prairieflyfisher

If you ever see me on an airplane, I doubt you would know it.  Being stuck in a dildo shaped steel tube with 15 too many people shoved into it and 3 arm rests for the 6 arms present in your row always causes me to screw my hat down over my eyes and turn my thoughts inward.  If I look around or pay too much attention to the snoring guy across the aisle, or the sweat from the fat lady’s arm next to me that is dripping on our shared armrest, I begin the think about the situation I am in: eventually reaching the conclusion, “you can’t breathe and you are never fucking getting out of here!”  It takes some effort to not……..hell I don’t know what, but doing about anything in that state of mind seems like poor judgment.

On a recent flight from Atlanta to Minneapolis, for the third leg of my 4 stage journey home, it occurred to me just how antithetical this situation was to the one I had just left.  I had just finished a fly-fishing trip to Hilton Head Island, SC – my first ever saltwater fly-fishing experience.  Fishing those mud flats for redfish on the (aptly named) Broad River just outside of Beaufort, SC was a lesson in largess and openness.

We awoke early and headed for the boat landing, arriving at just after dawn on a gorgeous South Caroline morning in early March.  I really didn’t know what to expect, short of the fact that we would be in some kind of boats and casting 8 or 9 weight rods (presumably Orvis) to redfish.  I was in a group of three; my dad, brother and myself.  We had enlisted the services of an outfitter and guiding service out of Beaufort called Bay Street Outfitters.  This is a top notch, Orvis-endorsed, outfitter and the head guide, Tuck Scott,  (one of the two that would be with us) was known in the area as a real good guide.  He brought another guide, Owen Plair, who knew where the fish were and how to find them.  These guys are great guides and great sports and they worked their tails off to get us on good fishing.

We split into two groups, with my brother going with Tuck and Dad and I going with Owen.  Immediately I was struck with the immense size of things and the openness of it all.  We were fishing an area at the mouth of the Broad River where it drains into the Atlantic.  To say it drains is to present it wrong.  It is more like the ocean breathes in the river; sucking water out at low tide and exhaling it back up river as the tide comes in.  This breathing of the ocean seems to drive everything.  The entire water scape changes, laying naked vast fields of oysters and mud when the tide is low and then hiding the fields and creating deep channels and drop-offs when the tide is in.  Fishing in a place where you could not move your boat and yet be in an entirely different place in 4 hours is not a concept I can entirely wrap my head around.

The scenery was spectacular and everywhere you looked there was water.  In this low country nothing is either ocean, river or dry land.  Everything is all three, simply vacillating among them – leaning towards being mostly one and then moving to being mostly another.  Everything is one good storm surge from being ocean floor and one low tide from being shoreline, with an impossible amount of area being both a couple of times a day.  I guess it is like anything… not really exactly anything.  More of a combination of all things, just in differing proportions.

Moreover, the landscape itself contains no obvious demarcations to give you a sense of being contained.  I mean, there are trees and hills, but nothing like the edge of a forest as it opens into a meadow, or a line of trees scarring the prairie as it slices along the banks of a river.  As you followed the horizon only the changing colors would tell you if what you were looking at was vegetation or ocean.  A colorblind person may try to walk to France from here.  This all made for an eerie sense of being exposed.  Like the feeling you get when you lay on your back in your bed with you arms at your side.  It can be exhilarating and halting all at the same time.

When we arrived at the boat ramp, Tuck and Owen were waiting for us with their boats and ready to go.  I had never been on a flats boat and I still can’t believe these things draft 8 inches.  It is trippy to look down into the water over the side of a boat and see that you could step off and barely go in over your boots – like looking out of an airplane and seeing that you could just step off if you wanted too.  It just ain’t right!

Tuck and Owen proved to be spectacular guides.  Tuck kept my brother on fish all morning (until the tide made it impossible) and in the process taught him a thing or two.  Owen was the kind of guide you want badly in a situation like this.  He grew up fishing the area and was some kind of savant, owning his first boat at 8 years old.  He knew this water as well as it can be known.  Additionally, he was a great guy and fun to be around, which was a real plus given the long periods of poling that needed to be done.  He worked hard to keep us on fish and succeeded sporadically, in the way that makes for a great day of fishing to a good redfish fly-fisher and getting skunked to a poor one.  For the record, I am officially a poor one.

Of the three of us, we hooked up three times, and all three times it was my brother that did it.  Once into a nice redfish that got him into one of those grip and grin hero pictures, once into his hat and once into his cheek.  That last one caused a little bleeding, but hell who am I to talk, I didn’t set a hook all day, and if you had told me, “you get to hookup on a redfish, but you have to hook your cheek first,”  I just might have done it.

