All Fishermen Are Liars Read online

  Of course we never know what to expect when we go fishing and wouldn’t want to know if we could. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to predict the future for fun and profit, but if we really knew with any certainty how our careers, love lives, the stock market or the fishing would turn out, we’d die of boredom. The best thing about fishing is that it takes place entirely in the present tense, so even if you feel vaguely cheated, you’re not brooding about the past, worrying about the future or wondering, What am I doing here? A question that’s only asked by those who wish they were somewhere else.

  After checking here and there along the upper river with no luck, I end up staking out one of the best dry-fly runs in the canyon, still without seeing a rise. I’m standing knee-deep in the water by way of claiming the spot, but that’s not really necessary. There were some other fishermen around earlier, but most bailed by midafternoon when the hatch failed to materialize. For the last few hours, I’ve been stubbornly rigged with a size 20 parachute mayfly pattern and a size 22 midge emerger on a dropper to split the difference, but I’ve yet to make a cast.

  The canyon is eerily quiet. The chilly air is still, rain is falling silently and fog muffles the sound of the current. Several Audubon’s warblers that weren’t here last week are perched on river birch twigs overlooking the water. These little insect-eating birds have recently made the long, harrowing flight from Central America to northern Colorado. They didn’t all survive the trip, and those that did are now bone-tired and starving and are also waiting for a hatch. I, on the other hand, am well rested, well fed and have nothing important at stake. I’m simply here in my capacity as the hapless goofball, considering the casual brutality of nature while rainwater drips off the brim of my hat.

  It does occur to me that I might still catch a few fish if I were willing to pinch on weight and dredge with nymphs, which for once I’m not. I understand that to fit the profile of the modern fly fisherman I should be less the long-suffering sportsman-philosopher and more the conspicuous fanatic carpet-bombing the river with the latest fly patterns, tackle and techniques: fishing from the same impulse that makes professional baseball players take steroids.

  I’ll admit that I’m capable of that from time to time, even though many of my fly patterns are dated and my tackle isn’t the newest or the best money can buy, although in some cases it’s the best money could have bought in 1968. I’ll also say that with forty years of experience I do know how to fish with a fly rod and I’m actually not a bad nymph fisherman. It’s just that some of the first dependable dry-fly fishing of the year begins in April and after a winter of bouncing split shot on the bottoms of rivers, I’m ready enough for a change to become a seasonal purist.

  This kind of temporary piety is the best I can muster these days, but I wasn’t always like that. Way back when, I took one of my first halting steps from bait to flies on a small, fast-flowing mountain stream where the trout were small, numerous and none too smart. I had only the sketchiest idea of what I was doing, but I actually caught one on something like a size 14 Adams. At the time, I didn’t understand how forgiving those fish were, so I was deeply impressed with myself. On the strength of a single eight-inch brook trout, I eschewed all lesser forms of fishing and immediately became a born again dry-fly fisherman.

  I like to think it came down to prettiness. I’d taken up fly fishing in the first place because in the right hands it was just about the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. The same went for dry flies. They looked like angels with their perky wings and hackle and they exhibited the ingenious engineering that allowed you to actually float a steel hook on the surface of the water.

  I also liked the relative unlikelihood of hooking a trout on a dry fly. At the time, some fishing expert had written that trout do 80 percent of their feeding under water and only 20 percent on the surface. That was probably just an educated guess, but the numbers stuck and made dry-fly fishing look like one $80 bottle of wine compared to four cases of Thunderbird for the same price. (It also made nymph fishing seem like more of a sure thing than it really is, but I wouldn’t learn that until later.) Something similar had happened a few years earlier when it was said that only 1 percent of motorcyclists gave the rest a bad name and the outlaw bikers immediately began displaying “1%” patches on their greasy denim jackets.

  There was an irresistible air of artistry to dry-fly fishing, although I now think it’s more of a neat trick than an actual art form. If a good fly fisherman was the picture of efficiency, a dry-fly fisherman was someone who had put efficiency in its proper place without actually turning his back on it. He could, and would, wait out a rise of trout using the superior patience it takes to successfully delay gratification. He might eventually get cagey enough to know when and where the hatches would come off and arrive at the river half an hour before the first dimple appeared on the surface. On the right water at the right time of year, he might even manage to pound fish up to a dry fly even when they weren’t already rising on their own, which still strikes me as the ultimate con.

  The idea wasn’t to go to a river and make something happen; it was to be there when it happened of its own accord and then slip in almost unnoticed. You could chase a hatch for days or even weeks, and then when it finally came off, you’d stand there and let one fish start rising, then three or four, then ten or twelve. You wanted them to lull themselves into a comfortable rhythm so they’d be less suspicious when you finally started casting, and sometimes it was only when a hatch got going that the bigger fish would show themselves. Out of curiosity (and because you had time to kill) you’d learn about birds and wildflowers. You’d tell yourself that even a blank day on the water could be a beautiful thing, and sometimes it was.

