BACK TO TROUT

 -a fishing book-

1

When my fishing partner died, many years ago, I inherited some of his flyfishing tackle.  That may be the wrong word.  I was offered a chance to buy it from his widow, Mattie.  I pretty much got to name the price, though.  Arnold Timm was a deacon of the Lutheran Church, while his wife was a lifelong Catholic; the money she raised went to the Sisters of Something Or Other.  I wondered how Timm would view that, then thought no more about it.

I bought some old flylines, his pram, a cartop carrier for it, an extra spool for my 3-3/4 St. George (the reel had been grabbed by another friend); Timm’s minister, Randy, had already taken the fine bait-casting reel I had my eye on.  The rest of the stuff that littered the garage had little value and would be soon hauled away. I wrote out a check for several hundred dollars, thinking Timm would approve and might even find it generous.  As I turned to leave, I spotted some dull aluminum flyboxes.

 “Mattie, what do you have in mind for those boxes?”

“Take them.”  Gladly I did.

I peeked inside but did not examine the contents closely for years, having no need for trout flies, and when I did, I whistled at what I beheld.  I had never been one to tie small, so I was impressed with the array of tiny trout nymphs and wets he had painstakingly assembled with his thick, machinist’s fingers during long winter evenings when the rivers were out.  They surprised me, for we were dedicated steelhead fishers.  True, we had both grown up on trout; who among us hadn’t?  Timm was thirty years my senior, so our times were somewhat different.  I had come to think trout were beneath us. We had outgrown them, the runts.  Admittedly, this was narrow thinking.  The boxes went into hiding and only lately have they come out--when my situations changed and I found a need for small flies.  A shame it didn’t happen earlier.

Most of us start out on trout and, if we’re lucky, we end up fishing for them again, for they have the complexity and intricacy we need to complete our lives on a deep psychic level.  Call it “in our heart of hearts,”  if you will, but don’t laugh.  For years I’ve been promising myself to “get back to trout.”  Recently I’ve done just that.  It is not a step backwards, I assure you.  I’m headed in the right direction, I know.

Trout are wonderful creatures.  They differ from steelhead, of which they are a biological subset, by eating all the time.  Oh, maybe not much in winter, when the water is cold and little is hatching out or crawling along the bottom.  But the statement generally holds true.  They eat at every opportunity.  When there is abundant food, trout sometimes don’t feed because they are already full, or because the moon is wrong, or the tide is ebbing or else it’s coming on, or for various other reasons known only to trout.  Now steelhead are different.  They’re not known to feed after once hitting freshwater, but sometimes can be seen gorging on the surface, or show gut-search evidence of having swallowed caddis, etc.  This may be from old habits.  But they don’t eat the way trout do.  The difference is a big one.

If trout eat regularly, they can be caught, if only the fisher can figure out what they are feeding on and tie flies that are appropriate.  (That’s all there is to it, gang.)  The fact that what’s appropriate varies from day to day only makes the job more interesting, not impossible.  For if you can’t catch trout, it does not exactly follow that they can’t be caught, only that you haven’t been able to do it.  Steelhead fishers can easily segue back to trout fishing because we are used to not catching fish.  It happens to us regularly, alas.  Thus we have a big advantage over the normal trout fisher, who expects to catch fish every time out.  We are inured to failure.  You might say we excel at it.

The trout fisher’s box score is impressive.  The other night I proudly said to a fellow fisher, on a little lake we both frequent now, “Just think, I caught four tonight, right up on top, all on a little green scud.”

“Don’t feel bad,” he urged.  “There are nights like that, but usually it is better.”

He didn’t understand that I was bragging.

I’ve found use for most of Timm’s old gear.  I not only regularly fish his pram now, but his tiny nymphs, spiders, and dries.  They continue to catch fish--now for me.  In an odd, mawkish way, I am catching Timm’s fish for him.  So life goes on, in an oblique manner.  What a wonderful way of explaining to ourselves and to non-fishers the idea of continuity and some kind of down-to-earth afterlife.  I  won’t call it immortality because that is carrying a good idea too far.  And it is too big a word.  Let me simply state that my partner Timm lives on memorably, at least to me.  He continues to exist in what he left behind him--his tackle and his flies, not to mention his gentleness and patience.  I am the direct beneficiary, though I exploit what is left of him, I know, even if I paid good money for the boat and tackle that now is rightly mine.  Wouldn’t it be a shame, though, if the good stuff had fallen into the wrong hands?  Or into no hands at all, ending up at the dump, amid the earth’s garbage?  It could have easily happened.  And regularly does, I fear.

I am learning to tie small myself.  It is not easy, with eyes that require a lot of magnification, and fingers grown stiff and thick with arthritic age.  Yet I have a patience I never had before; younger people don’t possess it to the same degree.  It is necessary and valuable tool.  At the same time, I fear I have slowed down and perhaps grown tedious in my thinking and speech.  Old men generally do.  Yet I catch fish regularly.  I catch them with deliberation and cunning.  It used to be the result of long, persistent hours on the water.  It brings me great satisfaction now.

As a boy I admired the flyfishers who routinely caught trout on flies they’d tied themselves.  How wonderful it must be, I thought.  And on the surface, too. I was an egg fisher mostly, or else fished with a Flatfish (which I still love to do, applying body torque whenever appropriate), or even with the lowly worm (though I would rather not anymore), and while I have no code preventing me from reverting to my former nefarious practices (and I would in fact probably enjoy each of them again in turn) I am largely committed to the fly.  I am doing what as a kid I admired most in grown men.  It is easy and pleasant.  Of course the trout must cooperate.  When they don’t, I go without, and sometimes ache from what is missing; then I am not the envy of anybody, not even the smallest kid standing at the water’s edge, watching me.  But that is okay, too.  It is part of the price we fishers pay.

2

Trout are beautiful, complicated  creatures. A rainbow trout still dripping water, alive, wriggling, is about as glorious a specimen of life as can be found on the planet, and even its faint smell on your hands after you’ve released it is like roses, at least to me.  It is not a fishy smell at all.  If not roses, something sweet and delicate, a scent that lingers and is so distant after a few moments as to be more an idea than the real thing.  You think you smell it, but can’t put the finger of your mind on it or its essence; the whole lake then smells like rainbow trout in the evening, again in the morning, but the more you try to focus your thoughts on its exact nature and how to describe it the farther it flees from precision and capture.  So you content yourself with the ghost of things, memories mostly, and pleasant old-time associations of lakes in the springtime, and small streams with no openings to the sea, when the snowmelt ends and the water draws in upon itself.

In Washington State there is a geological remainder from the Ice Age called the lowland lake.  It is special to the Puget Sound Region.  Perhaps it exists elsewhere, but it must take a slightly different form.  Low elevation and a certain amount of bogginess is characteristic.  Such a lake is small and not easily ruffled.  Often logs can be found floating on its surface, and on one of my favorites the logs are not moored; wind and I suspect beavers move them about nightly, so they are never in the same place for long.  Some logs have flowers growing on them.  The bark holds nutrients in sufficient quantity for plants to  take root and blossom.  The logs look like wandering window boxes.  Right now, at the end of May, several logs are home to an abundance of bright pink wildflowers.  I do not know their names.  Norma has looked through her many gardening books and is unable to identify the species.  But they are beautiful.  Since the shore is too boggy for her to reach them, she urges me to take a pail and snatch some from the pram.  She wants to transplant them to our river property and see if they will adapt, that is, root and bloom.  This I am reluctant to do, for it involves work and seems unnatural, but I suppose I will eventually, as I do such thing, for the sake of domestic harmony.  It would be nice to have such beauty at hand next spring.

Among the chief characteristics of lowland lakes is holding trout.  Historically they contained cutthroats, but most are home to rainbows today, the cutthroats being vanquished and replaced with hatchery fish, but some of the lakes produce a rainbow/cutthroat hybrid that is feisty and fun to catch.  (What is it, a rainbow or a cutt?  The fish is a bewildering little of both.)  The degree of hybridization can be measured subjectively on a scale of one to ten.  This is called a Binns Scale.  Hybridization is an important aspect of lowland lakes, but takes place only occasionally.  The lake must have both populations and a suitable spawning channel.  Many do not.

Lowland lakes have much in common with beaver ponds and might be thought of as overgrown ones, ponds writ huge, ones beavers haven’t yet ruined through their dam-building fury.  Their ultimate goal, the darling creatures, is to reduce all bodies of water to a series of stagnant puddles.  Many lakes have their resident beavers, however, and the damage along the edges seem slight.  Soon the beavers will move on to more profitable water.

The other night, nearing a bed of tulle in my pram, at the edge of which trout were busily ringing, I heard a loud splash.  It sounded as if Moby Dick was taking dry flies.  Now, no trout is capable of such an explosion, so it had to be a beaver.  They become active at twilight--about the same time that darkness lowers its curtain and smothers the land.  The sky and land gradually become one then.  Now beavers are rarely seen up close, at least by me.  They believe in keeping their distance.  They’d like you to return the favor.  A small dark head parting the water is about all they offer you.  It is always from afar.

I’ve found, through experimentation, that if you are so fatuous as to clap your hands sharply when a beaver is present, he will often take it as an alarm signal from another beaver and slap his tail, too, passing on the warning to his buddies down the line and making it seem, however briefly, that you are part of the beaver communication system.  This honor may make you believe you are closer to nature, and part of it, that is, unless there are other fishers present, in which case they may think you have lost your mind.  But that’s okay.  The fun of clapping and hearing the beavers response makes it worth your while.  Hey, maybe the other fishers will figure it out and join in the applause.

