Self-Taught

Words by John Gierach
Painting by Bob White

My friend Vince and I had split up along a stretch of river we both like. Right at the turnout where we’d parked, there’s a long, broken run with small mid-river slicks and fishy eddies against the banks. A short walk upstream past a featureless riffle, there’s another run with broad, glassy slicks and narrow channels where the trout never seem to hold in the same place twice, so it always seems like new water. In our personal mythology, the lower run is easier to fish than the upper one, although that doesn’t always prove out in practice. Each spot can be worth a few hours if the trout are biting—and if they’re biting in one place, they’re likely to be biting in the other—so it’s the ideal setup for two fishermen who like to fish alone while fishing together.

We could see a few rising trout from where we were standing above the river, which suggested that once you got down there for a closer look, you’d probably spot others. Sometimes there’s more discussion about who should start where, but this time Vince took charge with a firm, “Why don’t you start here and I’ll go upstream.” Fine with me. Our unspoken agreement has always been, whoever has the stronger opinion wins.

Once I’d picked my way down to the water through a stretch of ankle-twisting riprap, I saw that there were, in fact, more rises than we’d seen from the road; a few tight to bankside rocks and a few other quiet takes in broken water that were hard to spot even up close. The trout were picking at a sparse mixed hatch of small mayflies, both about a size 20, that I took to be Olives and Red Quills. I’ve come to believe that trout key on size first and then on behavior, with silhouette and color coming in last, so I thought a size 20 Adams parachute would be nondescript enough to split the difference.

The fish didn’t love the Adams, but they didn’t hate it, either. For every trout that would flash and reject the fly on a dead drift, there was another that would take it, and I brought my average up a little when I started adding skitters and bumps to my drifts. Trout can get awfully cagey on catch and release water like this, but they’re still predators and sometimes that little intimation of liveliness that separates a living insect from just another speck of flotsam is all it takes to flip their switch.

Once I’d have gone into a flurry of fly changes at this point, trying different duns and emergers and adding nymph droppers in order to dial this in even tighter, but that was when I thought the goal of fishing was to catch every trout in the river. I’m easier to please now, and even as a practical matter, I usually do my best by making an educated guess and then keeping my hook in the water.

Meanwhile, Vince had walked upstream to the next run, but as he got close, he saw a black Jeep pulled off in a place where people don’t usually park because there isn’t enough room. Even if you can squeeze onto the shoulder just right, you can barely get all four tires off the pavement, so you risk getting sideswiped by a passing truck.

And then a few steps farther on, he saw that someone was fishing his spot; someone short, slightly built and with long hair. Waders make us all look androgynous from behind, so going by the hair alone, Vince at first thought it was a woman, but then, when he got closer, he could see it was a man maybe in his mid-20s. That gave me a flashback to the counter culture days of the late

‘60s when a redneck might begin a conversation with a deadpan, “Thought you was a girl” and, depending on your read of the situation, you might answer, “How many girls you seen with beards?”

Vince stopped for a minute to watch. He said the guy’s casting needed some work, that he was fishing a pattern that was too big for the hatch and that he was casting upstream and dragging his drifts. At this point, most of us would simply think, Well, that guy’s probably not gonna catch anything and move on, but I knew Vince wouldn’t be able to leave it alone even before he got to that part of the story.

He opened with the usual, “How’s it goin’?” to break the ice, quickly ascertained that the guy was new to fly fishing (no surprise there) and asked if he could make a few suggestions.

First, he cleaned up the guy’s cast a little. (Vince is a casting instructor who’s done the same for me, but at what I’d like to think was a slightly more advanced level.) Then he showed him the down and across stream cast with an upstream mend in the line that can get you a better drift in braided currents. Next, he showed him how to add the infinitesimal upstream twitches and hops to the fly that can sometimes draw strikes when a dead drift won’t. That probably took the most coaching because the tactic mimics the struggles of a mosquito-sized insect against moving water weighing 8.34 pounds per gallon, so it’s easy to overdo.

In the course of all this, Vince learned that the guy was married and had a young daughter. He and his wife had recently moved to Colorado and were just barely scraping by, although in the way of young couples just starting out but in it for the long haul, they hoped to do better soon and were innocently confident that they would. The guy was on the river that day because he had it bad for fly fishing and knew he needed the practice, so that’s how he spent his rare days off, but his wife was working that day, so he’d have to leave early to pick his daughter up after school.