The old Impala with a trunkload of fishing paraphernalia was just no longer doing the trick.  There were section lines I needed to drive down, minimum maintenance roads that needed explored and there was beginning to be smell emanating from the trunk that I feared was becoming permanent.  The time had come to get a vehicle that was more in tune with my habit of standing in water and whipping a stick around.  In other words, I needed a fishing truck.

I began my “search” in a way reminiscent of how I like to approach a stream.  I sat, thought, ruminated, pondered, and excogitated.  Once I had that out of the way, it became time to ask and answer some serious questions.

Would it make sense to trade in my car and get something new-ish?  This is a more complex question than it first appears.  First off, my 6 year old daughter loves that Impala like an old teddy bear.  We have had some serious adventures in it and there are memories in every nook and cranny of that interior.  Plus, it runs well despite having a lot of miles, making it hard to part with.  Lastly, and possibly most importantly, if I had a truck as my only vehicle I may balk at particularly hard driving.  Frankly, I was looking for something that would do the hard job, but that I could be fairly care-free with.  Or careless.  Or, some would say, reckless.  In all reality I was looking for something that someone else had already beat up pretty good, so I wouldn’t feel too guilty about adding to the damage at the margins.  I understand how little sense this makes.  I mean, something that hasn’t suffered any abuse can take more punishment that something that has, but for some reason the first dent is far more painful to me than the third.

What type of vehicle did I want?  The obvious answer is a pickup.  I needed something with high clearance and 4 wheel drive.  A nice (or more precisely not nice) used pickup would make the most sense.  The problem is I didn’t want one.  Pickups with the clearance I was looking for are pretty large.  I feel awfully manly in a large pickup, but I wasn’t looking forward to parking the thing.  I live in an apartment with limited parking and my space is pretty tight.  Ok, that is all just a lame excuse.  Did I mention I didn’t want one?  I wanted something fun.  This was supposed to be the vehicle I use as a way to go fishing.  And, despite how serious we become about fishing, it is more closely related to what you did when you called and asked your friend’s mom if Tommy could come out and play than it is to any serious endeavor of humankind.  So the vehicle is more like getting a skateboard than it is to getting a family car.  It should do what you need it to as a vehicle, but it should also be, well…………awesome.

So now I own a 1999 Jeep Wrangler.  Yeah I gave up alot of hauling room, and yeah it is louder on the highway than the cab of a new pickup, even with the hard top.  And yes, Barbie did have a pink one with a purple roll bar as her Barbie car at one point.  But hey, Patton rode around in one, and the freakin’ windshield lays down!!!  I pulled up to a fast food window to order and the lady asked me, “Can you please turn off your vehicle so I can hear you order?”  My daughter, in the backseat, patted the wheel well and said, “That’s just how beasty this sucker is.”  That is all the endorsement I needed.

My first flyfishing experience was a (very well) guided flyfishing trip in Breckenridge, Colorado.  I had not so much as picked up a flyrod in my life and the amount of information that was thrown at me on this first weekend was astounding.  Our  guides presented us with a half day class on entomology, knot tying, casting, the names of various stream structures (such as riffles, undercuts, etc.) and a primer on what types of locations fish were likely to me found.  It was really an astounding to me how much there was to know.  These two men did a fine job of explaining the why’s and wherefore’s of everything they were teaching us and I left that half day class feeling well armed to undertake this proposition.  I mean hell, I had been fishing as long as I could remember, how hard could it be?

Well, it was like anything.  A class on it, or reading a book, will leave you over-confident and under-prepared for actually undertaking the tasks being described.  The casting was atrocious, I was totally befuddled by the fly box, or more precisely what fly to choose from it, and locating fishy looking spots was a helluva lot easier on a whiteboard propped up in the back of a pickup than on the stream.  Still, I knew what I was SUPPOSED to be doing and it was just a matter of learning the nuances that would allow me to become more proficient at those tasks.

The one thing that I could absolutely not get a grip on was spotting the fish.  I mean, I can see a rise as good as the next guy.  A foot long fish eating a bug off of the surface is hard to miss.  But these guides could see fish that were underwater and that were STAYING underwater.  I have very good eyesight and I am really good at spotting game, but I couldn’t see this fish for the life of me.  I tried squinting, squatting, and cleaning my sunglasses.  Of course I had come with the required polarized lenses, but there must have been magic in the glasses these guys were wearing.  By the halfway point of the second day the answer had become clear.  These men were obviously super-human.  They had been endowed, on the planet of their origin, with the ability to see through water as though it isn’t there.  I mean we aren’t talking about peering to the bottom of a glass of drinking water after all.  This is moving water, with a choppy surface distorting everything.  And the chop is moving so the distortions are changing.  On top of that the sun in is shining and reflecting off of the water.  This was like trying to do an Eye Chart that is stuck on a pole while riding the Teacup ride at the fair.  A Herculean feat.