Some evenings the light is just right, and there are low clouds of a determinedly threatening kind hanging overhead, and the sun is so obscured that there may be no sun at all, not in the whole vast world.  Then the darkening earth looks a little like the beginning of day, not its ending.  Nor will the world immediately end, either.  It is a thrilling time, albeit on a modest scale.  Since I am a chronically late riser, I rarely behold the sunrise, and must guess at what it is truly like.  Such an evening is much like dawn, I gather, and in my mind I exalt and call twilight daybreak. I marvel at the sharp contrasts of light and the gloomy corners of the world the dying sun illuminates, and the brilliant surface glare it lays across the water as if conducting an electroplating experiment, and imagine myself a boy again, perhaps a different kind of person, the kind who springs out of bed as if propelled by a coiled spring and is ever eager to face unknown challenges, none of which will ever be too great to triumph over, even left-handedly.  I’ve known people like this in college and admired them (amid my scorn); usually they were budding engineers.  They had little need for sleep, while I require a whole lot.  About the only true thing we have in common is the need to eat three times a day.

So nightfall is my daybreak, and I treat evenings at lowland lakes as my mornings, special, and they serve me well, in this dual capacity.  I not only marvel at them but revel in them.  I pretend it is the start of mankind on the patient earth, civilization still at arm’s length, nature still churning and raw.  I am the first man on the first lake, rather than a tardy arrival who has brought his pram to the public launch site, late in the day and the century.

It is the compression of time I really enjoy.  There is so little time left in which to catch a fish, and the light is diminishing rapidly.  So I must not waste a moment or a cast.

3

There are several kinds of lowland lakes and it is important to distinguish among them early.  Some are big and have the characteristics of huge bodies of water, including the sea.  Such  lakes require big boats and motors, with submergible trailers to put them in and take them out afterwards, they are so heavy.  This is the antithesis of my idea of the lowland lake and I put it out of mind at once.  These lakes belong in a different category and require a different kind of person to love and write knowingly about them.

My territory is the lake so small it can be rowed around comfortably in a pram or other small cartop flotation devise during a late afternoon or early evening--though many people insist on using electric trolls.  Sometimes a lowland lake is restricted to this type of motor, or else to no motor at all, and sometimes people will discreetly choose to use electrics only, but soon some dope comes along with a big Johnson or Envinrude, believing he can throttle down enough not to bother other fishers and fish, and the amount of oil and gasoline he distributes to the surface does not matter.  Well, he is wrong, and his type doesn’t belong on a lowland lake.  He should go to some bigger piece of water.

I’d say such a lake as I am thinking about is under a hundred acres on its surface measurement, and perhaps is less than sixty.  That’s about right for a max.  There is a size I have in mind where there’s just enough of a challenge (let us call it) to row around it, or row back from its furthermost end, with a mild chop blowing, to make the trip rigorously challenging and rewarding.  Depending upon the surrounding landforms, the protection a lake receives from the elements (mostly wind, but also driven rain) varies a lot.  Hills and trees help shield it, but not always; sometimes they create a funnel and the wind and rain  roar down the valley the funnel provides and the lake grows as rough as the open sea.  Pass Lake in Skagit County is one of these.  An outboard motor is prohibited and so is an electric troll.  You must do your best with oars.  Often this is not good enough.  The lake has fine big rainbows and browns to make the effort worthwhile, plus some landlocked Atlantics.  What’s more, it is open to flyfishing only. The wind springs up and the guys in floattubes bob like helpless corks and kick for the nearest shoreline, before they are blown far from their takeout point.

Once my friend Russ Miller--a skilled chironomid fisher who believes in firmly anchored boats—was blown straight up on end and managed to avoid capsizing only because of the lucky angle of his landing.  He hit the water flat and did not flip over.  Accordingly, a lake like Pass, which has much going for it, does not fit my definition, and I sadly excluded it here because of its size and openness.  I will stick to the simpler, easier lakes, and take smaller fish perhaps, as often is the case.

Lowland lakes are self-contained units.  They usually have mushy bottoms, which means they don’t lend themselves to swimming or waterskiers who want to zip off from shore.  The skiers are banned in my state from small bodies of water, and on medium-sized ones are restricted to a buoy-prescribed area near the lake’s center—where fishing is rarely any good, anyway.  Still, the drone of the motors and the wakes created by big boats are a nuisance and occasionally a hazard.  If your water-skiing days are behind you, you are not tolerant of wakes, and wish the boats and skiers somewhere where you are not.  There is a time and a place for each activity.  Lake size is the largely determining factor.  To say one cannot take a swim in a lowland lake on a hot spring day would be intolerably cruel, even if you are intently fishing it.  But with a soft bottom, it would not be unfair to remind them that one takes a swim at one’s own risk, and it is best not to put your feet down.  I won’t say the lakes have leeches, just muck that behaves much like quicksand to draw you down and has interesting things to catch between your toes.

Beer cans have a way of disappearing into such a lake.  Also fly rods and reels that get bumped overboard; these are gone forever.  And I suppose human bodies vanish, too.  Otherwise lowland lakes are benign.  They have a peaty look, as does most water with a woodland source, and often carry the appearance of overly steeped tea.  You would not want to drink from a lowland lake, no matter how thirsty you are.  (Rather guzzle the sea.)   If you can see to a depth of four feet you are doing well.  More often the viewable distance is only two.  Lowland lakes rise and fall with the rain.  They do not flood like a river does (and are in fact a good place to go when the rivers are high and gray), but they eat markedly into their lowlands and quickly become marshes.

In this particular environment a wealth of wildlife dwells.  You soon learn the difference between rushes and tulles and sedges (the vegetable kind, as well as the insect species), lily pads, cattails, Eurasian milfoil, purple loosestrife, etc.  Blackbirds trill and dart among the weeds, often bowing a cattail alarmingly when they light.  Swallows swoop and glide, often striking the water and leaving faint rings.

“Look at the fish rising,” said an angler to me once, when a lake was showing circles but we were having no strikes.  “Why can’t we hook anything?”

“Look again,” I said

He didn’t take this well.  “The fish are rising,” he repeated, “but they won’t take.”

“The fish aren’t rising,” I said softly.  “Those are swallow hitting the water with their bodies.”

He didn’t want to hear this, but it was true.  The fish were all on the bottom still--another man’s fishfinder soon confirmed it.  Nobody wanted a surface hatch, and to find the rainbows feeding there, more than I.  But I wasn’t going to manufacture a case out of a flock of cliff swallows picking up surface insects.  All the situation required was paying close attention.  Funny how for some people it is too great a price.

It is a special charm that lowland lakes have, and it isn’t for everybody.  I think it is mostly for fly fishers.  But there are many people who like to wander down to a lake’s edge on a calm evening and watch the changing light formations, the wave action, the insects, the birds, the trout sometimes gently slurping.  The ringing chime of such an evening, sometimes builds to a roar, unmistakable, but is heard only by people who have ears for special things and are keen to twilight nuances.  Otherwise the sound passes itself off as something else, something ordinary and minor, such as road noise.

To put it another way, it is what is left when the bullfrogs’ chorus dies down to near nothingness.

4

A lowland lake usually comes into bloom in late spring.  This is a natural occurrence and the result of excessive nutrients, too high a water temperature, and certain seasonal vegetative matters all reacting together.  The lake is said to turn over.  The bottom layer inverts itself and brings cooler water to the surface.  The three layers of a lake are called the epilimnion (top), the thermocline (middle), and the hypolimnion (bottom).  A lot of dead green matter comes drifting to the surface and will soon turn brown.  While it is lying there, rotting, stinking, the fishing is often lousy.  It is bad because, among other reasons, the stuff gets on your line, leader, and fly hook and makes it look like you are fishing in spinach.  No sensible fish, however hungry, will bother to sort it out and take your fly, which often resembles the pervasive green slime.  (They’d rather eat grass.)  But the surface and sub-surface weed gives nourishment to a wide variety of insects and crustaceans necessary to fish life.  Weed is essential to the biotic health of a lake.  But sometimes it gets to be too much.

Later the stuff sinks to the bottom and enriches it.  This is another way for saying it adds to the gooey soup or broth on the bottom.  It is what comes oozing between our toes when you attempt to walk along the bottom, and it is often dangerous, for there is no solid bottom for your bare feet to trod upon.  You can sink up to your keister in the slime, or deeper,  and never come up.  You will lie forever among the buried treasure of the muck.

In spring bloom starts to form in most lowland lakes and is very pretty, with wildflowers blossoming along the shoreline, cattails extending their narrow shafts upward, lily pads forming and beginning to expand their reach outward, reeds and tulles and grasses starting to achieve their annual elevation.  The  blue-green algae is developing along the shoreline but has not yet reached the clotting stage.  It is host to many food sources for trout and panfish—rotifers, copepods, cladocerons, diatoms, for juveniles; for hungry adults, chironomid larvae hatching out on the bottom and inching vertically to the surface to emerge as midges, their tiny shucks dotting the surface and looking like the downy fluff from the black cottonwood trees.  Some mayfly larvae emerge much the same way from their depths, while other kinds of mayflies blow in from the busy shore. Caddis nymphs crawl up on fresh grasses, shed their cases, and fly out over the water.

On a floating blanket of weed trout find prozoans, minute crustaceans, desmids, hydras, snails, diving beetles, and dragon-fly larvae, or so Encarta tells me.   I take their word for the particular species in the rich scum I see forming on water, wood, and land.  The rising of trout indicates they are cruising, feeding.  It is up to me—knowing so little about biology—to come up with something on the end of my leader that will trick them into accepting it for food.

Fortunately there is much that will appeal to them at this time of the year.  They are feeding hungrily, in keen competition with each other for survival.  This makes them gluttonous.  Not often in my lakes are they particular to an exclusive extent.  The will accept as food most anything small and moving—and if it is of the right size and color, so much the more often.  Usually a fly or lure need only be in the ballpark of what is they are looking for in their wet world.  It must behave correctly, though.  That means it must look natural and be moving at the right speed.  That speed is generally slow, but sometimes it has to be faster to induce them to strike.  A little experimentation will indicate what is working today.  It is not always the same thing, though we start out trying what worked yesterday, or last time out.  This is what makes fishing fun.  And tomorrow will be different yet.

