Production Fly Tying, 3rd edition
By A. K Best. Publish,d by Stackpole Boo/a, 2015; $39.95, softbound.
I confess that I never bought the previous editions of A. K. Best’s Production Fly Tying, despite being sorely tempted. It was clear from leafing though copies at Hy-fishing sh@ws that there would be plenty of interesting ideas in the book, even for an occasional tyer like me, who had no intention of trying to make a living tying Hies. But it also was clear, when I browsed through the books, that Best, who at one point in his career was tying as many as 3,000 dozen flies a year, had very strong opinions about a lot of things, an impression confirmed when I heard him talk at some of the same shows. And of course, Best had become a prominent figure in the fly-fishing world, in part through his frequent appearance in the writings of his friend John Gierach, who contributes a foreword here. All of that provoked in me a response that has been growing stronger over the years – a reaction against what has seemed like an increasingly pervasive phenomenon in angling publications: the rise to predominance of a figure I’ll call (with caps in homage to Scott Sadil’s “Real Guys”) The Expert.
The figure of The Expert is in some ways just a product of the genre of how-to books after all, you buy and read them because you expect their authors to be really good at things you’d like to learn.
But some authors implicitly or explicitly claim privileged knowl edge about how something should be done, and attempting to make such claims seems to have become an essential part of the business plan for survival in the small pond that is the Hy-fishing industry. And that’s where I start to balk.
Claiming that something always has to be done one way and not another flies in the face of one of the most important, frustrat ing, and engrossing characteristics of fly fishing contingency: the way in which there are no absolutes, and almost everything depends on particularities that change from hour to hour, day to day, river to river, person to person … the list pretty much covers every aspect of the sport. Some variation of “You shoulda been here yesterday” is fly fishing’s real motto.
It should follow that a really knowledgeable writer, as op posed to the Expert, would premise his or her work on that fact, and I was therefore delighted to find that despite his strongly held opinions about how to do things and in fact, because of how he arrived at those opinions A. K. Best does exactly that. ln the preface, he writes: “What I want to emphasize is that nothing that follows is carved in stone but then, neither is a lot of what has been written in the past. If you can use some of what you learn elsewhere and some of what you learn here, you’ll become a better tyer.” And he frames the book with a similarly modest claim in the afterword:
I don’t pretend to think I know all there is to know about tying flies. I just tie a lot of them (and for a lot of very nice people) and have tried to make the job even more fun than it is by its very nature. In approaching it that way every day, l constantly look for new techniques, materials, and ideas that just might make a small difference both in the fly’s effectiveness and in its tying. It seems like I learn something new every week tiny things; tiny things do catch trout.
This really is a book about contingencies and how Best has learned to cope with them. In fact, in addition to new photos in this edition of the book, some of the textual revisions involve Best’s responses to the changing availability and nature of the materials he uses the ways in which the perfection of genetic hackle has eliminated some of the imperfections, such as webbiness, that Best had used to improve the look of the hackles and thorax area of classic dry flies, for example, making lemonade out of lemons and then having to come up with a new recipe for lemonade when things changed.
What he presents here, then, is what has worked for him and, just as important, the reasoning that led him to do it that way and not another. As he writes of the book in the afterword, “I don’t expect anyone to blindly accept all of it, but it is my hope that you will at least make an attempt to under stand the reasoning behind the ideas and opinions and perhaps even try some of them.” What works for you may vary, because people and their needs and their resources and their tying and angling practices differ.
It’s the reasoning behind Best’s frequently strong and strongly expressed opinions that’s most helpful in deciding whether you find his methods palm-to-the-forehead, why-didn’t-1-think-of that brilliant, or just useful, or not really for you. However, they are always interesting. He really doesn’t like the sort of horizontal-axis rotary vise I’ve tied on since I graduated from a Thompson Model A, for example, because it interferes with the placement of the heel of your hand. And it does. It’s never bothered me, but he’s right, for sure.
A chapter on tools begins the book, and then he just works through the techniques and materials for the different parts of a Hy, starting with tailing the Hy, then ribbing it, constructing bodies, creating and mounting wings, and hackling the Hy. He adopted that order because, contrary to the”traditional” way of tying a clas sic dry fly, beginning with mounting the wings, when he started out, he thought it logical to begin at the back and work forward, and he still does, even if Rube Cross and the Darbees and Denes did it differently. And that’s a constant theme substituting what makes logical sense for what we’re told that others always do.
