Fans of Fly Rod & Reel magazine likely know of the journal’s demise. Columnists received notice in a letter dated April 17; subscribers found out when Fly Rod & Reel’s parent company mailed them a substitute, Shooting Sportsman, by way of “fulfilling” their Fly Rod & Reel contract. (A practice not uncommon enough in magazine publishing, apparently.) The substitution works for some or a few, but for others is as satisfying as a Justin Bieber fanzine.
So what happened? Ah, well, it’s tough out there, in print. And not just in the fly-fishing world. Yesterday, I found a copy of Time in my new surgeon’s office. What was once one of Americas’ major sources of news — I was raised on Time and Newsweek — felt about as substantial as a medium-sized newspaper’s Sunday supplement.
Fly Rod & Reel’s history deserves serious attention, in my opinion, perhaps written by a source who also knew it as Rod & Reel. Greg Thomas, Fly Rod & Reel’s editor for the last seven years — the most recent and last — offers a brief, personal, and carefully candid obituary for the magazine at http://www.anglerstonic.com/2017/03/fly-rod-reel-end-ofa-magazine-era. Thomas’s description is followed by a Q-and-A wherein readers lament losing John Gierach’s column, long illustrated by painter Bob White, a 25-year collaboration that will continue at Trout magazine. And a whole bunch will miss articles by environmental firebrand Ted Williams, a man who constructs pickaxes from facts to expose exploiters and fools of every stripe, including at times do-gooders he thinks misguided.
Count me with the disappointed. But there’s something else I will mourn.
For years, I picked up issues of Fly Rod & Reel on occasion, along with other national slicks. Then, in 1991, I found a short story that snapped my head back hard. Halfway through Cliff Hauptman’s “Meyer the Tyer,” I started hissing breaths pressed between outrage and delight. Either way or both, this was fiction of the first water — novel, brilliant, and daring. After a second read, I hoped someday to have the chops and cojones to chance a submission.
Publishing “Meyer” was part of an effort by Fly Rod & Reel editor Silvio Calabi to introduce “something different” to fly-fishing readers — short fiction. The first piece appeared in 1988. In 1994, the magazine joined with the John D. Voelker Foundation and, with support from the Frey Foundation, presented the Robert Traver Award, named for the nom de plume of the celebrated Michigan Supreme Court jurist, author of important opinions, also of Anatomy of a Murder and 10 other books, and a protector of the environment where trout are found.
The Traver award is only one of the Voelker Foundation’s activities, including sponsorships of Voelker Scholars, The Voelker Exhibit, and, in 2016, a documentary reporting stories of previous Voelker Scholars’ important contributions to their communities (http://www.voelkerfoundation.com).
Readers will find Hauptman’s “Meyer” in the first anthology of Traver entries, In Hemingway’s Meadow, released in 2009. A second volume, Love Story of the Trout, came out in 2010. Both were published by Fly Rod & Reel Books — RIP. Authors of these 30 stories include Pete Fromm, Scot Waldie, E. Donnall Thomas, Jerry Gibbs, Richard Chippone, Mallory Burton, Keith McCafferty, Charles Gaines, wild man Robert Jones, Dave Hughes (times 2), Thomas McIntyre, Kate Small, Kent Cowgill. . . .
There’s a pair of mine among these. “Edith’s Rule,” printed below, won in 1998. It hasn’t appeared in any collection of mine, and I’ve regretted a little its not having been offered to California Fly Fisher homies. So, without a nod to that doctor’s office reference, I’ll seize an excuse to substitute the story for this “Meander,” hoping it will serve better than a Bieber fanzine.
One last thing before that:
Traver authors get attention, but it’s the Voelker Foundation and its members who deserve more. I learned this when invited to serve on the judging committee, which once a year convenes — convened — by phone to discuss pieces forwarded by Fly Rod & Reel editors. Emeritus committee members include Nick Lyons, Charles Kuralt, and Voelker Foundation cofounder John Frey. For 15 or 16 years, I served with foundation president Rich Van der Veen, a man of grace, as well as with stalwart and literate Fred Baker, gracious John Frey, Doctor of Prose Ted Leeson, Fly Rod & Reel editors such as Jim Butler, and others.