I found it truly disheartening that there was no way I would ever be able to spot fish like these people could.  Fishing for fish you can see is a big part of the enjoyment of flyfishing to me.  I love that fact that flyfishing is somewhere in between sitting on a bucket watching a bobber and stalking a deer.  Unfortunately, I was apparently deer blind.

As our final hours approached I found myself walking past my uncle, who was on the trip with us, as I leapfrogged to a new spot.  I stopped to chat and he mentioned his frustration with not being able to spot the fish.  We were standing together, looking at the top of a stream that others could see the bottom of and bitching to each other about our failings when one of our two guides approached.  I told him our troubles and he smiled.  Then then pointed far upstream of where we were casting and said,”Look up there.   Every once is a while there will be a small window of smooth water traveling down the stream.  Find one and follow it with your eyes.  It will give you a survey of what is beneath the surface.”  He then walked on ahead to help my brother get a fly out of his hair.

Uncle and I stood there, looking for the magic window of smooth water.  Soon one appeared and sure as hell.  If you followed it with your eyes, and you worked to see through the water and not see the water, you could get a traveling view of the world beneath the chop.  A small moving square of knowledge and insight.  A fleeting pane of clarity.

Last Sunday night I had to do one of those things that make you lose your appetite.  Something that you have to do over and over, even though once seems practically emotionally unbearable.  Right on schedule, my old companion, the lump in my throat joined me.  The one that we have been trained to have, not so much as a prelude of crying, but rather as the obstacle around which the sob cannot cannot find a path.  It is a strawberry piece that gets stuck in the straw of your strawberry milkshake.  No matter how much better it would be to get the lump out and just let the milkshake come, there is no forcing it.  I wonder if I taught myself to have that at about the time I learned to not cry anymore when my feeling were hurt.  At any rate, that is where I was.

In the summer I would take this opportunity to try out a fishing spot.  I like to look for a new stream, somewhere that I had to be intellectually engaged in the fishing and thus distracted enough to wait out the sting.  I liked to look for new or challenging water, usually moving water.  That way the repetitiveness of cast and strip that I find attractive at times on lakes and ponds was not there.  It is those times when my mind leaves the fishing and I find it pondering relationships, or work, or other non-fishing topics.  It was this mind wandering that I looked to avoid.  So I found flowing water with fish that could see me.  More difficult, or at least engaged, fishing that demand my attention.  That is what I do in the summer.  It is early Decemeber.

I decided to get a bight to eat – at this point I am avoiding my quiet apartment at all costs – and head in the general direction of the eateries in my home town.  Somehow, I discover that I am on a hiway and have passed all the food joints.  Did I mention the loss of appetite?  I was driving out into the country and without even making the decision. I had apparently decided, unbeknown to myself, to head to the river.  I wish I had a better explanation than “it just happened” but I honestly don’t remember deciding to go to the river.  It was just happening and I didn’t have the energy to stop it.

There is no good explanation for going out there.  At 7:30 at night in South Dakota in December it has been dark for over two hours.  I did have my gear in the trunk and my license in my pocket, but the bank sign of the way out of town read 19 degrees so fishing was not a realistic possibility although I think that at the times I was still convinced that I would at least try a cast or two.  It was as though there wasn’t a question.  This was what needed to happen and I wasn’t going to have a say in it.

The place I was headed could safely be called my home water.  It is a 30 minute drive from my place and I have spent by far the lion’s share of my fishing hours working this stretch of water.  I am still learning about it, but it is the water that I know best.  There is nothing inherently attractive about this place.  It is not the greatest fishing spot around, in fact some people view it as an inferior spot that inexplicably works sometimes and can be defaulted to when the better places aren’t.  Nor is it a secret, I have fished with many different types and met some real characters on this stretch of water.  It is known to produce, although not necessarily in the size or type of fish that people around here are looking for.  Nor is it the most romantic water int he world, being in a cow pasture and near a road and all.  There is no magic here.  Well,  at least the magic here is not accessible to everyone.

What this place does have is sound.  There is a very nice riffle over large basketball size rocks, leading to a narrowing of the channel.  That, obviously, speeds up the water as it slides in a deep run under a Works Projects Association era bridge immediately into a nice little fall over some Volkswagen size boulders, splashing into a picturesque pool immediately adjacent and connected to a large still pond.  The current shoots straight through the side of the pond and exits in a beautiful riffle as it spreads across a gravel bed.  The cacophony created by this varied water-scape means that a turning of the head is all that is required to change the sound completely.

