On the way back to our little cabin I was thinking about my relationship with flyfishing and deciding to write something about it. I was setting up the laptop to write when my wife called me outside to look at the stars and something in that moment intersected. We don't see the stars in the city, at least not as many as one can see when there are not street lights or highway glare to hide them. And while I suppose one could cast a fly someplace in the city where I live, one is very unlikely to flyfish there.
But the stars and flyfishing intersect in another and more personal way.
Like many boys my age when I was growing up I had a fascination with the stars. This was well before Sputnik and the race to the moon—now 50-60 years behind us—so we learned about astronomy. One town I lived in when I was about 12 actually had a planetarium in the little local museum. It was free and I would go as often as I could. I knew the constellations and where to look for them. I knew about the double star in the bend of the Big Dipper, and the funny name of the star in Orion's shoulder, even where the tiny streak of light that was the Andromeda Galaxy could be found. I remember very little of it now, and sometimes forget to look up when there is an opportunity to see the stars.
My practice as a flyfisher is more recent, but for the record predates the release of the movie based on the MacLean book. My history with the idea of it goes back to about the same time as my fascination with the stars.
My father took me fishing when I was about nine or ten, but not flyfishing. Like most activities with him, it took place where alcohol was available in liberal quantities. In this case on a "deep sea" party boat with a liberally stocked cooler and a collection of men of similar mind as the old man.
Later when I was 13 or so and living in a small town in the South with my mother, I used to be fascinated with the strange light weight rods and reels in part of the fishing equipment section of the Western Auto store. I was there to buy a couple of pennies worth of fishing line and bobbers and hooks to use on a bamboo pole. My friends didn't know what the funny rods and reels were either. They coveted the spin casting gear at the other end of the display. But we both would take our bamboo poles, red and white plastic bobbers, and plain hooks to a local pond full of Blue Gills" and "Crappie." Someone would have dug worms or we'd catch grasshoppers in an adjacent field, and carefully concealing any squeamishness from each other, we'd bait our hooks with the live bait, toss the lines in and settle down to wait for a bobber to go under.
Fast forward thirty years. I was in a men's group and one of the men started talking about flyfishing. I asked him if he would teach me and some weeks later at a backyard barbeque he taught me the basics of casting. He was not particularly encouraging of my ability, which seemed odd to me, but a few weeks later I was on a trip to the "River of No Return Wilderness" in Idaho, and was determined to try.
In Boise the day before a float down the Salmon River I found a sporting goods store that carried fishing gear and asked a clerk for help. He sold me a basic rod and reel and all of the leaders and tippets and lures he thought I might need to get started. It wasn't much, but the key to it all was a comic book guide called The Curtis Creek Manifesto. It was an easy to follow encyclopedic guide to everything from how to tie the basic knots, to sneaking up on the wily trout techniques. I studied it in the hotel that night.
Later, on an upstream ride from the river to a mountain camp, the wrangler guide suggested a pool for me to try my luck in, and when I caught several small trout, showed me how to clean them and leave them on a stringer in the stream that night so we could have them for breakfast.
I don't keep what I catch anymore, but I still fish.
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