“Uh oh,” I heard a familiar voice say inside my head — the voice of Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy, still in there after all these years. “You’ve got some ’splainin’ to do!”
I’d been fishing the Metolius River, on the east side of the Oregon Cascades, a spring creek with the gradient of a Western freestone stream. It emerges from a wall of lava a few miles outside the small town of Sisters, named for the Three Sisters, a trio of volcanic peaks over 10,000 feet high that dominate the vistas in the area, along with Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson to the north. I’d been there for over a week, staying at an Airbnb and fishing the river and Three Creek Lake, located in an old glacial cirque at an elevation of 6,500 feet above town.
“You must have caught a lot of fish,” my seatmate on the flight home had said. Like many who don’t fish at all and like those who don’t fish with the long rod and flies made with fur and feathers, he’d asked about fly fishing when we chatted, as seatmates do, about where we’d been, where we were going, and why. Sooner or later, most fly fishers are faced with the same situation.
Fly fishing is about more than catching fish, as those who love it know, but it is an enigma to many. As the rugged mountains of northeastern Oregon gave way to the basin-and-range terrain of the intermountain West beneath the plane, I tried, as many others have, yet again to explain that “more,” talking about what had happened to me in Oregon.
“It’s process oriented, not goal oriented,” I told him, making a conceptual distinction using my best professorial manner. For one thing, I said, many fly fishers begin by fishing for trout, and trout live in beautiful places, as do other fish that fly fishers pursue, and the Metolius is a beautiful river.
“So it’s an escape from what you do every day,” he’d said. “A vacation.”
No, I said. It’s an intensification of what goes on in everyone’s life every day. I told him that I’d started fly fishing decades ago because it involved me completely, physically, intellectually, and aesthetically. Wading a river to get in position to present a fly effectively can be physically demanding, even dangerous. On the Metolius, I’d stepped onto what I thought was solid bottom and sunk up to my knees in mud. Crossing a shallow run on the lower portion of the river, where the volume of the flows was greatest, it was all I could do to keep my balance. And casting is a physical skill with subtleties as refined as the strokes in tennis. Doing it well is rewarding on its own terms, just as is hitting a good golf shot or any other act requiring coordination, practice, and touch. Fly fishing places you in your body.
But at the same time, it exercises analytical skills central to any intellectual endeavor. Fly fishers solve problems. Can you figure out what’s going on? What bugs are the fish eating? What fly might attract them if they aren’t visibly feeding at all? What is the best position from which to present a fly? How can it be presented across currents of different speeds? And then there’s the question of whether an angler can physically execute the solutions to some of these questions.
More than that, however, and prior to any analytical skills that fly fishing exercises, it demands what every analytical endeavor requires: being open to what is other. The most effective way to begin fishing is by not fishing. As the philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” What you learn from watching is that what you assume is going on or what you’ve been told is going on is not always congruent with what actually is going on.
And of course, what is going on exceeds all assumptions and expectations. That is the aesthetic component — something greater and more unexpected than the beauty of the landscape that may have been one of the attractions of your trip. Every fly fisher has experienced getting their gear tangled up in the streamside vegetation. As I walked the banks of the Metolius, the bushes kept grabbing and stopping me. They were blooming Nootka roses, a species of wild rose. Unlike the cliché, this was literal: the world demanding what convention has trivialized. Later, the bank-side plants that snagged my fly were wild mint, Mentha canadensis, and the air blossomed as I tore the leaves removing it. Odors can be the most powerful sensations. Long after the experience of light on the ponderosa pines that line the river has been mummified in the photographs I took, that smell will live in memory as one of the defining moments of the trip.
All this I explained with imagined elo-quence to my seatmate. If you think fishing is goal oriented, I said, you either catch fish or you don’t — you sometimes are disappointed and seldom are really satisfied. But fly fishing involves you in a process that is life itself in its complex essence. As you pursue it, sometimes fish will come to your fly, but what is happening is that the process itself is its own reward.
“So what you’re telling me,” he said, “is that you actually didn’t catch any fish.”
But I did! I really did. In fact, I’d anticipated being asked for a tally of fish caught, which is one reason why I had interrupted my idyll on the Metolius to fish Three Creek Lake. In this case, the interlocutor was my host at the Airbnb, an angler himself and a sometime fly fisher, but someone who is goal oriented, not process oriented. Wanting me to have a good trip — or what he regarded as one — he kept urging me to visit the lake, where he figured I could do well. And in his terms, I did well enough: a series of cookie-cutter eleven-inch stocked rainbows, caught by wading the shoreline pretty much anywhere there weren’t vacationers using the water in other ways, while float-tubers and pontoon-boaters trolled Woolly Buggers farther out in the lake with the same positive results.
It was as boring a time as I’ve have as a fly fisher. Once you figured out what fly to fish, the only question was whether a fish rising to it would be hooked or not and if hooked, whether brought to hand or freed via long-line release. It reminded me of the time I fished a lake above 11,000 feet in the Sierra on a horse-packing trip, when the only angling problem to be solved was how to keep the threeinch brook trout that had been stocked by air off the fly so that the six-inch brook trout that had been previously stocked by air could get at it.
I had looked at the wind-swept Oregon lake, had thought, “Up-slope blowin — terrestrial: ant,” and had tied on a West Coast pattern, Ralph Cutter’s Perfect Ant, which worked just fine from the start. At a restaurant the night before, a local lakes fly fisher, informed why I was in town, had urged fishing a “size 12 Black Caddis” on all the lakes and streams, but if the Internet is to be believed, there is no such insect. What looked a lot like a size 12 black stonefly kept landing on my waders, and my skinny ant pattern may have been imitating those, but ant, caddis, or stonefly, the fish didn’t care. They just ate the fly. When you’re right even if you’re wrong, there’s no joy in that.
