“Don’t get bigheaded or anything,” said RJ, an invaluable jack of all trades at my mother’s a nursing home. He’s also amiable, engaging, and relentlessly inquisitive — an avid reader with wide-ranging and usually literate tastes. Usually: “But I happened to pick up one of your books on Amazon,” he continues “used, I’m sorry to say, because I like to support writers — and it’s kind of motivated me. I mean, I’ve always had an interest in fly fishing — some interest, anyway — that I might have inherited from my grandfather. So I was hoping you could make a few suggestions about how to get started.”
Honestly, I’m surprised at how often I’ve had similar inquires of late, from cardiologists to my kids’ friends and teachers, from construction workers and firefighters to high-rolling entrepreneurs and even a right-of-right corporate guy to whom I could be related someday. This has much to do with having a circle of friends and acquaintances who don’t fly fish, most of them members of other circles populated by people prone to mistaking a “lyrical” fly fishing writer for an “expert.” It’s my fault, too, since I’m prone to proselytize, occasionally insisting, “Right now, your soul is roughly the size and shape of a raisin. But fly fishing can change all that.” Even so . . . these queries raise the hope of — if not a 90s-style River Runs Through It renaissance — momentum sufficient to replace those of us aging too fast.
Naturally, my knee-jerk reaction is to believe this is a fine phenomenon, presenting opportunities to welcome and encourage newcomers while making karmic payments to those who helped me as I learned the sport. Certainly, assisting somebody such as RJ seems a worthy project, even obligatory on some level.
So, “Absolutely,” I told him. “We’ll do it.” But even as I sashayed down the hallway, nodding my swollen head, I wondered. What is the best way — or ways — to help somebody get from roughly nowhere to somewhere?
That issue is complex and difficult enough by itself, really. But over the next few weeks, others occurred to me, several prompted by “Two Men in a Museum,” a piece from author Kent Cowgill’s new collection, Sunlit Riffles and Shadowed Runs: Stories of Fly Fishing in America. One question — not really Cowgill’s fault — led me to contemplations that made me a bit uncomfortable, uncharitable, and judgmental.
Simply put: How?
Answer 1: I don’t think I know. While I enjoyed my own mostly solo evolution, for most of my fishing life, this progressed at the speed of campaign finance reform. Worse than wandering around ignorant for so long — which really wasn’t so bad, given how much I enjoyed myself — I ended up with a cast looking and acting like a junk ball slider.
Answer 2: multiple choice, including many of the most often recommended methods.
- Find a mentor, volunteer or paid.
- Study books, magazines, and other forms of media, now including videos, DVDs, the Internet — but for God’s sake, don’t expect to learn much how-to from a book title that begins with “Meanderings.”
- Take classes or seminars offered by a fly shop, school, lodge, community college, or adult education program.
- Join a club, ask questions, check into their beginner groups, and find yourself surprised at how generous people are.
- Practice and experiment solo, as often as you can, however frustrating or awkward it might seem.
- Any or all of the above.
- Try bird watching.
While ambiguous, f) seems a safe answer. Now’s the time to state the obvious and unhelpful: it depends. On who you are (including your age), how you learn, where you live, how much time and money you’re willing to spend, and so on. Most important of all, I’d argue — and also most interesting — is why you want to learn and what you expect to get from the sport.
Leaving all that aside for a moment, as if that were possible….
It occurred to me that the best people to ask about how to proceed might be folks who started from scratch, or almost, and succeeded. I’m especially curious about relative blank slates who’ve had the options that are available in the last decade or two — people who got the urge and worked out or stumbled across systems satisfying enough that fly fishing is a large enough part of their lives that they read a magazine like this one.
But wait, thought I. Given that “where” is important for so many reasons — access, types of water, species of fish, expert and educational resources, the presence or absence of communities of supportive sportspersons, chances of finding some early and encouraging success — why not lift “like this one” from that description of magazines? Why not instead get specific to California Fly Fisher, querying our own readers? Might not their advice be more likely, most on point, most relevant and useful?
