Reports of a hurricane approaching our Puerto Penasco rental condo closed schools, restaurants, and main street shops, blowing enough smoke to drive away the Labor Day crowd jammed into this Sea of Cortez tourist town. Smoke’s what it turned out to be, mostly; from a patio, sipping drinks intended to enhance our cultural experience, we watched a wall of gray-on-coal clouds miss us — by fifty miles, somebody said. But there still were winds outside the storm’s invisible eye.
Two days later, they were still whipping up waves that reshaped the beach, eroding a shallow, but steep-sided trough parallel to shore.
The landward slope of this excavation is steep, composed of coarse and treacherous sand. Twice it collapses under my feet, tumbling me forward into full face plants, though naturally I hold rod and reel high. When at last I stumble far enough out to find compacted sand, the wave crests are separated by only five or six seconds, too many breaking into or over my face, thus corrupting that sweet, strong, lyrical rhythm I like to develop — and someday will — while shooting an 8-weight into the teeth, past the tongue, and down the trachea of gusts I’d guess at twenty knots.
Fishers not yet familiar with such conditions please be advised: double-hauling as you are pounded and staggered, blinded by salt and insulted by seaweed “makeovers” while trying to keep a narrow sidearm loop as you’re lifted off your feet and pushed north by a rabid rip tide is less a test of skill than of fortitude, the metal of your spine, and especially your willingness to endure failure and humiliation, forging on into the breach with absolutely no chance of success, knowing you blunder. My tolerance is limited. At thirty minutes I tap out. Quitting also humiliates, of course, as does wallowing about on wet sand looking, you fear, a lot like a barely upright, badly beaten beluga with an inexplicably heavy beard.
But that’s not the worst of things by far.
Gasps, a couple of wobbles — a knee tries to give way. I wipe my eyes to glare out to sea, speaking dandy Ahab gems for an appropriate period — guttural, Anglo Saxon words, mainly, bits of Spanish profanities mixed in. And I remain so importantly occupied long enough to see a dozen pelicans arrive, hunchback B-17 birds surrounded by twice as many sleek terns and half a dozen seagull pirates. All convene between a hundred and two hundred feet beyond the spot I’d so recently abandoned, all — even the gulls — gamely fighting the gusts. Then, all — except the gulls — rise a little, pausing for a half moment before folding their wings and, stoop — sort of — crashing beaks first, into what must be a bigly school of baitfish below.
I fall silent. For a minute I think I’m only imagining swirls and bright flashes beneath the surface out there, because I hope these are illusions. All attempts at denial are dashed when a brilliant two-foot blade arcs out of the water, sunlight flashing off its body.
Corvina, I think — white sea bass, which I’ve caught here before, when grunion were running. . . .
But I will never know.
If my angst had ended there, I could claim to be a better man — dare, on occasion to project an image more or less upright, middle-brow, tweedy in profile if a little overfed.
But no. Instead, I descend to into a personality positively presidential, ablaze with primitive lust and self-pity, victim again to an addiction that I only realized in hindsight had ground my morals to pulp. Without warning, I am again that Cro-Magnon I abandoned decades ago, standing just out of reach of frothing water, wild and cruelly aroused. Mr. Hyde. A shade of Tantalus, the Greek mythical figure, deprived of food and water that are always just out of reach, grasping for wine and a gyro. Or perhaps an eighth, out-of-wood pile cousin of Edward III, crying out —
My kingdom! My kingdom for a tenfoot surf rod, a Pflueger 5000, armed with a blue and silver KastMaster.
“The horror. The horror,” you say. How the gulls are laughing. But, s’truth, this has happened before —
Like on the Sacramento Delta last year, skulking through an Escher-built maze of decks, docks, pilings, weed beds, and rows of moored craft small and large, a labyrinth where the only right cast requires three reverse curves, two aerial mends, along with skips and hops to be determined later. Then an hour later and upriver, when a killer bass sucks down a coot from a hole in a tule forest behind a cottonwood deadfall snagged by a shipwreck’s anchor line coiled around a ferry cable. Please, please, let me have in hand a flippin’ rod and deft thumb, twenty-pound test tied to a 4/0 impaled on a slinky piece of plastic topped by a seared, but soft pork rind crust. . . .
Like this spring, the morning I slept too late, arriving to see thousands of kokanee salmon rising as one, twenty seconds before sunlight sends them fleeing, still as goddamn one, down to depths where they would spend the day out of my reach. . . . Like on the Klamath, and every other sizeable steelhead river, where I stare woefully at a run flowing along a far bank that others may reach, but that for me might as well be Ottawa, a moment that wrings from me mildly homicidal thoughts, followed by optimistic anticipation for an approaching apocalypse, then a shameless urge to fling a pink worm under a bobber — the Devil’s tools — that sure as hell will reach. . . .
Lead me not into temptation, Lord. But since you already have, allow me to plead my case.
By 1962, I might have been as fine a caster as any kid stuck with a Zebco 202 and the only solid fiberglass freshwater rod I’ve seen. Andy Puyans–like, I could have hit one of my father’s Lucky packs from 25 feet, or maybe gone six for ten. Not that I needed such precision often. I was then a wormer, fishing for bluegills, an occasional bass or catfish, and when carp invaded the Phoenix Zoo ponds, with dough balls. By my early teens I was throwing Mepps and spoons, Super Sonics and Hula Poppers, Rapalas when I could afford them. At fourteen I began teaching myself to fly fish, blindly, stupidly, often happily, then I continued switching back and forth between foolish efforts and spinning for twenty-odd years before converting to fly fishing (almost) wholesale nearly three decades back.