I mention this committee and these judges for two important reasons. First, this deck was not stacked. Period. Nobody knew the name of any story’s writer or cared. Every year, judges logged onto the call with a favorite or two, the rest ranked in rough orders that changed, often radically, as members argued positions and reasons, quoted passages, and considered entries by the light of the Traver contest mission.
Second, without a doubt, these discussions were some of the warmest, most civilized, and most literate conversations of my writing/editing experience. Like the stories themselves, a pleasure: you could almost smell the scotch.
Sometimes I am sad and sometimes resentful, and either way, I am old, getting cranky, convinced that the bass are harder than they used to be. Especially that beast under the willow in the big pool, 543 steps downstream from the dam.
Used to be 502, which shows you how long I’ve been fishing this stretch and how much time I have on my hands. Lots of time. Still, often these days,
I don’t check in with Bud at his counter in the park office. I just don’t feel like it, which means on the way out in the evening or sometimes the next morning — like this one — he dogs me, standing there, staring with his Weimaraner eyes and his hearing aid perched on one ear like a slug.
“Got to let me know, sir,” he said. “Judas Priest, Bud, like you don’t already? Like I’m not here seven days out of seven?”
“Not the point, sir.”
“Then what is the goddamn point, Bud? “
No expression in those eyes. Blank. The petals of two blue flowers impaled on black pistils. But Bud is tuned, believe me.
“The point, sir, is that you’re about the only person who fishes back there, where there’s copperheads and cottonmouths, snapping turtles bigger than you are, and rough walking that might not be so much a problem if you’d only carry a stick. The point is that I do not intend to let you die slow one night because I don’t know to go find you, so you sign my goddamn book every time you come in, and don’t tell me again about your goddamn ‘lifetime pass,’ sir . . . and thank you for visiting our park.”
See what I mean. Tuned.
I didn’t stick around after that. Doesn’t matter, except that I had wanted to ask Bud about the girl again. And maybe I’d also half thought to show him Edith’s 5-weight fly rod, which I’ve been using lately, even though it’s small for my hand and too light, really, to throw bugs. What a sweet little rod, though, a treasure, with its slim grip still clean and unmarked, because Edith would never hook her flies into the cork. “A perfect lady’s rod,” I might have told Bud, because that would also describe Edith. Then maybe I would have mentioned something about “Edith’s Rule.”
Probably not. Bud doesn’t actually fish much, really, and when he does, it’s with a bobber for what he calls “brim,” or for “crappie” — a word he pronounces to rhyme with “sappy,” suggesting fecal fish. Anyway, I couldn’t have pulled off the “perfect lady” line without getting sappy myself.
That’s how it is now. The doctor warned me that after surgeries like the one that zippered my chest, “You will tend to find yourself more emotional, and more likely to show it.”
Which for me means acting mean, apparently. Too often, anyway — sometimes I can’t figure out where my manners have gone. Me, who’s always thought good manners have more to do with maintaining civilization than almost any of the vaulted ideals: suddenly I can’t seem to snap my teeth fast enough to bite back exactly the kind of remark for which silence was invented.
Speaking of which: is that girl going to be watching me today? Skulking about through the trees, a paler shadow among the others? Exactly how long has she been doing that?
I first noticed her last week, but she’s so quiet, who knows. I’m not even sure I heard her at all. Maybe I was just looking around, like I do more often these days, wondering where everything’s gone — and there she was, standing partly hidden behind a big dogwood, maybe 75 feet away. She dropped her eyes when I squinted, then slipped away along the slope, probably on a deer trail up through there.
I didn’t call to her, of course. I wouldn’t have thought about her again, except that I saw her near the same spot two days later, just as I was deciding which tree to irrigate — very annoying. She disappeared instantly, but I’m pretty sure I heard her close by an hour later, which means she’d been stalking me the whole time.
Bud told me her story that afternoon. Turns out he talks to her on occasion, or maybe more than that. “She’s 12 years old and curious, real shy, maybe tryin’ to learn a few things.”
