Humor
The real warmth arrives in late April. By dawn, backlit vapor rises from the edge of lily pads; at noon, turtles sunbathe on every exposed log; just after 2 PM, a quilt of gray clouds arrives from the south. It’s beer-time on your local largemouth pond.
“AND FINALLY, I say to you,” Jesus announced, from the back of Simon Peter’s boat, to the crowd that had gathered on shore, “love one another as I have loved you. Thank you, Capernaum! Thank you, and good night!”
LIKE MANY FIRST-TIME ATTENDEES, he sat in the back for several nights, drinking coffee and working up the nerve. I noticed him, but I’ve seen plenty of his type come and go. Some have hit rock bottom and are ready to deal with their problem. Others know the truth but aren’t ready to accept their dependency until it destroys everything they once held dear. When you’ve been to as many meetings as I have, you learn not to get attached to the dabblers.
ONE THING BEGINNING fly anglers should be taught is the importance of knowing when to quit. In certain sports, sheer will and dogged determination are critical to success, but this can backfire in the case of tangled leaders. Every seasoned guide has witnessed this: The caster has missed a hookset or thrown a tailing loop into themselves or committed some other cardinal sin resulting in an infamous bird nest. Their rod is draped with a wet girdle bug, some split shot, a size-18 pheasant tail, and a strike indicator, all webbed together with dripping coils of crisscrossed fluorocarbon. Without fail, the new angler will ignore the line nippers hanging from his neck and instead set about trying to untangle the jumbled snarl while avoiding having to snip or re-tie any part of the system.
The look in my wife’s eyes suggested that what she was about to tell me would be a crushing blow. “I wasn’t able to get a ticket for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” The ticket in question was to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which, in the world of our teen and pre-teen daughters, is serious currency. My wife had secured six such tickets to the sold-out concert at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. All of which were allotted to my daughters, their friends, and their moms. I put my hands on my wife’s shoulders, looked her straight in the eyes and replied, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll try to find something else to do.”
I wish I knew more about bourbon. All I really know is that I like the taste, and that there are some I enjoy more than others. This may be the result of growing up in Kentucky, where my friends and I were introduced to good bourbon at an early age. Had I grown up in Poland or Scotland or the Caribbean, perhaps I’d prefer vodka or Scotch or rum. But bourbon is my thing. The details don’t interest me, however. Percentages of various mashes, types of wood in the barrels, the aging process? I just don’t get it. From people with more discerning palettes, I’ll hear things like “vanilla overtones” or “notes of cherry and chocolate.” Here is part of an actual description I found on a website for one of my favorite Kentucky bourbons:
Clyde had been sitting in a barn outside of Gadsden, in West Etowah County, Alabama, for nearly six months, with a flat front tire and a massive gash in his gas tank. He wanted to rumble his Detroit muscles, but hadn’t done so for some time under my watch. I never developed any mechanical skills, but my friend Adam has worked on cars since his youth, tinkering with his grandfather in their garage in Decatur. He put on a new gas tank in a little more than an hour, performing what seemed to me a mannish miracle. Clyde was purring again, and my passion for flyfishing culture would be realized at the Fly Fishing Film Festival at Cahaba Brewing in Birmingham the following weekend.
Now I understand how Mugato in Zoolander felt. Everyone at the fly shop is picking out different hackle, feathers, and fur, and here I am at the fly counter grabbing fistfuls of pre-tied adams and caddis, feeling left out for not tying my own.
The setting is the dining room of a fishing lodge in remote northern B.C. It’s early morning on a gray, drizzly day during a very slow week. Levine, one of the anglers, is talking to the head guide before the rest of the camp has come in for breakfast.
I find it best to begin all writing about flyfishing by first writing about hunting. Or, alternatively, the Asian culinary arts. I’ll start this one by talking about Boomer.
Memorial Weekend is typically a time to avoid fishing. But Clyde opens doors. And gates, with bass ponds behind them. I’m not a private-water-with-pellet-fed-trout guy, but access to an un-public largemouth lake in Tennessee? That’s another matter.
My older brother Charlie—the red-haired menace of my youth, and the protagonist of so many fishing adventures—came to visit me in Canada. It was mid-August when I picked him up from the airport. He was hungover and indignant, as one of his rods had been lost in transit. We headed straight for a well-regarded trout stream in southern Ontario where there were rumors of giant browns, stopping eight hours later at the local fly shop to book a half-day trip with some dude named Larry.