There will be things that for any serious tyer will leap off the page, but contingency again this will vary from person to person. He covers techniques for everything from size 22 dries to bonefish and tarpon flies, and since I don’t tie bonefish and tarpon flies, my attention went elsewhere, but yours might go there. Efficiency is one of the things that, as a commercial tyer, he values most, so he doesn’t like whip finishers, for example, because it’s a tool you have to find and pick up, when instead you can learn to whip finish by hand — which of course is the way Rube Cross and the Darbees and Dettes did it. And he also values economy. Rather than cutting off a length of chenille or flash and then trimming off several inches of waste, he ties from the card, hank, or spool — a neat idea, even if you’re just a cheapskate duffer.
He’s a proponent of natural fibers for dry-fly tails and dubbing, partly because they are multicolored, as natural insects are, not a single color, as most synthetic materials are, partly because, as Ralph Cutter argued in the November/December 2015 issue of California Fly Fisher, they float better and don’t wick up water, and partly because, as he emphasizes, mayflies don’t have shaggy bodies, and natural materials can be dubbed really tightly. Several times he advocates actually looking at the insects themselves, not at the fly patterns alleged to imitate them, and then devising ways actually to imitate the bug in question. Hence his declaration that “sparkle emerger tailing is just plain wrong,” because it imitates what a railing shuck looks like out of the water, not under it. He recommends duck-flank fibers — incidentally, another “traditional” choice — for such an application.
He also advocates applying dubbing wax not to your tying thread, where it just clumps up, but to your index finger and thumb. I’d heard that before — from Glenn Overton, the originator of the mythic and no-longer-available Overton’s Wonder Wax. To that end, he advocates melting the wax out of the tube it comes in and pouring it into a plastic box, where it can be touched more easily. Since in some circles you’re not really a Real Guy as a fly tyer unless your tying desk sports the holy-grail green tube of Overton’s, procured for big bucks on eBay, I guess you could still show off the empty tube there.
A. K. Best is known for his hackle-point dry-fly wings, and there’s an extended discussion and how-to about procuring them and mounting them. Likewise, there’s an in-depth discussion of his theory and practice of hackling classic dry-fly wings, which produces a hackle and thorax that are the exact opposite of the traditional Catskill-style hackle, a hackle that is rigorously vertical. Instead, he wants the hackle to splay forward and back, like the legs on a real insect — and similar to the way Vincent Marinaro advocated for his thorax-style dries.
It’s often said that there’s nothing really new in fly tying, at least in its fundamentals. After all, there are only so many ways to wrap stuff on a hook so that it looks like a bug. But some ways are better than others in order to achieve some ends, which, however, may differ, too. What’s best for me may not be what’s best for you, but what’s proven to be best for Best is worth considering, not because he’s The Expert, but because he’s thought long and hard about things that matter if you tie and fish flies.
— Bud Bynack
The Trout Diaries: A Year of Fly-Fishing in New Zealand
By Derek Grzelewski. Published by Stackpole Books, 2011; $22.95, softbound.
At the very top of my fly fishing bucket list is a trip to New Zealand. The lure is big trout, gin-clear waters, and great dry-fly fishing in a mythical place with a wide variety of rivers and lakes, all wrapped in postcard beauty. I was initially looking for a guide for my dream trip to New Zealand. Reading Derek Grzelewski’s posts on social media, drooling over his pictures of big fish and beautiful surroundings, led me to this book.
In Trout Diaries, Grzelewski takes us on a year-long fishing journey, month by month, water by water. The journey brings us to both North Island and South Island, rivers and lakes, often alone or with colorful company. Whether camping with indigenous peoples or making the annual pilgrimage for the run of quinnat (chinook salmon transplanted from the Sacramento River system), Grzelewski is one of the locals. He has friends on all of his favorite rivers, and he’s welcomed as such, not as an outsider. Grzelewski’s writing is clean, full of flavor, and amusing. The Kiwi phraseology, melodic and quirky to me, can’t help but bring a smile to your face. His writing also is complex, what you might read from a fly-fishing college professor taking a sabbatical from teaching. Not just seeing the obvious, Grzelewski looks well beneath the surface, adding more complexity and research to his subjects than I could ever expect.
But Grzelewski is a fishing guide, and the book in part is about the people a guide encounters. Many of his clients are interesting fishing companions, including Marc Petitjean, one of the pioneers of tying flies with cul de canard, and a client whose deteriorating health may make this fishing trip his last. Not all of those encounters go well, including one with a client who complains, when his back cast is hung up in a tree, “The damned thing won’t go out,” while violently shaking the tree over and over, trying to complete the cast. Soon after that trip, Grzelewski took down his guide site, transferred all his trips to other guides, and turned off his phone. With a big sigh of relief, he returned to life as just a fisherman. He enjoys fishing alone and shares a fair amount of those times in Trout Diaries, too, exploring, plotting, calculating, coming back tomorrow with a better plan (and maybe a better rig) to fool a fish.