  Dry-fly fishing took the kind of composure that was a stretch at the age I was then. By all rights, patience should come easily when you’re young because you have all the time in the world, but in practice it only arrives later when time begins to stretch a little thin. Still, the effort seemed worthwhile as a kind of counterculture self-improvement project, and my friends and I were only vaguely aware that we were updating a tradition. To the previous generation, the whole dry-fly business had been genteel and vaguely British in the spirit of Izaak Walton. We operated on more of an oriental model along the lines of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist who’s supposed to have said, “If you sit on the riverbank long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”

  Of course, few of us have what it takes to wait indefinitely for the body of our enemy—whoever or whatever we think that is—to float by, but if you’re waiting out a hatch, you can still say you’re “doing something” in the hyperactive way Americans use that term. Coincidentally, that’s also the legal definition. Even if you’re not casting and don’t even have a fly tied on, if a wildlife officer catches you anywhere near public water with a rod in your hand, he’ll assume you’re fishing and you had damned well better have a fishing license.

  Being young, eager and impressionable must have had something to do with it, too. I became a dry-fly fisher—and also decided to make my way in life as a writer—at an age when you can easily make life-altering choices that might later seem suicidally impractical. Fly fishing seemed terribly important then (and still does), but it was just part of a larger program of relearning some of the rustic skills the last generation of my family had intentionally unlearned in the suburbs. I thought that finding something better than the usual uneasy truce with life and livelihood was my own unique idea, only to learn that I was part of a loose movement of disaffected young folks who’d all had the same brainstorm. Naturally, there were misgivings. For one thing, I was poor as dirt, with no real prospects, but if one day I was afraid the world would pass me by, the next day I was afraid it wouldn’t.

  Some choices never actually prove to be right or wrong, but they do become irrevocable, and even if you don’t believe in fate, things eventually seem to turn out the way they were meant to.
In the end, the world visited briefly enough to put a roof over my head and passed by to the extent that I feel I’ve retained my sanity. I may not always be deliriously happy, but I’m content enough that I’ve never had to “seek professional help,” as they say. That’s just as well. After talking to any number of friends who have seen psychiatrists, it seems clear that you can’t start with a middle-aged basket case and reverse-engineer a different life.

  But eventually that initial flush of purism that afflicts all beginners ran its course—as it probably should have—and I came to see that no one fishing method is superior to any other. Nymphs, streamers, mice, wet flies and everything in between were all effective at times and all had their own apparently infinite shades of subtlety. Even short-lining live maggots on a cane pole, as some locals did then, incorporated all the skills of trout fishing as well as a particular sensitivity to the strike.

  I once heard a dry-fly fisherman say, “You can catch ’em ugly or you can catch ’em pretty.” I agree, but I now think that catching ’em pretty has more to do with a kind of seamless elegance than with what’s tied to the end of your leader. How you decide to fly-fish on any given day is one of those rare things that needn’t concern anyone else. It’s yours alone and the only rule is that if there’s something you love, you should do as much of it as you can—the same rationale that works so well for Labrador retrievers.

  So I now consider myself a generalist, but I still have a soft spot for dry flies simply because that’s how all this started. Likewise, I was with a dark-haired girl on that first memorable night in the back row at the drive-in, so brunettes will rattle my cage for the rest of my natural life. This is less than a pathological fixation, but somehow more than just a preference. There’s nothing I can do about it and nothing I should do.

  13

  TENKARA

  We were in my kitchen in northern Colorado on a warm August evening. I was at the stove stirring a pot of elk spaghetti sauce; Susan McCann, the journalist and editor I’ve lived with for the last twenty years, was constructing an enormous salad; and Ed Engle, the fishing writer and my oldest continuous friend, was slicing French bread. Daniel Galhardo, owner and founder of Tenkara USA, had offered to help several times, but it was a small, crowded kitchen with cats underfoot and limited counter space, and there was nothing left to do, so he’d settled for volunteering to wash the dishes.

  For the last few days, Ed and Daniel had been staying at the house, and the three of us had been tenkara fishing in some nearby trout streams. The plan for the next day was to four-wheel up to 9,000 feet to a brook trout creek Ed and I like, and to that end I’d drive to a friend’s house after dinner to borrow his Jeep Wrangler. In the thirty-some years that Ed and I have been fishing this stream, the road has deteriorated to the point that my four-wheel-drive pickup with its long wheelbase will no longer make it without bottoming out.

  Tenkara is a traditional Japanese method of fixed-line fly fishing that uses only a long, light rod with a length of line attached and a single fly. No guides, no extra line, no reel. It’s been billed accurately as the soul of simplicity: the fly-fishing equivalent of haiku. This method—or something very much like it—has been practiced in the mountain streams of Japan for at least several hundred years and may date back as far as the eighth or ninth century.

  The original rods were unsplit bamboo and the lines were braided horsehair. They were similar to the rods described in The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle in 1496 and by any number of other cultures around the world that used artificial flies, although the advantage Japan had over Europe was that they could use bamboo instead of hardwood, so from the beginning the rods were lighter and more delicate. It’s conceivable that there was some cross-pollination between cultures that would explain the similarity in tackle, but it seems more likely that when first confronted with the question of how to deliver a feathered hook to a fish using available technology, the universal answer has always been: Get a long stick and a string.