We’ve never run a survey from this column, so maybe it’s time. (Maybe not, but here’s hoping.) Observations of instructors are welcome and I expect will provide some of the best sources of the most generally insightful answers to a question we’ll phrase as “Why do new fly fisher’s succeed and stay with us?” But I’m especially interested in personal testimonies from those who started up on their ownsome, or maybe with a more or less equally inexperienced pal, in the last 10 or 20 years, with all the new resources available. How did you do it? What worked or didn’t, and why? Suggestions? Cautions?
I’m sincere about this and convinced that California Fly Fisher readers have valuable experiences to share — useful tactics, inspirational for both other tyros and those who’d like to assist them. I’ll do my best to include as many as I can, editing carefully. Send to sethnorman4@gmail.com.
Now, Readers, here’s the rub. You know what I can’t expect to find?
First-person stories from those who gave up. Quitters — I honestly use that word without prejudice — whose almost new gear appears at garage sales, on Craigslist or eBay, and in shops’ used-gear racks. I find it hard not to wonder what their stories might be. And since that calls for speculation, let’s do just that.
Common sense and a little experience suggests some reasons why a lot of people don’t get hooked or stay hooked on fly fishing. I’ve grouped them here in no special order:
Folks who received fly-fishing equipment, lessons, books, and media, even exotic trips, as gifts from well-intended others who hoped to develop an interest where none existed and none ever appeared.
A corollary group, composed of those who try to pick up the sport to please others, perhaps to encourage a relationship that could be familial, friendly, or romantic, or, as was popular for a while, a perceived career advantage, like golf.
Restless types whose garages are stuffed with gear for a dozen sports they played for a month or a year.
People seduced by widespread misperceptions, including illusions that fly fishing is a “relaxing” hobby, sedentary, and essentially pastoral, providing an easy and stylish way to connect with a lovely (if sometimes idealized) world they considered “wild.” (Think Thoreau.)
Unfortunates who imagined they would some day find the time, but didn’t.
Motivated would-be fishers who tried, but failed to find an approach to learning that led them forward — see Answer 2 — and so abandoned the pursuit from frustration. Casting might rank highest of the barriers encountered, but location is certainly another. As the Editor reminded me, it is one thing to venture solo onto tiny Sierra streams where a study of The Curtis Creek Manifesto can teach you enough to stalk and dap out treasures or to a local panfish pond brimming with small bluegills, perch, and bass who actually appreciate a messy presentation. But if your early trips are to today’s Truckee, you’d better arrive with more significant skills, preferably with somebody who can help refine these.
Finally, there are those who found entry to the sport too expensive, even though I don’t think it needs to be, and a few I’ve known who found themselves physically unable to participate, confronted by failing vision or health problems related to stamina and endurance.
Feel free to add to these. And mark me well, please: the groups above provide gross generalizations, but many individuals who originally belonged to one or another are now fanatics. For example, countless numbers of today’s fishers unwrapped unwanted Christmas gifts 2 or 10 or 20 years later, fit ferrules together, had at it, and never stopped. Twice I’ve heard lines like “I took it up to spend more time with a boyfriend. Didn’t work out with him, but it turned out I loved the sport,” and while I’ve never heard something similar from former boyfriends, I have met ex-sons-in-law who, at first only hoping to placate fathers-in-law, turned devotees, and I’m sure romantic aesthetes have discovered in themselves predators of the first water. Exceptions don’t prove rules, of course, only that rules don’t work as well as we’d like. More’s the pity, when we need them. However emphatically we disdain generalizations, without them, we cannot function in everyday life. As a general rule, vehicles in America keep to the right lane. When they don’t, somebody’s likely to die. Which brings me round to that to Cowgill story, memories it provoked, and uncomfortable contemplations. Along with questions of how somebody can help someone learn to fly fish come practical considerations of time and energy, books and tackle to lend or give out, trips to offer or not. . . .
