All Fishermen Are Liars Read online

  Most fly rods cast as well as they’ll ever cast—whether it’s good, bad or indifferent—with the line weight the manufacturer recommends, or at least something very close to it. Maybe a weight-forward 5 instead of a double-taper 4. But then, other rods seem so mismatched that you wonder if the line designation was a mistake. I have an 8½-foot graphite that sold years ago as a 2-weight, but that won’t load at normal casting ranges with anything lighter than a double-taper 4. The silver lining there is, it’s a really nice 4-weight and out here in the Rocky Mountains I don’t see much use for a 2-weight anyway.

  Some rod experts say that a good rod will cast a wide variety of line sizes. I think what they mean is that it can be made to cast with some effort, but every rod I’ve ever liked had a sweet spot that could only be satisfied by a very specific line size. This kind of fine-tuning may approach a universal truth about all tools. An old woodcutter once told me it didn’t matter what kind of chain saw you used, but “if your chain ain’t sharpened right, your kerf goes all cattywampus.”

  There is a difference between fly lines from different manufacturers, although not always as much as their claims might lead you to think. I spent a long time trying out all the fly lines I could get my hands on and then finally settled on a single make of line I liked and that I now use for almost all my fishing. (Coincidentally, it’s the only line I know of that hasn’t changed since the early 1970s, except that it now comes in a fancy plastic box. They’ve added “Classic” to the name and of course it costs more.) It’s possible that I’m missing something, but this combination of habit and brand loyalty eliminates unpleasant surprises and keeps life a little simpler.

  I think we each eventually settle on a handful of line weights that mirror the fishing we do and that strike some ergonomic chord. I instinctively want a 5-weight for most of my local trout fishing—it just feels right—although the length of the rod can vary from 7½ to 9 feet, depending on the water. I have a few 4-weights I also really like, but I feel that anything lighter is either impractical or a gimmick. For a heavier rod I prefer a 9-foot 8-weight, and I have some real sweethearts, including a Payne bamboo and a Loop graphite. Many good casters prefer a 7-weight and have no use for an 8, but 7-weights strike me as too much for some purposes and not enough for others. A good 6-weight, on the other hand, is like a souped-up 5-weight for larger fish, wider rivers and bigger flies. Or is all that just an excuse to have a whole bunch of fly rods?

  For Spey rods I like the versatility of a 13- or 14-foot 9-weight. Lighter, shorter two-handed rods are in fashion now, but you can fish a 9-weight anywhere, including situations that involve big water, big fish and flies the size of squirrels. I went through several Spey rods before I settled on a pair of 9-weights that I like: one 13½-feet, the other 14. It would be nice if I could leave it at that, but although I own enough rods to build a picket fence around my property, I can sometimes be convinced that I need just one more.

  In the long run, it’s possible that there’s no such thing as the perfect fly rod because a rod is a study in paradoxes. It has to be as long as possible but as short as necessary; sensitive but powerful; able to cast a line and play a fish (two distinctly different chores) and so on. A good fly rod would fit Aristotle’s idea of virtue as falling midway between two defects, so that courage is well beyond cowardice, but somewhere short of recklessness.

  Tempting as it is, I won’t list all my favorite rods here, if only because it’s impossible to adequately describe a fly rod in purely technical terms, so I’d end up sounding like an overbred wine connoisseur with his pinky out. I will say I sometimes have to remind myself that I love the best rods I have because I don’t think about them when I’m casting them—which is precisely what makes them so good. Some of my favorites seem to defy the laws of physics as well as my own inadequacies. You could call them “effortless.” Or maybe “forgiving.”

  There are some rods and some casters with truly weird idiosyncrasies and sometimes they find each other and live happily ever after, but for the most part I think good rods fall into a fairly narrow range. What separates a good one from a great one usually isn’t some new taper or material, but a subtlety of action and balance that’s recognizable but indescribable. Individual casting style has less to do with rod quality than some think, although it is possible not to appreciate a rod that’s widely considered to be great or to love one for reasons that are more sentimental than practical.

