TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080789/08078900.075

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 109 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 52

Zen and the Art of Fly-Fishing


Americans flock to the trout streams for a mystical high

By Jerome Cramer


    Fly-fishing for trout is an undemocratic sport. It takes
intelligence and skill to learn, a healthy income to afford and
plenty of free time to practice. Though bait fishermen scoff
that snobs use flies as an excuse to keep worm and minnow goo
off their hands, fly-fishermen approach the sport with an almost
mystical reverence. Perhaps that's because learning to catch
trout is a complex process bordering on religion. Yet it is one
of the fastest-growing sports in the U.S., now embraced by
nearly 500,000 fisherpeople.

    It is in some ways a dangerous sport too, but less for the
fish than for the angler's relatives. Fly-fishermen can quickly
become world-class bores. Solitude becomes an end in itself.
Spouses bristle at the suggestion that family vacations should
consist of two weeks at some bug-infested fishing camp in
Forsaken, Mont. Dinner-party invitations trail off as
conversation seems to center on the pleasures of fishing nymphs
in deep riffles or the relative merits of bamboo and graphite
fly rods. Children growl at the proposal that the backyard pool
be returned to nature and converted to a trout pond.

    To the uninitiated, the sport may seem ridiculously simple:
take a long pole with a line, attach a fake bug and toss it at
some unsuspecting fish. But the disciplines involved in this
seemingly simple act take years to master. Novices often quit
in disgust or spend hours on the river, pleading to heaven for
the strike of just one trout. Eventually, with practice, the
casts begin to land right, without a splash, and then one day
a trout rises to examine the offering -- and strikes.

    With split-second timing, the rod tip is lifted and the
battle begun. Since the fly is attached to the line with a
gossamer-thin tippet, a fisherman must use the long, sensitive
rod to tire the trout as it surges and runs, leaps and sometimes
literally walks across the water's surface on its tail. There
is no mistaking this magic. The fish explodes again, up through
a silver shower of water, shaking its head in an effort to throw
the hook. You notice the color. It is gorgeous, almost surreal.
The trout's meaty flanks sport outrageous spots of black and
orange, horizontal streaks of silver and red. The line rips
through the water, sending signals directly to your pounding
heart. Your ears ring.

    As the fish tires, you draw it close to your leg, remove
the hook and hold the trout for a moment, gauging its length
before giving it back to the stream. That too is part of the
sport. When waters were cleaner and trout spawned nearly
everywhere, killing and eating the fish were a more common
reward for the catch. But a generation raised on conservation
ethics is releasing fish to reproduce and perhaps be caught
again. Our atavistic selves relish the hunt, but our better
natures understand the need to protect what we cherish.
Fly-fishing lets us do both.

    After the first catch comes the tough part: waiting for the
next one. It can take months of beating the waters before it
happens again, and the anticipation can be painful. The novice
consoles himself by turning to books. Few other sports have
been written about so thoroughly by so many authors, from Izaak
Walton to Ernest Hemingway and Tom McGuane. You search for what
fathers or uncles in an earlier generation used to pass down
over dinner tables or around campfires: secrets of the water,
hints about how to read streams and tread them lightly, how to
intuit the mysterious nature of the wild trout.

    The apprenticeship is not over, not yet. One day some
fisherman with a pipe stands in the stream nearby releasing fish
and announces that the trout are hitting bugs with an
unpronounceable Latin name. You nod but don't know what he's
talking about. Then back to the books for a quick course on
streamside biology, matching the hatch, figuring out what the
trout is eating and which artificial flies imitate those
insects. Armed with a little entomology and inflamed with trout
psychosis, you start buying everything that countless catalogs
offer: stream thermometers, a flashlight for nighttime fishing,
hook-sharpening files, dozens of flies no fish has ever seen.

    Catching trout comes quicker now; on a good day perhaps
six, even ten, get landed. You adopt rituals, preferring certain
flies that bring you luck and that your friends use
successfully. Gear gets stowed in familiar pockets as your
fishing vest softens and fades with age. It is a delicate time,
for as the addiction grows, the fish begin to invade your
thoughts and dreams. At unpredictable moments the fisherman's
mind fills with images of wide water, where brown trout hit
large dry flies and pull long and hard.

    If the fly-fisherman is lucky, the passion becomes
manageable, second nature, like tying knots in the dark or
reading a deep green pool by an undercut bank and knowing where
the trout are holding and which fly to use. But having gone
through the novitiate, fly-fishermen are never the same again.
They scan rivers and lakes, seeing water but imagining the life
underneath. They concentrate for hours, zenlike, watching
thunderheads build and billow above, gazing at streams running
over moss-covered rocks, searching for the sight of a trout,
that near perfect fish, as it fins and darts, drifts and feeds
in clear mountain water. Those visions take hold and simply
won't let go.