Tying Bugs: The Complete Book of Poppers, Sliders, and Divers for Fresh and Salt Water
By Kirk Dietrich. Published by Stackpole, 2019; $39.95 softbound.
“If I worked my hands in wood, would you still love me?” The line from Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter” from the 1960s was an earworm as I read Kirk Dietrich’s Tying Bugs. I review a lot of fly-tying books, and their intended audience is pretty straightforward: it’s fly tyers (duh) — that is, people who want to lash and bend materials onto hooks, intending to fool fish, from tiny brook trout to big pelagic species, working in a tradition that extends back at least to 1496 and Dame Juliana Berners’s Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle. Kirk Dietrich’s Tying Bugs wants the love of fly tyers, but it sits athwart that tradition at an odd angle.
Fly fishers who fish poppers, sliders, and divers, especially for stillwater and saltwater species, certainly are interested in creating their own flies. Within the fly-tying tradition, spinning deer-hair heads and bodies has been one of the principal ways that’s been done, at least for freshwater flies. But this book explicitly excludes deer-hair flies from its purview. It’s about building solid-body bugs from various kinds of wood and synthetic materials. The short title therefore actually isn’t really accurate. The phrase Dietrich uses throughout to describe what he does is “making bugs,” and as he says at one point, the book sometimes reads like “a syllabus for a carpentry class.”
Yet at the same time, fly fishing for bass can claim to be the one truly American fly-fishing tradition, stretching back well into the nineteenth century, especially in the South, and forming a part of the canon of American angling literature, in the writings of Thaddeus Norris, among others, antedating the focus on trout and the dry fly that arrived after 1900 with Theodore Gordon and George M. L. LaBranche. The top-water bass bug is America’s dry fly, as Tom Jindra points out in the foreword to this book, and like other aspects of fly fishing, it has a history.
Dietrich attributes the development of the modern, commercially available hard-body bass popper to Earnest H. Peckinpaugh of Chattanooga, Tennessee, around 1910, and one of the interesting aspects of Tying Bugs is Dietrich’s attention to the history of his craft: from the development of the hump-shank hook to prevent bodies from spinning, which is attributed to Cal McCarthy, a Chicago fly tyer, in the 1920s; to Peckinpaugh and his Peck’s Bugs, including the crude, original Night Bug; to Peckinpaugh’s successors; and to others who designed bugs at the behest of the likes of Joe Brooks and Lefty Kreh. Still, the ambiguous relation of making bass bugs to tying flies appears in the sources for such a history, which can be found more in the writing about American fishing lures than in the abundant literature of American fly fishing.
And in a book of 12 chapters, the final one a how-to about actually fishing these bugs, it’s not until you get to Chapter 11, “Dressing It Up: The Fly-Tying Part,” that what fly tyers do becomes the topic. But the book is thoughtfully structured to lead even those familiar only with hare’s masks and CDC puffs through what it takes to build a hardbody bass popper, a process more like building a model airplane from scratch than tying a Parachute Adams.
It really is quite a process. It’s all about the body. After a chapter surveying the parts of a popper, with emphasis on body materials and weed guards, Dietrich starts out by identifying some of the basic tools you’ll need to create the basic body and shape it. I say “some,” because these are just the saws, knives, drill bits, glues, and drying racks you’ll need to get going. As the process progresses, there will be more tools that seem almost essential, if you want a classy finished product, including a rotary tool such as a Dremel and an airbrush setup, complete with an air compressor. And you’ll still need a fly-tying vise for the fly-tying part.
Almost all poppers, divers, and sliders are more or less cylindrical, but they have been tweaked into more complex tapers and shapes, and while excellent preformed bodies are commercially available from purveyors such as Wapsi, shaping raw materials is the basic task of the craft, and Dietrich prefers to modify even the preshaped bodies that are available. For a classic bass bug, shaping the body means shaping wood, and one of the many things I learned from Tying Bugs is that in addition to the cork and balsa that I expected to see discussed, a number of other woods — Tupelo gum, paulownia, and basswood, as well as grades of balsa not found in hobby shops — can be used and even are preferred in some uses.
These come in rectangular pieces, and before you can go further, they need to be converted to cylinders, as do blocks of foam, even if they’re just the soles of flip-flops. For wood, this can be accomplished by carving and sanding by hand, though it’s easier if you have a lathe (you have a lathe, right?), and for foam, you can fabricate plug cutters from copper pipe. Despite the use of some pretty serious shop machinery, there’s actually a fair amount of tool making that goes on throughout the process, including crafting jigs and sanding blocks.
