You’d be surprised how often I’m asked why I fly fish. It’s not that I hang out in rarefied circles where postmodern literature’s the chief topic of conversation. There’s just a mystique about our sport that baffles some folks. “You’d think a worm would do the trick,” a guest said smugly to me at a recent dinner party. I should’ve let it pass, but I took the bait, as it were — I blame the pinot noir — and told him it’s less about catching trout than how you go about it, sounding sufficiently Zen-like to regret it in the morning. To avoid the same mistake the next time I’m asked, I sat down and made a list of five reasons fly fishing’s an abiding passion of mine.
First and foremost, I love the challenge. You need discipline, patience, skill, native cunning, and a stout heart to succeed. So many variables go into catching a decent-sized brown, brookie, or rainbow it’s a minor miracle when they all fall into place. Disappointment will dog you many a day. Outsiders don’t understand the degree of difficulty. I didn’t understand it myself when I started out. As an experienced spin fisher, I figured I had a leg up. After buying a fly rod, I taught myself to cast at the pools at the Angler’s Lodge in Golden Gate Park. Although I never managed to hit a target, I felt confident — wrongly, as it happened — in my ability and decided I was ready to put it to the test in the field.
I chose the North Yuba for the experiment. It’s a relatively easy stream, compared with blue-ribbons such as Hat Creek, and I’d done well there with my Mepps spinners. The day was warm and pleasant, with a few bugs in the air, so I tied on an Adams as an all-purpose dry. As expected, my casting went fine, but I had no idea how to pick up slack. The line came back at me so fast I was soon wrapped in tangles. I looked to be doing a weird form of macramé. Once, the line shot right past, and a trout fingerling inhaled the fly behind my back. I didn’t even feel the take. A twig would’ve fought harder. Only on my next cast did I realize I had a fish on. The poor little trout sailed by overhead, as shocked in the moment as I was.
Such was my inauspicious start. Casting properly was only part of the challenge. You had to factor in the speed of the current and the angle of the drift. Delicacy’s called for, too, when presenting the fly. Choosing the correct one is essential. If there’s a hatch on, how best to match it? Mayfly or caddisfly imitation? In what size or color? What if the trout are feeding subsurface? Hare’s Ear or Pheasant Tail? Or should you try an attractor pattern? So many variables, as I’ve said. Fly fishing forces us to be strategic thinkers without really thinking about it. Half the time, we trust to instinct, but the wheels are still turning. Hooking a trout confirms the fact you’ve finally got it right.
All that activity induces a meditative calm. That’s the second reason I fly fish. It’s my form of therapy. No matter how much stress I’m under or how bleak the world looks these days, I lose my blues the minute I’m on a river. There’s so much to do and see. I’m busy from the get-go, and my mind begins to wander. That’s healthy, the psychologists tell us. It’s called a neural reset, and listening to certain types of music — classical, in particular — has a similarly soothing effect. (Try Schubert’s piano quintet “The Trout,” written on holiday in upper Austria.) My brain skips free of its usual grooves, and I live in the moment, as countless gurus advise us to do. I even rely on fly fishing to put me to sleep. If I’m tossing and turning, I imagine I’m leaving on a trip. I pack the gear, drive into the mountains, smell the sunwarmed pine needles, hear the heartening ripple of a stream, and before long, I’m out cold. Few other aspects of my life offer such solace.
Season number three: trout tend to flourish in beautiful places, and fly fishing leads us to them. I arrived in San Francisco in 1969, totally unprepared for the glories of Northern California. I’d grown up in a denuded Long Island suburb, and the only mountains I’d ever seen were the Catskills, home to Borscht Belt comics. In my neighborhood, a squirrel counted as a nature sighting, so I was astonished when I laid eyes on the Sierra Nevada. I remember renting an old miner’s cabin on the Trinity River on my first trip. It had no electricity or running water, but the sleeping porch overlooked the river, and I could cast from it to the silvery rainbows on the move.
Who wouldn’t be seduced? I recall being on the Fall River, as lovely a spring creek as I know, during the Hex hatch one summer. At twilight, a gorgeous ribbon of pink sky colored the horizon, and when the light faded, the big mayflies came off in such profusion I swore I could hear their wings brush up against one another. I caught some large trout, but it’s the sound of those wings that has stayed with me. The isolated grandeur of the McCloud, the Merced against the backdrop of Yosemite: our rivers offer an unparalleled geographical diversity. We’re truly spoiled for choice.
Fly fishing connects us to the natural world in a special way. That’s the fourth reason I pursue it. It turns us into active participants, not mere observers. The sport forces an education on you, belatedly, in my case. Once you stumble on those beautiful places, you want to know more about them. I never thought I’d develop an interest in entomology and toss around words like “subimago” or that I’d be able to recite the Latin name for California Buckeye (Aesculus californica). It’s a matter of being attentive. You pick up the taxonomy as you go along. As a fly fisher, I feel part of the great web of being, related to dippers and black bears, herons and hoppers, and every other creature you might meet along a watershed. That creates an awareness of the ecosystem’s fragility and an obligation to protect it.
Through fly fishing I became an amateur naturalist. It started when I lived on the Russian River years ago. I bought field guides by the dozen and adopted Roger Tory Peterson as my mentor. I checked off every bird I saw while angling — scrub jay, osprey, pine siskin. (A friend once flipped through my list and remarked, “You’ve got a lot of nerve checking off crow.”) In a meadow along the river, the field mushrooms known as pinkies grew. I looked them up — Agaricus campestris — and found they were safe and sautéed them in butter with a splash of sherry. The rose hips by a feeder creek were easily harvested and brewed into a tea rich in Vitamin C. I’d never have made such discoveries if not for fly fishing.
My fifth and last reason should be obvious: to get away from the people who ask too many questions. I’m only being a little facetious. It’s not just the questions. It’s the entire technological universe we occupy, with its snooping and information gathering, its junk e-mails and telemarketing, its Facebook and the unavoidable Kardashians. Fly fishing gets rid of the claptrap and strips us back to the basics of being a hunter-gatherer. It’s primitive, but effective.
When Franz Schubert composed “The Trout,” he was twenty-two and not quite five feet tall. He went by the nickname of “Little Mushroom.” It was a friend who invited him to upper Austria, to the town of Steyr on the Enns River. The Enns holds native browns and rainbows and some brookies. Nowadays, six kilometers are set aside for fly fishing only. Although Schubert didn’t fish, he walked by the river and found his inspiration. He also wrote a song about the trout — “Die Forelle” in German — based on a poem that begins, “In a clear little brook / There darted about in happy haste / The moody trout / Dashing everywhere like an arrow.” It ends badly for the trout, though, when an angler catches it, but I like to think he or she was an enlightened soul who practiced catch and release.
