The Orvis Fly-Tying Guide, revised and updated edition
By Tom Rosenbauer. Published by Lyons Press, 2019; $39.95, softbound.
All how-to beginners’ fly-tying books are the same. All how-to beginners’ fly-tying books are different.
They are the same, because the work they have to do requires that they cover the same topics: explaining everything from what a hook gap is and how to mount thread to a hook to how to select and spin deer hair or tie upright and divided wings. They can assume nothing and need to cover everything, so they all tend to begin by explaining the same basics in pretty much the same way. Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis Fly-Tying Guide does that with a comprehensive coverage of tools, materials, techniques, and peripheral but important topics such as where to tie, lighting, storage, and the like.
All how-to beginners’ fly tying books are different, though, because they have different authors with different conceptions of how to teach fly tying via the medium of the printed book. The Orvis Fly-Tying Guide is distinguished, first, by having Tom Rosenbauer as its author. He is one of the most lucid explainers of angling and tying topics who has ever undertaken the task.
But Rosenbauer is aware that books can teach only so much when it comes to fly-tying skills — classes and practice always can help — and he embraces the availability of online resources for learning to tie, arguing that “books and videos complement each other in a magical way that was never available to tiers in the past.” That’s because “some of us still learn better from books, studying photographs in detail and taking our time, instead of constantly hitting the pause button or, worse yet, sitting through a windy introduction to a video on how the originator invented the fly.” Also, “it’s convenient and efficient to find hundreds of proven fly patterns in one place, ready to access instantly instead of turning on a computer, parsing search terms, and staring at a screen.”
Authors of such books also differ in their conceptions of how to teach tying skills in a progression from simple to more complex and what patterns to use as ways to teach those skills. I started out, decades ago, with Randall Kaufmann’s Fly Tyers Nymph Manual, which gets a newbie started by tying a Rubberlegs — basically, just winding chenille on a hook — and then moves on to a simple caddis larva (dubbing and a rib), an old pattern called the Trueblood Otter (dubbing, rib, tail, and a beard), and a soft hackle (winding hackle). More recently, Ted Leeson and Jim Schollmeyer, in The Benchside Introduction To Fly Tying, decided to split the spiral-bound volume horizontally, with patterns ranging from a Gold-Ribbed Hares’ Ear Nymph, to a classic Black Quill wet fly, to a Muddler Minnow on one part and techniques on the other, so learners could flip to the appropriate techniques for tying a particular pattern.
What makes The Orvis Fly-Tying Guide unusual is the collection of patterns that Rosenbauer has selected as ways to teach “nearly any basic skill you’ll need in tying flies.” He of course selected “effective fish catchers” and patterns that “demonstrate skills and techniques that can be applied to numerous other patterns,” but every how-to book does that, however much the actual selections differ. A third criterion determined Rosenbauer’s selection: “The patterns must be available in a fly shop now and for the next decade or so” — no Trueblood Otter. The reason is that a newbie can “buy a sample to compare to your own efforts, or even to unwind . . . to see how the fly was put together.” Also, there likely will be online videos teaching how to tie these enduringly popular patterns, with “many different variations in technique, and one of them might work better for you than the method I show here.” Making sure real examples are available is a cool idea, and deferring to others’ approaches to teaching a pattern and a skill is a remarkable example of authorial humility and another recognition that different people learn in different ways.
The specific patterns that Rosenbauer has selected using these criteria are a surprise. In the sequence that he asks be followed and in increasing order of difficulty, they are the Woolly Bugger (simple enough), but then the Clouser Minnow, Frenchie, Chernobyl Ant (foam — get over it, traditionalists), Hare’s Ear Nymph, Copper John, Sparkle Dun, Stimulator, Cone Head Bunny Muddler, Deer Hair Bass Bug, Puglisi Spawning Shrimp, and Parachute Adams. Note that he covers warmwater and saltwater patterns, not just trout flies, and that for the techniques involved, some of the patterns are not all that easy — the heads of Stimulators always give me problems. Anyone who masters the techniques required to tie these patterns really will be an effective fly tyer.
In addition to explaining the basics and then giving step-by-step instructions for the techniques that the book teaches and the patterns it uses to do so, The Orvis Fly-Tying Guide also “offers the recipes for every fly in the 2018 Orvis fly offering, plus many others,” graded for level of difficulty from 1 to 5. There are classic patterns in these concluding 139 pages of the book, but also such things as Griffin’s Stimicator Fly, with a foam bead as a head, giant articulated streamers, and even a few semirealistic stonefly nymphs. If nothing else, it documents the current state of the art in flies ranging from midges to saltwater baitfish imitations. As a historical document, not just as a handy reference, that, too, makes The Orvis Fly-Tying Guide different.