I thought that was so awfully damn obvious of him, I wondered if he also told her I was a ringer for Grampa Walton. “You know, Bud,” I said, and I still flush to remember my tone, “I don’t mind fishing alone. I don’t mind that at all.”
Bud stared at me, unreadable as a clock face without hands. I kept thinking he was going to say something. Maybe he would have, but suddenly I felt tired and told him I was going home. Not that going home helped, since all evening I worried about what Edith would have thought if she’d heard me so rude. Got so bad I eventually took out her tackle for the first time, to clean it up, as if it needed attention and she would forgive me.
Of course, there’s no reason the girl shouldn’t watch except that I don’t want her to. She has every right. Bud says her people have owned the slope above the big pool — my pool, it feels like — for a hundred years, maybe two, though none of them have lived around here since anybody can remember. Or they hadn’t until her mother brought in a brush hog to clear a patch up near the road, then had an old trailer pulled in.
I hear her visitors, sometimes, when I’ve stayed late an evening. Or their cars, and maybe I see the headlights reflecting off the trees.
So happens that I’m not the one to pass judgment on these men, but maybe it’s because of them that I didn’t talk to the girl yesterday, when I spotted her way down near the tail of the pool. It was the right moment to address her directly, maybe even wade across to explain, face to face, that one of the most important parts of fishing to me is solitude. I should have done it, and I’ll have to, but the problem is that I don’t want her to think that I’m saying this because her mother’s, well, a woman of that profession. God only knows what grief the daughter will get from others when the junior high school opens in the fall, smirks and whispers that will hit her like slaps across the mouth. It’s a small town, not without pity, but a few hard hearts can break yours when you’re young.
Not that I know to much about that, I guess. Oh how Edith wanted a child.
Me too.
So maybe I won’t even go all the way to the big pool today. I don’t have to. Below me right here is a smaller one, a slow channel, really, with bluegill holding close to a bank where kudzu swarms down to swallow a deadfall. I could toss out a popper — Lord I love a popper — one of my own bitty little deer hair babies, which are getting hard for me to spin, or one of the store-bought foam doodads, which work just as well and are cheap. (I won’t fish deep this early in the day, because there will be plenty of time for streamers later.) Normally I use my own ties in the morning, when I’m still fresh and my casts correctly made more often than not, unless there’s a serious reason to think I might hang a branch while taking a reasonable risk.
Like right now. If I wade to position from below and stoop enough to where it hurts my knees — some anglers don’t understand how well bluegill see, how smart they’ve got to be to live a year — I’ll have a clear shot forward. I’ll also have hell with yellow pine and brambles behind, meaning a tight little roll cast — and that’s why I use a double-tapered line, never mind the economy of it. But a roll cast from an uncomfortable crouch, while I’m shaking a little, like I do, with Edith’s rod just a tad lighter than I want . . . it’s sure easy to imagine that the fly will drift right, right into kudzu. That’s okay if it tumbles off one of the broad leaves, as it probably will, acting exactly like those tiny terrors expect of a clumsy beetle or spider or some other bug. But if the fly slips between leaves, catches down in the stems. . . .
Justifiable risk, I’d say. For a foam popper, anyway. And I would take it post haste, except for another fly — this one in the ointment. There’s a reason the bluegill are grouped at the front of the channel, and it’s green-backed and golden-eyed, suspended deep in the branches of that deadfall, a Sunfish Nemesis. He’s not a monster bass, like the one at the big pool, but I bet he’s three pounds. Not bad for a warm little tailwater nobody else bothers much.
He won’t come up for a popper, though. Or I haven’t been able to raise him. Maybe at night I could. Wonder if I could still manage that? Give Bud fits if he knew I tried —
The problem is that he might well come after a bluegill, if it’s hooked and struggling, trying to head into cover. There’s half a chance, anyway. Then it will be trumpets and drums for as long as it takes the bass to disgorge — or not, so to drag both bluegill and fly back into that deadfall, everything and everybody tangled together in a macramé of leader and branches with a live fish or two thrashing around where I can’t get at them without a mask and fins.