Finally, Vince gave the guy a size 20 Red Quill to fish, left him a spare in case he lost the first one, watched until he thought the guy had the drift down well enough, and then went looking for some open water of his own to fish.

Vince has always been good at that kind of thing. He’s an easy talker and a good listener—the kind who’ll strike up a conversation with anyone just to see what they have to say—and he’s so predisposed to be helpful that he’s known in some circles as “Uncle Vince.” And even in his 60s, he has this boy-nextdoor thing going that lets him approach people easily.

I’m not especially good at it, probably because I came up in fishing at a time when fishermen were jealous of what they knew—even if it wasn’t much—so any impulse to help was counterbalanced by a tendency toward secrecy and misdirection. And although I do have the requisite generosity if I dig deeply enough to find it, I’m an impatient teacher and there’s something feral about me that makes strangers suspicious. I’m also capable of misreading situations so badly that once I was even invited to go screw myself, but that was before I learned to only offer a hand to people who were so hopelessly inept that they’d grasp at any straw.

And even when it goes well, I can still manage to ruin it. For one thing, it’s too easy for me to pose as the benevolent expert, puffing myself up like a conceited tomcat and then feeling foolish afterward. For another, even when I can avoid the pitfall of showboating, I’m likely to walk away from a successful encounter thinking, Well, there’s one more nimrod clogging up my home water, as if lending a hand had cost me so much; as if all the other fishermen on the river were only there to poach my fish.

Still, I sometimes wonder why I’m so bad at this while it comes so naturally to Vince. Is it because I’m not a good enough human being, or that I don’t know as much about fly fishing as I think I do, or just that I need to brush up on my social skills?

This isn’t a question I want to linger over because I might not like the answer, but I do think offering help was more common when there were fewer fishermen and therefore more water and more fish to go around, so we didn’t have to be so territorial. Or maybe it’s just that this was before technology had so fully trained us away from face-toface contact, so there was still a kind of graciousness in operation that life in the 21st century has since done its best to beat out of us.

I grew up as a bait and lure guy and when I started fly fishing, it wasn’t easy to find someone to show me the ropes. The few fly casters I knew then had all learned from their fathers and uncles at such an early age that they might as well have been born holding fly rods. The assumption was that if the grownups dragged you along often enough, it would eventually just rub off, and it did, but since you weren’t actually taught, you didn’t have the vocabulary to teach anyone else. So although your muscle memory understood the complex physics of fly casting, all you could manage by way of encouragement was something unhelpfully vague like, “Oh, you just kind of wave the line back and forth a few times and then put it on the water.”

At the time, there were no instructional DVDs to consult and you couldn’t look up websites or YouTube videos because the Internet didn’t exist yet. (The tech giants were still geeky kids tinkering in their garages and people were still asking, “Why in the world would anyone want a computer?”) As for fly shops, few of them had yet discovered the potential for extra income and customer loyalty that came from giving lessons, so they often exuded the standoffish air of private clubs that you didn’t belong to.

I’d heard that there was a school for guides somewhere in Montana, but that was a long way to go, I doubted I could afford it and I didn’t want to be a guide anyway; I just wanted to learn how to fly fish.

So all I could do was get my hands on a flea market rod and reel, a storebought line and leader and a handful of randomly chosen hardware store flies. Then I tried my best to learn fly casting from the sketchy instructions and still photos in books. (I remember one British writer who began by saying that fly casting couldn’t be adequately described in print and then went on for ten pages to prove his point.) Finally I just hit the river, where my education began.

It was trial and error at first—heavy on the errors—but sometimes a passerby would stop to help. A few were downright kindly, as if I reminded them of their own hapless sons, or—from behind with long hair—maybe their daughters. Others were grumpy, as if they’d stopped to help only because watching me try to fish was too painful to endure. But even grudging generosity is still generosity and every little bit helped.