  I’ll guess that I’ve owned somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred fly rods at one time or another and still have around half that many, although some haven’t seen the light of day in years. In any given season I might fish only eight or nine of those rods as conditions and moods dictate, and I’d be a better caster if I fished only two or three. Most of the rods I’ve owned were perfectly okay. Among the rest, I’ve loved a few and hated a few others without much reference to what they cost, what they were made of, or what anyone else thought of them.

  I was a self-taught caster in the beginning and I’m afraid it still shows, especially when I’m tired or excited. (The best thing to do when your casting goes to hell is to reel in and take a ten-minute break.) I went for something like thirty years without taking a formal casting lesson because lessons weren’t widely available when I was a beginner and I probably couldn’t have afforded them anyway. And by the time they were available, I felt like I knew what I was doing. Over the years I got tips from some good casters and learned to study fishermen who seemed to know what they were doing. In time, I managed to unlearn some of my bad habits and pieced together some fundamentals: It’s all about line speed, timing, smoothness, economy of motion and letting the rod do the work, even on long, windy casts. (Speaking of wind, I learned it’s helpful to think of yourself as leaning against it instead of fighting it head on. If you fight it, the wind always wins.) Then, when I did finally take what was described as an “advanced casting seminar,” I was embarrassed by how much it helped.

  I now own some of the best fly rods I’ve ever cast—plus a bunch of others that I don’t really know what to do with—but I’m not sure if that’s helped or hurt. When it’s all said and done, I’m an adequate fly caster with an option to be slightly better than most when I’m fishing a favorite rod on familiar water on a good day. But I’ll probably never be as efficient or as stylish as I’d like to be. I was fishing with a friend once and we got to talking about casting during a break. I said, “I always wanted to be a pretty caster” (maybe trolling for a little compliment). He said, “Well, you’re not, but you get the fly where you want it and that’s what counts.”

  8

  THE MILE

  The conceit among trout fishers is that we’re all such unreconstructed fanatics that when fishing possibilities dwindle over the winter we go quietly insane. In fact, some do—and not always quietly—but others seem to take the break more or less in stride and a few even think it’s “good for the soul,” as Nick Lyons once said, to have an off-season for rest and reflection.

  I go back and forth myself. I do go quietly insane at times, although the apparent cause is usually CNN rather than a lack of fishing. It’s true that a week somewhere with a fly rod in my hand would affect a cure, but then so would the same week at home without TV or newspapers. For the most part though, I’m happy enough to think about where I’ve been, plan where I’ll go next, tie flies, fuss with tackle and try my best to make a living.

  I was doing just that toward the end of February when my friend Vince called and proposed a quickie. We’d drive up to the Miracle Mile in Wyoming, fish for two days with an overnight camp and then head home. I’d been hearing about the Mile—as it’s called—for years, but had obstinately never fished it. I think I was put off by the name as much as by the crowd it’s known to draw at certain times of year. “Miracle Mile” sounds more like a roadside theme park than a stretch of the North Platte River in Wyoming that’s famous for good trout fishing. It’s not ev
en accurate because the stretch of river the name refers to is actually more like six miles long. (One symptom of incipient off-season insanity is that I become my high school English teacher, snidely correcting imprecise language at every opportunity.)

  The weather was seasonably cold and uninviting, the forecast was for more of the same and there was no available fishing report. I jumped on the invitation with more eagerness than I thought was in me.

  The drive to the river was familiar from other trips north until we peeled off the interstate at the dreary refinery town of Sinclair and started out across the Red Desert. This is a region without clear boundaries that’s been variously described as hostile, inhospitable, unforgiving and haunting, but its salient feature is that there’s no one there. The population density of Carbon County, Wyoming, is roughly one person for every three square miles, but that’s deceptive since better than half of them live in the county seat of Rawlins and are smart enough to stay in town in the winter. Out on County Road 351, anyone at all constitutes a crowd and seeing another car amounts to traffic.

