The close of trout season always saddens me a little. No matter how much I’ve fished I still want more, so I turn to my library of angling books to see me through the cold months. I never planned to be a collector. It started by chance years ago when I worked as a publicist for Alfred Knopf. The job was lowly, but the perks were terrific. I received a copy of every title on the Knopf list. Half I sold to supplement my income, but the other half were keepers. From Julia Child I learned the art of French cookery, while Ray Bergman taught me how to properly fly fish a stream.
In those days, sporting titles weren’t consigned to niche publishers. Most major houses included books on hunting and fishing in their catalogs. Bergman’s Trout was a case in point. First published in 1938, when the author was the angling editor of Outdoor Life, it had become both a classic and a bestseller. Knopf’s reprint edition of 1970 reproduced sixteen pages of lavish full-color plates devoted to flies, quite a few originated by Bergman. (He’d collected more than 200,000 distinct patterns in his travels.) I spent hours poring over the plates before I read so much as a word. They provided an invaluable historical record as well as being a tribute to the fly-tying greats.
Bergman’s style was humble and homespun. You might mistake him for your favorite uncle offering some sage advice. The main lesson I took away from his book was the need for fly fishers to be more patient. Overly eager types like me often start working a river before they’ve studied it and mapped out a strategy. The sight of a hatch or a rise quickens our blood, and we throw caution to the wind. Before you know it, we scare off the trout with too many casts. Bergman never makes that mistake. Instead, he’s a keen observer. Sometimes he watches a pool for a half hour before he makes a move. By then, he’s identified the best lies and the spots where the trout are likely to feed.
I first put Bergman’s ideas to the test on the Bear River in Placer County. It’s a much abused stream, but it was close enough to San Francisco for a quick overnight trip. The river consists of pocket water for the most part, except for a couple of pools near the road. Easy access means heavy pressure, of course, and two anglers were attacking a pool when I arrived. They weren’t having any luck. They’d already put down the trout with their flailing. When they finally gave up, I followed Bergman’s lead and rested the pool for twenty minutes or so. Gradually, a gentle calm ensued, and fish began to rise. On my second cast I caught a nice brown on an Adams and tipped my ball cap to Mr. Bergman.
Another Knopf classic that came my way was Streamers and Bucktails: The Big Fish Flies, by Joseph Bates. The subtitle grabbed me for obvious reasons — who doesn’t want a big fish? — as did the cover illustration of a ferocious looking salmon hooked on a streamer. Such fishing has never been as popular in California as it is back east, especially in Maine, where Carrie Stevens introduced her famous Gray Ghost in 1924. The preferred method is to troll a streamer or bucktail behind a canoe or a rowboat. Streamers mimic forage fish, so the trick is to coax a trophy trout into dropping its guard and chasing after the piscine equivalent of prime rib.
Bates got me so excited I invested in a batch of streamers. They were beautifully tied in a host of alluring colors — Micky Finns, Black Ghosts, Orange Blossom Specials. I took the lot to Hat Creek to try in the riffles, probably the most forgiving section of that unforgiving river. I used a short leader and quartered upstream as Bates advised, careful to keep the fly near the bottom as I’d do with a nymph. As the streamer swung a cross the current, I used a number of retrieves — fast, slow, dead drift, and a quick jerk and pause to imitate an injured baitfish — but nothing worked, even after I added a split shot. When I switched to a Hare’s Ear nymph, though, I picked up a trout in short order. No doubt the fault was mine, but I only rely on streamers now when nothing else will produce.
Although I left Knopf after two years, I continued to acquire angling books. Some I bought for pleasure — the works of Roderick Haig Brown, say, like A River Never Sleeps — and others to improve my technique. Trey Combs’s Steelhead Fly Fishing was a prime example. For my money, it’s still the best guide to catching (or trying to catch) those elusive sea-run fish. I never tire of Tom McGuane’s The Longest Silence or Robert Travers’s Trout Madness, and I reread A River Runs Through It every winter, a book so perfectly structured and elegantly written no amount of overexposure (or Hollywood glitter) can ruin its appeal.
I thought about Norman Maclean’s preacherly father when a friend recently loaned me a copy of Fishing and Thinking, a book I’d never heard of before. The author, A.A. Luce (for Arthur Ashton), who died in 1977, was a professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. An avid angler, he put an ad in the Church of Ireland Gazette every June announcing that he’d be willing to relieve a country rector of his duties for the month of August if the rectory was suitable as a family home with “good fishing in the neighborhood.” As the title suggests, Luce is a cerebral, high-minded writer. He even devotes a chapter to the ethics of angling from a Christian perspective, noting that at least seven of Christ’s apostles liked to fish. His chapter on gillies, overworked and underpraised, is priceless. He admires their encyclopedic knowledge and how lightly they carry it. The job has its dangers, he admits, such as “the wealthy angler who has had a good day, and is too free with his flask” — at risk of falling into the water and drowning, that is. Luce’s log of catches will make you weep.
On Lough Conn in Ireland in 1945, he took 76 trout on the fly in 28 days of fishing. Their average weight was 22 ounces.
Every angling book has a tale of the one that got away, and Fishing and Thinking is no exception. Luce hooked his monster on a lake, using a wet fly called Watson’s Fancy. It’s a lovely pattern with a body of black over red seal’s fur; a tail of golden pheasant crest; rib and hackle of silver tinsel and black hen; and wings of goose dyed black. Luce saw a rise close to shore and cast to it. A huge brown struck, and the struggle began. First and foremost, the boatman had to row toward deeper water, or else the fish would hunker down in some weeds or tangle itself amid some rocks.
The trout leaped twice. Luce guessed its weight at ten to fifteen pounds. After its leap it went into a “long sulk” and towed the boat around the lake for two hours. Luce, ever philosophical, confesses that he can’t imagine how to describe this for the reader without being boring. “It was just one long drift packed with hopes and fears,” he writes, a sentiment every fly fisher will recognize. Eventually, the trout drags the boat to the opposite end of the lake where there’s a sandy bay. It looks the ideal spot to land the trout, but it’s very shallow and weedy. “In a flash he was in them [the weeds],” says Luce, “and got the purchase, and in a minute or two my line came back minus the Watson’s Fancy.”
It’s those vicarious adventures that make an angling library such a treasure. The cost is negligible compared to the enjoyment to be had. In any kind of weather, you can open a book and be on the bonefish flats with McGuane, the Beaverkill with Bergman, or the Irati in Spain with Hemingway’s Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises, who’s a bait fisherman, alas, although his pal Bill Gorton nixes the worms, makes off with a fly book, and ties on a McGinty. When the day’s tally is in, Gorton’s caught the most trout.
