Once I was big enough and strong enough to work the gates it was like I’d become an adult. In my young mind, being trusted enough to keep the cows where they belonged, and taking the place of my Grandfather at the gates, I was a man. It’s really something to look back on a grandfather getting older and letting you do the work because you are too, and to realize now that you didn’t realize then, it meant you were both getting older and that all things pass with time, including us.
I told him that I tried to live my life the same way I organized my fly boxes… With good intentions. But that just like the fly boxes, good intentions are only so good and last only so long, and that sooner or later you go to the box to find a specific fly that will change your luck for the better and find only an unorganized mess. Chaos was probably the better word. Just ask my ex-wife.
The creek out back. That’s how I refer to it most of the time. It’s got a name like most creeks, but to me it’s the creek out back. Why? Because that’s where it is. The name isn’t important on most days. Less and less becomes important to me all the time the older I get it seems. And what I hold onto as actually important likewise becomes more important the older I get. The creek is important. Its name, not so much as its location. Out back.
I knew I only had one larger streamer in my fly box, so I moved my hands slowly up to my chest pack and began the task of snipping off the crayfish pattern and tying on the five inch streamer tied entirely of flash. No deer air. No Hackles. No marabou or even fake craft fur from the craft store. Nothing but flash. A black back, a blue mid-section, and a silver belly. I made a short cast just above it and out in the current, and as it sunk it passed the fish on the bottom at about its eleven o’clock. The fish turned to face it and stare it down like a top predator does. I gave a twitch.
Some might say not packing up because of a little rain is what separates the men from the boys, while others will argue that the fish bite the best when it’s raining. I’ll admit to using both excuses more than once to keep casting, whether I was catching anything or not. If there’s one thing fishermen are good at, it’s lying. And if there’s a close second, it’s making up excuses.
But this morning I came across some pictures from up on the towers, and it lead to me thinking about things that I took away from my short time in that industry. Mostly fly fishing, and a pair of old friends. In the picture I’m looking down past my boots at the featureless landscape four-hundred and fifty some odd feet below. But it wasn’t the height, and it wasn’t the memory of that specific job that made the picture special. It was my boots supporting me up on the narrow, cold steel up in the wind. They’re my wading boots.
I’ve never considered myself a sappy, emotional, or sensitive person. As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure I’ve done my best through a lot of my life to be just the opposite of those things. But alone by myself on a river or stream, I’ll admit that the water, and the fish, do bring out those qualities from somewhere inside me from time to time. That’s most likely the healing factor people talk about water having. Us fly anglers just happened to stumble upon the fact that a brightly colored fly line forming loops above the moving water happens to enhance the healing power somehow. I’m not going to try and analyze it. That’s a rabbit hole for another day. On a warm, sunny day like this, I’m happy to simply accept it for what it is, take it for granted, and enjoy it.
JP added me to a string of e-mails recently between him and a customer who lives on a tropical island. You know, one of those islands surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean…and my ideas of what fishing was like on one of those islands was all but destroyed. It’s not like I talk to fly fishermen every day who live on an island in the middle of an ocean, so most of my notions are actually nothing more than assumptions. Come to think about it, if you asked me what kind of fish you’d catch in a small fresh water stream on a tropical island five thousand miles from home, I wouldn’t have the first clue. So the only assumption I really made was thinking I might have an idea in the first place.
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