And of course, how you shape poppers, divers, and sliders is a little different for each kind of bug, as is fabricating the head of a frog imitation. In fact, there are numerous basic shapes that have developed over the years, just as have types of dry flies — Catskill style, parachutes, foam bodies, and so on — and there’s plenty here about each, including the classic Gerbubble Bug, developed by Tom Loving of Baltimore in the 1920s; Tony Accardo’s Round Dinny diver, with its spherical head; and Dietrich’s own Rabid Dog slider, which dips subsurface and “walks the dog” like a Zara Spook conventional lure.
Shaping a body is the basis for making any bug, and placing it correctly on the correct hook to get the desired action matters (there’s plenty about that here), but the bug is not close to complete until you apply some kind of finish, including eyes. As Dietrich says, you probably could catch plenty of bass with an unpainted popper, but you wouldn’t catch the eye of many bass anglers, and anyway, you’d still have to seal it and coat it to keep it afloat and for durability.
As when painting your living room, a lot of what goes into painting a bug is prep work. First, the body needs to be sealed. Breathes there a wine-drinking fly fisher with soul so dead who never to himself or herself has said, “I could make a popper out of those corks!” And you can, though Dietrich prefers the composite corks with no voids that have become prevalent since cork became in short supply. But cork is porous, as are the softer woods. The wine-cork poppers I once tried to make just sucked up the paint. Sealing is essential.
Once a bug is sealed, there are a lot of ways to apply color, including markers, brush-on-paints, or even nail polish, but the really professional-looking results come from airbrushing with one of the available airbrush systems and a variety of homemade spray masks and stencils to get all kinds of imitative and attractive effects. This is when a mere three-dimensional object turns into a work of art. The effects that Dietrich achieves with an airbrush, masks, and markers are stunning. They obviously take a lot of practice to master, but so does tying off a parachute hackle without screwing it up, and very few people have ooh’d and aah’d over that, while the results that Dietrich gets have a serious wow factor. If the book has a hook, this is it. You’ll say, “I’d really like to be able to do that.”
After a chapter on applying eyes and a final sealer for durability, you finally come to the chapter on things you probably really can do now, even if you’re a novice fly tyer — apply tails and a skirt between the tail and the body of the bug and add rubber legs, though that can involve drilling into a painted and sealed body, which can be scary. He also covers making articulated tails, with articulated flies being a thing now, and there’s an interesting section on how to make bucktail legs for frog poppers. That chapter ends with directions for finishing a number of specific designs, including an original Peckinpaugh popper and the interesting Gerbubble Bug.
As a carpenter, I am what my grandfather used to call a “wood butcher,” and I recall being told by the shop teacher during the semester that I took his required class in high school, “It’s a good thing you’re going to college.” Shaping and painting wood, or even working with more forgiving materials such as preshaped foam, are not among my skill sets. However, Dietrich convinces me that if I applied myself, this book could teach me how to make a decent top-water bass lure, even if my bookcases never come out exactly square. For fly tyers who fish for bass, it should be all you need to learn to build your own bugs, if you’re willing to commit to acquiring the skills and the appropriate tools.
Kirk Dieter is from New Orleans, and just as the South was the cradle of American bass-bug f ly fishing, Louisiana has been its playpen, with local tyers such as Tom Nixon applying what they have learned from fishing the bayous to the development of effective bass patterns — variations on his Calcasieu Pig Boat long have been praised in California Fly Fisher by both the late Richard Alden Bean and “The Stillwater Fly Fisher” columnist Trent Robert Pridemore, and Nixon’s Fly Tying and Fly Fishing for Bass and Panfish, originally published in 1968, is one of the basic modern works on bass angling in the United States. Kirk Dietrich has gone about as deeply into the craft of bug making as you can go, working out the relationship between how a bug is made and how it performs in the only way that matters — by fishing his creations on his local Louisiana waters. And as I noted, he also is aware that much like the Darbees and the Dettes were in the Catskills, he is working in an American tradition, both keeping the past alive and carrying it forward into the future. Tying Bugs could well be the definitive work on tying hard-body tying bass bugs for our time and a resource for future fly tyers — or at least for future bug makers.
— Bud Bynack
Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers
By John Gierach. Published by Simon and Schuster, 2020; $27.00 hardbound.
I picked up a copy of John Gierach’s Trout Bum in 1986. Despite what they say about judging a book by its cover, I bought it simply because I liked the title. This book quickly became a cult classic among fly fishers and launched the literary career of one of the best contemporary authors out there today. He has been on a roll ever since, becoming one of the most prolific outdoor writers of our time, writing 22 books and coauthoring 4 others. In 1994, he was awarded the Federation of Fly Fishers Roderick HaigBrown Award for his literary contributions to our sport. I quickly became hooked on his humorous and down-to-earth writing style. After having read most of his books, I must say that I have very much enjoyed each of them while eagerly awaiting the next one.