Thank goodness for the difference—as the French say about men and women.

5

     Timm’s flies came to me in three tin boxes.  (Actually aluminum alloy.)  I had put them aside, briefly examined about once.  When my thoughts turned to trout again, I had flies of my own—though most of them I had tied for searun cutthroat and had a decidedly steelhead look to them, though tied smaller.  They were reduced versions of bright patterns that had worked successfully over the years in rivers for various anadromous fish.  As far as trout in lowland lakes went, they were nearly worthless.  That’s not quite true.  There are days when trout will hit almost anything that moves through the water at the depth they choose to occupy.  But that is not most of the time and I would hate to have to depend upon such serendipity.   A fisher needs a deeper range of attitude and flies to accompany it.

Two of the boxes were wets and nymphs.  The third was small dries.  About eighty percent of the wets were tiny and nondescript.  They were black and brown, green and gray, plus all the drab colors in between, including various combinations of them.  But twenty percent had some bright component—tinsel, red in the tail or body, daylight florescent green or orange in their tiny wings.  They were a personal expression of what a fly ought to be like, in one man’s opinion.  Timm was a steelhead fisher first of all, and could never get past the idea that some bit of brightness was needed, even for trout, and they might ignore everything else.  It is a hard idea to get past, even when fishing for searun cutthroat in the fall, as he and I often did.   And I guess I subscribed to the same theory.  We were much alike in our fishing outlook.  But he had a lot of dull, dark flies, too.  He knew that many times it was what the fish wanted, and they would take only them.  This I had to discover the hard way.  It is how I learn most things.  (If I ever learn them at all.)

The boxes were of brushed aluminum, darkened by time and abuse, abrasion and scrapes against something harder than aluminum, and nearly everything else is.  There is a soft dent, here and there, and many a scuff.  They look lived-in, as people say about houses.  The hinges opened with reluctance--which is good in a fly box, or else it may spill its contents into the river or lake.  The Perrine Company made them, not changing their design an iota, in all these years, and wisely providing tiny ringed airholes (unlike their tony competitor, Wheatley) so that if  wetted, their contents may luckily dry out and not let the hooks rust.  If not, feathers fade so nondescriptly that you will ask, “What was this?  What did it used to be?”

Both boxes had spring-type hook holders.  I don’t like these because they tend to dull the hook points through repeated insertions and extractions, but the clip-types have their drawbacks, too.  They get sprung and won’t hold flies securely; often they will dump a fly into the water and it is gone.  A spring is less likely to release the fist of its grip.  The price you pay is occasional dulling of the hook point.   With the clip, the fly is not secured.  Close the box and the fly goes on a little journey around the dark interior; when the box is opened, it may be lying anywhere.  Off it goes, into the wild wet yonder, usually lost.  If you try to return a clip to its original shape and function, good luck to you.  It will remain always a little loose and infirm, no matter how hard and often you may press upon it with your fingers.  It will keep disappointing you.

Clips can be damaged, too, by forcing too large a fly into them, a fly bigger than they may be expected to hold easily.  This is your fault, not the box’s or the clip’s.  I habitually ruin my clips by jamming steelhead flies into them, then pay the penalty in lost smaller flies.  But I always blame the boxes and their manufacturers.

In Timm’s boxes I detect some signs of rust.  It is mainly in the springs, which must be of stainless steel, which is not stainless at all and often dulls into something brown or orange.   Is rust . . . transferable from old flies to new?  I suspect it is, and so when I insert brand new hooks with flies attached, I introduce them to a rust-producing environment and may ruin them.  If  so, so be it.  I have done this for years.  It is a way of preserving the old at the expense of the new.  Perhaps I am too stingy to buy new, rustless boxes.  Let the old ones do again.

There are some flies in the box that are of unmistakable historical value.  They take me back—farther than I might like to go.  Shortly after World War II ended, materials used for the war effort came back onto the civilian market, and some were available for the first time ever.  Of course there had always been rayon, but rayon had “gone to war,” along with butter, gasoline, and rubber.  (As for the new materials, I am thinking primarily of nylon, soon to be everybody’s favorite leader material and the stuff of spinning-reel lines.) Rayon returned in the form of flashy men’s stockings, easily washed and quickly dried, cheap stuff, brighter than anything found in the natural world, in Dayglow orange or green.  (These were the same kinds of socks sold by men out of the trunks of cars at wide spots in the road, on weekends.  Remember?)  Fishers found that the socks could be unraveled, producing long strands of brightly colored, kinky fine yarn that behaved like floss.  It could be used for the bodies of trout flies.  (It could also be used to tie killer steelhead flies, either as built-up bodies or as wing toppings.)

     Carrot Nymph was a fly that was enhanced by having its dull orange body intensified.  And Dandy Green Nymph often proved better, tied with floss provided by the chartreuse sock.  But there were times, it turned out, when a color that fluoresced so in daylight seemed to scare fish.  We told ourselves that the fish were “full,” or had stopped biting for some other reason, our faith in the new material was so great.  For practical purposes there is no difference between a trout that isn’t hitting and one that is frightened away from a bright fly.  But there were many more times when the trout hit the exceedingly bright flies well.  This gave them credibility.  It gave us faith in them.

I guess we believed, as steelheaders foolishly do, that the fish could not see ordinary flies.  This is a widely cultivated idea.  It is specious.  Trout have no difficulty seeing under extreme conditions.  It is only we who do.  Thus, brightness, flash, sparkle, and luminescence have their advocates, true enough, and many think that to fish flies or lures without these add-ons is an insurmountable  handicap.  That is, they won’t catch fish without them.  This is an outgrowth, I think, of the two classical division of flies into attractors and naturals.  If a natural is not in evidence, switch to something that will attract them, the brighter the better.  This is an ancient trap.  It is a pit that few emerge from unscathed.

Another old pattern I found in Timm’s wet boxes was the Nylon Nymph.  It lurked there in numbers.  It is a fond favorite of mine, but a fly with some frustration attached.  The fly goes back to the end of World War II and the return of strategic materials to civilian life.  I was a boy then.  All the nylon produced by our factories was used previously for parachutes.  It saved lives.  When the war ended, it quickly became the leader material of choice, it was so fine and supple.  It was manufactured by the same factories, under license to Dupont, in a variety of diameters, stiffness, and colors.  It was later adapted to tie the segmented bodies of adult insects and nymphs.

In the Pacific Northwest, with its many lowland lakes puddling the countryside, it was a long-awaited development.  Fish could usually be found feeding, but many times not on anything large enough to be seen floating on the surface; when the trout were observed ringing in large numbers, the food source turned out to be just under the surface instead.  It was a big surprise to dry-fly purists.  The trout were nymphing.  A trying time it was.  They might hit, but seldom were hooked solidly and soon came off the hook.  What a disappointment!  I remember fishing medium-sized nymphs and having dozens of strikes in an hour, with not a single fish hooked solidly and of course nothing landed, or to take home.  A boy likes to bring home fish and hear the praise.

I would troll (a favorite way of fishing) a fly right on the surface, and my rod tip was constantly dipping to the soft strike of fish.  That’s all.  Bob, pause.  Bob, pause.  I would try waiting, I would try a delayed strike back, I would try feeding line to the plucking fish  and then striking back quickly in  a variety of ways:   I would strike softly, I would strike hard, I would wait to strike, I’d try to anticipate the take and strike before it had actually arrived.  All had the same result:  no fish  hooked.   It was maddening.  The trout were out there, all right, and they were rising, feeding, even striking lethargically, but they avoided being hooked.  I would talk to other fishers about the problem, and their experience was about the same as mine.  How frustrating!  A few bait fishers, or those trolling spoons, would catch fish, but not many of them.  They too related tales of fishing striking so softly that they wouldn’t put a momentary bend in the rod.  We were all in the same boat, as it were.

The advent of the Nylon Nymph didn’t exactly remedy the situation.  Rather, it compounded the problem.  The missed fish even increased in number.  To understand the phenomenon, one must know what a Nylon Nymph looked like.  It was hard, largish by today’s standards, and unmistakably shaped like a nymph, that is, slightly humpbacked.  You could tie it in nearly any color.  This was because clear nylon is transparent, and whatever color you put beneath the wrap becomes the dominant color of the fly.  Usually floss forms the underbody, and floss came in a nearly infinite array of colors.  A body could be tapered--was best when tapered--into a cigar shape, or some minor variation of one, such as a forward-leaning cigar, or a cigar with a shoulder to it, which resembled a wing-casing.  Some flies had tiny eyes painted on their heads with airplane dope enamel. This made the flies resemble tiny fish or fry.

Ken McLeod invented the Nylon Nymph, but since he was not a tier, it was his son, George, who wrapped the flies--according to some pretty plain, inflexible suggestions from his father.  The idea was to produce a fly, a nymph, that caught fish more dependable than the other wets.  The fact that nylon was translucent (if not outright transparent) was what gave it an advantage; silkworm gut did not do this, being as opaque as things come and without any shine or sparkle.

You would tie a tail on a hook--golden pheasant tippet, short, was good--tie in a the nylon at the butt, and wrap on a body of floss of your favorite color, giving it the taper that you liked, and then you would wrap the nylon over the body, starting from back at the tail, laying the coils exceedingly neatly and tightly side by side, and stopping just short of where the head would be.  Then you put on a collar of grouse or grizzly hen, and finished off the head.  No need to keep it small, large was considered good.  If you liked to (and I did) you might paint on a tiny eye.  This appealed to a certain fisher’s aesthetic.

