TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/080789/08078900.075

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 98 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.