Gierach’s latest book, Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, is one his best efforts yet. In the first chapter, he explains how as a young man, he used cash (his inheritance) to buy “the cheapest house in the county” in a small town in Colorado, because as a “free-lance” writer, he could not qualify for a loan. This “wretched but habitable little house” also just happened to be across the street from a trout stream. Here is where he started his journey as a true trout bum, living a lifestyle any fly fisher would envy: traveling, fishing, and writing about it.
In this book, Gierach will take you to many destinations, fly fishing for a variety of different species, from farm ponds for bluegills to Labrador for brook trout. There is a chapter on Pyramid Lake, where he describes fishing for Lahontan cutthroats using a ladder. “The first time I climbed up on one of these things the whole operation felt a little too vertiginous for my taste, but then I quickly got used to it and eventually began to feel mildly regal, like a nineteenth-century English sahib hunting tigers from the back of an elephant.” He also takes you to the Quinault River on the Olympic Peninsula, fishing with Trey Combs for steelhead “where enormous silver dreamslabs will happily eat your flies and then proceed to destroy your expensive tackle.” Fishing for muskies in Wisconsin, he casts “20-inch flies for 50-inch fish” where the local technique is to “figure-8 the fly at the end of every retrieve: to induce a strike from an unseen muskie that, 99 casts out of a hundred, isn’t there.” In the chapter “Fish Dogs,” he describes a dog named Buddy who was “happy to wait patiently while you hooked, played, and landed a fish and then step in for a quick sniff before you released it. If a fish didn’t take, he’d shrug philosophically and move on, but if you missed a strike or had a fish on and lost it, he’d turn and give you a withering look. In fact, Buddy was the only dog I ever met that could roll his eyes.” My wife, who does not fish, but loves dogs, read this chapter and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Gierach of course has a vast knowledge of fly fishing that can be obtained only by spending decades on the water. However, it’s not the great places or the fishing that stand out in this book. As in all the others, it is his writing style that captures you. He makes you feel as if you know him, as if you were riding in an old pickup truck with an old friend on a trip to a remote river that you promise not ever to tell anyone about. His humble, sometimes self-deprecating, hilariously witty way of storytelling is addictive. Imagine Mark Twain with a fly rod in his hand. Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers has a wide appeal and can be enjoyed by fishers and nonfishers alike.
— Roger LeGrande
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Just Before Dark, by Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison liked to say that he craved the substantial in life. That’s why he ordered doubles in bars. He was a poet, fiction writer, nature lover, outdoorsman, and trencherman par excellence. Unlike his friends Tom McGuane and Russ Chatham, he wasn’t a wordclass fly fisher in any technical sense. He was often more interested in what he was having for lunch than in what the trout were taking, and he said that his guide had to tie his fly on for him because he couldn’t see anything that small. But he more than made up for a lack of expertise by his avidity for the natural world.
The author of 12 novels, 24 novellas, and 13 volumes of poetry, he also found time, in between screenplays, travel essays, food writing, and a book-length memoir to pen magazine stories about his fishing and hunting sojourns. He called a lot of his nonfiction “ journalism,” but he wrote in the style of the personal essay, a form perfected by writers such as Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, and Edward Abbey.
Just Before Dark brings together 18 of Harrison’s sporting essays in a broad collection that ranges over his other great passions, including travel, literary matters, and food and wine. Harrison’s life was a banquet for the senses that he generously shared with his readers. One of the great pleasures in literature is walking around in Jim Harrison’s head.
Many of these sporting pieces first appeared in magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy. The earliest, from the 1970s, display some hip attitudinizing that now seems comically dated, but they reveal as much about the man as his topics do. Taken together, they suggest the life experience and philosophy that gave birth to masterpieces such as Legends of the Fall and Dalva.
For Harrison, sport wasn’t just about filling the game bag, although that was important, too. Putting game birds on the table, eating your catch, was your birthright if you grew up in rural Michigan. It was all part of the rich tapestry of country life, time-honored and ecologically sound. Hunting and fishing, done responsibly, brought him closer to the natural world. He was reverential about the woods, but we aren’t made to feel as if we are in Sunday school.