You might be able to paint on a pupil with a round, slightly feathered toothpick.  With the unfeathered end you could dot on a center, or pupil.  Yellow with a black center was good as was red and black together.  Afterwards you let the head dry and coated it with protective clear lacquer or flyhead cement—if you had enough time and cared about perfection.  You had created a thing that (without stretching your imagination all out of shape) might look like a small bait fish.  Or else a swimming insect of medium size.  In short, a nymph, or nymph lookalike of some vague, generic type.

Timm’s flyboxes were loaded with Nylon Nymphs.  Mostly dull colors, a few were bright.  I understood at once.  They were a steelheader’s version of a small trout fly.  And the brightness dictum persisted.  He was trying to improve a type of fly that was frustrating to fish because of all the short strikes.  Maybe they weren’t hitting solidly because the fly wasn’t bright enough.

 When I started fishing trout again, I recognized the Nylon Nymphs at once, and all the attendant frustrations of fishing them came rushing back.  I re-entered Timm’s mind at the exact moment I was trying to improve on yesterday’s nymphs, almost as though 20 years had not gone by.  I understood what was involved completely.  But much had transpired since then, and all was an improvement.  The Nylon Nymph now had mainly historic value to me.  I studied them half-admiringly.  I still liked the way they look.  But I’d lost the small amount of faith I had in them.

Today’s nymphs make use of superior materials to produce much the same effects.  Fish are much less likely to reject or eject them.  Swannundaze is one such material, and so is V-Rib, Edge Bright, Larva Lace (love the name!), Heavy Latex, Closed Cell Foam, and Braided Butt Material—to name only a few things from today’s catalogs.  Most are vinyl; others are some kindred petroleum distillate.  What they do is more softly approximate the effect we were after with nylon in tying our nymphs.  The new flies catch more fish, though fish frequently continue to reject or eject them.  Today’s nymphs have greater eye appeal--both human and, I suppose, to the fish.  And the material is easier to work with, for nylon, no matter how small its diameter, remains stiff and recalcitrant.  Its bulk produces a large head and does not compress under pressure from the thread.  Hence the old head remains big enough to be painted on as an eye in order to minimize it.

Nylon Nymphs look crude today, ill-formed.  They are elementary.  Hey, I want to explain, we did the best we could with what we had to do it with.  Our tying thread was size A, or else OO, OOO.  Silk.  Silk is fat.  You go finer with either silk or nylon, and the thread will break upon tightening, however gently you do it.  To tie off a head, especially with nylon as your body wrap, you must cinch down on the thread almost to the breaking point.  Often you exceed it.  What we wanted then is today’s Italian 8/0 thread, with the strength of 3/0, or Herb Howard 6/0, with the same degree of toughness, but they were late in arriving.  We continued tying with the thick, clumsy stuff we were used to, and it broke on us regularly--just from looking at it too hard, we sometimes thought.

Timm’s flies all have that ancient, historical look.  I love it.  Their heads reveal that thick tying-thread look.  He died in 1980, and much of the great, good stuff hadn’t yet come on the market.  Yet they caught fish.  I fish with them still.  Perhaps it is the fuddy-duddy in me that wants to prove that today’s trout will take yesterday’s flies, crude as they are in comparison.  Maybe I don’t want to believe that trout have changed any and are so selective, so modern, that only today’s fancy materials and fancy tying tricks will produce flies that can catch them.

I am of both worlds, then and now, one of those sad creatures destined by his time in history to try to bridge the unclosable gap, the yawn of immeasurable distances.  Time is distance, we all know and accept.  Anxiously I buy the new materials, one after another, and nervously tie with them, producing I am sure superior flies--flies that to my jaundiced eye look absolutely great.  But secretly, in my dark heart, I hope the old ones will continue to produce fish in greater, surer numbers.  But I lack the conviction to fish them long enough to prove the point, once and for all.

6

Most of Timm’s nymphs are no-account patterns.  They lack names, or else have lost them to time.  I can identify only a few.  And there is the fact to overcome that many good and great flies are so nondescript as to be barely recognized by name, anyway.  They have a wonderful grubby appearance by which we select them, not knowing precisely what they are or how they were originated.  But we know they will do the job.

Gold-ribbed hare’s ear is one.  (You’ll notice I don’t capitalize it; I want it to stay generic, vague, anonymous in its origin.)  March brown is another.  (Same reason for it being lower case.)  A wingless version of Professor and Coachman makes them nymphs, whatever you choose to call them by.  (Capitalized here because I can’t help myself, the tradition of proper names, or proper nouns, is so long.)  Black gnat, plus black gnat tied with grizzly tail and hackle, and no wing to mar its symmetry when glimpsed from the side or from below.  Partridge and . . .  any color will do, and quite nicely;  it catches fish, all over the world.  Teal and Something, too, in a similar range of colors.  All of the soft-hackled flies of Skues in Britain and Neumes in America reflect this outlook.  All seem to be nicely represented in Timm’s fly boxes. 

By quick count the nymphs number 261.  They go down to size 18, I’d guess.  Tiny things, if I dropped one it might well disappear into the rug, lost forever, or else into the fir-needled litter beside a lake or stream.   To a person used to tying steelhead flies--eight down to 3/0, but generally two to six--I find them minute creatures, but marvel at the minimum of materials involved in their construction.  They must be cheap to tie, as well, for they use up so little stuff, whatever it may happen to be.  Yet to catch fish consistently they must be just the right size and color.  And what a range of materials are involved.  So many different kinds of dubbing there are today with which to trick the trout.  I detect wool, nylon monofilament, chenille, peacock herl, floss that must be rayon--all the staples.  But I don’t see any seal dubbing, or any of its modern-day substitutes, which are multitudinous and excellent.  Ah, if Timm could only have lived to see them and to have had them available for tying purposes, what these nymphs would look like.  They would be slenderer, sleeker, buggier, sparser.  But they look pretty good anyway.  The trout like them, too.   Recently they’ve caught their share, before I came up with ones of my own.  I don’t know if the new ones are any better, truthfully.

His biggest are about size eight.  A six would leap out as something too big for trout.  An eight is about right for late-summer steelhead, too, and I’ve tied a few in recent years.  There’s the challenge.  Perhaps I could learn to tie smaller yet.  I hate to admit this, but when the light lies low, I have  a terrible time threading a small fly on a slender tippet and tying a trustworthy knot.  But then there are other days, when the light is coming at the right slant over my shoulder, when I can see the eye of the tiny fly and the gossamer tippet so clearly that I am startled by the clarity, and I do the job in one or two pokes.  I wish it was always so.

I remember one recent March afternoon on blowy Lake Martha when I tried and tried to thread the eye of a small fly, while bright wavy light was reflected into my face, and kept failing, over and over, and finally produced a knot I knew would not hold a medium-sized trout, but fished on with my fly, with thin hope and an attendant small fear.

I was rewarded by not a single strike.  What a relief.

7

The third fly box (you see, I haven’t forgotten it) holds dries exclusively.  They are mostly tens and twelves, and have a certain dull uniformity that makes me think Timm bought them.  Right after the war, the market was flooded with cheap dry flies tied in the Far East or India, and you could buy a hackled fly with nicely matched duck-quill wings for about the price of the hook alone in America.  I don’t know where the hooks came from for these flies, but they look worse than the cheapest ones manufactured in England or Norway.  Still, though they bend easily, they seem to hold the small fish which we catch, and if they get gaped on the release they can be easily be straightened back into weak shape.

My count is only 61 dries, but I remember transferring a whole bunch more into a used mustard jar with a tightly fitting lid, as a guard against moths.  They must be some place.  I did this to free up one of Timm’s boxes so that I could use it for steelhead flies.  I thought I would have no future use for trout flies.  I must hunt them down and rebox them, now that summer is coming on fast and the fish I seek are frequently found feeding on top.

Until then this small assortment must do.  They are a bit odd-looking.  All are featherwings, except for a solitary Montana Buck.  Where are the hairwing dries of yesteryear?  Well, they were relatively new.  These are the classic patterns, many with quill bodies, such as Blue Upright and Cahill Light and Dark.  Many are faded to near colorlessness.  Maybe I oughtn’t fish them but send them off to the museum in Vermont.  And if flies needn’t be smaller than these, I can tie them myself and almost have--my smallest steelhead dries are but one size larger.  All the hairwing Wulffs I’ve been tying are not only appropriate but ideal for trout.  If the trout will take a ten Royal Wulff, why not an eight?  Answer:  Because the one size difference often is critical.  Let’s face it, an eight is a big, big fly for trout, when it is a dry and supposed to imitate something found floating on the surface of a lowland lake.

In Timm’s box are Royal Coachman, Coachman, and even an ancient Leadwing Coachman, which is nothing more than a Coachman tied with slate-gray wings instead of slips from white duck secondary wing feathers.  (Of course Coachman is basically The Royal Same, but wrapped without its red bellyband, and with a more sedate tail--though tails on Coachmen have varied over the years, too, once being golden pheasant tippet and later red hackle fibers.  Lee Wulff gave it a tail of brown bucktail to keep it afloat in an upright position, when all the other tail materials absorbed water and caused the fly to droop like one of those inverted questionmarks with which the Spanish like to start sentences.

I like the old-fashioned appearance of both Coachmen flies tied with red hackle-fiber tails.  It is probably the steelheader in me that won’t recognize a fly as good unless it has red in it somewhere—if nowhere else, then the tail.  But I like their appearance more in the fly box than in the water, when I’m searching for trout.  Red seem a little much.

Maybe it’s because I’m learning to think trout, and to shy away from the bright colors--especially since the flies I’ve been catching trout on this spring are really drab.  Small and drab:  that’s the ticket.