The Metolius, on the other hand, was a puzzle, which is what made it so interesting to fish. The fish are all wild, and guides are prohibited on the Metolius, so you have to figure things out for yourself.
Making things more interesting was the fact that I’m a dry-fly guy. I won’t say “snob,” because I fish a lot of emergers and have no qualms about fishing soft hackles, including beadhead soft hackles. They are emerging emergers, so to speak. But in six days on the Metolius, I saw three fish actually rise. And while there were a few bugs in the air — Golden Stones above Camp Sherman, the occasional Pale Morning Dun on the lower section of the river, and a swarm of PMD spinners on the upper section of the fly-fishing-only water — there were no discernible hatches occurring and no other fish rising anywhere to anything.
Partisans of the dry fly are like poets who choose to limit themselves to restrictive forms such as the sestina and villanelle, rather than embrace the freedoms of blank verse, and we get uncomprehending looks even from goal-oriented fly fishers who constantly remind us that trout are said to do 90 percent of their feeding beneath the surface and that if you want to catch fish, that’s where you should target them. The websites of the Metolius fly shops all point out that fishing subsurface is by far the most effective method there, and they hint darkly about the seductions of Czech nymphing.
But perhaps because something inherent in fly fishing encourages a progressive movement toward increasing difficulty — from just catching fish, to catching more fish, to catching big fish, to catching difficult fish — there are a lot of anglers willing to limit themselves to fishing with dries, even if that means the fishing is difficult. There were surprisingly few people fishing the Metolius when I was there in early July, but very few of them were nymphing.
One afternoon, after I had taken off my waders, I fell into conversation with a couple of guys — brothers — who had been fishing above the bridge that marks the lower end of the fly-only section of the river. I’d watched as one hooked a fish, lost it, then reeled up and waded out, telling his brother, “That’s it. I got what I came for today.” He was fishing the same fly I’d been using all week, a size 16 Quigley Film Critic PMD, a low-riding dry/emerger pattern.
“It’s no river for dry-fly guys,” I said ruefully, when he climbed up to the bridge. “Well, we’re dry-fly guys,” he said. He’d been fishing the river for over twenty years, for a long time now with dries only. He said he and his brother had been fishing at a secret spot downstream of the fly-only stretch and had done OK. But OK is a relative term. As we talked about the challenges of fishing the Metolius, he told me, “I’ve had eight-fish days here! Eight-fish days!” When I told him the city I was from, he said, “What are you doing there, when you could have this?” Obviously, he was not a goal-oriented angler.
By the way, I did catch fish on the Metolius, too. Well, one fish — a seven-inch wild Deschutes Basin redband trout that seemed as surprised as I was. OK — it was a six-inch wild redband trout, but still I caught it on a swung beadless size 16 Pheasant Tail Soft Hackle. At least it wasn’t on a nymph.
I changed planes on the way home, and my skeptical seatmate left me. As night fell and the patterns of light on the land unrolling beneath the plane grew closer and closer together, I thought some more about what I’d tried to tell him — about how what goes on in fly fishing, understood as a process, is an intensification of what goes on in everyone’s life every day. It is not just when wading a river that you risk losing your balance or find yourself sinking up to your knees in mud. The person who helped me in the months after my wife was killed in a car crash was a clinical psychologist with an allegiance to the work of Julia Kristeva, and it was from her that I understood the concept of the self as en procès: always in the process of change, yes, but also always on trial, for the term in French also includes that meaning. “Can you do this?” is always a question in life, often in everyday moments, as well as in the important ones, and not just when solving the problem of a difficult dry-fly presentation.
Fly fishing can seem to be a pointless enterprise. After all, most fly fishers actually release the fish that are caught, and as with my seatmate out of Portland, my explanations of how there is more to fishing than catching fish and my claims that it needs to be understood as a process tend to fall on deaf ears, as they had with my Airbnb host. However, not only as a process, but as an activity that puts fly fishers en procès, the sport teaches something important or reminds us of something important that we may have forgotten. It affirms that the resources — physical, intellectual, and aesthetic — are there for answering “Can you do this?” in the affirmative by actually doing it, whatever it may be — though not perhaps successfully this time.
Failure is also part of the process and the risk of being always on trial. Just as there is no joy in being right even if you’re wrong, there is no joy in easy affirmations. The joy comes in finding ways to do what you could not — in difficulty confronted and met.
Those resources are always present as a potential, as a power latent that can be realized. To access that power and realize that potential, a fly fisher ultimately learns (and of course, it is not just fly fishers who learn this, or learn it in the same way), that one must open oneself to the other, to the world — a world where it is not always wild roses that impede you or wild mint that scents the air. Because what you assume is going on or what you’ve been told is going on is not always congruent with what actually is going on, the only way to deal effectively with it is to face it — “not suppose a case, but take the case that is,” as Thoreau puts it at the conclusion of Walden.
In the end, it comes down to this: being process oriented, as so many fly fishers learn to be, not goal oriented, gives you the confidence to take on the risk of living, of living en procès, even or especially when unexpectedly knee-deep in mud. Thoreau tells the story of the traveler on horseback who, encountering a swamp, asked a boy standing by if it had a hard bottom. “The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveler’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, ‘I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.’ ‘So it has,’ answered the latter, ‘but you have not got halfway to it yet.’”
“There is solid bottom everywhere,” Thoreau nevertheless declares. There is solid bottom, even if, en procès, you sometimes have to sink up to your knees in mud to find it.