Alighting from the car, I realize that no fishing will occur on this night.  First of all, I am wearing my Puma tennis shoes with soles so grippless that bar floors can become skating rinks.  Secondly, I have on my leather coat that causes me to ponder why cows don’t freeze to death every winter.  Lastly, the sandpaper sensation on my face caused from walking in the 19 degree air does what it does ever winter.  It tells me “Screw this up, be unprepared or less than vigilant on a stone and you will be lucky if your ears are all it will cost you.”  I love that realization.  I force it upon myself at times.  The thought that I am in a situation that plausibly could kill me.  I require something like that, something to contrast daily life against, to remind me just where I am and what I am.  I think people say it makes them feel alive.  I would say it reminds me that that is all I am.

So, there I am, lump, pumas and all.  I put my hands in my pockets and walk out on the bridge.  I am here for some reason, lets see what it is.  Peering over each side of the bridge I get excellent views of the water, black and oozing it appears.  I can hear all the different instruments being played by this stretch of water.  Winter cold in SoDak means that the air can’t hold any moisture so the stars are close and obvious.  There happens to be a full moon on this night and it shines so brightly that as I meander back of forth across the bridge I continually jump thinking headlights are coming down the road.  I can hear a deer crash through the 6 foot high grass.  There is no wind at all, so if I stand stock still a sort of body heat bubble forms around me and I don’t feel cold at all.

I walked around for something like 45 minutes before I decided to get back in the car and drive home.  By then the lump was gone.  In fact I felt pretty good.  No major life realizations to impart, no new wisdom gained.  Just not as bad as before.  like maybe I should go write something.

Southeastern South Dakota, where I live, was having an unseasonably mild August.  By the middle of August the weather felt like the middle of a normal September.  Temperatures were warm all day with the evenings cooling off nicely.  The local flora and fauna were responding accordingly.  My five year old daughter and I had decided to do some fishing on a Saturday afternoon.  My daughter loves to fish, and the night before had been like an invitation to catch.  The sky had been clear and warm all day on Friday and right as the sun started to relent, a nice low pressure system had rolled in; bringing a little drizzle and a mating swarm of mayflies that, if they had teamed up, could have grabbed you by the shoulders and carried you away.  These things were gigantic, an inch or longer in the body, and were so numerous that your car would get covered with them at the nearby gas station when you stopped to pump.  I had never seen a spinner fall like this before and I had fished it alone and hard.  Fish were rising to these bugs and I caught many large ones.  The particular species that were partaking in the buggy feast are locally known as mooneyes.  Don’t feel bad, even with 20 years of fishing these waters I proclaimed, “Holy shit, I caught a piranha!’ when I landed my first one that day.  A google search when I got home revealed the real species.  These are flat, silver fish, with oddly upturned, toothy mouths and large scales.  The largest one I caught was nearly as big around as my net.   Anyway, I wanted my daughter to participate in this fishing bonanza.  While she wouldn’t be able to dead drift a mayfly look-a-like to them, I had noticed that once the feeding frenzy was on; these fish were aggressively biting anything that appeared semi-foodlike.  A minnow on a bobber should be particularly effective.  So I spent the half hour drive to the stream teaching her about the lifecycle of mayflies and the ensuing fish feast that would inevitably follow.  We fished for a few hours and the mayflies refused to breed and die.  My daughter was completely out of patience.

If you have ever been fishing with a 5 year old, you know that it can be a daunting proposition.  They want to catch fish, the bigger the better, just like any of us.  However, they would rather not wait for these fish to show up.  So you are left with a quandary.  Do you try to put them into some small bluegills, so they can catch many small fish quickly and eventually get bored with that and want to go home.  Or do you try to get them into bigger fish and run the risk of them not catching anything for a while and getting bored and wanting to go home?  The trick, in my opinion is twofold.  First, you embrace the experience for what it is; time in nature with your child and don’t be afraid to reel in and go look at the cow-patties and explore for pretty rocks.  It is the 5 year old equivalent to me sitting on the edge of a stream thinking about how buddha was right when he said life is like a river.  The inherent value in recognizing how truly unimportant our responsibilities can be and going to explore something new.  Secondly, and more practically, fish for the little ones without excluding the possibility of a wallhanger.

My daughter and I had been fishing on a prior occasion and she was catching bluegills as fast as I could get them off the hook and a new worm on it.  I had purchased a couple dozen crawlers for this particular fishing trip and we were going through them so fast it looked like we were going to run out.  I didn’t get to fish that day; I was too busy baiting her hook and taking her fish off. Despite the impending nightcrawler shortage I continued to put full, large worms on her hook and direct her to cast to the outside of the pingpong table sized area where the bluegills were hanging.  I thought there was a chance, with a nice looking worm and by being on the outskirts of the fishy circle, that we might pick up a big cruiser.  Sure enough, her bobber vanished and she fought with everything she had, nearly losing her pole in the process and, after screaming at me that this was her fish and to not help, she drug it on shore. She had landed a 19 inch walleye.  That is a fish that is nearly half as big as her.  She still talks about landing that beast and holding him and then letting him go.  The only thing bigger than that fish she caught that day was her smile.