  Tenkara wouldn’t have been considered a sport at first. It’s said to have been developed by people who simply wanted fish to eat or sell, so there was no need for the embellishments you find in things that are done more for fun than results. The rod itself could be found growing wild, and collected rather than bought. There was no need for more than a rod’s length of line because the mountain streams these anglers fished, and the trout and char they caught, were both fairly small. A tenkara rod was a tool: as utilitarian as a hoe or a shovel and no more complicated than it had to be. Even the apparently ornamental wraps may have been originally intended to camouflage the outline of the rod rather than to look pretty.

  The modern incarnation of tenkara is considered a sport, but although it’s gone somewhat high-tech, it hasn’t lost its homespun simplicity. The rods are now telescoping graphite, usually between eleven and fourteen feet long, inspired by some of the traditional bamboo versions where smaller sections were stored inside larger ones to make the rods more portable. The lines are either braided fluorocarbon—like a long furled leader—or sometimes just level lengths of fluorocarbon that have a smaller diameter and are said to cast better in the wind. But high-tech or not, a Japanese angler from three hundred years ago would recognize the tackle.

  Daniel said he learned to fly-fish with a conventional fly rod and reel in his native Brazil as a teenager. Later, while living in San Francisco, he got interested in Japanese styles of fly fishing and first learned about tenkara from an old pamphlet published by the English Board of Tourism in 1939. When he traveled to Japan with his wife, Margaret Kuwata, in 2008, he saw tenkara firsthand and was smitten by its elegant simplicity. He doesn’t describe this as a conversion experience, but he now fishes exclusively with tenkara tackle, although he’s held onto his old rod and reel for sentimental reasons.

  Daniel founded Tenkara USA in 2009, marketing the few things a tenkara fisherman needs: rod, line, a handful of flies and not much else. (Tenkara is a traditional Japanese method, but oddly—though maybe not surprisingly—the rods are made in China.) It was also in that year that Daniel met the renowned tenkara fisherman Dr. Hisao Ishigaki when the Doctor spoke at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center in New York. Daniel and Ishigaki hit it off as student and teacher and now jokingly refer to each other as “tenkara no otto-san” and “tenkara no musuko” or “tenkara father” and “tenkara son.”

  Ishigaki is sometimes referred to as a “tenkara master,” but that’s an unofficial title. In fact, he makes no special claims for himself or for tenkara beyond the method’s austere efficiency. Some Americans can’t help but imbue the sport with oriental ideology, but when Daniel asked him if there was a Zen aspect to tenkara, Ishigaki laughed and said, “No Zen, just a nice way to catch fish”—which of course is exactly what a Zen master would say.

  Daniel himself is young, lean, fit, and seems shy at first, but then turns out to be only soft-spoken. He comes off as a kind of low-key evangelist and his enthusiasm can be quietly infectious, but he’s not unaware of the difficulties of introducing something small, quiet and simple to a country that likes things big, loud and complicated. He also understands the dangers inherent in turning something you love into a business, but doesn’t seem worried about it. So far, he hasn’t launched the big media blitz, which I suspect is equal parts economics and temperament, but he has the obligatory website and blog, he’s run a few ads, has done a few interviews and sometimes turns up at fly-fishing trade shows.

  Tenkara isn’t widely known in America, but word-of-mouth is spreading and in certain circles it has a kind of underground buzz. Over the last year or so, I’ve run into a number of fly fishers who have heard of tenkara and a smaller handful who’ve tried it. Attitudes range from shrugging indifference through various levels of curiosity to a newfound dedication to simplicity, though this isn’t widespread enough to have flooded the market with used rods and reels. Most said they learned about it on the Internet, and when I
searched “tenkara” recently out of curiosity, I got just short of forty thousand results.

  There’s also been some resistance. A famous fisherman said tenkara was a fad that would blow itself out in a few seasons—a hard case to make about something that’s been established practice for centuries. Others have flatly declared that it’s not really fly fishing without specifying exactly why.

  Converts, on the other hand, brag about the ease of the method and the number of fish they catch. Another well-known fisherman recently said, “I can teach your granddaughter to fish with a tenkara in two minutes and she’ll catch more than you.”

  A collapsed tenkara rod is only about twenty inches long—a stubby graphite shaft with a cork grip that resembles the butt section of a multipiece graphite rod with the reel seat sawn off. When you first extend one, it keeps coming and coming until it begins to feel unwieldy. The line is attached by girth-looping the butt end to a short piece of knotted cord called a “lillian” that sticks straight out of the end of the tip section. The leader is attached to the line with a loop-to-loop connection. You can use whatever length leader you want, but it’s best to start with a tippet that doesn’t extend much more than a foot or two past the butt of the rod. It’s all pretty self-evident, but it doesn’t hurt to read the instructions.

  The cast is a familiar fly cast, but with a shorter, softer stroke and a high, reaching stop designed to keep the line and most of the leader off the water. It’s easy to overpower the rod, and your inbred tendency to shoot an extra foot or two, even on a short forward cast, is stymied by the fixed line. At the end of every cast, your left hand reflexively reaches for the loose line off the reel that isn’t there. This may get annoying enough that you’ll put your line hand in your pocket to make it stop.