  Except for a low pass through the Seminoe Mountains, this area is largely treeless, with scattered sage, sparse grasses and tough little shrubs like cedar rim thistle and bladderpod, all hanging on for dear life in what Annie Proulx called “bad dirt.” Living things tend to stay low here, while rocks that stand up in the constant, sandy wind are abraded into the spooky mushroom shapes geologists call “hoodoos.”

  Wind is a fact of life as well as the basis for rural Wyoming humor. Mark Spragg said, “There are people here who’d like to move away, but they’d have to go outside to do it.” A man living in a town that eleven souls now call home once told me, “We’re losin’ people. Even the wind is in a big fuckin’ hurry to be somewhere else.”

  For long stretches of the drive there were no human artifacts except for the unpaved road we were on and the ubiquitous western barbed wire fences that Ted Leeson described as separating “a great deal of one thing from a lot more of the same.” It had snowed recently, but most of the snow had blown away, leaving ominous-looking drifts across the road in the low spots. You’d normally stop and inspect drifts for depth on a road like this because it’s the last place you’d want to get stuck, but there were fairly recent skidding tire tracks through the snow, so we’d put the truck in high-range four-wheel, pick up some speed on the downslope and fishtail through, postponing second thoughts until we were back on bare ground on the other side.

  When we finally got down to the river, we reconnoitered for half an hour, looking at fishy-looking water and keeping an eye out without much luck for a spot to camp out of the wind. There were a few cottonwoods along the river, but not enough in any one place to make a proper shelterbelt. We picked out a long tailing pool above a bridge and gave it half an hour. There was no sign of insect or fish life, but the water was easily readable, so you could tell where the fish would be if they were there. After thirty minutes I believed that I may or may not have had a halfhearted bump to a nymph. It was the usual first act on a new river at less than the best time of year.

  When we went to try another spot, the pickup wouldn’t start. Vince turned the key and instead of the usual growl of a V-8 engine coming to life, there was the disheartening click that tells you there isn’t enough juice to turn over the starter. This means corroded terminals if you’re lucky, a dead battery if you’re not.

  When you’re out in winter weather, the pickup is a real icon of survival: a mobile windbreak with a heater that, in a pinch, can get you the many miles to the nearest McDonald’s or Motel 6. When it fails to start forty-some miles up a lonesome dirt road with no traffic, you experience what can only be called profound disappointment. We stared ahead through the windshield at sagebrush twitching in the wind. Nothing was said. When we’d driven around earlier, we’d seen a few other fishermen parked here and there along the river, but the chances of any of them happening by anytime soon seemed slim. Vince told me later he was beginning to formulate a plan, although he didn’t fill me in on the details. I was simply thinking that we’d taken his truck because it was newer and more reliable than mine.

  At which point our friend Corey pulled up, having recognized the truck. I stepped out of the passenger door to shake hands. Vince began digging behind the seat for the jumper cables. As it turned out, the battery terminals were pristine, as anything Vince maintains usually is, but the battery itself was eight months past its expiration date and wouldn’t hold a charge. So we fished with Corey for the rest of the day because he’s our friend and we like his company, because he knows the river, and because the truck would no longer start without a jump, so we had to stay close to a functioning vehicle.

  For the same reason, we camped together that night in a bivouac that consisted of eight fishermen ranging in age from their early twenties to past sixty. I’m not at all sure who most of these people were except that everyone seemed to know someone else and so we’d all ended up together in a sparse grove of narrow-leaf cottonwoods that had no effect on the cold wind except to funnel it into stronger gusts.

  Everyone had packed in firewood—from neatly split pine logs to construction scraps—so we got a uselessly huge bonfire going. The temperature had dropped into the low thirties even before the sun went down. After dark the wind picked up and came from a different direction every five minutes. Hunkered around the fire, you’d either get a face full of smoke and sparks or your ears would be cold even as tread melted off the soles of your boots.

