because the answer is implied in the action and in the character of anglers such as Bill Schaadt. Chatham does not have to meditate on themes of excellence, because the excellence is built right there into the technique — not just in the fishing, but in the prose, in the way the book says all it wants to say without any wasted words or ungainly sentences. Each tale delves in its own way into the personal side of angling and the true value of being passionate about something, no matter what that might be. There is a right way of going about something, devoting yourself whole-heartedly to it, that can put you on the path to excellence. That mastery doesn’t have to be about fishing. The author shows us how passion, determination, and skill in anything can lead us to finding our rightful place in the world.
This book is as much epitaph as celebration. We will never see the like of such a fishery again. The days of twenty kings on twenty casts are over. They were on their way out when Chatham wrote his book. In the opening chapter, he acknowledges as much. “But the California fishery is almost a thing of the past. In 1956, Schaadt landed between eight hundred and nine hundred steelhead in the Russian River. Fishing the same number of hours today he would be lucky to catch twenty.”
That was in 1976. In 1990, Chatham brought out an expanded edition of the book, enlarged to include photographs of the great fishermen and rivers of our West Coast. He wrote this in his introduction: “If these stories were originally written as documents of things going on, they now record conditions only vaguely remembered. Wild salmon and steelhead are hovering on the brink of extinction.”
The Angler’s Coast belongs on every angler’s bookshelf, if only to remind us of what we have lost.
