“Edges, edges, edges. Fifty-eight to sixty-four. Mend!” This was my mantra as a seven-year-old girl. This is what was engraved into my brain every weekend between April and July of every year. This is what I remember about growing up with parents who taught a fly-fishing school. Trout are on the edges, they thrive in water temperatures between fifty-eight and sixty-four, and dang it, you better mend for a natural drift to catch fish.
It was inevitable that I would grow up to live in the fly-fishing world. My dad’s first book about fly fishing the Sierra was published the year that I was born. My parents started teaching fly-fishing classes together two years after that.
I learned to crawl in the Truckee River. My parents figured that since I couldn’t move, it’d be okay to fish with me lying on the bank. When they found me rolling with the ripples in the shallows of the river, it was apparent I had learned the crawling thing.
I was officially connected with fly fishing when my dad put me in a car seat behind him at Martis Lake and caught me on a back cast (this is recorded on video). My path might have been laid when my parents took me on a rafting trip on the Deschutes when I was nine months old. Some claimed this to be child abuse. Maybe spending weeks at fly-fishing shows under the booth in a bassinet had its effect, too. Whatever the reasons, it was inevitable that I would grow into a fly fisher.
When I could think for myself, I thought of fly fishing as an “old person’s sport,” and it bored me to tears. I would give all the excuses in the world as to why I couldn’t be dragged down to the river, but it never worked. My sister and I never won the “fishing fight” and always found ourselves moping in the back seat on the way to the river. When we actually arrived, it was never that bad. We got to play “balance beam” on the railroad tracks while Mom and Dad wadered up. We turned rocks over to find stoneflies and little squiggly bugs. We dipped our fingers into floatant, then into the water . . . the shiny coating was amazing, really! And at that point, we were already at the river and having fun, so why not cast a rod?
The patience level of a seven-year-old girl is not much, and it’s in the rule book for the Truckee River to have lots of patience. “Cast upstream, let it drift down to the edge of the rock. Mend, mend, mend.” Nothing. Again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Ugh, boring. So I was left to do my own kind of fishing . . . just cast out, then put the line through the water. With this kind of fishing, the only instruction I had was to pull as hard as I could if I got stuck on something. Of course, I got stuck in the bushes and, remembering my dad’s instructions, just pulled. And pulled. I turned around only when I heard my dad screaming at me to stop pulling. I had hooked him through the neck with a Woolly Bug-ger. Not only was I pulling my line as hard as I could to get it out of the “bushes,” the barb wasn’t smashed. My mom handed him a six-pack of beer and told him to start drinking. Sorry Dad.
My sister and I realized that we were going to have to go fishing no matter what, so we had to make the best of it. Our formula was to find a good long branch, tie some leader to the end, add a nymph, and walk with our lines in the water along the bank of Martis Lake. This will catch you as many sunfish as you could ever want. It got to the point where Mom and Dad were no longer needed to release the fish, and we could walk as far as we wanted. The rule was to be back at the car before dark, and then we could go to 7-Eleven on the way home for Slurpees (and beer). I’m not sure if this particular night my sister wanted to show her catch at 7-11 or pay with it. She stuck her hand in her pants pocket, pulled out a sunfish, and slammed it on the counter. The cashier screamed and dropped a Slurpee, splashing it up to the ceiling. Mom and Dad were laughing the whole way home. I’m pretty sure that’s the night we got the talk about catch and release.
Fly fishing was boring to me until it took me places. Horse pack trips in the eastern Sierra changed fly fishing for me. I think I was 10. I remember creeping on the edge of a small stream, looking for fish, casting my fly into the ripples at the edge, and hooking a golden trout. It was the first time I ever thought a trout was beautiful, and it was the first time I fell in love with fly fishing. I was hooked.
In our dining room, we had an eight-foot-long aquarium with all sorts of pumps and gadgets to mimic the environment of a river. There were rocks covered in stoneflies, snails hiding in the water plants, a sculpin feeding on any algae he could find, and one beautiful golden trout. Her name was Goldie. On this tank there was a fine mesh netting that extended to the ceiling so that you could actually watch the mayflies emerging. This was all set up for the fly-fishing classes, but I remember it being pretty cool. No one else had a tank like this one, and still to this day I have yet to see anything like it.
Fishing grew on me, and there became a point when I was asking to go to the river and asking my mom and dad to come with me to the fly-fishing shows. Many years and lots of fishing later, I was managing a fly-fishing lodge in Mexico, followed over the next five years by working at a fishing lodge in Alaska. I guess I should have known then, at the age of seven, when I could name you any of Joe Tomelleri’s trout prints or tell you the scientific name of any aquatic insect, that my future would involve fly fishing.
I could not imagine having grown up any other way. I now find myself fishing the edges, checking the water temperature, and yes, mending. That is my mantra still, 20 years later. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