Having the opportunity to share what you have learned about where the fish are and when, can be a very rewarding use of your fishing knowledge.  My mother and I had agreed to meet on dreary day at a spot near her house.  I got there about 15 minutes before her, and strung up and hit the water.  There was a beautiful seam that was easily fishable from shore right were I approached the stream and I swung a white wooly bugger into it.  I cast 5 times before Mom appeared on the bank behind me and I had gotten 4 hits and caught a beautiful dark gold walleye.  I was so excited that I immediately put Mom right where I was standing, pointed out the seam to her and suggested a lure (mom is a spin fisherperson) to her.  I then left to find myself a new spot.  Mom caught a couple very nice fish in that spot, including a chunky 17  incher.  I, on the other hand, didn’t get a hit for the rest of the evening.  I would say I got skunked, but the next morning she called me and thanked for the experience.  It seems she hadn’t caught a fish that size for a number of years.  I would call that a pretty good catch.

My mom is not the only other person in my family that fishes.  My Dad and my brother do also.  In fact, I recently went on a two day fishing excursion with my little brother.  Now this was not your average, everyday flyfishing trip.  My brother lives in Minneapolis proper and we were fishing in the city.  So there we were, a couple of guys in chest waders, fishing vests and hats, wondering the parks of Minneapolis.  It is a wonder we weren’t arrested.  After a full day and a half of looking for fish and only catching one small northern pike, we were close to calling it a weekend.  But lady luck had something more in store, for me at least.  As we were walking back slowly along a stream, my Brother spotted a nice little school of bluegills.  At this point it behooves me to point out that my Brother’s recent domestication and his career as an attorney have severely limited the time he spends on the water.  And in fairness, we were both pretty excited to see some fish after a good 18 hours of fishing with nothing to show for it.  Any way, he spotted the fish and immediately pointed them out to me by thrusting his 9 foot rod at them like a fencing sword.  That caused the fish to decide to move, obviously.  I chastised him appropriately and then asked him to again identify precisely where he had seen the fish.  And, with an absentmindedness befitting a wacky haired college professor, he repeated the rod thrust motion, completely spooking the school of fish.  When we finally located the school again, or more likely another school that hadn’t had our presence broadcast to them, I stepped back to give my brother a shot at fishing these fish.  He was so excited that you could visibly see it, and that doesn’t translate into effective flyfishing.  He managed to knot his line while trying to strip out to prepare for his cast.  He then took one step too many in approaching the bank and nearly fell into the water.  After getting his wits about him, he attempted to cast and managed to get the line wrapped about his body and his fly hooked in the tree behind him.  After we had utilized some moves reminiscent of a top to get him all ready to cast, he hooked his fly on the back of his vest in his backcast.  Needless to say, the fish had left the area long before he put a fly on the water and we came up empty.  But I did get a nice ab workout from laughing so hard at him that I thought I was going to wet my pants.

Anyway, my Daughter had lost all patience and was ready to call it a night.  I took my fly off and was winding up when she said, “Daddy, what does a Mayfly look like?”  I began to describe it to her again and she interrupted me, saying, “Does it look like that?” as she pointed to the water.  And the Spinner Fall was on.

Examining the way certain species of fish are viewed by people and how that view changes from group to group is a very interesting study in group dynamics.   At our core, we are all fisherpeople, looking to somehow influence the behavior of a fish.   I was originally going to say that we were all looking to entice a fish to bite our hook and be drug onto shore, but I thought I might get the bowfishers and the pallid sturgeon snaggers offended.  They totally circumvent the whole “me fool fish” part of fishing and go straight to the fishhunting.  I was then going to say that we are all looking for a way to drag a fish out of water and into our hands, but I remembered the newly popular sport of hookless flyfishing.  These folks take the fooling of the fish as the ultimate goal and the enjoyment, for them, stops there.  For the rest of us fishing is something akin to being drug dealers.  We are trying to get the fish to put something into their bodies that they will ultimately regret.  Possibly we are more like tobacco companies.  At any rate, lets not get overly romantic about our place in this game.  We are not the fish’s friends anymore than a cat is a friend to the mouse that it plays with.  Ultimately, we want to catch the biggest of whatever fish we are after that we can, regardless of the fishes feelings on the subject.

The question is, what fish do we choose to fish for.  It seems that everyone has a view on what is the proper species of fish to pursue.  There is a loose connection between what the ultimate purpose of the fishing is and what species one pursues.  Sometimes this means that there is a connection between personal taste and the appropriate fish to catch.  I grew up in a town that sold Bullhead meat in the grocery stores.  Needless to say, there were people that would go out and specifically fish for bullhead because they ate it.  For them, the bullhead was the goal; actually the biggest bullhead was the goal.  Many people here, fish for walleye.  It is very tasty meat and a game fish to boot.  So it has a double draw.  In that way the walleye fisherperson and the bullhead fisherperson are effectively engaged in the exact same activity with the exact same goal.  They are both trying to catch the biggest fish possible that is made out of the meat that they think is tastiest.