8

It is dawn on a lowland lake.  The month is May.  A mist or ground fog hovers over the lake and sags in its pockets; if a photographer were to take a picture of the lake, either in black and white or in living color, as they call it, he would bat his eyes at what comes back from the lab:  much of the picture is missing.  It has been erased.  The snap is a picture puzzle.  Name the absent components.  I’ve taken such pictures before, simply because the light was so great, the lake so soft and beautiful, the colors so gently muted.  The results have been colossally disappointing.

Anyway, the lake today is calm as glass.  Here and there the mirror is broken with a feeding ring.  There are lesser rings from insects rising to the surface.  But some of the rings are clearly trout feeding with a quiet slurp.

I am imagining this dawn, of course.  I haven’t seen one since I had the stomach flu.  I see primarily evenings and view them clearly.  Evening mimics dawn nicely, with light warmer to the camera lens in late afternoon, more towards the red than the yellow end of the spectrum.  It is how we tell at what time of day a picture was taken.  The warmth or the coolness of the tones is a dead giveaway.  I won’t fake my dawns, or try to lie about them with fancy descriptions.  I will simply say my dawns are sunsets turned upside down and backwards.  And of course dawn brings on the advance of light, while the setting sun announces its vanishment.  There will be no more light until I’ve slept some, the sky says.  Perhaps this is why I love afternoons and evenings.  They connote what is missing from my life.  They also truncate my experience and compress the moments before it will be too dark to continue fishing.

Nobody I know well is a night fisherman, but I keep hearing about how great it is.  Night fishing is good in the big-hatch trout lakes of Eastern Washington, I know.  At Big Twin, Maurice Travis tells me the best fishing begins after the sun has been down a while.  Or happens even later.  Fishers queue up, waiting for the magic moment.  Their cigarettes softly punctuate the darkness, as they talk and breathe in and out through red-tipped tubes.

But when do they sleep?  When do they know a good thing has ended?  How do they know it to be a fact, when the next day dawns while they are still fishing the past night?  Or does it always work out this way?  Do night fishers finally call it a day, and go home to sleep before the day they’ve already called it has arrived with the sun?  I’ll tell you, it is much too complicated for me.  I’ll take my evenings, thank you, and be grateful for what they bring, in the day’s wake.

It is a beautiful time, truly.  The sun basks low, and if there are clouds they are stretched across a horizon that is westward ruddy, and if eastward pale or raspberry with light reflected 180 degrees, such as when there are snow-capped mountains, or else the loosening sky is so delicately palely robin’s-egg blue that it takes your breath away, especially when there is a ghostly sliver of a moon hung there like a fingernail paring.  At first you don’t believe it, the report of your eyes, because the sky has to be dark for there to be a moon, right?  Only there is an hour left of daylight.  So if it isn’t the moon, what kind of apparition is it?

Ambiguities like this occur with disturbing regularity as the day lessens and the lake spreads out in front of you to widen your eyes with joy.  This lake is special--dark, remote, attractive.  It comprises about thirty acres and there are just two landowners.  One has a nice spread, with a modern peeled-log house of two storeys, plus a pair of jutting docks that warmly sign the lake, No Trespassing.  A resident beaver is in daily violation of this dictum, and since beavers are nocturnal, this animal manages to get busy at my favorite time of day—just as darkness slides down its pole.  Often Mr. Beaver hits the water with a splash that makes me jump in my boatseat.  His dark brown head disappears beneath an oily surface, but a moment later bobs up and can be seen plowing the water, throwing a sizable wake.  Is there just one beaver, or are there more?  To me they all look alike.  This guy swims a zigzag course, first heading northwest, now veering west-southwest, then south-southwest, and lastly east-southeast, before diving again, with another loud whack of his tail.  Now, I remember river beavers heading in a more or less straight line for the far bank.  Time after time this beaver swims an irregular course, as if undecided as to where he wants to go in the lake, or constantly changing his mind and direction.  Like somebody is shooting at him.  Like a ship trying to avoid a torpedo.

Is this what lake beavers do, all the time, or does this guy have a bad gyroscope and is physically incapable of prescribing a straight line, but keeps trying and failing?  I’d like to know, sure, but admit such knowledge is not very useful or has any practical application.  I mean, it won’t help my fishing, which needs it.

Does the beaver scare the fish?  I know for sure an otter does.  A family of otters properly reminds trout of approaching death.  But a beaver is a vegetarian.  He wouldn’t know what to do with a trout if he had one in his mouth and would head for a bite of the nearest cottonwood tree, instead.  Do trout know they are safe?  Do they know, for instance, that my eight-foot pram and I are harmless to them, and only the fly on the end of my hopefully invisible or at any rate insignificant leader poses the real danger?

You have lots of time for thoughts like these while drifting around on a lake, with only occasional recourse to manning the oars, the water calm as a bucketful of nothingness, you watching whatever is going on in the wonderful world of trout, casting here, or mooching over there, as I often do, when no surface activity calls for laying a fly on a dime.  It makes for a nice afternoon and the start of a bright evening.

The second landowner on the lake is actually an organization, international in scope.  A colony of Finns have erected small cabins, mobile homes, and other variously shaped shelters back from the shoreline.  They are packed together like proverbial sardines and some of the old Airstreams resemble those metal containers turned on edge.  The Finns have a common lodge, cookhouse, Laundromat, outdoor swimming pool (I’m told its the largest one built out of doors in all of Washington and Oregon), camping area ($10 per night for members only), showers and toilets, boat launch; I see many upended aluminum watercraft beached there like shiny baby whales.  I covet adding my little fiberglass dingy to them, just to get away from lugging it back and forth to the lake in the rear of my Ford Explorer, for I intend to fish here much more.  And I am tempted to apply for membership, for being a Finn is no longer prerequisite.  They must be desperate, hardup enough to admit the likes of me, mostly Irish and Scotch, with a tad of Welsh thrown in for bad measure.

The Finns own about a third of the lake, and their dwellings stretch off back into the hills like toadstools, for they own considerable property, and it is all in rich second-growth trees, for the people detest the logging that is stripping away the nearby hills.  Yearly the eyesore increases and makes good folks grit their back teeth.  I call the lake Eudora--though this is not its real name.  But it could easily be a Eudora; it looks like a Eudora--remote, mysterious, romantic, beautiful.  The lake is right out of a more benevolent Edgar Allen Poe.  It has a gentle surface and even in a storm remains unscathed.  Perhaps in response to its sheltered tranquillity, the Finns have mandated that no motors other than nearly silent electric trolls be used. The Fish and Wildlife people responded accordingly and now, along with the State Patrol, enforce the ban.

It surprises me how many people who come to the public access area with their boats have battery-powered motors dangling from the stern.  Are they really necessary?  I like to row and consider it a fine form of exercise on a calm day.  I suppose a few of these dudes with electric trolls return home after a day’s put-putting and head for the rowing machine, not recognizing the gross incongruity or folly of what they do.  It takes many kinds of us, I know, etc.

The colony of Finns, who are mostly not at home here, are also notorious for not fishing the lake, for whatever reasons; I will not try to change them and their ways.  They are nice people, neat, orderly, and their colony is well-tended; it has a caretaker (not a member, not a Finn) who lives at the ungated entrance and cuts the hugely conspicuous community lawn with his ride-type mower.  Another one of his duties is to collect fees for members who do not own property and use the campgrounds.  I’ve learned all this, you see, by doing a diligent amount of poking around, looking at available cottages and building sites, and asking my usual snooty questions.  I have it in my head to become a Finn, albeit a honorary one.  Anything to get closer to this wonderful lake and have its fishing more at hand.  Not that it’s all that difficult to reach, you understand.  Its only about fifteen miles from the river.

9

The other landowner I sometimes see at a great distance unloading groceries from his pickup truck (which has become the earth’s ubiquitous haul vehicle) and carrying them in the kitchen door.  The family comprises a father who works “out,” as they say, a wife at home, a couple of tall kids, and a dog that barks shrilly from a long ways off at me and others in small boats, sending his yips out over the water like a siren, whence they come rattling back from the baffled trees more lonesome and forlorn than they started out.

Occasionally, just before other people’s dinner time, when I am still hungrily fishing, I hear the soft staccato snarl of the saddled lawnmower operated by the caretaker, the non-Finn whose existence the residents don’t seems to acknowledge.  He’s the modern-day Invisible Man to them.

I wonder why don’t the Finn’s regularly seek the trout, since they are among the fine things in life, and the Finns are tasteful people, with a reported overwhelming appetite for fish.  Otherwise, pray tell, what are they doing here in such numbers?  Or does this explain their current corporeal absence?  I want to tell them how lucky they are to have cabins on such a lake, that a lake without trout is an empty body of water, a sad thing.  To them it must be just a big bathtub, fit only for swimming on one of the hot days coming up.  And what a large loss to them this would be.

The lake has a demonstrable rainbow population, well known, but there are rumors of other trout, and they intrigue me.  A man the other day told me he caught a twelve-inch cutthroat.  I envied him.  A cutthroat from this lake?  Great news.  It sure looks like a cutthroat lake. Still, the man might not know what he is talking about, for rainbows and cutthroats are closely related, perhaps first-cousins. Often they mate and produce hybrids.  I’ve seen a range.  Nobody is sure whether the hybrid is sterile.  I would guess it is not.

Searun cutts could get into the lake from its outlet, running up from Jim Creek, a tributary of the South Fork of the Stillaguamish river, which has a pretty decent run.  They might tend to hang out and not go back to Puget Sound after they’ve spawned.  In other words, they might prefer living here.  I would.  There seems to be plenty of food.  If it is true there are cutts in the lake, they may interbreed regularly with the planted rainbows and produce hybrids that are to various degrees neither rainbow nor cutthroat but both.  Or they may spawn only with their own kind and produce a pure stock, a fish that is all cutthroat.  I have no idea which.   I’m dying to find out, though, and the only way is to catch some.