Specifically, there’s this. While it’s dicey and arrogant to presume, are there motives and expectations that doom would-be fly fishers from the start? Are there attitudes that reveal these and perhaps also ways to inform a perspective, correct a misdirection, or at least conserve finite reserves?
Ungenerous, I know. Uncharitable. Forgive me that. Also because I thought there might be useful answers . . . and, maybe, still do.
“The first “pure” fly fisher with whom I actually angled had been a friend and occasional fishing partner for half a dozen years and remains both, three decades later. Talented with lures and bait, experienced mainly in Southern California saltwater, his conversion occurred about halfway through medical school. It was, apparently, a Saint Paul moment. I knew nothing about this until we arranged to meet in Colorado one summer, where — on the way to a river in the Rockies — he declared that trout and salmon were for him now the only species of fish worth a true sportsman’s efforts and that the only worthy way to catch them was on dry flies. I laughed — he couldn’t be serious.
But he was, and as proof had outfitted himself from head to toe in gear worth more than my Galaxy 500. Included in his tackle was the first graphite rod I’d ever seen, which four hours into the trip he realized he’d left behind, which substantially increased the length of our journey. To his credit, he stuck with dries, fruitlessly, for almost a week. He sneered through a mouthful of trout I’d caught for him on bait and continued to scorn me when I landed too many fish stripping soft hackles in the evenings. In short, he was a real pain in the ass.
During breaks between my catching and what soon became his sulks, I insisted that he explain what this was about.
Tradition, he informed me grandly, though he’d only just read about it. He tossed about ideas such as “purity of purpose,” aspiring to a higher challenge, proper etiquette, and quest. In fact, the grumpier he got, the more he sounded like the lovechild of Sir Perceval and Frederic Halford. Then he started smoking a pipe.
That was too much. I called him out as elitist and classist, reminded him of the Che Guevara poster he hung on his dorm room wall. Surely he wasn’t en route to becoming the kind of pompous bourgeois he’d so long despised.
As you might imagine, I enjoyed these challenges a lot more than he did at the time.
That was then. We’ve both laughed about that trip half a hundred times since. As it happens, it was the last one he took carrying only a fly rod, and for the last 20 years, he’s stuck to fishing a spinning rig and Mepps.
Call his experience a flirtation, if you like. Or maybe a seizure. The point is, it didn’t last.
And the irony here?
“Purity of purpose,” aspiring to a higher challenge, quest . . . although posed in purplish prose, are these not qualities that attract so many to fly fishing — and keep them engaged? They certainly mean something to me.
My second example is also compromised, I’m afraid. For that reason I’ll keep the story brief.
South Carolina. A couple of years later, another med student — I’m not picking on them — invites me through an acquaintance to fish with him for bass on the waters of the Santee-Cooper hydroelectric project. He’s a stranger, but also brand new to the sport and rigged with the best. His library’s extensive, and he’s been tying flies, perfect to my eyes, for almost a year, although so far has caught only one small stocked trout on them. Beyond that, he’s bought a brand new boat and modified it precisely using plans purchased for the task. There’s not a speck on it or on anything else he owns.
At the launch, it seems possible that he’s never launched anything before. Our slow, awkward process is much extended because after we’re finished, every object must be set exactly right per a scheme he’s fixed in his mind. Okay with me — a lot of captains are like this, for good reason. Besides, I’m excited. The water looks great, exotic and fishy. We see alligators right off the bat. Better yet, when we finally approach our destination, a lagoon carved out of the main current, there are bass busting at the inlet, scores, I’m convinced, furiously savaging an enormous swarm of giant dragonflies. This happens. Man, it was crazy.
He steers right past them. What?
Bass, he tells me, hang out under lily pads. That’s what his books say.
But those are bass we just passed!
Feeding like mad!
He’d rather try the lily pads. And that’s where he stops, back in the lagoon where shallow, stagnant-looking water simmers under bright summer sun. I’m . . . completely bewildered.