What a mess! “So, Edith, what I might do is —”
See there.
That happens. Lots, lately — all of a sudden. It’s strange, because it never did when she was alive. Didn’t need to . . . this sudden sense of her, a rush of presence so immediate to me. What’s stranger still, it only happens when I’m fishing, not ever when I’m alone in the house and might welcome the company, if that’s what to call it. Only when I’m fishing.
I don’t know what to think about that. Fishing for me has always meant slipping into a state of mind with borders nearly as absolute as a river bank or ocean shore. All the preparations and whatnot, the evenings with magazines or at the vise, the people you know because fishing is what you do — that’s all been part of my life. But when I’m on the water fishing, the act itself engages me completely: my thoughts are machinations, and every nerve of sense I can bring to bear stays directed, focused. Even these days, that’s still so true that sometimes I’ll forget about lunch until after the morning shadows falling to this bank fall back across to the other. “It’s a place all your own you go to,” Edith said soon after we were married, “and I don’t mind at all, as long as you come home to me.”
I always did. Now I would if I could.
Edith came along, of course. Not often, because she had places of her own to go. (Once, when she was sewing, I remembered the name Ariadne, who I think started as a beautiful woman — her fingers so quick, and her teeth pressed tight together as she hummed.) But sometimes she’d come. Always, on trips to the mountains for trout, when for a few hours at a time she’d lay out her short, picture-perfect casts in an action that was to my own like a pirouette to putting the shot. “Now go on,” she’d say after I’d watched a little. “Now you go on. I know what you want to do. I’ll be here when you get back. And I’ll probably still love you, though there’s no guarantee you’ll get dinner.”
Sometimes when I returned she’d still be casting, but the cane rod I’d bought her was heavy, and she wouldn’t consider any other until this one I’m using today came along. Finding it, of course, was a big surprise — the only time she ever applied “Edith’s Rule” to herself.
Edith’s Rule . . . I doubt I could have explained it to Bud if I tried. That wasn’t even Edith’s name for such a fine and crazy idea, which she seemed to think was just an extension of common sense — which it is, if only in the same way as the Golden Rule and most of the Ten Commandments.
The first time I saw her use it was my first year at college after I came back from The War. We were both cubs on the newspaper staff then. I’d already half noticed her — a tiny, friendly girl with peaked eyebrows, a sly smile, and wit that could sneak in and make your head snap back with laughter. Lovely, she really was, but she seemed still a girl to me, and the war had put me apart from what I thought of as “kids.” Then one day she brought me a framed picture in a cloth bag.
“Here,” she said. “This is yours.”
At first I thought it was some kind of fantastic photograph of a bigmouth bass. Then I looked closer. The image was constructed of tiny dots, almost like pixels on a comic book page, except this was hand done, with art in it, by somebody named Thomas Gonzales. Wonderful thing, really. I still hadn’t put it down when I asked her what this was all about.
She laughed. “Don’t make too much of it,” she said. “It’s just that sometimes there’s a certain thing that naturally belongs to a particular person and far and away fits them best. I’ve been reading your fishing stories, so I know this picture belongs to you and only happened to fall into my hands on its way.”
Crazy thinking. Completely. But she wouldn’t let me buy it, and she wouldn’t take it back, absolutely not. At first she wouldn’t even let me take her to dinner, by way of making some compensation. Then she did, and we had this lifetime together after that.
Edith’s Rule, I came to call this. I saw it invoked half a hundred times after that, occasionally with people almost strangers. Most folks were as baffled as I was that first time, yet you could always see by their expression that whatever Edith gave them was something they would treasure, even if they hadn’t known they would — uncanny, she was. A hat or a lamp, once a set of antique crochet needles she saw at a garage sale. But I never saw her apply it to anything she wanted for herself until one day when we were on vacation near Loveland.
We’d stopped at a shop for information and to buy a few flies. The fellow was ringing me up when Edith put a rod down beside the register, little wand of a 5-weight called an Elkhorn. “And please ring this also,” Edith said.