Given the commonalities in our pursuits, one would think that there would be a very tight camaraderie amongst all different sorts of fishpeople.  However, like any community, there are fissures and fractures that cause different factions to spring up.  These factions tend to ignore the things they have in common with other groups and focus exclusively on differences.  One group finds that catching a certain species of fish is easy, ignoring the fact that catching THE LARGEST of that species is still hard.  Or that the official handbook has not designated a certain species as a game fish and it is therefore not worthy of a cast.  Or my favorite, that certain species of fish are non-native and are thus not actually fish at all, but actually don’t exist.  We use different tackle, different bait, or differ in whether or not we release the fish.  All of these thing are used to make one group of fisherperson distinct from others and therefore allow a superiority complex to emerge.

One of the things I love about flyfishing is that I can cross boundaries in terms of what I want to catch, and I am not limited by what I have originally gone out to pursue.  If I went out after Largemouth Bass and a spinner fall occurs, bringing the Mooneye to the surface to feed.  I don’t have the watch helplessly while all the fun passes me by.  I can tie on a dryfly and go crazy.  The point is, that flyfishing allows me to enjoy the opportunities that nature, or god or a low pressure system or whatever, afford me as they come.  I am not constrained by a rigidity in what is the right fish, because the right fish is the one I choose to cast too.  And if he isn’t there, then it is the next one.  I broaden my sources of success to include anything that is presented, allowing me to enjoy the world as it is, rather than as I had hoped it would be.

There is a certain species of fish that I would like to describe for you to guess.  It is an introduced species; very spooky but sometimes visible as it feed on the surface frequently.  Most of its diet consist of small underwater insects.  This fish can be a very choosey eater, and if it is feeding on a certain thing at the time it will not take anything else.  Give up?  It is a Brown Trout.  Also, it is a Carp.

At some point, in the progression of human society, we stopped being a part of nature.  We quit being a participant and began to become an influencer.  We were no longer forced to play by the rules that nature dictates because we learned that we could change the rules.  We could step out of our roles as players buffeted by the great forces of weather, migrations and natural selection.  The size of our concentrated populations was no longer decided by the amount of food made naturally available.  We began to take the bounties of the earth and mold them to serve our purposes.  Whether it was sowing seeds in order to change the amount of food offered in a certain location, or reshaping a stone to allow us to harvest more wild game; the rules were now under our control.  We became miniature gods.

Some thousands of years later, we find ourselves where we are today; questioning the global implications of rewriting nature’s rules.  What we fail to examine is the personal implications of having lost the ability to participate in nature without influencing it.  We have become so removed for being in the game, that we no longer know how to play.  Most of us will go our entire lives without spending one moment being a participant.  Even when we attempt to enjoy nature we are outside of it.  We have extracted ourselves so completely from being participants that we no longer fit back into the game.  When we camp, it is with propane stoves and in camping spots with paved parking areas.  When we hike, it is on man-made paths with hand-rails and steps on the inclines.  We no more participate in nature than we participate in a football game we are watching from the stands.

I have spent my entire life in the outdoors. From constantly exploring when I was a child, to hunting as soon as I was of age, to camping every weekend as I was growing up.  I love being outdoors and I love all that nature has to offer, but I had never participated in nature until I began to flyfish.  All of the other activities in nature that I do are games of human design, set up so that I will be the victor.  Pheasant hunting with dogs and 12 gauges; Fishing with Ratl’n Rapalas and fish finders.

Flyfishing is different.  My job is to influence nothing.  I need to make no waves; cast no shadow.  I must make my casting motion invisible to the fish.  I must hold 40 feet of line in the air, letting it touch nothing, back and forth and then lay it gently on the water without making a ripple.  I need to cast a tiny fly tied to a piece of plastic string across currents of varying speeds and then work that line so that the fly floats as though it isn’t tied to anything.  A dead drift.  It is maximum effort focused on minimum influence.  Strive to vanish.  Struggle to disappear.  Endeavor not to be.  Only as I approach apparition status, do I begin to participate in nature.

There is a peace that comes with such an intense focus on being as translucent as possible; something serene in the act of total focus on becoming nothing.  Flyfishing is teaching me something, I am just not sure I know what it is.