And stay that way. For three hours, he throws beautifully tied flies toward lies he seems to believe are assigned to bass by well-known authors. Over and over, endlessly. Not a bream moves, and I can still see bass busting at the inlet.
A guest in his bow, I wait, then suggest, politely. Maybe I cajole a little during hour two, urge with emphasis sometime after that. No effect. There’s a plan here. An order. Some equation or algorithm that must be worked just so because this is how it’s done.
I stop fishing. Because it’s pointless. Because I’m frustrated and, let’s face it, angry as well. Also, honestly, I’m trying to understand what’s happening here.
I don’t. Or I only suspect, until we’re crossing the bridge back to Charleston in brutal rush hour traffic. That’s when the bow of the boat lifts up from the trailer and flips straight back, nearly smashing the car behind us.
I leap out, find the bracket that’s failed. One bolt is missing entirely. The end of the other is barely hanging on, buried deep in the nut. Here’s what’s queer: at the head end of the bolt, where I expect to find an inch or more I can screw back in, there’s less than an eighth inch of steel — barely three turns of thread.
“The bolts must have broken,” I shout over the honking of hundreds of cars.
“No.”
What?
“I cut them off.” But why?
“It’s just much neater that way.”
No laughing this time. I’m not sure if this fellow fly fished again; if so, not for long. I know this even though we were not and never became friends. He killed himself a year or two later, leaving four kids behind.
I felt sorry for him, sadder for his family. And I’m sorry, Reader, for that ending. But this fellow’s entry to fly fishing, I came to believe, may have emerged from a vastly exaggerated drive I would eventually recognize as not entirely alien to fly fishers I’ve met and admired, people with special, all but absolute commitments. Tyers of Atlantic salmon flies, for example, also artisans described by the title of George Black’s wonderful book about the history of building with split cane in this country, Casting a Spell: The Bamboo Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection.
They find it, perfection. Or probably not, but at least an avenue that allows them to approach the ideal. So while I would never dare guide somebody heading in this direction, I certainly don’t think they should detour.
And does that mean there are no reasons that doom anyone from the start?
No. Or not necessarily. There are certainly a lot more possibilities than considered here. Among these is the one that appears in the Kent Cowgill story “Two Men in a Museum” — a fiction that indirectly suggests a possibility during a painfully polite confrontation between a college instructor who is a highly competent fly fisher and an older man whose life and career demonstrate, by his lights, far more important conventional successes. The story’s also a Traver Award Winner, published in Fly Rod & Reel, where I note in a review as follows:
It’s the kind of long, earnest conversation a few fly fishers may have wanted to engage with a special “type” who hopes to amuse him or herself at the expense of somebody with a passion they can’t fathom. Cowgill’s twist: in “Museum” we share the perspective of the smug, a conventionally successful suit who disdains our proxy as “an apparently competent man of prime earning years [who] could love something as trivial as fly fishing with the ardor of a child,” a “fellow from the hinterlands” and “ambitionless hack . . . no one who mattered had ever heard of.” Of course, if turns out that passion for life is really the issue.
That’s too brief a synopsis, I know; I don’t want to spoil the story. But passion. . . “passion” is the word I want to print in bold. Also to expand upon: in fly fishing, it can be about fish and the predatory hunt and the adventures to which the chase leads us. But while that seems the heart of the matter to me, I know fishers who fell in love first with camaraderie, what they see as pervasive generosity. I also know others who are true solo artists, quietly pursuing perfect flies, casts, and presentations. However manifest, what they feel is intense, enduring, and gratifying in ways we can seldom explain.
Passion. Does RJ have it, or will he?
Can I tell?
The idea that I might imagine I can know that makes me laugh, literally. So does the fact that as I was writing this piece, only hours ago, I got a call from a stranger, somebody’s uncle, who wants to know how he can repair and turn over his father’s cane rod to a nephew he’s sure will enjoy it.