Out of the blue — just like that. I must of opened my mouth to say something — no doubt to offer my supposedly expert opinion — but she reached up and put her finger across my lips. Then, for the first and only time, she used my name for her habit. “Edith’s Rule,” she whispered.
I can hear her. I can hear her say it now. It sounds like a breeze in these trees, and it is of course. But it makes me remember how her hand held the very grip I have in mine this instant, then the warm feel of her and of the way her body moved. Her strength. She was so slight you couldn’t have guessed that she flexed like spring steel, but with a touch so tender it made me want to say “Thank you” aloud. God, I watched her watching me in the light of so many thousand nights, marveling at how everything fit, her skin smooth as slowly moving water and the seams of her small muscles shifting, folding and opening, lovely lines leading me back to her face, to her eyes. I can remember how she amazed me that first time, when I did not expect she would teach me how little I’d learned in the brothels of Bari, soon after we’d bombed Rommel into the sand and had begun flying the missions north that we all believed would kill us — so many of us were right — and so had tried to seize every scrap of pleasure from the life we feared we’d lose. Just imagine, leaving life before finding Edith. Before learning that just as surely as there are things that seem to be made for people who will well and truly love them, so are some people made for one another. Created that way, I guess, or shaped so closely that suddenly the words “You’re Mine” on a Valentine’s Heart mean something altogether different from possession, a recognition of belonging that is like light.
Edith.
I’m not going to cast for those bluegill. Or to that bass I can’t figure out. I can’t even see them through the mist, if you want to know the truth. But I’ll be all right pretty soon. Certainly by the time I get to the big pool. I will be all right because fishing is my place, the place I go to. And it’s fine that Edith visits me there.
I don’t see her on the slope. The girl. She could be watching and probably is.
She’ll see me catch that big bass, I promise. Because I know exactly how I will — have it figured right to the moment. I know what I’m going to cast and where, then how much line I will have to strip out while I slowly wade back out of the fish’s vision and how long I’ll wait until I’ve faded from its dim monster memory — twenty minutes, on the watch. . . . Then I’ll give one . . . little . . . twitch.
I’ll catch him all right. But not today.
I see her now, downstream, closer than ever before. It’s time to get this done.
We watch each other as I wade across. She’s an ordinary girl, I should think. Worried, by the way she holds her hands. A sad way of standing, she has. But I can tell by her eyes that this time she’s not going away.
Probably Bud warned her. Told her that I am old and widowed, pitiful and turning mean. But I’m going to explain it anyway. Tell her that I only need to be left alone, to find my private place, because that’s what’s left. She may not understand that need now. Perhaps she will someday.
I’m certain she will. Someday very soon, I’m afraid.
I say, “Young lady,” and in that moment it feels like my thoughts have been severed from each other, as if by looking into her face I see sky.
“Young lady,” I say again, pausing because I’m suddenly so surprised and frightened and must drift an instant before I let go, surrender all of a rush after fighting so hard. “You see . . . this rod, this rod was my wife’s, whose name was Edith, and I believe she would like you to have it.”
I stare at her, still listening to what I’ve said. She looks confused and draws her hands away from her sides, raises them partway up to her face. I would say the rest if I could, reassure her, answer questions she cannot know to ask. But it’s all I can do to wait for her to take the grip I have extended, to watch as her gaze is distracted by the smooth, clean cork. When at last her fingers close around it, I can see how she’s startled by the fit, though I am not, and by a balance in her hand she will soon understand.
I’ve seen that look before.
“That’s right,” I whisper, and I know that it is, even if I am so sorry to lose this piece of Edith it’s like something inside me is tearing. But it’s very right. I know who would be proud of me, and if the image of the girl’s eyes blur in mine, I still try to meet them for the moment it takes to manage “Tomorrow. I will show you. Tomorrow.”
I am a little better, walking back. At least I’m halfway to the dam before I realize I’m not counting steps. I wonder if I will miss my solitude on a water that has been only mine, but then, so much of my life is empty enough. And since emptiness is also space to fill, I guess I’ll stop at Bud’s desk in the morning.
I will thank him for thinking of me. And I will try to explain about Edith’s Rule.