One thing you quickly discover while carrying your flyrod with your vest on to the edge of a river or lake in these parts is that “you ain’t gonna catch nothin’ with that stuff here.”  Or even better, “there ain’t any trout in this water.”  Some Busch Light swillin’ dude sitting on an upside down five gallon pail with a Dale Jr. T-shirt on and his Camo baseball cap will quickly and repeatedly let you know that you took a wrong turn at Nebraska and ended up in South Dakota, which you have apparently mistaken for Colorado or Montana.  Most are friendly enough when you tell then that you are going to give it a shot and some are interested in watching or even asking questions.  This, of course, assumes that you are not out-fishing them.  Worse yet, out-fishing them and then releasing everything you catch.  I should be clear. I see nothing inherently wrong with spin fishing or using live bait, or with keeping your catch.  I do, however, have a problem with pretentiousness or with the assumption that because something is different it is wrong.  This is what I deal with nearly every time I fish.

You see, fishing here is a combination of sport and food collection.  The fish to catch here is the Walleye because it tastes good.  Nobody deliberately fishes for Largemouth Bass because they say that in these waters the bass eat crawdads and are therefore oily and fishy tasting.  The Walleye, on the other hand, is very good because they eat mostly baitfish.  Northern Pike are considered junk fish and no one deliberately fishes them either, because the flesh is bony and hard to eat.  All this adds up to two things; all fishing is down in deep water with live bait for walleyes and if you catch anything over 14 inches you throw it in your bucket to take home to eat.  I have talked to old boys that have been fishing for years that will freely tell you that a walleye doesn’t fight like most fish here, and in fact gives up easily and lets you haul it in, yet that is what they would choose.  Given these facts, a man with a flyrod is unfathomable to people and a man releasing a 19 inch walleye is sacrilege.

I have learned to be extra friendly and even self-effacing and to, when it seems to help ensure my personal safety, even act surprised that I am catching anything.  You see, after a 12 pack of Busch Light the frustration gets serious and I have even had a beer can or two thrown at me.

I recently had one of the more satisfying experiences I have ever had with regard to the hostility I sometimes find on the water.  A pair of very serious meat eaters showed up at the same stretch of water I was fishing about an hour before sundown.  They were wearing hundreds of dollars worth of Dryfit outdoor clothing and each had a giant tackle box, two spin rods, a bucket and a head lamp on their foreheads.  I was about to be shown a very serious display of night fishing.

I had already staked out a spot on the water that allowed me to fish some fast moving water and a deep pool that runs perpendicular to the main current.  From here I commanded the deeper water where the cruisers are and the seam where the current runs along the slow water and the fish like to hang out and let the food come to them.  While it is a good spot, it is far from the only good spot in the area.  There is plenty of room for all.

There was much whispering and gawking by our two serious fishermen when they first showed up.  It was clear that they had an opinion about what I was doing, although they kept it to themselves.  Both men clipped large plugs to their swivels and began casting across the current and reeling back in.  They too had staked a fine spot to fish from; one that gave us all plenty of room.  This was an odd situation from the beginning.  There were no pleasantries or fishing civilities exchanged.  No “Any luck, today?” or  “You nailin’ ‘em?”  There was an odd sense of hostility from the beginning.  It was as though I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to, but nobody was going to say out-loud what it was.

Shortly after my uninvited fishing partners showed up I decided to switch to a large Clouser Minnow fly.  The sun was setting and I thought there was a pretty good chance to get into some fish coming up to hunt.   I threw my first cast into the current and began a speedy retrieve and hooked into a rather nice largemouth bass.  After netting him and releasing him, one of the men downstream yelled, “Just a bass?” to the guffaws of his partner.  Bear in mind they had yet to catch a fish.  I released the bass and cast back into the current, a few times.  At this point I noticed that one of my cohorts had turned and was now casting directly upstream, right to where I had hooked my largemouth.  This effectively made it impossible for me to fish the current.  Oh well, I could still fish the seam.  I threw a cast just on the current side of the seam and let it swing into the still water and immediately had a hit.  I hooked and netted a nice 18 inch long walleye which I promptly released.  There was still no sound from down the bank but the hostility hung in the air like an oncoming thunderstorm.  Before I was ready to cast again, the other fisherman was throwing his Rapala into the seam right in front of me.  Now I was completely hemmed in.  I literally had nowhere I could cast.

As I mentioned, that there is plenty of room for fishing on this specific spot.  So I ambled off my perch, giving up the current and the seam and moved into the still and deeper water of the pool.  As I was leaving both men rushed to move into where they could more effectively fish the water that I had chosen originally.  This had reached ridiculous proportions.

I waded up to my thighs and gave a long cast straight out into the deepest part of the pool and quickly retrieved my fly with jerks and twitches, trying to make it look like a wounded minnow.  It was on the first cast that I got a hard hit.  The sun was set and it was about 20 minutes from total darkness and I had a serious fish on the line.  I am fishing 3 pound test line so I have to be very careful when I play a fish in and this one was gonna take some time.  I made sure to indicate that I had a fish so the geniuses up the bank knew that while they were well on their way to getting skunked, I was happily fighting my third nice fish of the evening.

