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Too much modern "sport" is no sport at all, rather a one-sided contest between the innocent and the technology designed by the hunter to assure the outcome in the latter's favor. The philosophy that suggests that to make a bigger impression one needs a bigger hammer, exemplifies the attitude that makes people buy the best telescopic sights and the worst ammunition.
Fly fishing is different. The hunter has to think, not just about regularly used trails and camouflage and killing range, but about the brain of a cold-blooded creature who doesn't even see as we do. The fisherman has to know not just what's on the menu for the trout or salmon, but what's on the menu on that day at that hour. It's likely to be harder to think like a fish than like a deer or a bear.
If you want to cast a streamer into the base of a pool and make it mimic a minnow, or put a tiny artificial gnat gently on the surface of the water as if it had happened to fall there by chance, you will need the stealth and delicacy of a true predator. Besides needing to know what, if it's hungry, the fish are eating, the fisherman must be in the special place where the cautious prey lurking among stones and broken shadows may be hiding, and there's always a chance that an unexpected treat might entice his quarry out of its shadowy hideaway. It's a subtle contest that includes a form of mind-reading. Maybe a fish has a small brain, but it's hard to fool one.
Roderick Haig-Brown probably said it all about how these brains and bodies live and die. Return to the River may be about salmon, but as any fly fisherman will tell you, the distinction between those and trout is really a technicality. Anthropomorphism may or may not appeal to you, but you can learn as much from perspective under water as from the 17th Century classic by Izaak Walton and John Cotton tell you from the land. Perhaps this is the only a sport which, if you want to know how to go about it, you can learn from real literature.
Another distinction of a fly fisherman is that he doesn't seek "coarse fish," which is to say, if he lives east of the Mississippi, he seeks only the genera Salmo (salmon and brown trout), Oncrhynchus (rainbow), and Salvelinus (brookies). Anything else is beneath his notice. What's the sport in getting a fish to swallow bait and be hauled into your boat by the line?
Most fly fishermen of my acquaintance have long since given up eating their catch. While I treasure my memories of the delicious meals of trout rolled in salted corn meal and fried in bacon drippings over an open fire, I sympathize with the need for places where one can catch as many fish as possible without harm to the population as a whole. Rarified as the rationale for fly fishing may seem, it can't exist if pollution, global warming, development, or over fishing exterminate the object of the exercise.
The circumstances required for satisfactory fly fishing exemplify those that lend every sentient human being the emotional and aesthetic material we all know are essential to keeping our planet livable. Where the trout hide are settings as close to pristine as we can still find. Think of composers, painters, essayists who for hundreds of years have been inspired by this sport that owes at least part of its appeal to a yearning in the souls of the practitioners, rather than empty stomachs.
I remember the hours my father sat tying flies. I remember my amazement when I discovered how many of those confections aren't all copies of natural fish foods, but are inventions of other fishermen. Imagination at work. Some of the most popular lures have the most imaginative names: Royal Coachman, Adams Parachute, Madam X, Rat Faced McDougal. My father's desk would be glittering with snippets of gold foil, spools of brilliantly colored silk, as resplendent as a jeweler's tray with iridescent peacock and pheasant feathers, tiny bits of deer and badger and elk hair, and puffs of down. I didn't know a vise could be no larger than a demitasse spoon until I saw a brilliant yellow and orange streamer being wrapped onto a tiny hook while my father peered at his task through a magnifying glass on a bracket. Evidence of artistry expanded beyond the streams and the casting reel into the winter evenings.
There are sadly too few who have had a chance to go where the trout are and spend the hours it takes to succeed in landing one, and then having the special pleasure of releasing it. The essentials of enjoyment for every sense are fortunately still available to almost anybody whose hands are at one end of a bamboo rod with a light reel that suspends the gossamer weight of a lure at the other.
©2009 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