— Bud Bynack
Fly Fishing the River Styx: Stories with an Angle
By Richard Dokey. Published by Adelaide Books, 2018; $19.60 softbound.
As you might expect from the title, death is a constant presence in Fly Fishing the River Styx, a collection of short stories that are also related to each other by recurring themes and characters. That description sounds so grim as to be off-putting, but in these tales, the opposite of death — its counterpoise — has a constant presence, as well. It’s fly fishing. In a book concerned with death and with confronting mortality, fly fishing is life.
The balance between them is established in the title story, in which two brothers are being rowed on a remote river by an enigmatic guide named “Charlie.” The Greeks would have called him “Charon.” One brother suffers a heart attack, days from their rendezvous with a float plane. They can either hasten to the rendezvous and wait, or they can continue, with the other brother — the narrator — fishing. “You might as well fish,” Charlie says. “Fish. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? . . . What else can you do?”
I stood in the bow of the boat. My brother was on a tarp in the stern. The fly line was a hot wire. I released it, out over the water. I fished all day and into the evening. I was exhausted with fishing. I had never caught so many trout. “I want to tell you,” Charlie said, as the sun met the horizon, “you’re the best damned fly fisherman I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen them all.”
And still Charlie rowed.
The simple declarative sentences that establish something unsaid (reread “damned fly fisherman . . . I’ve seen them all” in light of the title) are Hemingwayesque, and in a coda, Dokey acknowledges a debt to him as a “literary father,” as well as to his biological father, both of them dead at 61, Hemingway by his own hand and his father by “a heart attack in the house of a woman who was not my mother.” Those deaths underlie the confrontation with mortality that runs throughout these stories. “I hit 61. Then I hit 71. In a few months I’ll be 73 years old,” Dokey writes in the coda. “What do you do when fate collapses, when the sense of a final paragraph, a last chapter, vanishes into the indefiniteness of each morning’s empty page?”
That is a writer’s question, and the answer he has written in these stories is that you go fishing. Many of the later stories in the collection revolve around confronting mortality late in life, but even earlier ones dealing with characters’ young lives establish fly fishing as an almost reflexive response to the presence of death. In “Fish Story,” for example, young Levert Gardner finds a bamboo rod left behind by the man he’s been told was his father, who killed himself when he discovered that his wife had slept with another man, He’s also intrigued by the fly casting of a “crazy man” who “lived alone in a shack across the railroad line near the Yellowstone River.” In a burst of violence, Levert kills a man who is physically abusing his mother — I wasn’t kidding when I said that death is a constant presence in these stories. Afterward, he takes the fly rod and seeks out the “crazy man,” who teaches him to fly fish — and who eventually is himself killed with a hammer while being robbed by two men passing through town. Fly fishing literally becomes Lev’s life.
When he wasn’t at school or working odd jobs, Lev was on the Boulder or the Yellowstone, casting a long, gray line or turning over rocks and stones to examine bugs. In his room he creates tiny f lies from wisps of feather and hair. By the time he had finished the ninth grade, he had helped more than one f isherman from California, who bragged in the shops in Livingston about the kid from Big Timber who knew every hatch, read every riffle and current seam and got them into more trout than any four-hundred-dollar-a-day man with a McKenzie boat and a Styrofoam chest of cold cuts and imported beer.
He goes to work for Dan Bailey’s fly shop, turns down a full-time job there, and the last that’s heard of him, he’s “in New Zealand, fishing the Tongariro.”
Fly fishing is not just about catching fish, and in “The Trophy of a Lifetime,” Dokey makes it clear that ultimately, the quarry we seek is ourselves. It begins with a reprise of the title story, but here, the brother, Frank, is dead, the “dead brother I never truly knew . . . I only knew my brother, fly fishing on silver waters.” That is the narrator’s motivation for fishing: he is a rootless trout bum, owns all the latest, best equipment, and wants “The Big One. The Biggest One. I’m the Ahab of fly fishing In the name of an unknowable brother . . . I want The Whale,” fishing all over the world in his search. Then, on a remote creek in northeastern Idaho, he encounters an old man in a torn, dirty vest and patched hip boots who’s fishing an old Shakespeare fiberglass rod and dented Pflueger reel, raising trout after trout and striking none of them, not so much as even moving the fly.
He’s fishing flies with the hook point removed. “You can’t catch anything that way,” says the narrator. “I catch what I want to catch,” the old man replies. He, too, is after “the trophy of a lifetime,” he claims. “Catch yourself?” the narrator says, finally getting it. “You’re out of season.”
What the old man wants to know about himself is, “How could I not react after a lifetime of reacting?”— of seeing the rise, setting the hook. Then he produces a f ly with an intact point — the ultimate test: “I want to know if I can not react when I know that I will hook him if I do.”