I also learned to spy on people who I thought were fishing brilliantly—which usually just meant they were catching fish when I wasn’t. I’d watch until I figured out what they were doing, then keep watching until I thought I’d puzzled out why they were doing it. Eventually, through observation and mimicry, I picked up things like liveline roll casting, hauling to increase line speed, changing casting position for a better drift, cocking my back cast sideways to duck under overhanging limbs, mending line and so on. I also learned that if you spent enough time watching someone fish, they’d eventually get self-conscious enough to flub a cast.

And it wasn’t much of a stretch from watching fishermen to watching the rivers themselves, which would also give up a secret or two if you paid close enough attention. I was at an impatient age with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about most things, but I trained myself to be a slow fisherman and when people accuse me of that now, I take it as a compliment. The most skillful people I ever knew—fishermen or not—were, if not actually slow, then at least in no big hurry.

So: a casting tip here, a fly pattern there, maybe a useful new knot and my own patient observations. No one thing made all the difference, but I eventually pieced things together enough to become an adequate fly fisherman. Supplemental reading helped and, later on, so did spending time with good fishermen. Some were technicians who did things entirely by the book (and in some cases went on to write the books) while others had the kind of fish sense that allowed for playfulness and goofball experiments on the theory that fish don’t always know what they want, but they’ll recognize it instantly when they see it.

This all took an appalling amount of time, but time was the thing I had the most of. Like some others of my generation, I was overeducated, underemployed, at loose ends and light on prospects, but at least all the little boxes on my calendar were blank and the nearest trout stream was across the road. I also had the kind of beginner’s mind that made spending eight hours on the water in order to catch a single eight-inch trout seem like a fair return on my investment. And for that matter, the sense that catching a fish was the exception rather than the rule was good preparation for Atlantic salmon and steelhead fishing where, as Ted Leeson once said, hooking one is so rare that it “borders on religious experience and happens about as often.”

Anyway, I never had much of what you could call formal instruction until years later when I met Vince. I was writing an outdoor sports column for a daily newspaper at the time and, always hungry for fresh material, I decided to take a casting class from him and write about it. It turned into a better story than I expected, I ended up making a friend and I was embarrassed by how much the lesson improved my casting.

So, when I now say I’m a self-taught fisherman, what I really mean is that I was taught by a mostly volunteer faculty of strangers, and although I won’t go so far as to say I owe that favor to others because it was once done for me, that’s at least something I think about.

I don’t know how long I spent on that lower run, but by the time I saw Vince walking back downstream, I’d caught plenty of fish and the hatch was petering out anyway, so I was happy enough to reel in and take a break.

We poured coffee from the thermos, perched on the tailgate as people have done since the invention of the pickup truck, and Vince launched into his story, which took a while. (We’re both extemporaneous storytellers, but one of us edits his first drafts more extensively than the other.) He was just far enough into the tale that when a black Jeep pulled up behind us and a young guy with long hair and wearing a big grin got out, I knew who it must be.

The guy shook Vince’s hand, thanked him again for all his help and said that he’d landed four trout on that Red Quill and missed a few others, which is the best he’d done so far in a single day of fishing. (I remember liking the optimism of that “so far.”) Then he shook Vince’s hand again, shook mine for good measure, and was off down the canyon in a shower of gravel to pick up his daughter.

Without missing more than a beat, Vince finished his story. After helping the guy, he’d walked upstream looking for a place to fish. There’s private, posted water just around the bend from that upper pool, but it occurred to him that he’d never taken a close look at the little stretch of river in between. (Me neither, come to think of it. Like many older fishermen, I’ve gotten so used to what I already know that I sometimes overlook the obvious.)

It was a short stretch of riffly pocket water that didn’t look like much at first, but it was all he had, so he spent the better part of an hour methodically picking apart all the miniature slicks and plunges with short casts and drifts. He caught several fish, including one he described as “a really nice brown trout,” which, on this river, I understood to mean a well-fed 15 inches, give or take an inch. It came from a small but deep bucket behind a rock within sight of the no trespassing sign, but still on the legal side of it. There couldn’t have been more than 75 yards of river in there, but it wasn’t visible from the road and he’d never fished it before, so every inch of it must have seemed undiscovered.

It may have occurred to both of us that that little stretch of pocket water and the trout that came out of it could have been a reward for Vince’s good deed, but he didn’t say it and neither did I. I think we’d both like it if the world actually worked that way, but we don’t really believe it does.