I think the rifle deer season was just about finished when, fairly frozen after a deer-less morning in the stand, Henry kissed me in the front seat of his truck. That was pretty much all she wrote. Bill hadn’t touched me in more than a year, and I caved to this new man offering affection and, truth be told, the keys to all my other passions.
A couple weeks later, Bill called me while I was at work at Blue Ridge Arsenal and accused me of having an affair. Turns out he’d bugged my car, the house phone, the table at Applebee’s where I spilled my guts to my friends, and a bunch of other places, with the help of an old retired FBI friend of his. Nice guy, eh? Not that I hadn’t been in the wrong—I had been—but still, it wasn’t like I was squirreling away State secrets and selling them to the Russians. To me, it was just another sign of just how ugly an individual the man who was my husband really was. At the end of the phone conversation, he ordered me to get out of the condo before he returned home at midnight from his shift. I was only too happy to oblige, and so I loaded up the cat, my few guns, and my clothes into my Subaru wagon and hightailed it to my folks, who instantly forgot that I’d barely spoken to them for nearly two years and said that of course I could come home. I think they were relieved the marriage was over (funny how family and friends always know, usually from the start, when your relationships just aren’t right and you’re the one who gets the late notice).
Through that winter, I holed up at my parents’ house, continued to work at the gun store, and dated Henry while the divorce went through its motions. Since hunting seasons were mostly over and turkey season was still a long ways off, Henry indulged my fascination with all things outdoors by turning our conversation to talk about lines, rods, reels, vests, and oh! soooo many flies! He even gave me a couple casting lessons in the yard, when the wind wasn’t howling, attempting to teach me the basics in hauling and loop control and how to lay down the piece of bright orange yarn tied at the end of the line on some mark he’d set out on the frozen lawn.
I sucked at it, right off the bat. My head understood the basics of 10 o’clock-2 o’clock hinged at the elbow, but my casting arm seemed to have no connection to my brain. “Buggy whipping,” and “frothing the air” were just a few phrases that could describe how those initial casting lessons went. I thought maybe I was just too close to Henry personally for the lessons to work, so I went the route I always do when I’m not getting what I want from a person: I turned to books.
I’d already accumulated a good number of hunting books and had slowly begun to add books on fly angling and fly tying after I met Henry. One of the angling books I really sat down and read in my frustration over the inability to throw a simple line was Gary Borger’s Presentation. Just two chapters in, though, that book turned my slightly more than idle curiosity with fly-fishing to out-and-out fascination.
Fly fishing is never boring. That’s what I got from the first couple pages of Presentation. Sure I’d fished before—not ever well and not ever often, but I’d fished—but the idea of being on a boat in the middle of some big body of water and just casting over and over made me feel, well, like yawning. The few times I’d gone along on such excursions, I’d also felt trapped, in that nobody else ever wanted to get off the damn water when I wanted. I also didn’t like the idea of fish finders, which, while they surely eliminate the guess work on depths of water you can’t see into, kinda also seem like cheating to me. I did like fishing small ponds for crappie and smallmouth, especially when you could see evening rises or knew structure existed that likely housed fish and that you could cast to, but still, sitting on a bank and throwing out and reeling in a lure repeatedly was a little dull to me in the manner skeet and trap had become stagnant after a while. I am a person who needs action, needs something I can think through, and something I can participate in to make something happen. Sporting clays had been the answer to shooting boredom for me, and fly fishing promised to do the same for things finned.
What I gleaned from the pages of Presentation, long before I actually did any fly fishing, was that every inch of water has something new that has to be learned about it if one is going to fish it well. Mostly, though, the entire approach to getting fish on a line was just far more interactive when fly fishing than by any other method. The fly angler was always on the move, casting here, there, and then moving a few feet left or right to study a new riffle or pool before casting again, like a golfer eyes the break of a green before he swings his putter. There were water temperatures to take, rocks to overturn to see what bugs were hatching there, flotsam to study for other possible food choices, and dozens of knots to choose from. Move, analyze, cast. Nothing? Move again, analyze again, and cast again, this time to watch a trout sip at your barbless and spit it out. One more time, with a change the fly, this one cast a bit further back on the pool … watch the drift, watch, watch … strike!
It was also a sport wrapped in romance and obsessed with gear. I loved
the idea of a bamboo rod that whipped out a Royal Coachman and caught a fatly sleek trout that needed to be laid in a nest of damp grass lining a wicker creel. There were burnished brass reels that clicked, as you turned their handle, as softly and precisely as a Rolex watch. Rods wore grips of exotic woods, and fly-fishing vests housed innumerable, compartmentalized boxes of tiny flies in dozens of colors and dozens more types. For someone who despises tedium, this was a sport of action and variety that made my head swirl. Even more, I was conscious of the fact that, even if I became a Trout Bum on the order of John Gierach, I’d never learn it all. Every foot of water would provide a new puzzle to figure out on any given day, because any given day would be unlike any day before it. It would always be a thinking man’s sport—and if that’s not a cure for boredom, I don’t know what is.
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