Six months previous to this, the old man’s wife, Margaret, had died. “We were married sixty years . . . Sixty fine years.
Could I keep something so dear and yet lose it? Could I live when someone I had lived with so long was no longer living with me?” The narrator thinks of Frank. “So that’s what I’m doing now,” the old man says, taking the next step: “Leave the point on the hook and not strike. Visit Margaret’s grave each day and want to live. That’s what I have to catch.”
Death is a social act: it affects others, and not just after it occurs, but also in prospect, as well. In a book where fly-fishing is life, the relationships that develop within that life and the inevitability of their loss are among the main concerns. The pairing of the narrator and his brother recurs in various forms in these stories, which for all of Dokey’s stylistic allegiance to Hemingway, sometimes take on an obsessive, dreamlike quality when read straight through. In “O, Brother!” — set in Spenger’s, the seafood restaurant in Berkeley, at the narrator’s younger brother’s seventieth birthday party — their differences are irreducible: this live brother is also “the brother I never knew.” Here, both confront their mortality. Their mother has died at 96: “A lot of my friends are leaving too. . . . Their names appear in the paper. I’m experiencing not so much a mourning as an odd resentment that they have slipped away and I did not know them. But your brother is your brother. There is no other brother.”
However, there are other bonds that fishing builds. Recurring characters in these stories meet late in life on Silver Creek in Idaho each year, brought together by the Brown Drake hatch: Greg, a retired Portland attorney with an amputated leg and a prosthesis; Jay, a retired lobsterman from Maine with a bad back; and the narrator. One June, Jay’s camper is missing — he has died while in New Mexico, fishing the San Juan. The day after hearing the news, Greg and the narrator fish from float tubes — Greg cannot wade the spring creek.
Greg was ahead, I watched his rod lift back and forward, the line running forward in a narrow sinew of strength, the rhythm of all true fly fishermen and the comrade who comes when practice becomes art . . . I wanted Greg to catch trout. I wanted him to catch big trout, so many big trout that he might believe, as I did, that there is relief in chasing the whale. I had had my own operation months before, the kind of operation that makes one think about selling everything and maybe buying a fifth wheel or a camper or a trailer and be a vagrant of the sun. There is always pursuit. Even if there is no capture, pursuit is good enough.
For most of our lives, from early on, the answer to problems as they arose often has been to go fishing. There have been times when I thought I needed either to fish or to die. Whether you’re old or young, face-to-face with mortality or assuming you’ll live forever, it’s reassuring to learn from Fly Fishing the River Styx that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been right about that choice: fly fishing is life.
— Bud Bynack
Charles F. Waterman
By Michael Checchio
Nostalgia may not be what it once was, but there actually was a time when an outdoor writer could earn a passable living as a freelance author. Those days are gone. The popular fishing writer John Gierach has said that without his publisher, Simon and Schuster, and the stream of income from his eighteen books, he wouldn’t be able to make it as a magazine freelancer, which is how he started his career. Any writer setting out to do it these days would be well advised to be born with a lengthy backlist.
Charley Waterman churned out articles and columns about hunting and fishing for 71 years while living mainly off the proceeds of his writing. He was the last of a breed. “We never had much money,” said his widow, Debie Waterman, “but he was ambitious and found a way to do what he loved.”
And how does one go about that exactly? Part of it is luck and timing. Much of it is hard work. But mostly, it’s persistence, because the whole world seems to conspire against you living the kind of life you want.
Charley Waterman was born on a grain farm in southeastern Kansas, a long way from any trout stream. The year was 1913. There were no f ishermen in his family, but that didn’t stop him from discovering bluegills in nearby farm ponds. He didn’t have an angling mentor, but he had a mother who taught him to read when he was still in diapers. At age 2, he was reading the newspaper and the National Sportsman. He saved his first issue as a kind of memento. It still had his crayon marks in it. “The article by P. J. Malloy on f ly fishing was what started me reading trout and salmon literature, which has confused me considerably since.” By age 10, he was floating on the James River in the Ozarks, a hundred miles from home, when he should have been back there tending to farm chores. Charley grew up to be a young man with big dreams, most of them having to do with hunting and fishing. “My first boat trailer really was made from the running gears of an old buggy and I pulled it with a Model T Ford. That is the whole truth, even though it would be easy to lie about anything that happened in the 1920s.”
Making his way through life, Charley held a lot of jobs — teacher, book salesman, commercial photographer, newspaper reporter, even professional wrestler and private eye — while establishing himself full time as an outdoor freelance writer.