That about sums up my fishing history, absent the details. And frankly, I don’t think there’s much unusual about this evolution. Not in California, anyway, where fewer fly folks were born sucking those German silver rod butt binkys required for membership in private Eastern clubs built on rivers named by tribes their ancestors helped exterminate.
What I’m wondering while marinating in Pflueger guilt is if my modest progress doesn’t closely resemble that of pilgrims reading this magazine.
Lots of pilgrims. You know who you are. And that poses the question: Does anyone else suffer the occasional temptation to switch back to conventional tackle?
Probably not. Nor do you plan ever to reveal that Mitchell 300 hidden among dishwasher parts in your garage. We closet reprobates like to keep things that way. We mask our bait-stained origins with pristine outfits accumulated since our “Ascension,” clothes and gear sporting high-end brand labels sewn onto pockets, into vests and wader seams, logos etched into boots and pewter flasks, inked almost everywhere. Some of us tag our vehicles with company decals we actually pay for, hoping to raise our status among tailgating strangers by association. Add inscribed office accessories, coffee mugs, luggage, and — I’m only repeating a rumor here — the new Trojan Mayfly Dry Series, with either a “fast tip or parabolic action.”
Yeah. Sure. But whom are we fooling? And is it worth it, to live in fear? In the ashes of night, we calculate the odds of an eight-millimeter movie appearing on YouTube, a movie in which we are smiling, slinging around words like “swivel,” “treble” and “star drag,” bragging obscenely about the finger action of some “bail,” as we called them then. And if anybody at a club or favorite store discovered a “stringer” in our past, one of those crummy blue ones made from crudely braided plastic that shredded gills and gullet with a sound like ripping Velcro constructed from gristle and flesh —
Whoa guys. Stay calm. It’s okay. Sports Afield, family, and friends led you astray. But now you’ve accepted the Adams as the sign of your piscatorial savior, am I right? Kneel to Saints Sawyer and Marinaro, tithe to CalTrout, the Federation of Fly Fishers, Trout Unlimited, et al. Be at ease, fellow traveler. You were young. At some point, everybody cuts a corner, does things the easy, brutal way —
— and gets blood on their hands. Scales. Gut gunk like regurgitated PowerBait. Put that behind you. Forget what Faulkner wrote: “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past,” a notion I’m pretty sure won’t work with your mortgage company. Everything’s fine unless —
Comes a day you’re Pfluegerless as fish and pelicans bust an acre of ocean.
You can’t touch that Escher-ensconced bass that’s finished the coot and is now trying to swallow a ski vest.
Your spouse is begging for a halibut, or a chinook like Bob the Neighbor brought home, caught on a downrigger pulled at 120 feet, as if that’s so hard.
Steelhead? Let’s just leave them out of this.
You’re fine, really, unless, in any situation similar, you feel at the base of your spine a nearly Trojan tension. Or if, without noticing, your mouth has filled with enamel you’ve ground off your molars. Or you’re wearing a bodice that bursts.
Kept your mouth shut and stay still. Because a better person standing beside you on bank or in boat — a real fly fisher, refined and upright, whose tweed is lamb’s wool, somebody fishing synthetic silk line with a Payne, but not feeling yours . . . might mildly inquire if you’ve swallowed something wrong.
“ Yes,” you would say, if honesty trumped shame, then add while gagging, “Feels a lot like a blue stringer.”
Remain silent, exposed only to yourself, pagan.
I wish I could write a something to make you feel better. I do, improved by having spread blame around. So maybe that helps.
Cross-fishers — or those who merely feel “urges” — are not alone. A week after recognizing myself as a sinful son on a beach, an e-mail arrived from a hard-core pal, established with the flyfishing tribe. Embedded within was a YouTube segment. Not a fly-tying sequence or fish fight, but a video of a fellow throwing roughly the same outfit I prayed for as pelicans played with my heart. It shows a new cast he’s invented, a violent pirouette that also looks like a blend of an old-school discus hurl, a vertical rolling ukemi (for all you judo people), and David’s lethal sling-whirl at Goliath performed with a whippy nine-foot atlatl. We who watch can’t measure how far he propels his projectile, but from his launch, it’s likely that this lead would not only crack Goliath’s brain pan but kill every Philistine behind him all the way to Philistinia. Naturally my pal was intrigued, though he has a high-class accent. He wanted to try this, so did, sending me his own video of what he has nicknamed “the Darth Cast.” A nine-foot rod threw an ounce “ just over one hundred yards.” With a four-ounce sinker and a twelve-foot surf stick, he doubled this distance and is certain “If I could control the cast, an extra 50-75 yards is easily on tap.”
A few days thereafter, I called a local fish friend to suggest a few hours on the lake. He couldn’t, because he’d taken off the day before to fish with his wife and daughters, also to fill the freezer with yellow perch fillets. They did, all using Disney Kids’ spin-casting outfits. “I just can’t tell you how much fun we had. Laughing for hours. Lots of fish — doubles and triples, tangled lines. What a ball.”
Well sure, if you like that kind of thing. Sniff.
Then came the kicker.