Lockdown at the ViseFifteen flies we’ve tied during the pandemic Illustration by Paul Puckett CHERNOBYL ANTIBODY. Unlike traditional flies, you eat this one. Helps ward off belief in fictitious cicada hatches. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE DRAKE. Only floats on the right side of the river—the far right, more like a side channel, or a drainage…
I thought I was still buzzed from the night before when I first saw what appeared to be a person lounging in a yellow pool-floatie on the water. “Only in Vegas,” I thought. Some drunk idiot ends up using Lake Bellagio as his personal swimming pool. But looking closer, I could see that the person was a man moving his arm back and forth a few times before bringing it to rest. “Is he casting?”
None of us guessed what was coming. Within hours of our leaving the river, the county would close all boat ramps and Oregon’s governor would implement stay-at-home guidelines. We were fishing on the last days of winter steelhead season 2020 and we didn’t even know it.
It’s late February and I stumble out the door to grab another beer kept cold by winter’s free refrigeration. If it was anything but the high-octane variety, it would’ve frozen from a lack of alcohol. I pop the cap, drain it, and unzip my pants, melting as much snow as possible when I piss—anything to…
Not the leave-behind you wanted My father stood in the middle of the Beaverhead River, looking upstream calmly but urgently, almost how he looks when he’s sorting cows. This was a little different. His reel and his rod’s butt section were sitting on the bank. And he had a question. “Do fly rods float?” We’d…
Facing the Beast with Brian Grossenbacher If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to flyfishing media over the past two decades, then you’ve seen plenty of shots taken by Bozeman, Montana-based photographer Brian Grossenbacher. Whether shooting commercially for clients like Simms, Orvis, and Yeti, or editorially for this magazine and many others, Grossenbacher has made…
Statuary in the Southern Imagination “What do we do with hundreds of Confederate monuments and related statuary across the United States? Americans face a challenge that might be called the mass curation of our public spaces, in light of contemporary sensibilities, yes, but just as important, in service of what has always been the truth.”…
If My cats were talking cats they would ask me the same question my father does: why don’t you keep the fish you catch. Why are you so spineless, so un-hungry, so thoughtless as to our longsuffering? I’ve released countless fish, many which could have turned a day into legend for my dad. We didn’t…
From Alaska to the Keys, the on-the-water epidemic is real It all started several decades ago in Alaska. I was a newbie guide, hoping to land a nice tip. So, when my clients asked if they could spend the morning bonking sockeye spawners, completely ignoring the egg-crazed bows bouncing off their waders, I obliged. The…
Her hand, inches from my nose, is filled with a half dozen hooks in varying states of undress and oxidation. Reaching out, I choose a moderately rusty hook with a small clump of fur dangling from a bit of unraveling thread. “Just think of it like summer camp craft hour,” she says, holding up a…
I’d never been to Guanaja, Honduras, but I did my research and learned that we’d have our own little island surrounded by permit flats. I was even told of permit before breakfast—almost as great as waking up in that special way.
Instead of dick pics, I send my girlfriend pictures of myself, naked, holding fish over my junk. Sometimes they’re full-body shots. Other times they’re close ups of just the fish covering my frank and beans, with a halo of manicured pubic hair surrounding it. #hottie #instawizard.
Booze consumed me as I sat listless in the upper bar of the Dogwood; a restored Mississippi riverboat docked a few hundred yards east of the Hopedale, Louisiana, boat launch. For the next two days and nights, the Dogwood would serve as home and headquarters to anglers competing in the 2017 Sheepy tournament—a tongue-in-cheek backcountry…
Is this what mortality feels like? They’re in the deep pools, the ones that are filling now with yellow alder leaves. They come up easily to a humpy or an elk-hair caddis, bright browns and brook trout flashing the colors of autumn. At least that’s what I suppose. I don’t know for sure, actually.
After graduating from college, I accepted a position as an actuarial analyst—a very digital, very stationary job. My parents appreciated this move, as it meant financial independence, and also that I wouldn’t be joining some friends on what eventually became an eight-month motorcycle tour of America. I was mostly certain I didn’t want to become…