He knew that a higher education would at least get him out of farm work, so early on, he enrolled in journalism classes at Kansas State Teachers College in nearby Pittsburg (now Emporia State University), 15 miles from his hometown, Girard. He was soon freelancing outdoor articles for the Pittsburg Headlight, and in 1934, he became a full-time staff writer and photographer on that newspaper. A colleague introduced him to fly fishing for black bass in the tank ponds around the Kansas grain towns. World War II interrupted his budding career.
Like any sensible farm boy living in a landlocked state, Charley enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was assigned to head up a photo combat team in the Pacific Theater. After mustering out of the service, Waterman took a job as a staff photographer with the San Mateo Times in California, but he had another life in mind than one on the West Coast, so he quit his newspaper job and took off for Florida with Debie, a sportswoman who could outfish and outshoot him.
The year was 1952. Charley was to spend the rest of the twentieth century exploring light-tackle fishing in the Everglades and in the Florida backcountry and introducing that world to readers of sporting magazines. His wife was a frequent companion on these excursions. The Keys had already been scoped out by fly fishers, but the mangrove swamps and bass lakes of Florida were a new frontier for anyone holding a fly rod. Charley figured out how to catch outsized snook and to jump baby tarpon in the Tamiami Trail Canal, a roadside ditch crossing Southern Florida from Miami to Naples. “The fly rod is ideal for such a canal as long as you remember to keep your backcast over the traffic, which increased steadily through the years as the fishing deteriorated.” He broke similar ground when he started fly fishing the shad run on the St. Johns River, to the vast amusement of bait anglers. “Probably somebody else fly fished for shad on the St. Johns before I did, but he probably has steady work and didn’t bother to write about it.”
The Florida move brought a lot of freelance work Charley’s way. He soon had an outdoor column going in the Jacksonville Times-Union and later on a monthly column in Florida Sportsman. And he was teaching literature and journalism at nearby Stetson University while establishing a market for outdoor stories.
Traveling south to the Keys for bonefish, Waterman hooked up with the prominent f ishing author Joe Brooks, who would steer Charley to national markets for his outdoor journalism. They and their wives became lifelong friends. (Brooks also became a mentor to another f ly-fishing great, Lefty Kreh.) Charley was able to set up advance assignments that would take him to fishing and hunting hot spots all over. He and Debie got around in a travel trailer. “At Anchorage I had the farm boy’s feeling of being on the edge and that everything was out there.” His globetrotting took the couple to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and beyond. “This happened in New Zealand, which eliminated any necessity for exaggeration of the trout’s size.” He developed a taste for dry-fly fishing in Montana, his favorite kind of angling. “Bill Browning was making this movie about trout fishing in spring creeks and he was using me as a model because I had a fairly clean fishing vest and was planning to go fishing anyway.” Charley and Debie would spend their winters in Florida and their summers trailer camping around Livingston, Montana. Debie was free to accompany Charley on a lot of these assignments because they never had kids. He wrote the words for the magazines, they both took photos, and Charley converted his features and columns into chapters for the many books he authored. They subsisted mostly on this freelance income and made a great life out of it. They had to be frugal, but theirs was a life rich in experience and adventure. As a writer, Charley was indefatigable. Even in his eighties, he was turning out reams of copy and banging out books as fast as he could type. He dedicated his autobiography thus: “To my wife Debie, who cooked much of my subject matter.” His features became a mainstay in almost every issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal, and his byline contributed a lot to that magazine’s prestige. His column in Gun Dog magazine ran for two decades. (He told readers his own bird dogs were more likely to respond to Debie’s commands than to his.) He won armloads of writing and conservation awards. It seemed as if nothing could stop him.
Not even a car that struck him down when he was out riding his bicycle at age 86 (another of his outdoor passions). Charley suffered brain trauma and had to learn to walk and even to type all over again. He gave up driving his car, but didn’t let up on the typewriter keys. And he could still swing a fly rod, although his aim was a little off on wing shooting. It wasn’t until age 89 that he finally put the cover on his Underwood and retired. By the time he died at age 91, he had filled a bookshelf with 19 titles bearing his name.
Humor, wisdom, and insight — those were his hallmarks. He wrote in a conversational style that made it seem effortless. That was his way of hiding his art. His knowledge of the outdoors ran deep, but he avoided the know-itall-ism that turns experts into boors. He also steered clear of the sentimentality in which some outdoor feature writers of his generation liked to wallow. There was genuine humility and self-deprecating humor in everything he wrote. “My bitterness about the harmless snobbery of trout fishing requires no detailed analysis. I believe it started with my near failure in two Latin courses.” Above all, he portrayed himself as an average guy who just got lucky. But that kind of luck — like a marriage — doesn’t just happen. It’s made.
All quotes are from stories written by Charles F. Waterman that originally appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal.