Caveat lector: fly fishing aphorisms make no sense whatever. An aphorism is a shotgun blast, a broken thought, a fragmented something or other. Fly fishing rambles on and on and on…

Mean? How can fly fishing mean anything? Do the rocks? Does the water? Any meaning radiates from the angler. Like throwing a handful of salt into the stream.

Inasmuch as the sun interrupts continuous night, these streams trespass across the earth, owning mere slips of territory, if any at all. It’s laughable, really.

The graceful, striving feral.

The stuttering, benighted pure.

Oh no! We have dematerialized! Fly fishing is now rivers of electrons flowing through ether. Soon we needn’t even bother getting our hands wet.

Enjoy thy stream, O harmless fish;
And when an angler for his dish,
Through gluttony’s vile sin,
Attempts, the wretch, to pull thee out,
God give thee strength, O gentle trout,
To pull the rascal in!
~John Wolcot

Dalliant. Evermost. Headlong. Fecund.

Jim Harrison: The head is a cloud anchor which the feet must follow.

Trout are not neither regal or noble. They are however vicious. A beautiful, efficient viciousness.

Vicious? Being owed nothing. Expecting nothing.

“A puncher’s chance”

Yes, vicious, but trout seem always to aspire to something more: more brawn, more ferocity, more guile — yet settle upon the subtle sheen of an arty reticence.

Unapproachable.

Proust: We must perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable. “
…Willing to rise to the bait until “Less probable” !

Forget it. You cannot reinvent fly fishing. You cannot reinvent the nature of the fish. You cannot reinvent this joyous, hideous connection. We mumble some thanks to no real god for that connection, curse ourselves for doing so,  but still marvel: it is something.

The nature of the thing — the margins; the eddies; so close to the slack water. So close to the steep, steep drop off.

Silly. Fly fishing always seems more about the fly fisherman than the fish. Luckily, the fish do not give a fuck.

The guide who rowed for Dick Cheney.

Hope, the most gorgeous utterance in our language, defines our stumble- bumble lot.

Faith. Our rusting shackle, paints us in clown colors.

A slump buster’s mantra: “It ain’t like hell — it wont last forever.”

Damn you. Tamper your own enthusiasm? And do it willfully? Techniques that lead to negation yet serve to amplify your sense of… what is it? Suffering? Righteousness, Entitlement? Please Lord, no further trespassing upon our souls…

Still, those moments when glory surrounds.

Issac Walton digested 99 percent of everything he caught. Easily.

Ditto G.E.M. Skues.

And I do mean everything.

We are forced to stoicism… forced to zen… staring at that fucking knot.

When fishing, our other vices unfurl and march forth with such grace and sophistication. Oh! Every sense in bloom!

Who said life is fleeting? Did they fish?

Not to mention Hemingway.

No, don’t tell me that. Fish can’t possibly be your enemy.

And Teddy Roosevelt.

You were furious when you missed that fish? I am torn between admiration and pity.

Good Lord, let us once and for all refrain from defiling the river by calling it “sacred” or “holy”. It remains a blood sport, after all. It’s the blood that’s sacred.

Primitive? We can’t even scratch the surface. But there we go, off to our woodsy theater again.

Impermanant.

How quickly the color drains from a fish you’ve killed. How the scales tip almost imperceptibly up and away from the skin when the rigor sets the flesh. How many ways we perceive death when we ourselves deal it.

“Blessings upon all that hate contention, and love quietnesse, and vertue, and Angling.”  Izaak Walton said that. Our fishing souls, Ike, need no soothing. Our dozens of other souls… well…

Too proud. There is no such animal as luck, son. No fisherman really believes in such a beast.

Butcher, lift your thumb from the scale: Those who lie about their fishing. Those who we only suspect are lying. Our own lies.

Have we finally killed the formality? The pretense? The preening? Lordy, I hope there is but a thin smear of that blood upon my waders.

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…”
Yes, Shakespeare, but we hold the key to this confounded lock! We have a secret passage! And our creep, creep, creeping deals death, too.

Call yourself whatever you wish, but one only becomes a fisherman when one almost dies upon the stream (drowning, heatstroke, snakebite) and then returns to it once again, happily. There should be some sort of badge for that.

A fisherman’s vanity: Gloriously fugitive; sniffing that matted, stinking mass of fur, bones, and teeth rotting in that fetid, muddy ditch. Ammonia, death, piss, history. Civilization, resting comfortably.

That vest, those old boots, that tin of worthless and rusted flies. We can’t throw them away. They have battled with us.  Our heroism held in tiny boxes, smelling of mud and cold.

Forced to be alone with ourselves. Who do we confront? Can we fish together?

In fishing, we can finally stop talking. We don’t have to talk. Silence is golden.

Desire is the inconvenience of its object. Lourdes isn’t Lourdes if you live in Lourdes.
–Don Patterson said that.

Do we come close to boredom or do we, instead, glimpse the giddy nothingness… all of that glorious nothingness? A fisherman doesn’t really need to think about it.

Siddartha in waders.

Set your watch by the tides. Better yet, chuck that fucker into the drink.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains,” so claimed Henry David Thoreau

   

It began as escapism. It was an activity saved for family vacations, happy times where dad had a cooler full of beer and I was allowed to drink all the cokes I wanted. Impale a worm, drown it under a bobber and see what happens, fishing is very simple when you’re 4. With each passing year It has become a much more elaborate form of escapism but remains, at it’s core, an escape. When paired with drugs and alcohol, it is a detached, wobbly form of escape. When paired with crackling cold, sunrise light and solitude it is an empowered, confident form of escape.

