Finally the fisherman stood up and stretched his back, dumped out his worms, reeled in his line, and headed for his old Crown Vic with the fading navy blue paint and vinyl top. I stepped out of the Jeep and he gave me a nod. “Good luck, I give up.” I couldn’t tell if he said it as if he didn’t think I could do any better, or because he figured I’d go out there and catch what he couldn’t, but I’ve never seen an elderly guy toss a lawn chair in the back seat and peel out in a cloud of dust from a gravel lot in quite such a perfectly miserable… Well, if a car can have body language, it said he was done fishing. Forever.
It ended up being a beautiful day. The sun would hide behind clouds and then the clouds would move past and you could almost hear the temperature rise a degree or two before more moved in and you could feel the drop. When the temperatures are hovering right between those two numbers where one means snow and the other means rain, yet neither is happening, I seem to notice the rises and falls of the thermometer with more awareness. Of course it might just be that I’m enjoying feeling the sun on my face only because I’m hoping it doesn’t warm up enough to feel a freezing rain on it instead.
When I started tying I began with nothing but a few different colors of marabou and some black hackles. But if you tie your own flies then you already know where this is going so we’ll just skip ahead. Once you start tying you never look at anything the same again. And more importantly, you’re always looking. And your friends know it too. And your wife.
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