I will spare you the details, but it was 30 minutes later and pitch black before I landed her and she wouldn’t fit in my net.  I had been ordered to “break it off, it is just a f***ing carp!” and “just get it in already.”  It was not a carp; it was a 24 inch long, 6 pound walleye.  After I had her safely on shore I took off the fly and broke down my pole and began for the car.  At this point I thought a friendly smile, a helpful tip and 6 pounds of fish would be the best jab I could give.  So, when I got near the other two fishermen I said, “I was using the flyfishing equivalent to a red and yellow Rapala.” And was greated with “Get the F*** out of here.”  Then they actually both turned for their tackle boxes.  Gee, I wonder what they were looking for?  Maybe the best revenge IS a life well lived.

One of the multitude of things that flyfishing has given me is far better attentiveness to my diet.  I now make sure that I put things in my body that will generally agree with it.  This is not from some need to fuel myself right in order to undertake the rigors of the fishing.  Nor is it due to some crap about getting in tune with the environment and therefore only wanting eggs from cage-free chickens.  Flyfishing has not made me a tree hugging granola eater.  Instead, I have learned a valuable lesson concerning our olfactory sense.

It all starts with a simple question from the man behind the counter at the local burrito chain.  “Would you like black beans on your steak burrito?”  Of course I would.

It was lunchtime on a cool Saturday in late fall. A low-pressure system was just settling in, chasing out the last vestiges of our Indian summer.  The change in pressure was bringing in some wind and on and off sprinkles; making the outlook promising for some fishing.  I met my fishing partner for lunch at a chain burrito restaurant, so we could wolf down a burrito the size of our heads and then get out to the water for 6 or 7 good hours of fishing.  I was hoping that the wind would cause some chop on the water and the walleyes would be up and feeding.  We snagged a couple of burritos, forced them down our gullets and hit the road.  The drive to the river we were fishing is about 30 minutes, tack on 15 minutes for getting all geared up and you have plenty of time for the burrito to do what burritos do.

The water we were working is interestingly laid out.  There is a fairly swift river, cascading about 20 feet down some rocks; gets to about 4 foot deep and then into a shallow riffle as it speeds away.  Jutting out from the river at a right angle between the rocks and the riffle is a large pond.  It covers about three quarters of an acre and gets something like 6 feet deep.  This is where we would be looking for the walleyes, in the deeper water.  Deep water means deep wading.  Deep wading means chest-waders instead of hip-waders.

For the uninitiated, chest waders are like waterproof snow-pants.  They fit very loosely and cover you from the bottom of you feet all the way up to your armpits.  Of course being waterproof, there is no way for air to escape either except to slowly seep out the top right under your neck.

Standing at the trunk of my car, I pull on my waders and notice an unpleasant rumbling in my stomach.  Just as I got the shoulder straps buckled into place, another rumble.  Vest on, rumble.  Pole put together, rumble rumble.  I actually farted the first time as we walked to the water.  It would not be the last.

Walking and windy conditions can help you not have to pay the price to farting in your waders, but once you get down by the water, where the wind is blocked and you are standing in one place…….God help you.  I approached the pond quietly and noticed a horrific odor.  Must be a dead fish on the shore somewhere?  The smell just kept coming and coming, like it was being slowly blown on my face.  For a second I thought maybe it was myself I was smelling. No way.  That was clear back while we were walking.  Certainly it hadn’t followed me all the way to the water.  I took a step into the water and the smell suddenly got stronger,  like a puff of noxious fumes.  Maybe the water stunk.  Another step and another puff.  God this was getting unbearable.  Finally I had waded about as deep as I wanted to go, to my waist, and I stopped and the odor subsided, eventually leaving altogether.

I cast a few times, tied on a different fly and cast a few more.  The rumbling was getting bad now and I succumbed to the urge to relax once more.  After about a 10 count the odor started again.  Oh my, it was me that I smelt.  The waders were holding my poisonous gases to my body and slowly funneling them out right under my chin!  It was terrible.  At one point I actually decided against lighting a cigarette for fear I would die in a terribly well contained flame ball!  I also realized that as I waded the water pressure would collapse my waders to my leg, making my baggy fart holders squeeze puffs of hell’s own fury into my face.  Like some sort of fart bellows invented for the Inquisition.  Worse, the rumblings were getting more frequent and ominous.  I was no longer confident that it was safe to relax and there wasn’t a bathroom for 2 miles.  We had only been on the water for about an hour, but I had no choice.

My fishing buddy didn’t seem too disturbed as we sat having coffee at the coffee shop in town (yeah, cause another diuretic like coffee was what I need.).  I mean, sure the conditions had been right and the fish were probably biting.  Sure we were burning a rare opportunity for a full day on the water due to a need to stay within a stone’s throw of a bathroom. But hey, burritos had been his idea.