It is an excuse to hike, to climb, to scramble up a loose rock face with slobbery cork pressed between my teeth. It’s an excuse to go away for days or weeks or months on end, to sleep in the dirt, to not shave. It’s an excuse (at least temporarily) to live with simple purpose: find water, find shelter, find fish, find that there are moments left over, fill them. It’s a justification to climb the highest scrabble peaks that hide cold alpine lakes or slide through swampy jungle mangrove lagoons in stealth-mode kayaks. It’s the only good reason I can think of to go to Florida. It can be enjoyed in backyard ponds and neighborhood creeks in the thin window between work and dinner. For those with the means, it can be a great way to drop ten grand in a week living in plush comfort in some of the least hospitable corners of the world. At its best, it is an excuse to connect with a select few other people who “get it”. At its worst, when there are too many people who “get it” and they begin to get in my way, it is an excuse to hate the world and its ever-increasing population for encroaching on what is so obviously “mine”.

I wasn’t raised on fly-fishing, I found it. In my house Dad played video games. There was no boat and before I displayed an unprecedented interest in fooling aquatic vertebrates, there was no tackle either. For three weeks every summer we would travel to northern Wisconsin where extended family had a cabin on a small lake. A decade before I would discover women or weed, I was immersed in fishing. In fact, until there were girls and ganja, the two things I cared about were fishing and baseball. My uncles taught both my father and me to fish and it became a way for us to connect. Fishing and brewing beer together would guide our relationship through the frothing rock garden of my teen years.
Even though I only got to wet a line in fresh water 1/25th of the year, I spent the other 49 weeks preparing for those 21 days. By the age of eight, I was reading Roland Martin’s bass fishing books, Tony Rizzo’s Musky chasing books and had a subscription to In-Fisherman magazine. By age ten, I found my uncle’s old fiberglass 7ft packrod rigged with an automatic wind reel tucked in the rafters of his open-air porch. I flailed away on the dock, piling line in front of me and picking off bluegill with little foam spiders. As I was hauling in one of those struggling panfish, I saw an s-curve and a flash and then the bluegill was gone, lodged headfirst into the throat of a pike. I fought it to the dock and tried to lift it out of the water, unsure of what else to do. It shook violently and freed itself. The bluegill popped from the gullet of the pike very much alive with only a few puncture wounds. The pike swam away slowly, it disappeared with a sway of weeds. When I think of that fish, I see it through the wide eyes of my ten year old self and it is massive. Though probably no more than six or seven pounds, that pike is seared in my memory as a trophy. That fish became my red herring, my scapegoat. I blame that fish for much of what came later, when he freed himself from the gill’ stuck his throat and controlling him, it was almost like it transferred to me. From then on, it seems like I’ve been led around by the fly rod.

Every fisherman (or woman) has a creation story. It might be the one good thing that an abusive, errant father bestowed on his son before fading into the night. Maybe it was what you used to do with your neighbor during summer vacations, you’d wake up early after a rainstorm and collect the worms that had emerged from the soil, dropping them into an old mayonnaise jar on the road to the lake. In your sixth decade of life you may have been invited to a fishing lodge with some business partners only agreeing to go because it was important to remain in their favor and there you may have discovered a passion you will carry the rest of your life. Maybe you had an ex-boyfriend who was a fishing guide and the ability to throw a tight loop was the only thing he left you. Possibly you have always had this intense interest in fishing. You don’t know why, you’ve never even been fishing but something about it just appeals to you, something about oceans, lakes, rivers and estuaries. Probably, it started out as an excuse to get out of the house, an excuse to be on the water. Inevitably it becomes an escape.
All fishermen are escapists, like alcoholics, adrenaline junkies, or television addicts (some of us are all of these things) we seek a way out of the drudgery that can overwhelm everyday life. Fishing is a black hole of resources: time, money, sanity. Many people have written of the virtues fishing teaches to the youth: patience, observance, silence, respect for wild places and an understanding of the importance of conservation. They claim that these virtues transcend from the water to the office or the home. I say bullshit, that’s just an excuse used to justify a constant vacillation between selfishness (fishing) and responsibility (work, family, etc). My patience on the river translates to an overwhelming impatience with being in an office or watching re-runs of Friends on the couch with a girlfriend. A true, bone-deep fishing jones has caused more than a few people to shirk all of their “important” responsibilities. I’ve given two hours notice, stripped healthy bank accounts, and left women crying in confused anger as I loaded up the truck, grabbed the dog and took off.
Fishing will not make you a more productive, healthy member of society. If you do it right, fishing will make you a lonely old misanthrope whose equity includes a beater truck, a slumping trailer near a body of water, several cases of beer, a small “garden” out back and whole rooms overflowing with rods, reels, lines, partridge skins, vices, bobbins, tweezers, nippers, silicone, prescription pills and hooks in every size shape and color imaginable. Your only friends will be your dog, the guys at the fly shop and the few friends who, like you, have managed to avoid the lull of domesticity. Fishing, like heroin addiction or religious cult membership will realign all of your priorities. They will be distilled into one flaming need: to be on the water as much as humanly possible.