Grzelewski’s writing allows a reader to feel like one of the crew, fishing alongside him and his mischievous Airedale.
The very best trips I’ve had are defined by the times between the actual fishing — hanging out, learning, sharing stories of the day, planning for tomorrow, sitting around the lodge, campfire, or even on a bar stool, lamenting missed f-ish, blown casts. There are plenty of these times in Trout Diaries, times when you want to be on the trip. He makes me wish I was sitting on a log, sipping single malt, grinning over that monster brown that carelessly took my cicada.
Grzelewski unwinds some of the mysteries and myths of fly fishing in New Zealand but admits that much is still a mystery to him. He dispels the myth that every cast nets a 10-pound trout and that even a neophyte with no angling skills will catch record numbers of fish. He shares days when a client shows up with the most expensive gear, can’t cast, and doesn’t have the physical conditioning for the rigors of the trip. And there are days when he gets skunked, days when nothing goes right for him, but does for everyone else. In other words, in Trout Diaries, Grzelewski shows that New Zealand is no different from any other famous an-
gling destination. That’s trout fishing. And in Trout Diaries, Grzelewski takes you fishing with him. It’s an experience worth having.
— Kurt Colgan
Classics Revisited
With Michael Checchio
Trout Fishing in America
By Richard Brautigan. Originally published in 1967; published by Mariner Books, 2010, $13.95, softbound; previous editions available used; also available as a Kindle ebook.
In the summer of 1961, a young man and his wife vacated their Greenwich Street apartment in San Francisco, packed some camping gear into a 10-year-old Plymouth station wagon, along with their baby daughter, a Royal manual typewriter borrowed from the man’s barber, and a two-piece RA Special #240 bamboo fly rod, and set out for Idaho on a trip that would change the course of American literature.
They camped and fished beside two dozen creeks, rivers, and lakes, mostly around Idaho’s Stanley Basin, in an idyll that would last from June through August of that year. Unemployed, they were living off a $350 tax refund. When the fishing slowed at midday, the man, Richard Brautigan, sat at a picnic table and typed chapters in a book unlike anything that had come before it in American fiction. Those chapters included scenes from the author’s childhood in the Pacific Northwest, his day-to-day life in prehippie San Francisco, and his Idaho camping trip.
Brautigan returned to San Francisco to put the finishing touches on his evolving manuscript and to find a publisher for it — no easy task. Chapters appeared here and there in publications such as Evergreen Review and City Lights Journal. Brautigan was becoming a well-known figure around Haight-Ashbury and in North Beach, giving away poems that he printed on seed packets. He was hard to miss, favoring cast-off outfits that combined a hippie wardrobe with a Western frontier look, as if he had stepped out of a pioneer past.
In 1967, his strange, but beautiful book finally was brought out by the Four Seasons Foundation, a nonprofit publisher. But despite glowing reviews, it didn’t become popular until it was picked up two years later by a major East Coast publishing house. Seymour Lawrence at Delacorte, an imprint of Dell Publishing, recognized the author’s talent, and Lawrence was always on the lookout for fresh literary voices. The publisher would crusade tirelessly for the kind of writing that was to cause a seismic shift in modern fiction, publishing authors such as J. P. Donleavy, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Jim Harrison.
Trout Fishing in America — that was the book’s title — went on to sell two million copies. An editor at Viking, one of many mainstream publishers that rejected the book, filed an internal memo that somehow wound up on the novel’s dust jacket: “Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called Trout Fishing in America. I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing.” Well, the book was and it wasn’t.
The novel — a novella, really, at 111 pages — announced from the outset an authorial voice that was both unmistakable and inimitable. It was the voice of a true American original.
“As a child when did I first hear of Trout Fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine. Summer of 1942. The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.”
Brautigan’s style is plainspoken, his delivery deadpan. The writing appears to be casual, offhand. But his seemingly throwaway sentences have perfect pitch. It takes effort to make art feel effortless. Brautigan’s story is playful, yet serious; hilarious, yet sad; absurd, but profound. There seems to be a mind-blowing sentence on every page. “It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine.” “We read Kraft-Ebbing aloud all the time as if he were Kraft Dinner.” “Big Redfish Lake is the Forest Lawn of camping in Idaho, laid out for maximum comfort.”
This is a kind of surrealism that somehow feels completely natural and in the American grain. In the chapter called “The Hunchback Trout,” Brautigan describes a good cutthroat stream hemmed in by trees as being “like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings.” On Tom Martin Creek, a tributary to the Klamath, the author explains to the reader: “You had to be a plumber to fish that creek.”