My Ben Paris Fishing Guide for 1966 (I hang on to such things) states authoritatively that Eudora contains Eastern brook trout.  Period.  My ears go up when I read this.  Wow!  I love brookies and cut my eyeteeth on them in my early Boy Scout days, fishing high-altitude lakes.  Back in the grandly experimental days of wide-spread stocking, a great number of different kinds of fish got dumped as fry into lakes and rivers throughout the Pacific Northwest.  The question the fish biologists asked themselves was pragmatic:  “What do you think would happen if we. . . ?”  And the answer was, “I dunno.  Let’s try it and find out.”  Hence brookies in Eudora and elsewhere, often unsuitably.   Usually they die out in one generation.  Yet mightn’t a few have survived?  Mightn’t they have found the inlet stream and some suitable gravel, and done what the rainbows and cutthroats do, that is, spawn naturally?  I would like to think so, but I fear not with the brookies, and they have become a ghost species.

Would they then take a tandem Gray Ghost streamer, mooched or trolled?

10

I pull on the oars and drift along, waiting until I’m nearly dead in the water to stroke again.  I’m trolling a fly, dragging it limply around the lake just under the surface, hoping for a pull, for there is not much surface activity at the moment, only a widely spaced ring too far away to cast to, and that very seldom.  Pull and glide, dreaming of brookies.   Dreaming of them not because they fight so well (they pull rather like a perch, if the truth be spoken) but because they are rare and beautiful, therefore precious.  When they first come out of the water, their dark backs with pale markings dripping brown water, they are the color of wild rose and dandelion, their lower fins edged with brilliant white.  I haven’t seen one for years, but their after-image remains with me, perhaps reinforced by the sight of the Dolly Vardens I luck into each year--brothers if only in genus and the similar mottling of their pale skins.

Pull and glide, then pull, pull, pull, gliding now at a faster rate in hopes a trout will take either while accelerating or (more likely) when the pram starts to lose energy and reach a static state.  Always the rod tip is under my strong consideration.  It is the indicator, you see, of what is happening sixty feet off, underwater, where the fish live, cruise, feed.  Across the lake a man (some Finn,  I presume) is preparing to launch an aluminum boat about fourteen feet long.  It must weigh a ton, and that is why it is giving him and his fishing buddy so much hernia-inducing difficulty.  They have a motor, I see, which is gasoline powered (a no-no here), but they also have an electric troll mounted alongside, which I presume they’ll use instead.  I’d guess they came from a lake nearby and are anxious to try this one out, and see if they will have better luck.

From their rod tips dangle a lot of jewelry--popgear, it is called.  At the end of this string of spinners they will impale a worm, and if they do it right it will dangle and swim enticingly and attract a trout.  I understand there are plastic worms available in all colors now, some imbedded with scent.  Wow. What a wonder science is.  If it can put a man on the moon, why can’t it consistently trick a wary trout?  But then, where would the fun be?

Popgear is not fair here.  But it is legal.  My main objection to gangtrolls is that they weigh a ton and in order to make them work right they must whirl slowly on their cable, sending out great flashes of light and vibrations.  This pulls on the rod and is not awfully different from the lead we used to put on our lines when fishing for salmon in Alaska.  Some of those weights were nearly a pound.  Popgear pulls so it is hard to tell from a dragged fish.  I remember as a boy urging my landlubber mother to put on a small troll, please, in order to catch a trout from McGinnis Lake, when we as a family were having a bad, storm-tossed day in Eastern Washington.  She did, with Son-As-Guide, and soon a beautiful 14-inch brookie took the lure.  She didn’t know she had a fish on until I coaxed her to reel in her line to check her bait.  Lo, a big trout, nearly drowned, scarcely a wiggle left in him, was on the end of her propeller.  What a sad way for so splendid a fish to die.  Delicious, though.  And it was all my fault.

Today I know better.  We all do.  So this is why I look at the pair of presumptive Finns with something less than derision.  Call it bemused tolerance.  They are trying hard to have fun.  So much hard work.  Maybe they will have a togetherness good time.  One of the newly resident 11-inch rainbows may succumb to the flash and smell of the gear, thereby producing a catch for them.  Finns, I take it they will kill and eat their catch immediately.  May the bag be big enough to make it worth greasing up a pan.  (Then may they disappear from my watery scene for the rest of the season.  I have a hunch they may do just that, for opening day is barely past.)

Some fishers like to go out on a lake because it erases their minds and acts as a purgative for their general malaise.  Thus they are cleansed of all dark thoughts and the residue from the world of business.  They return to work with scrubbed minds.  This is not me.   My mind remains hyper-active all the while I fish, and I return home from such a day churning with new ideas.  Something about the great out-of-doors stimulates me; it turns me on and my mind speeds--as the druggies say.  I think about everything under the sun, all in rapid succession; I refight old battles and prepare for new ones that often never come, especially forays against obtuse governmental agencies that seem to live for themselves alone and have no concern for what they supposedly safeguard--say, the environment or natural resources and public policy.

Practically never do I experience regret while I’m fishing.  I have no past days that I wish to live over and come up with better solutions for, the second time around.  In fact, my life is singularly free from regrets.  A fishing trip is almost always beneficial.  As a writer I find that some of my best ideas come to me while I am fishing.

too occupied to write them down and, afterwards, they are lost to recall and time, but—hey--that’s okay, for there are many more to come.  Some of my best writing ideas—whole books--have come to me unrequested while I’m driving.  The Marysville stretch of I-5 is one of my favorite points of inspiration.  I can think of no good reason why this is so, only state that it happens over and over again, and so I’ve come depend upon it.  It rarely lets me down.

Ideas that arrive while fishing are different.  They are more of a general nature and might well be called contemplations.  My friend Charlie Gearheart, the rock star and great country musician (whom nobody has heard of but a few of us), once wrote a song nobody has heard of called, “Oh So Special.”  It is a pun, an in-house joke, because there is a steelhead fly called the Oso Special, but the song works successfully on another level and is about a lady (aren’t all country songs about a lady, or the cowboy who done her wrong?) and she is not ordinary.  She has inflamed the songwriter’s mind and so he has written a song for her and to express his feeling. I’m nearly  positive the song came to him while he was flyfishing the Manure Spreader Hole on my beloved Stilly, about a dozen years ago  Or was it the Cicero Reach, Charlie?

No songs have come to me, but I have a number of poems that ran about three lines before they petered out in a riffle, about 126 short-story ideas (one of them published in Esquire), and numerous bits and pieces of things that have wound their way into these interminable fishing reports, my books.  And what has this to do with fishing?  A lot.  If you don’t have writing ideas, surely you have some equivalent of a nagging mind.  Often I solve some practical problem while fishing, too.  Now, if I was a business man, I would insist on going fishing on company time at least once a week and plead that my company would benefit directly from it.  Considrably.  It might be hard to prove, however.  I know my own decision-making ability somehow takes care of big problems while I am inattentive to them, fishing.  And even if I didn’t solve them all, or come tothe right decision, in business you only have to be is right about half the time to succeed.  So fishing will increase your percentage, fly fishing perhaps even more.   And there is more.  The mood of tranquillity with which you return to the dread and drear office, and the consideration you treat your peers, will benefit everybody.  So, bug out, get a rod, and go fishing.

We rowers are part of a community of water people.  We form a grand society.  Think of the collegiate crew.  Usually rowing is a group activity, with a boat of eight pulling against several other boats or crews, each representing a specific school, usually a college.  But there is also a craft designed expressly for loners.  It is the single-scull.  It has close, easily discernible parallels to a fisher rowing a pram around a lowland lake, namely myself.  Yet the activity is much different.  We may have a boat in common, sure, and a pair of oars to propel it with, but there the likeness is apt to stop.   A scull and its occupant attempt to cover a predesigned course in the shortest possible time and are sent off on their journey with others similarly equipped from a starting line on some enclosed body of water that is usually not a lowland lake of my description.  Instead it is much bigger, but the rowing takes place in an enclosed bay or quiet reach on a flattened river between dams.  A reservoir, then.

Here is how we differ:  We flyfishers start out independently, throughout the day, and attempt to cover an unprescribed course in the greatest amount of time.  The course is never the same for any two of us.  We stop, we start, we turn on a dime, we turn on a silver dollar, we row backwards, we drift sideways, we pound off across the lake like a goosed cormorant, we bump into floating logs approached backwards with an alarming thump, we lose an oar and retrieve it (using the remaining unshackled one as a paddle hook to reach it), we bend to our task like an Olympic athlete when the wind comes up and we are far from our launch site and home.  And so forth.  We splash a lot, for neatness doesn’t count and our attention is directed elsewhere—say, off the starboard bow where a trout has just ringed and we wonder if we can retrieve line fast enough to cover the rise before it widens to, say, a yard in diameter?  Then we decide not to try and press on.  Suddenly we are  stroking as smoothly as the junior varsity.  Whence the change?  Well, we’ve just gotten our stroke, as a runner gets his wind numbers one and two.  We nudge the shore, disembark, go ashore to pee, for we are proud flyfishers.  There are others, alas, who stand straight up in their boats in a rocking sea, unzip, and direct their stream brazenly over the side like a horse that has been drinking beer.

Flyfishers envision themselves a discrete lot and never, never, pee in a river or a lake.  We hurry to the beach and relieve ourselves six feet away in the near bushes.