  Someone tossed foil-wrapped potatoes at the edge of the fire to bake. Once that suggestion had been planted, the rest of us dug out propane stoves and the usual odd assortment of camp food ranging from quick, cheap and easy to elaborate. While we were cooking supper, someone produced a battery-operated boom box. I’ve never cared for recorded music in camp and I rolled my eyes at Vince, but then when a vintage Bob Dylan tune came out of the thing, I softened a little.

  It had turned full dark and bitterly cold by the time we’d all gotten supper taken care of and had settled in for some serious campfire sitting. Eight lawn chairs were crammed in a seamless ring around the fire pit, but it wasn’t possible to either build the blaze big enough or to sit quite close enough to it. Cans of beer and a bottle of tequila appeared, and although I don’t actually remember seeing a joint going around, I do recall a familiar whiff of something that wasn’t wood smoke. Some trout had been caught that day, but I won’t say how many in case you’d think the trip wasn’t “worthwhile” in the way some understand that term.

  It must have been on someone’s mind because the talk turned to women earlier than it usually does in a camp full of men. “You need a woman who likes to travel and fish herself, but who doesn’t always want to come along,” someone said. “You know, she’s gotta give you some space.” We were lined up around the fire nearly in each other’s laps and all nodded agreement on the need for space in relationships.

  Even the youngest of these guys was old enough now to have had these things go south a few times, although why is never clear. The assumption is that these are affairs of the heart and therefore a great and tender mystery, but we’re men, after all; we can work it out logically. When a lull in the conversation came, I felt an urge to say something wise befitting the thirty or forty years I had on some of these guys. But nothing came to mind except a youth filled with older men droning on as if they owned the secrets of the universe, never mind that their own lives were train wrecks. Then the moment passed and the conversation drifted off in the predictable direction of pickups, boats, fly rods and increasingly long, fire-gazing silences.

  Finally one man said, apropos of nothing, “I’m like a largemouth bass: I lurk . . . and then I pounce!”

  Someone else replied, “Damn right.”

  It was getting late.

  I’ve never been much of a winter camper, although I did once spend an experimental night in a snow cave to see if it would b
e as cozy as some claimed. It wasn’t. In other words, I don’t have actual winter camping gear, but I make do by stuffing a so-called three-season sleeping bag inside a summer-weight bag and sleeping in full long johns, fleece socks, sweatshirt and wool hat. On that particular night it was stinging cold away from the fire and I reread only a page of The Meadow by James Galvin before I nestled in to generate a pocket of heat by burning calories. I had the tent cinched tight as a drum with rocks on top of the stakes to keep them from working loose, but the wind was still up and the rain fly flapped like a trapped condor. Even with that racket I managed to drift off before I was actually warm. I’d only gotten good and cozy hours later when I woke up in the middle of the night with an undeniable urge to pee.

  For some reason, cold, windy nights in tents are when I’m most likely to have one of those luminous dreams where everything suddenly fits together. I wake up with the fleeting sense that I’ve been given the answer to an important question I don’t remember asking and lay there in the first light trying to remember what it was. Then I get sidetracked by thoughts of coffee and a big cold-weather breakfast: as much chopped-up bacon as will fit in the pan with room left over for half a dozen eggs scrambled in and four slices of whole wheat bread scorched over the fire to approximate toast. It’s calm this morning, but colder than it was last night, so frost will condense on the propane bottle before the percolator on the camp stove starts to bubble. I can picture it all vividly. Now all I have to do is pry myself out of my warm spot and make it happen.

  Corey is already up and a little too cheerful as I force my fingers to work enough to get the coffee started. He asks if I heard the great horned owl last night, and I say I did but don’t add that I thought it was part of the dream. A snore comes from one of the tents, and I think we’re the only two awake until I glance downstream and see one of the younger guys at a bend pool landing what looks like a good-sized trout. I’m deeply impressed but not exactly envious. For some, winter fishing is the kind of extreme sport that separates the men from the boys, as they used to say. But then for others it’s a more pensive enterprise where the fire and the coffeepot compete on equal footing with the river.