Scenes of natural beauty are juxtaposed with urban squalor. An ex-con and a reformed whore are hiding out in a Frisco flophouse called the Trout Fishing in America Hotel. It is half a block from the corner of Broadway and Columbus, where North Beach meets Chinatown. “ ‘I’ ll open the door.’ A simple declarative sentence. He undid about a hundred locks, bolts and chains and anchors and steel spikes and canes filled with acid, and then the door was opened like the classroom of a great university and everything was in its proper place.”
There is no plot or chronology in Trout Fishing in America. Characters seem to disappear in their own becoming. The book opens with scenes of a childhood that by turns feels magical and deprived. You can almost feel the mildew and the linoleum warping in the rain.
One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock. Then there was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray.
There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it.
Trout.
At last an opportunity to go trout fishing, to catch my first trout. . . .
. . . But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally, I got close enough to see what the trouble was.
The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.
I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.
Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood.
“Trout Fishing in America” refers variously to the book’s title, to a character in the novel who seems to be as ageless as the Republic, to a legless wino named Trout Fishing in America Shorty, to the name of a cheap hotel for transients, to the act of trout fishing itself, and ultimately to a state of mind. The book is full of whimsy, puns, and offbeat humor, with a countercultural viewpoint that seems off-kilter and kind of druggy, although the author never touched dope. Unlike most experimental fiction, it is actually fun to read. The book has been called “Hemingway for hippies,” but its outlook is more optimistic than tragic. Yet beneath the optimism and humor is an undercurrent of sadness, loneliness, and mental pain.
The subtext of the book seems to be a pastoral America that is fading before our eyes. A sigh escapes from its pages, a lament for the loss of our pioneer spirit, our innocence, and a more hopeful way of life. Brautigan hangs out with winos and cripples, panhandlers and shack dwellers, derelicts and old-timers. He pauses in front of abandoned outhouses and unkempt graves, as if communing with our dead ancestors and with the past that shaped us. His tone is upbeat, lighthearted, and a little wistful. America is still a laid-back place where you can chill, but it’s changing. The author seems to stand between a hopeful past and an uncertain future.
Is the frontier closed? Has our wilderness vanished? Is nature on her way out? A posted sign on Salt Creek warns of cyanide capsules left on the ground as bait for coyotes. Don’t eat them. Another sign on another stream warns trespassers: “If you fish this creek, we’ll punch you in the head.” The landscape seems to be populated with soulful losers, dropouts from society, and the down-and-out. There is the feeling that life is mostly happenstance.
In the chapter titled “Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity,” the author recalls a scene from his childhood, when he was doing chores for an old woman who “lived by herself in a house that was like a twin sister to her.” Everything in the house except a big radio looked like it came from another era. “It’s the beauty of our speed that has done it to them, causing them to age prematurely into the clothes and thoughts of people from another century.” The child finds a fishing diary in an old trunk, written by the woman’s brother, who died in his youth. He was a man who never caught a fish. The long-gone brother concludes his diary with these words:
I’ve had it. I’ve gone fishing now for seven years and I haven’t caught a single trout. I’ve lost every trout I’ve ever hooked. They either jump off or twist off, or squirm off or break my leader or flop off or fuck off. I have never even gotten my hands on a trout. For all its frustration, I believe it was an interesting experiment in total loss but next year somebody else will have to go trout fishing. Somebody else will have to go out there.
The moment feels like the reading of a will, where an orphan comes into an inheritance. One of the last scenes in the novel takes place in a San Francisco junkyard, where a trout stream is stacked into sections and sold by the foot. The prices seem reasonable.
I first read Trout Fishing in America in 1969, my freshman year in college. It was a big hit on campuses, and it seemed to speak to my generation. (Oddly enough, it did not make me want to go fishing, and to this day I don’t know why.) For a book to become the favorite reading material of the young usually means a death sentence for the reputation of a serious author. Critics who once held Brautigan in esteem began looking at him cross-eyed. They questioned his seriousness, wondering if the author’s arresting innocence was just childishness or terminal naïveté. One of his sappier poems assures us that we are “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” How’s that working out? Except for the sex and scatology, Trout Fishing in America could be Young Adult fiction.
But I think its strengths are as glaring as its weaknesses. Maybe the proof of Brautigan’s ultimate seriousness is in his refusal to be serious. Or rather in his insistence on being as serious as springtime. Far from being a period piece, this defining novel of the hippie era, with its parables and jokes and wild hallucinations, with its marvelous incongruities and nonsequiturs, is as fresh today as it was on the day it was published at the height of flower power. The fact that it was written well ahead of that era shows how prescient it was. In some weird way, the book feels even more relevant today. Despite its trippy surrealism, it is as American as a John Deere tractor. And it has entered the consciousness and dreamtime of our land.