“A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven” brings readers to Kalkaska, Michigan, for the thirty-fourth annual National Trout Festival, a celebration of bait dunking and small-town civic boosterism. “The Violators” throws a spotlight on poaching by “snaggers” and “ jacklighters,” who abound in the north woods. “Guiding Light in the Keys” and “A Day in May” mixes tarpon f ishing with the gaudy nightlife of Key West. “La Venerie Francaise” affords Harrison an opportunity to hunt and feast in France in the company of a genuine count, his friend Guy de la Valdene. “Night Games” explores trout fishing after nightfall, when the mosquitoes are out in droves, a popular pastime in northern Michigan — as is “Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport.” “Bird Hunting” renders the sensory pleasures of early autumn in Michigan in pursuit of woodcocks and grouse, an annual ritual that has as much to do with menu planning as wing shooting.
Harrison conveys the freshness of the outdoors and the autumn palette of the hunt, “the sere umbers, the siennas, the subdued Tuscan riot that is a Michigan October.” This feast for the senses moves indoors into Harrison’s kitchen, where chunks of grouse and sweetbreads marinate in cream and Tabasco and woodcocks are plucked for the grill. The “rinse” is three bottles of Montrachet and four of Chateauneuf du Pape. “And so it goes. We hunt hard during the short Indian summer days and cook hard during the long evenings A week of the local hunting leaves us with a caloric load that we can’t quite walk off in our daily hunting. I would like to say that somehow our genes are issuing messages to store up for the coming winter but this is ardent nonsense.”
In “A Sporting Life,” the child is father to the man. “It begins very young up in the country,” he opens his story. “On many dawns he accompanies his father trout fishing on a nearby river; he is forced to fish the same hole all day to avoid getting lost. The same evening he will row his father around the lake until midnight, bass fishing.”
Scenes shift over time. There he stands as a young man in the bow of a skiff, trying to catch a hundred-pound tarpon on a fly rod. “Today, being an open-minded soul, he’s totally blown away on a triple-hit of psilocybin. A few numbers rolled out of Columbian buds add to the sweet stew.” Harrison asks himself: “But how did we get from there to here across two decades?” A lot of it, he concludes, is about obsession and longing and our desire to experience fully the plenitude of life.
The beauty and sensuosity of the natural world is so direct and open you often forget it: the tactility of standing in the river in your waders with the rush of water around your legs, whether deep in a cedar swamp in Michigan, or in Montana where you have the mountains to look at when the fishing is slow. With all of the senses at full play and the delicious absence of thought, each occasion recalls others in the past. It is a continuous present. You begin at seven rowing your father around the lake at night, hearing in the dark the whirr of his reel as he casts for bass, the creak and dip of the oars and the whine of clouds of mosquitoes around your head. You might have been lucky enough to hear a loon, surely the most unique birdcall on earth, and see heat lightning silhouette the tips of the white pines and birch.
And then thirty years later you find yourself in a shabby village off the coast of Ecuador, gazing at the fishing boats in the harbor and at the deep blue ocean where the marlin are. “It is finally a mystery what keeps you so profoundly interested over so many years. The sum is far more than simply adding those separate parts. In the restorative quality there is the idea that as humans we get our power from the beauty we love most.”
No contemporary author has given me as much reading pleasure over the years as Jim Harrison. His novels of violent conflict and the struggle for love resonate deeply and help us to find in love and nature consolation for our mortality.
The essays in Just Before Dark span the first four decades of his professional writing life, from 1965 to 1991, when he was still at midcareer. Harrison continued to write nonfiction until his death in 2016. There is enough out there for a final, posthumous collection, and one truly hopes that his publisher is alert to this.
In the meantime, many of his as yet-uncollected essays on travel, the outdoors, and sundry literary topics can be accessed online at the websites of the magazines where they originally saw print: Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, and the New York Times, to name but a few. A little online research yields tremendous rewards. Highly recommended is “Older Fishing,” a longish essay about fishing at the twilight of life that is available on the fly-fishing website midcurrent.com.
And on Vimeo, you can find a rare French television documentary called “Jim Harrison: Entre Chien et Loup.” (Jim Harrison: Between Dog and Wolf). It was directed by George Luneau, aired in 1993, not long after publication of Just Before Dark, and can be accessed on the director’s website georgeluneau.com. The password is JIM. In that hour-long documentary, Harrison goes on long rambles in the countryside in the company of his bird dogs, searches the woods for morels near his farmhouse in northern Michigan, shoots pool in Dick’s Pour House, his favorite bar in town, and drives to his cabin in the Upper Peninsula, where he hooks up with the painter Russell Chatham to fish for brook trout, all the while discoursing on poetry, life, and the restorative quality of nature.
Jim Harrison’s Just Before Dark was first published by Clark City Press in 1991.
