Nick Lyons - The Seasonable Angler

Nick Lyons

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright 1970, 2013 by Nick Lyons

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62087-811-8

Printed in the United States of America

For Mari

Is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly? A trout! That is more sharp-sighted than any hawk you have named and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled merlin is bold!

a generous fish ... he also has seasons.

I ZAAK W ALTON

This was my first book and it came about under happy circumstances. In the fall of 1968 and then in February 1969, Clare Conley, then editor of Field & Stream, published the first two stories I wrote about fishing. They were mostly true. One was about the first trout I caught, in an unnamed Catskill creek, by giggin it with a Carlisle hook strapped to a cheap bamboo pole; it was late summer and the fish was in hibernation under a log buttress of the bridge. The other was about a long memorable trip I had taken from Woodstock to the Beaverkillan hours ride that stretched to eightwith Frank Mele, a remarkable new friend I called Hawkes. I wrote both in 1967 when my wife and I spent the summer in an old cabin in Woodstock, New York, with our four children.

I had been writing for a dozen years with nothing published except for some lumpy academic essays and my doctoral dissertation on a New England poet who believed that his poems had all been dictated to him by the Holy Spirit; my two first fish tales came so quickly that I half thought them also dictated, by some new spirit in me. Their language, after all the lumbering words of the literary criticism that had dogged me after graduate school, felt so much more natural to me that I abandoned all other writing; thereafter I mostly wrote about the strange and hilarious events I lived in this fishing world I had been mad for from my earliest years.

I bought fifteen copies of each magazine, tore out my pieces, and sent them to a dozen friends, a former professor, and my mother-in-law. The former professor said I should abandon such writing at once and get back to my career as professor and critic. One of my friends, Emile Capouya, had recently returned to the world of book publishing as publisher of Funk & Wagnalls, and he promptly wrote me, asking if I would write a book about fishing, a memoir perhaps, and to be sure it includedI remember his exact phrasea mlange of poetry and technology. I was already a failed poet and knew little enough about the esoteric technology of fishing, but I leapt at this generous offer from one of the wisest and most generous men I knew. I was thrilled and began the book that night. The title I cooked up became the title of a column I wrote for Fly Fisherman Magazine for twenty-five years, and that is still used, years after I wrote a farewell essay for that home Id enjoyed so long.

The Seasonable Angler has been reprinted by three other publishers over the past forty-odd years but I am especially pleased to see it returned yet again. Though I find it awkwardstill somewhat lumpy in placesI have changed nothing; most of it is as Id like it to remain and the weaker parts are reminders of what I could write then.

The world of fishing has changed dramatically in the last four decadeswith astonishing advances in technology, daily reports of astonishing sport in far-flung places, high-profile (and paying) competitions, and so much morebut I hope theres still a place for an old-time memoir like this and I hope that this book will find a few new friends.

Nick Lyons

Woodstock, New York

September 2012

There is a rhythm to the anglers life and a rhythm to his year.

If, as Father Walton says, angling is some-what like poetry, men are to be born so, then most anglers, like myself, will have begun at an age before memorywith stout cord, bamboo pole, long, level leader, bait hook, and worm. Others, who come to it late, often have the sensation of having found a deep and abiding love, there all the while, like fire in the straw, that required only the proper wind to fan it forth. So it is with a talent, a genius even, for music, painting, writing; so it is, especially, with trout fishingwhich may be said to be so like the Mathematics that it can never be fully learnt.

There is, or should be, a rhythmic evolution to the fishermans life (there is so little rhythm today in so many lives). At first glance it may seem merely that from barefoot boy with garden hackle to fly-fisherman with all the delicious paraphernalia that makes trout fishing a consummate ritual, an enticing and inexhaustible mystery, a perpetual delight. But the evolution runs deeper, and incorporates at least at one level an increasing respect for the event of fishing (I would not even call it sport) and of nature, and a diminishing of much necessary interest in the fat creel.

But while the man evolvesand it is the trouter, quite as much as the trout, that concerns me each year has its own rhythm. The season begins in the dark brooding of winter, brightened by innumerable memories and preparatory tasks; it bursts out with raw action in April, rough-hewn and chill; it is filled with infinite variety and constant expectation and change throughout midspring; in June it reaches its rich culmination in the ecstatic major hatches; in summer it is sparer, more demanding, more leisurely, more philosophic; and in autumn, the season of mellow fruitfulness, it is ripe and fulfilled.

And then it all begins again. And again.

I am a lover of angling, an aficionadoeven an addict. My experiences on the streams have been intense and varied, and they have been compounded by the countless times I have relived them in my imagination. Like most fishermen, I have an abnormal imaginationor, more bluntly, I have been known to lie in my teeth. Perhaps it comes with the territory. Though I have been rigorous with myself in this book, some parts of it may still seem unbelievable. Believe them. By now I do. And why quibble? For this is mans play, angling, and as the world becomes more and more desperate, I further respect its values as a tonic and as an antidoteon the stream and in the imaginationand as a virtue in itself.

These then are the confessions of an angling addictan addict with a rage for order, a penchant for stretchers, and a quiet desire to allow the seasons to live through him and to instruct him.