David Coggins - The Optimist: A Case for the Fly Fishing Life

Immersive, true, pitch-perfect, and a soon-to-be classic. Coggins is a fresh voice in the fly fishing canon, a wry genius, and the perfect guide for angler and non-angler alike.

CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, author of Body of Water

The Optimist

A Case for the Fly Fishing Life

David Coggins

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Moving water thrills me. I cant drive over a bridge without looking down at the river and wondering whether trout live there. I speculate about where they might be hiding and how Id try to catch them. Then I break from my reverie before I swerve into oncoming traffic. If Ive decided the rivers promising, I privately plot a return. Its like discovering a secret hidden in plain sight.

The discovery is bittersweet, however, because the chances of coming back are low. Life interferes with the best angling intentions. Ive studied maps with snaking blue lines and evocative names waiting to be fished: the Jefferson, the Test, the Spey, the Alta. Theres so much water, and it takes years, longer, to learn a rivers nature. The names of rivers Ive yet to fish are etched in my head like the titles of great novels sitting unread on the shelf. Im still trying to understand the rivers in my life beyond the most basic familiarity. Beneath the surface are mysteries we can barely make out, so we study and speculate and remember every detail we can. This is fishing.

By fishing, I mean fly fishing, with its traditional way of casting, wading or from a drift boat, often for trout. But also salmon, bonefish, striped bass, and more, all over the world. The obsession, when it takes hold, is global and total. A friend has an insightEverybody knows about the salmon fishing in Iceland, but did you hear about their brown trout?apparently its great, and I find myself on an esoteric website at midnight in a language I dont read.

Angling is about anticipation and planning trips far in the future, but it also has a storied history. This sport has been practiced since Izaak Waltons Compleat Angler was published in 1653, in ways that are, to the naked eye, fairly unchanged today, like a Shakespeare play performed on a thrust stage. Some people justify fly fishing with claims that its poetic, and, yes, there are moments of pure poetry, but the pleasures of fishing are also tactile and immediate. The theoretical considerations tend to enter my mind, sometimes against my will, when Im not catching anything.

When upstanding yet angling-agnostic citizens find out Im fishing for a week in Montana, they raise an eyebrow; when they find out Im going to the Bahamas, they raise two. Its as if Im not merely leaving town but leaving society, the society thats employed, productive, efficient, and to their mind, necessary. Fishing in the modern world, Ive come to realize, is a contrary act. While it might improve ones moral character (a possibly dubious theory), to fish with purpose and intensity, to seek sporting opportunities in far-flung places, strikes many as decadent.

Perhaps fishing is decadent, but it didnt always seem that way. I began fishing as a boy not because I thought it was morally redeeming, but because I loved it. If anything, it felt natural. We had a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin, and what could make more sense than to row a boat out into the bay and cast to bass as the sun went down over the trees? What I enjoyed then I still enjoy now: the solitude and mystery, the bursts of action, the near misses, the occasional triumphs and, when its over, rowing home in silence, the water smooth as glass.

As a man, standing in a stream on a weekday afternoon in late spring, casting to trout, is a more conscious decision. I still do it for the sheer joy of being outside, of concentrating, of the doubts and rewards of being connected to a fish, of landing and releasing it. Fishing offers an internal reward, and that personal satisfaction is enough. This is the same reason why a good luncha proper three-hour lunch, where wine is ordered by the bottle not the glassis so rare and rewarding. This escape is not exactly illicit, but it certainly takes you outside the course of events of the day.

Fishing is waiting. When Im on the water, Im out of time and the world recedes. Even when nothing seems to be happening, something is happening. The seeming nothing is what gives shape to the eruption of activity, it offers a symmetry, though really an asymmetry, to the strike. Tom McGuane wrote that its the long stretches of silence that give fishing its purpose. When Countess Almaviva sings her aria at the end of The Marriage of Figaro, its one of the most beautiful passages in music. You can listen to it anytime, but if you watch the opera at the Met its four hours into the production. Getting to that point reveals the burden of her characters loss and the delicate forgiveness of her husband. All that time is necessary to feel the full weight of what shes singing. Similarly, catching a fish without waiting is a distorted experience. You cant live on dessert alone.

And yet even waiting on the water Im more engaged than I am anywhere else. An angler is sensitive to changes in the weather, to shade and sun, to any movement on the stream. There are clues everywhere lightly hidden: which insects are appearing that a trout might eat, the speed of the current, shadows faintly moving under the water. When this knowledge converges with enough skill and conspires with luck, I might catch a fish.

But more often I dont catch a fish. Thats why fishing requires coming to terms with the fact that you can do everything exactly the way you want to and still fail. Are you comfortable with that? I hope so. Fishing measures success in an invisible way. Most fly fishing is catch and release, by rule or by principle. At the end of the day, theres nothing to show for it. Catching a fish first exists in the moment and then in the memory, like childhood, with photos that dont do the experience justice.

When people ask me about the attraction to fishing, which they often do because they genuinely want to know or are mildly exasperated that I do it, I tell them that its an outdoor sport. This is obvious of course, but its the basic truth. Youre in the natural world, usually in a beautiful place. I read once that if you stand all day on a typical east-west street in Manhattan, like the one I live on, youll receive eight minutes of direct sunlight. I dont know if thats true, but it certainly feels true. When I go fishing, I know Ill be outside for the next eight hours with as much direct sunlight as I want.

There are the angling specifics, the rituals and peripheral pleasures that are also part of the sport. Early breakfast at a saloon before driving into Yellowstone National Park, hash browns well done. Buying ice at the gas station, picking up lunch. Talking to the slightly dismissive men at the local fly shop and trying to sort out their cryptic advice about whats been working. They possess the superior air of harboring secret knowledge that record store clerks used to have. The curious glances at the trucks driven by guides hauling drift boatsand guides always drive trucks, usually with a crack snaking across the windshield.