     11

Pull, lift oars, glide:  These are our principles.  The world sweeps by as though it were riding on a train pulling out of some remote, rural station and it is we who are rendered stationary.  The trees slide along, empowered by their own machinery, a vast conveyor belt, while we sit silently, oars hovering, water dripping from our blades as though batter from a pancake spoon.  A pair of buffleheads, nearly as small as dippers, works the surface for insects, then, as though linked by a loop of monocord, dive in search of larger quarry, perhaps trout fry.  The beaver is gone, it being full daylight, with night being held at arm’s length by an act of will from the sky. 

The lake is glassy, like a stare.  I prefer this to what is called a fisherman’s ripple.  I like to see everything that is going on and a ripple obscures the surface; fishers think it hides the leader and this leads to more strikes.  I don’t think leaders bother fish much, if at all.  But the fly or lure must look right to them.  I glide along and notice, at long last, a single ring inscribe the surface.  Then another.  I search the mirror around me for a clue to what is going on just beneath the surface.  Beats me.  There is always the difficulty of deciding whether the action is taking place on the surface or just under it.  Men write books about it, but not me.  Wiser men have been fooled by surface appearances.  All is not what it seems.

Now, when you are fishing lowland lakes on the West of the Cascade Mountains, rarely do you encounter a hatch of the substantial kind that you read about as you go East.  Here, many small flies hatch out at once, but the trout seem to ignore them.  Why is this?  Are our bugs inedible?  Sour, bitter-tasting things?  Or are the fish fed up on subsurface food?  Whatever, matching the hatch is only occasionally called for, and most of the time if the fish can be found feeding they will take much of anything, so long as it is in their stratum.  But size remains important.  Be not too big is the dictum.  Or so has been my experience.  “Soup’s on,” is the call of the wild, and the trout are not too fussy as to ask what’s in the chowder. 

The trout on this lake are beginning to feed.  My trolled black leech, size six, a good searching fly, does not provide a single strike, however, whether I troll it or cast it towards the grassy bank.  I have a hunch that is growing stronger by the minute that I’ve rigged up wrong.  I need something smaller and probably olive.  So I switch over, trying to be fast but not anywhere near so swift as I’d like to be, or used to be, when I was a boy.  I go down to three-pound test tippet--I don’t know what the Xs are; never been an X-type person.  The tiny fly I select out of one of Timm’s boxes seems huge, though it is one of his smaller numbers.  By the way, I am now tying ones smaller than his and they are looking better and better.

What I want to do this evening is to catch a fish on one of his.  I can’t say exactly why--it’s more like a challenge I set for myself, one without significant purpose.  It’s a game I play often with myself and has something to do with establishing continuity with a past that wants to recede out of reach.  Well, I won’t let it go.  Let’s let the matter go at that.

After five tries I manage to thread the leader through the tiny eye and am blinking like a sun-struck bat afterwards.  Now for the hard part:  the knot.  All of them will be tough to tie in this cruel glare, but I decide to attempt an improved clinch.  Ta-da!  It’s easy enough to make the five turns of nylon go back upon themselves.  As for threading the end of the tippet back through the loop formed at the eye, well, it is nearly impossible for me to do.  But patience and dumb persistence finally turn the trick.  The knot now requires another tuck-through, and it is even more difficult.  I try and I try, but I fail and fail, and finally pull the clinch up tight without its improvement, which would make it ten percent stronger.  This means it might break, but is the best I can do today.  If I bust off, so be it, but no flyfisher worth the name ought to break off a trout on a calm lake, with a leader testing three pounds, not even when horsing.

I roll out the double-tapered line to about forty feet and admire how smooth and straight the preparatory cast was.  (Often it is better than the one that follows it.)  I move the line and fly slightly in order to pick it up in an overhead cast and shoot it a bit farther.  A trout nails it with a swirl.  Wow.  I am into my first fish of the day, without ever having made a true cast.  It proves to be a hatchery rainbow of less than ten inches; its rounded fins and tail indicate that its parents never met in real life.  Yet it fights well, staying on the surface and splashing and dancing around there, dipping and diving, wriggling hard.  It even takes out a bit of line, since the Orvis Battenkill Four has a very light check and I have set it so that it will yield to the least resistance.  I bring the fish, lashing, close to the pram, reach down (waving my rod tip crazily in the air in order to do so), and grasp the leader at the last knot just above the fly.  The fish rolls, tugging left and right, as I search for the fly in its jaw.  There it is, in the hinge, and since it is barbless it backs right out.  The small fish rights itself in a half-count, then is off to the tannic depths.

I could have used my long-handled dip net and often do, but this little guy looked like he would prefer a watery release.  I now roll out my line, as before, and do a little twitch in preparation for a pickup, pause, and wait for a trout to take the mincing fly.  No reaction.  So I cast out about forty-five feet, strip in irregularly, and when the knot joining my leader and line are about two feet from my rod tip, lift, falsecast, and shoot again.  Another skinny eight feet of line go out.  It is about my seated max.

I keep doing this over and over, while sitting, casting toward the sedges, and once I detect a follow, a bulge, a wake, but the fish turns aside as the fly rises up in the water column.  Damn.  So I cast and cast, gradually feeling my wrist begin to ache from the unusual casting angle I’ve developed to achieve moderate distance while remaining seated; it works the backs of the fingers more than they are used to doing, more than any other daily activity.   Soon shooting pains arrive.  I decide--since the rises are few again--to resume my troll, using the same fly that produced what is evidently the incidental, fluke trout.  Whipping out enough line so that I have about sixty-five feet lying on the water, I leave the skinny yellow stuff piled on the surface like so much continuous spaghetti and reach for the oars.  I take one stroke, two, and see the line straighten out nicely from a zigzag course to a slow curl.  When the curl reaches the point of tautness, the rod tip suddenly plunges toward the water and, far out on the lake, a trout jumps.  It is mine, or will be if everything goes right.

This time line runs off the reel--it doesn’t exactly screech but makes a pleasant whirring sound.  Dry gears.  Funny how a trout in the air resembles a crescent moon--such is the effect of near distances on the horizon-accustomed eye.  The fish continues to swim in and produce slack in the line as I gather it up on the reel (an old steelheader’s hard-learned lesson, once acquired, is rarely departed from, and then only with great effort), and when the line grows tight again the fish climbs back into the air, taking the reel handle from my fingers and making it spin.  The reel sings, as they say.  A happy song.  What fun!

In truth, this proves a second fluke.  Let’s be honest with myself.  Two trout within such a short period of time, I know I will soon forget the accidental nature of the strikes and begin to take full credit for my success, such as it is.  Soon all will be the result of my brilliance, my skill.  I draw the trout near the pram and see that it is a couple of inches longer than the first and evidently was recently introduced into the wild; that is, it’s another hatchery fish.  This time I use the net and locate the little green fly along the fish’s gumline while the trout is still enveloped in mesh.  I reach inside the net and back out the hook, letting the taut fly pop and swing free in the boat, and having to dodge it with my head.  The fish in the net I admire briefly; then I sink the net back in the lake and with a swift reversing motion take it away from the trout, leaving the bewildered fish back in its natural element as quickly as it had been withdrawn from it.  It floats indecisively for a moment.  Then, with a wink of its tail, it disappears into the dark depths.

Trout fishing can be like this, not so fast but furious when it happens.  Total elapsed time for the two fish, that is, between strikes, excluding the playing of them to the boat, is about five minutes.  This makes for some moderate excitement, if only it will last.  And of course it doesn’t.  It is half an hour till my next strike and I miss it.  I curse and blame myself.  Have to, since I’ve given myself all the credit for the first two fish brought happily to the boat.

It’s the other side of the coin, when you’ve given yourself a pat on the back for something you don’t deserve.  It’s the price you pay.  It makes you think, too.  Fishing exists largely in the mind, even while it is happening.  Quickly it become memory.  I remember twilight eves nymph fishing in Seattle’s Green Lake, when the bite was on in the fall.  Earlier in the season the bite would last maybe an hour, but it would be without frenzy.  Then, as the year moved towards its close and the water chilled, the bite would become shorter and shorter, cut off by the advance of night and the inability of fishers or fish to see a small fly in the rushing dark.  I’d fish into the void, fish by feel, mostly, fish knowing that if I got a leader tangle or a weird, loopy knot I’d be done for what was left of the day, a particle.

The trout were small, the product of last spring’s fry plant in a shallow lake rich with summer food, also yielding occasionally what is called a holdover in the form of one of spring’s planted trout, a rainbow of twelve inches or more.  It would double up your rod and make you think you (at least for a misleading moment) that you were into a salmon.  Usually our fish would be a pathetic seven-inches.   Only a boy might go out after them.  Well, I wasn’t much more than that myself.

As fall advanced, the trout put on remarkable growth--more than an inch a month.  They’d be respectable ten-inchers by early October.  By November, they’d add another inch, though food and feeding was shutting down.  The frenzy shrank to twenty minutes, ten, five.  In five minutes time you would catch all the trout you were going to get for the most part of the day.  I would time my visit carefully, closely, with both eyes on the clock.  I would play games with myself.  I had young eyes, ones that could see like a tiger into the infernal night to tie on microscopic flies and tippets, and fingers with rubbery flexibility.  Up to a certain time of evening I could wrap on another leader and surely another fly.  In five minutes of feeding panic, at the season’s close, how many trout could I catch before there was no more light?  Six or eight?  Often I did.

It was simply a matter of throwing the fly out there, working it a bit, anticipating the strike, sensing the take of the nymph, tightening or else striking hard (depending), then hauling in the fish to hand-release it so I could cast quickly again for another.  Fun?  It was more frantic accomplishment than joy.  Anxiety played a major role.  The landing of the trout was an annoyance, something to be gotten past quickly so I could get back to the important part; that was the strike and the hook-up.  They are what lie at the heart of trout fishing.  It is always so.

Seen another way, such fishing is pure ego, absolute greed.  There is a lot of bad dharma in trout fishing, if the truth be known, and it occasionally should be.

