Why the Fly?

I try not to spend much time in my life mulling over questions that don’t have real answers, but people often ask me why I fly fish or what it is about fly fishing that draws me to cold rivers at times of the day when most folks are still sleeping. I have a hard time putting it into words, but what I do know is that it is something that has staked a claim in my mind and it doesn’t seem to be leaving any time soon.

Both of my grandfathers were fisherman, as is my father. I think that my grandfathers fished from a place of sustenance. That’s not to say that they didn’t derive some sense of enjoyment from it but the motivations that had originally created the activity were at the helm. I also think it involved a certain amount of indifference towards paying for something in the store that you can catch in the river. If I am being honest, I have so say I tend to share the same indifference.

My father is more of a recreationalist whose motivations are rooted in nostalgia and meditation...the guy doesn’t even eat fish. He also has the uncanny ability to only chew tobacco in the summer and quit for the other 9 months of the year. I typically consider individuals with that type of will power outliers. But in the case of understanding the “why” behind fly fishing, it just might help paint a picture, even if it’s in a Salvador Dali kind of way.

Dad always stuck with a more conventional approach to fishing and I honestly don’t know if he owns more than one lure. If you asked him what brand his rod was or what pound line he was using he likely wouldn't be able to tell you. I knock the guy, but he knows how to catch fish. He always said that he didn’t like fly fishing because he had to use both hands to do it, which meant that he didn’t have a hand free to hold a beer. I think it had more to do with a lack of instruction than anything else.

I grew up just outside of Denver in a town that was an hour drive from anything that looked even remotely fishy. It was an urban, no pulp in the orange juice, manicured bubble in a state that touts some of the best fly waters in the west.

Even given my dad’s affinity for fishing we hardly ever wet a line in Colorado. We spent the vast majority of our summers in the northern part of Idaho on a piece of riverbank that had been handed down over the course of a generation or two. This water was (still is) our spot and it is where my love for fishing was conceived, incubated and molded into an obsession that became borderline destructive.

It wasn’t until I got into high school that I really started to learn how to fly fish. My paternal grandfather knew his way around a fly rod and his oldest son was a seasoned caster. There were several people in my family that enjoyed the idea of fly fishing, but the lack of eager mentors left me holding a Zebco and a Fighting Fish…not that there is anything wrong with that. To be clear, I consider myself an angler that simply likes to catch a fish…. I don’t discriminate against the method. But, for some reason the characteristics of fly fishing continue to tug at my heart. There is certain amount of romanticism that goes along with fly fishing that I didn’t understand when I first started. It’s a game of patience and efficiency rather than feckless fin chasing.

My early education consisted of two men (my grandfather and my uncle) standing on the bank shouting at me to keep my tip up. I had no clue what I was doing and, looking back, it’s probably a good thing. Some lessons simply have to be learned the hard way.

I was in my mid-teens and, realistically, I was too impatient to understand the concepts and idiosyncrasies involved. I knew less about fly fishing than I did about women and my attention to detail was halfhearted at best. I fished on a fairly regular basis in the summer, but I only used a fly rod from time to time. I picked up my 5wt here and there when I got tired of catching fish on spoons or when I really wanted to test my patience. The first rod that I had was a hand me down of my father’s. It was a no-name 8’6” graphite rod with a medalist strung for a right-handed retrieve. He was left handed and I didn’t realize you had to flip the bearing, so I fished with an upside-down reel for the first two years. I had no clue what I was doing…and it showed. My dad had virtually given up on the sport and passed the gear on to me. His teachers and method of instruction were likely very similar to mine. Over the course of the next few years I developed a meager sum of casting skills and could make it more than two or three passes without tying a wind knot in my tippet. Improvement came slowly but it was enough to keep me interested.

Fly fishing didn’t consume me immediately like it does some anglers. It took me a while to develop a repour with the activity that can often times be a love hate relationship. People spend years trying to hone the craft, but it only takes one bad outing to bring you back to reality. Anyone that claims to be a master fly fisherman is full of shit because, in my mind, that doesn’t exist. Sometimes the fish are biting and sometimes they aren’t. It doesn't matter how "good" you are…we all have days where we get skunked. I think that is part of what drives me back to it. There is no foreseeable end in sight.

I graduated from high school and moved to Idaho to go to college. There was something about that place that was drawing me back and I wasn’t the type of kid that was interested in sticking around suburbia to hang out with the same people I had gone to school with for the last 12 years. The University of Idaho was a thousand miles from Denver and only a couple of hours from my fly fishing home waters. I came from a long line of Vandal Alumni and had a handful of cousins going to school there are the time, so it seemed like a reasonable choice.

I loaded all my shit into a 1998 pickup and took I25 north until I hit Buffalo, Wyoming then turned left onto I90. You could damn near make the 1,000-mile trek with your eyes closed, as long as you shook yourself awake in time to veer towards Missoula. Throughout my college years I spent the fall and winter hunting ducks and game and most of my time in the summer harassing my liver and trying to make a few dollars. Fly Fishing was on my to-do list, just not at the top.

Four years later I was ready to graduate with a semester left and I decided to squeeze a fly tying course into my schedule. My girlfriend at the time convinced me to do it. She was not shy about filling her schedule with recreational electives, so I decided to take a page out of her book. It was a great suggestion. Her attitude and her love for the outdoors had me hooked. Realistically I was punching above my weight-class but for some reason she seemed to like me.

The year after we graduated, she continued on to nursing school 30 miles south at Lewis-Clark State College and I was able to land a job with an agricultural lender as entry level analyst. It was mundane, but it kept me close to her. The fact that there were two large freshwater arteries running through town was a bonus. We rented a two-bedroom apartment in a unit relatively close to campus and I automatically turned the back bedroom into a fly tying depot where my love for this activity would truly begin to develop. She would study and I would tie. Between fall mid-terms and finals, I tied 400 flies and had started building my first rod. I even fished occasionally. Since that date I have tied more flies than I care to count and built almost a dozen custom rods.

Fly fishing had consumed me and it still has a stranglehold today. Things have changed some as we have since moved closer to that revered piece of riverbank, got married, bought a house and grew the flock. But fly fishing itself remains the same. You are still just, as Geirach says, standing in a river waiving a stick.

Gary LaFontaine said, “I fish because of beauty…and in our contentious time of partisan hubris, selfishness and outright mendacity, Beauty itself may prove the most endangered thing of all”. I don’t consider myself to be that poetic. I think the point is, that for some people, fly fishing is simply a philosophy that tends to engulf us and change the way we view the world and the role we play in it.

In all honesty, fly fishing is something that changed the way I live my life. It forced me to understand patience, attention to detail, the beauty of nature and the solace of a quiet trout stream. It has brought me closer to my family and it has allowed me to spend time with the people I love. It has helped me realize that no matter how fragmented and chaotic your life gets you can always find some reprieve in a cold river. I know this is true, because on days that I don’t catch fish I am still surrounded by an atmosphere of something much larger than myself and it makes me feel amazingly small.

Why the Fly? Because the characteristics of being a good fly fisherman are often synonymous with those of being a good person. Frustration is almost always evident; the payoffs are tremendous and the space in between makes you happy just to be alive.