Nick Lyons - A Flyfishers World

For Tony
The Official Copy 1,

with much love
from your old Dad
and your Mom (who loves you)

BOOKS BY NICK LYONS

THE SEASONABLE ANGLER

JONES VERY: SELECTED POEMS (editor)

FISHERMAN'S BOUNTY (editor)

THE SONY VISION

LOCKED JAWS

FISHING WIDOWS

TWO FISH TALES

BRIGHT RIVERS

CONFESSIONS OF A FLY FISHING ADDICT

TROUT RIVER (text for photographs by Larry Madison)

SPRING CREEK

A FLYFISHER'S WORLD

Nick Lyons

DRAWINGS BY MARI LYONS

Skyhorse Publis

Copyright 2013 by Nick Lyons

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street,

11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

Skyhorse and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [TK]

ISBN: [TK]

FOR TONY UP TO HIS GILLS IN FISH BOOKS

The take instantly validates our efforts,

conferring a measure of definitiveness and closure to

to an enterprise otherwise riddled with uncertainty

and inconclusiveness. Few things in life,

I think, have this to offer.

TED LEESON, The Habit of Rivers

W hen I arranged this collection, in 1996, mostly of columns I had written with much pleasure for Fly Fisherman Magazine, I tried to order the pieces in a way that might account for the arc of my fly-fishing life up to that time.

I had fished virtually from infancy and knew quite a bit about where fish might be found, in a lake or stream, and I took too many of them on spinning tackle and whatever bait would work. I began to fuss with a fly rod during my college years but clumsily and generally not on water but on lawns and an empty basketball court. I had no experienced friend of coach. Once I threaded the line through the keeper ring; I doubt if line and rod were balanced; the line floated in a wide half circle and plopped merely a few feet from my shoelaces. The harder I whipped the rod the fewer the results.

Then one day on Michigans Ausable, I watched a skillful flyfisher cast into a side channel of the river upstream of the bridge on which I stood. It was rainy and cold. My wife and our two infants were in the car. I was mesmerized by the mans effortless, lyrical performance and when a modest brown trout rose to the blonde fly that floated high and calmly on the current, I was hooked.

This would have been 1961 or so. The pieces in this book that I wrote for Fly Fisherman Magazine and a few others along with a flood of recollections of earlier daysregister the deepening and broadening of my connections to the world of fishing, particularly those I discovered through fly fishing. The bass, pickerel, and bluegill of my teens, and certainly the trout, became new fish when I sought them with a fly rod; to them I added pike, bluefish, tarpon and others, both near at home in the East and in wider and wider circles. I thought much more about how I fished and with what, and learned to understand more about the waters I fishedespecially the insects and prey my quarries ate; I learned to appreciate small creeks and hot days and the respite of a season ending. I saw more and more of the delicious humor in it alla humor of circumstances and character, often at my expense, rarely divorced from events that really happened, rarely at someone else's expense. I lived more and more of the fishing that goes on in one's headphilosophic matters, rhythms, the establishment of values, the need for conservation, the dangers of proliferating competitions and other challenges.

Now, a decade and a half later, in my eightieth year, the arc has made one of its last turns. More has happened. More of my fishing life lives only in memory. But those memories remain diamond-clear and sustaining, and re-reading many of them in this book has made them live again for me. I loved writing these pieces and hope they give you some of the pleasure I had.

Nick Lyons

Woodstock, New York

September 2012

I am struck, as I move deeply into my sixties, by how much I still love to fly fish and to write about fly fishing, how grateful I am for the simple fun and happy intensity this passion has given me since that day, many years ago, when I saw a trout rise and had some brand of apocalyptic vision on Michigans Au Sable River.

I had fished since before memorywith worm, frog, doughball, and spinning lurebut fly fishing, requiring such a galaxy of disciplines, was different; and from that day, despite all the complexities of my personal life and the much greater complexities of a world in volatile flux, fly fishing has always been in my head: quirky, maverick, green thoughts that shaped themselves into the kind of personal essays Ive collected in this book. They came while I was strap-hanging in a New York subway almost as often as when I was on a river, while I was in business conferences, reading a book, waiting for a doctor, and even, a year ago, as I lay in a hospital bed, as I returned from a sour brush with death.

I have not deluded myself all these years into thinking that fly fishing was a religion, a way of life, an activity more important than a thousand other human activitiesneither growing a family, putting together a life in classrooms and offices, nor wars, tragic events in Bosnia or Africa or Russia or Asia, nor high art. It is merely a lovely, useless activity that, somehow, has become an axial line in my life, an anchor. I wanted desperately to write when I was young, and fishing, somehow, became a magnet for most of what I have had to say on any subject; I have found it one of the happiest parts of my life to write about this activity, to dream and imagine and recollect and theorize about fly fishing. It did not take me long, in my twenties, to discover that I was not Joyce, neither was I Faulkner. Tolstoy and Dickens were vaster than I knew, Kafka wiser; even a local columnist I thought thin had his special craft. In fly fishing I found a plot of land that was minesmall but not contemptible, capable of yielding a strange and amusing fruit or two, mostly beneath the worlds notice, but always and inescapably my lot and something satisfying to write about. That it gave enough people pleasure to read what Id done helped me to write more, and I am grateful to them as much as I am to rivers and fly rods.

This summer, in the West, as Ive collected these essays, mostly of the past half-dozen years, Ive noticed that more and more seem to be looking backward or to theory. Three-quarters of my life is behind me and so are most of my firstswith tarpon, bluefish, pike, and other species but also, probably, with places. Ive never been much of an explorer. Ive always preferred intimacy to the exotic. In creasingly I lean toward memory and reflectionperhans because I am no longer bursting with energy, as I was in my manic youth. My fires are banked now: less flashy but probably hotter and certainly more concentrated. I fish more wisely; I have a keener sense of where fish will be and when theyll be up. I probably fall in lessand certainly I have reported on my pratfalls enough for this trip.