Back in the mid-1970S, I was stranded at some semiformal fishing gathering having to listen to a fellow give a detailed, 40-minute presentation on the origins, virtues, and tying specifics of the Catskill dry fly. The “true” Catskill dry, mind you, not the heretical variations being bandied about by folks who hadn’t been baptized in the Willowemoc. This guy was a priest of Catskill arcana and had the self-confidence of a Jesuit speaking to a coven of Wiccans. I was young then, and impatient, and I wondered what this had to do with my own fishing interests, dominated by California streams, caddis hatches, and high-stick nymphing, by shooting heads and winter steelhead. When I mentioned to the Catskill fellow the kind of flies and waters my friends and I fished, his eyes glazed over, pretty much as mine had during much of his talk. Like Brits and Americans, separated by an ocean and a common language, the two of us were separated by different notions about what constitutes our common sport.
As fly fishers, we’re branded by our angling roots, a mark that’s visible on our flies and tackle, by our lore, and by the waters we fish. I’m a California guy, and a San Franciscan, to boot. I was raised on tales of steelhead on the Russian and Eel, of trout on the Pit and Feather and Stanislaus, of “black bass” in Clear Lake and Shasta, of stripers in the bay and off the coast. I’d heard that there were some decent East Coast and Midwest fly rods, but knew that E. C. Powell and Lew Stoner and later Jim Green and Russ Peak had refined rod making to heretofore unheard-of heights. As for flies, had anyone surpassed Cal Bird, or Grant King, or C. Jim Pray? Not in the West, they hadn’t.
Back in my very early, fly-addled twenties, I was hungry for knowledge of our sport. I was a grad student at the time, and because of that, I was also a library rat. I read everything I could about fly fishing in the local public library as well as in U.C. Berkeley’s Doe Library, where I should have been reading British intellectual history. I only infrequently found a book that described the kinds of waters I fished or how I fished them. Far and fine? Except in rare instances, that’s not the ticket on the Truckee, or the upper Sac, or the tiny creeks of the high Sierra: short and a mouthful was more the case. Rocky Mountain anglers such as Dan Bailey and
Charlie Brooks offered more and better information, and through them I saw that to improve, I needed to fish in Montana and Idaho. But Eastern waters and Eastern lore were So Yesterday. And while a Red Quill or a Hendrickson or a Quill Gordon took the occasional fish, I was usually better off with a Humpy or a Bird’s Nest or with one of Ted Fay’s Bombers or a Brooks’s Stonefly. And the Jassid — a beetle imitation that Vince Marinaro found exceptionally effective on his Pennsylvania spring creeks — wasn’t worth a crap on the Feather.
But it wasn’t just the East Coast flyfishing tradition against which I struggled. I briefly worked part-time at an Eddie Bauer store when that company still sold outdoor gear. The fishing department at the new San Francisco store had been stocked by an angling guru who ran the company’s flagship Seattle fishing department. He’d sent us lots of good gear, but our fly case had not a single weighted Comet or Boss or Horner Shrimp, and there wasn’t a sinking shooting head to be found. When I called the guru to see if he would order some for us, he told me they were unnecessary — just sell the flies he’d sent, and if the customer foolishly didn’t want to fish a floating line, sell him a 20-foot sink-tip. Regional prejudices again, and I was as guilty of them as he was.
I also recall going to an annual meeting of the Saltwater Fly Rodders of America, held, of all places, at a hotel on California’s Salton Sea. I took with me what then were Scott PowR-ply’s heaviest fiberglass saltwater rods, sticks that guys regularly fished for San Francisco Bay stripers and some that had taken big tarpon in Costa Rica. I met a fellow there who guided in the Keys for tarpon. He picked up one 11-weight I had, wiggled it, and shook his head. “Here’s what we fish,” he said, handing me a rod so stiff I wasn’t sure it was really a fly rod. “How the hell does a guy cast this,” I wondered? But the Keys guy was similarly unclear about what a shooting head was for and couldn’t understand why we fished sinking lines.
I began to get the idea that there was a world out there about which I had no idea, though I figured a couple of really good caster/anglers from the West Coast could straighten the Keys folks out. That there were already a score of them down there every May was something I didn’t know, or that they were learning things they could apply to our fishing out here, just as they were leaving new ideas with their hosts.
When the fly-fishing renaissance of the early 1980s started to blossom, Westerners began to supplant our cousins in the East as pathfinders of the sport. My head had grown larger, if not downright swollen, and I laughed when East Coast friends fantasized about “going out West” to fish. Of course, they didn’t mean my West, the Sierra and the Siskyous and the fogdraped coastal estuaries of the Pacific, but rather the Great Trout Theme Parks of the Rockies. Although offering astonishing fishing, Yellowstone and its neighbors were still at the edge of the Midwest as far as this San Franciscan was concerned: important, but still foreign, though we Californians soon adopted those waters as our own. We were in the bucket out here, and the East Coasters clearly weren’t, though when I referred to things that way, they looked puzzled.
But our striper populations were declining, while the Mid-Atlantic states began to experience a boom that created enough 9-weight rod sales to rebalance the books of a handful of rod companies. When one Massachusetts friend described fishing a striper “blitz,” I thought it was a silly name, better suited to a brand of beer. But damnit, I caught more big stripers within an hour of his house over the course of a week than I had in a season in San Francisco. And there were hard-core guys out there living in pickups and station wagons while waiting for a tide or a blitz who reminded me of my steelhead-and-salmon-crazed friends. The East wasn’t all that effete.
Mellower now, and more patient, I’ve fished reasonably widely over the past 40 years, much of it with what I hope is an open mind. I’m no longer stupidly smug when I listen to friends from Michigan talk about their rivers or their reverence for collectible bamboo rods by Paul Young or Everett Garrison. The same goes for Coloradans and their curious love for Phillipsons and Grangers and for marvelous rivers such as the Gunnison. I’ve had great days fishing little New England streams that tumble through postcard-perfect villages (and one that runs behind a Vermont Kmart), taking bright little fish that were the ancestors of the brookies I chase in the high Sierra. I even spent 10 years living on a steelhead river in Oregon, where I found a floating line and some of the Seattle guy’s flies effective as hell. Now, when I’m accused of being a Luddite for not fishing a double-handed rod for steelhead, I remind myself that just as clichés once voiced new truths, angling fashions are changeable and that an outdoor writer for the San Francisco Chronicle once described the Trinity as “a perfect 8-foot-rod river.”I’m even conciliatory when I run into Easterners in Baja, folks who gush about how inexpensive it is while I quietly smolder at the ever-increasing prices in what was once a poor man’s angling paradise.
Too many silly buggers out East still can’t cast past 60 feet, but I suspect they continue to learn from us, just as I occasionally learn from them. We’ll share similar stories when we run into each other on a trout stream in Montana, where we’re both interlopers to the few folks up there who didn’t move in from elsewhere after seeing The Movie. But I’ll still look to California as the wellspring of everything I love about fly fishing, the real “out West.” And I’ll go home with a smile on my face that’s just a hair shy of smug while I await the next trip to somewhere else that isn’t yet my home.