12

What I remember most from those days at Green Lake was trying to figure out ways to get those short-striking trout to hit solidly and be hooked, instead of nipping at the fly or turning away from it without giving it a touch.  Sometimes I could see them--the bulge behind the fly, the swirl, even the cruising dorsal fin.  They were tiny sharks.  Other times I simply sensed their presence in the dark beyond.  There is something about trout fishing that is comprised of primal nuances.  You think your fly is being followed; you can feel it on your skin, on the hairs on the back of your neck, on the balls of your feet, where the sensitive area lies just behind the toe curl and feels like a tickle.  You discern it at some mysterious place that your thoughts can’t quite touch, but you know it’s happening as surely as rain falls on you and your skin and leaves it wet.

At Green Lake I first tried going smaller to hook those fish.  I tied nymphs on fourteens, then sixteens.  They utilized primarily soft brown hackles, hen feathers, barbels provided by scruffy no-account barnyard chickens, egg-layers all, birds of little worth and no great commercial value.  These chickens have the softest feathers, and they are what I was after.  The bodies of my flies were invariably peacock herl--either quills or the sword fibers sparsely stacked atop the hook.  Often I put a red tail on my flies because there is a general feeling that a wet fly without a red tail is incomplete and loses sixty percent of its effectiveness.  I knew this was not true, at the same time I practiced it faithfully.  (Some wag defined faith as believing in something you know isn’t true.)

So this was my basic trout wet, and I guess it was a nymph simply because it didn’t have a wing.  (A wing would have ruined it.)  And after going small, and still getting annoying, frustrating misses repeatedly, I tried tying a trailing hook one size smaller.  It worked beautifully.  It went like this:  tie a short length of three-pound nylon to a hook one size smaller, now a sixteen, with a halibut knot, making it in effect a snell.  Then wrap this tightly to the principal hook, a fourteen, with many tight coils of tying thread, starting at the tail, going to the head, and back again, since there is no knot on the main body of the hook to secure it there.  Usually the trailing hook contains no materials, but at times I tied it as a tiny duplicate of the larger fly.  And often it was just a body and a tail, the tail being red again; in this instance, I wound the soft brown hackle a little longer, so that the second fly would be hidden in the trailing fibers.  Thus the second fly rode only a short distance behind the first--less than an inch.  Usually the bend of the second fly was simply a fraction of an inch behind the bend of the first hook and, of course, reversed in its position, so that it rode upside down.

And how did it work?  Excellently.  Nearly all my fish were hooked on the rearward hook.  Fairly often the fish had both hooks in its mouth.  This produced a problem when the plan was to hook, land, and release the fish in the shortest amount of time possible because of onrushing darkness, greediness also being important, and I was anxious to cast to the next fish quickly and see if I could get another take.  One barbed hook, let alone two, posed releasing difficulties.  They often hurt the small trout and were time-consuming to work out, as well.  So I debarbed first the trailing hook, then the primary one.  So in a purely personal sense was catch-and-release fishing born.  I discovered that its purpose was not conservation at all, but simply in order to keep on fishing.  Time is what really mattered then, not then number of fish you could kill.  Only catch.

The trout still took “short,” or often pecked at the fly, but when one of them did strike, it hit hard and often took the fly deeply.  Trying to come up with a way to release fish more quickly, it perversely took me longer.  Only a few trout proved hooked in the hinge of the jaw or along the gumline, which is greatly desirable, and these were usually trout that took while turning away with the fly. They were probably trout that would have hooked themselves without my striking back. They were the easy fish, the ones you couldn’t miss even if you wanted to.  They were the suckers in the pack, fish that if caught and released could be taken over and over again.  It is a shame to kill such fish, even if they are pretty dumb.

The fall fish increased in size as the year wore on, until the food supply dropped off and the fishing stopped.  And, mixed in, were a few fine holdovers from spring, plus the rare really big fish that were left from the previous year.  They would number in your catch about one or two a season.

Spring fishing was very different.  Since the bait fishers were out in force, and every lost worm or single salmon egg represents a dietary supplement to the trout’s daily food supply, all the trout that were not quickly caught out soon were on the lookout for bait.  This ruined them for flies for weeks, until the baitfishing slowed and the fishers went away in disappointment. Then, for a very short time, the remaining trout (an inch or so longer than when they had left their hatchery Mama, the rearing pond) could sometimes be found cruising around just beneath the surface, looking for natural food in the form of insects.  They would take a fly readily, when they were actively feeding, which didn’t seem to be that often, judging by results.  But about this time, May first, the Department of Fish and Wildlife made its annual fry plant in this lake and in others.  Here they dumped in about two-hundred thousand one-inch rainbows.  The fishing halted immediately.  Probably what was left of the adult rainbow population began to cannibalize the plant.  And then the lake went into bloom; its surface became dense to a depth of several inches with a floating blue-green algae scum mixed with dying weeds.

Fishing stopped for all except a few confirmed bait fishers, who went over to a float about now, and hoped their bait could be seen amid the scum.  They’d reel in to check their hooks, every once in a while, to find them trailing snaky green weed.  The rest of us had already gone someplace else.  To rivers mostly.

13

Spring on Green Lake was a pleasant time, though often crowded.  It was jammed with fish too, planted trout that ran 8-11 inches.  They came from the Seward Park Hatchery on the East edge of the city, and because they were such easy victims, the fisheries people developed a method of staggered planting to make them last longer.  They’d put some fish in the lake a couple of weeks before the opener, the bulk of the plant a day or two before the opener, and then hold back on a respectable number until about ten days after opening day, when the crowds began to drop off fast because of lack of action.  This was the time seriously to approach the lake with the fly, and the time was short because of the upcoming fry plant.  It was a narrow though productive window, and I opened it for all it was worth.

One year the department planted some surplus steelhead fingerlings.  These were two-year-old fish that had not smolted yet, or else they were smolted fish deemed extra to the department’s river-stocking needs.  I never knew which.  They ended up in Green Lake, just after the opening crowds began to disperse, and provided marvelous fun for those of us who remained.  Of course I am prejudiced in favor of steelhead, at any time, and tend to exaggerate the case for them, even when the reason is dubious or not apparent to all.  These trout hit like barracuda, and looked a little bit like them, too, being lean, shiny, and tough.  I almost said mean.  You knew at the strike that you’d hooked something special.  They didn’t take like your usual hatchery rainbow trout, which is a domesticated creature that can be reliably depended on to suck in the fly, jump repeatedly, and splash about, but not really test you or your equipment.  The baby steelhead would rip the slack out of your fingers and vault into the sky like an arrow.  They never stopped fighting, wriggling, and when you landed one, it would lie across your palm, its body thumping hard and metronomically.  That pulse was the rhythm of life.

They were bright silver, true smolts, and when and if you managed to land one (for many were lost), its loose shiny scales came off in your hand, leaving your fingers coated with what looked like flecks from the minting of new dimes.  I released most of these fish, but took a few home to eat or to give to special friends.  They were delicious.  And there was no good reason not to kill and eat them, I reckoned.  They’d been put into the lake as surplus for this particular reason.  A boy put back trout now--if the truth is to be told--mainly because it was a daily pain to have to clean them all.  You’d rather do something more profitable, such as eating your late dinner, watching TV, or reading a book.

Most nights I would average six fish.  The limit was twelve, which seems excessive today.  Now, six is one more than five, true, the limit presently.  It seemed to me at the time a respectable number, from a catching standpoint.  In two hours fishing to hook and land six such trout was (and still is) justly rewarding.  The fish averaged about ten inches.  A nine-incher you knew at once from its lack of body weight and resistance.  And an eleven-incher had substance and would take a few feet of line out of your fingers or off the reel, if it had a light enough setting.  I began keeping more of my fish, some nights all of them.  I had a lot of relatives living nearby and was young and showoffy enough to want to illustrate my expertise to them.  I had to do it over and over.  It is never enough.  Call it grandstanding.

One night was different.  I still haven’t figured it out.  The North end of the lake is now reserved for children.  This wasn’t always the case.  It was my favorite place to fish, for I could wade along the shoreline and cast toward the dropoff.  In so many lakes this will produce good, reliable catches.  It did here.  Meanwhile, a pedestrian path circled the lake, only forty feet out, and often bicyclists whizzed by behind me at a clip.  Once I nearly took a guy off his bike on my backcast, when he rode right into it, and the only thing that saved me from his rage was that I happened to be standing in four feet of water.  He stood on shore, shaking his fist at me, swearing, as I tried to explain that he was the moving one, while I was stationary, and it was he who should look where he was peddling.  This is maritime law.  But he was in no mood for reason.  And I’m not quite sure I was right.

On that special night I took my usual quota of six fish, killing them all in a kind of madness.  It happens sometimes, when you are in a certain mood.  The smallest was twelve inches, the largest seventeen.  Whew.  I couldn’t close the lid of my creel on them.  When I lugged them home and dumped them in the kitchen sink, preparatory to cleaning them, they filled the basin.  It was a huge mess, and I was not in the least ashamed of myself for bringing them back dead.

The next night I was back to the lake early.  I cast and I cast, into the gathering gloom, and hooked my usual number of rainbows.  All were small again.  They averaged ten inches, and seemed even smaller because of the night before.  And then the fry plant was made, the lake slowed down, the bloom occurred, and I went away, along with the others.  I can’t explain that wonderful night except to say that it was a fluke--the real reason for all great successes, by the way.  Maybe it was a combination of the tides and phases of the moon, though I don’t believe in that stuff.  Yet it happened and would not happen again for me, no matter how much I wished it would and how often I tried to repeat the situation.  And try I did.

One balmy spring afternoon, with a glassy calm beckoning me, I decided to fish early.  I tore myself away from my writing and drove to the lake, parking my heap at the handiest curb.  I raced to the water’s edg