Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing | Ice Fishing | Spin Fishing |
" All the freaky people make the beauty of the world. - Michael Franti "
When I first arrived in the San Juan country, fly fishing was a very different sport. Fly shops were a rarity here,
and well-tied flies designed for local waters were virtually non-existent unless you tied them yourself. The flies
you could buy at sporting goods stores in western slope towns consisted largely of attractor patterns made out of
poor materials - dry flies often had soft, weepy hackles and fragile quill wings that curved in all the wrong
directions. They fell apart after a few fish and spun like helicopter blades when you cast them. They were usually
tied on hooks the size of harpoons with barbs that could have held a whale - assuming you could strike hard enough
(and not break the lousy leader) to set the hook. Few fishermen flattened a barb in those days. Almost everyone cast
a line at least two sizes too heavy for the small streams we often fished, and when we found ourselves on rivers
appropriate for our six- and seven-weight rods, the rods themselves proved to be far too whippy to cover the water
with anything remotely resembling the efficiency of today's fly rods. True, sophisticated anglers with money could
order good flies from catalogues, and even get some pretty good rods by mail order, but the average western slope
angler made do with flies and tackle hugely inferior to what is available today.
But we had one thing going for us that fisherman in more sophisticated places had long since lost - solitude. The
angling bounty of the Rockies was known to a number of hard-core fly fishermen from elsewhere, but the hoards of
eastern and west coast anglers who would show up later were still either unborn, or mostly flinging their flies and
lures somewhere else. A day on a stream or river, back then, was a day wrapped in a soothing blanket of solitude, and
I'm not sure the advances in tackle and flies we've made since have compensated us for its loss.
In those years, I'd often set myself some kind of goal - like try to fish the entire length of Lime Creek, from high
alpine tundra to tall timber and scrub-lined Animas in a single season between snowmelt summer and the fresh snowfall
of a new autumn. The summer I did that, I ran into only two other fisherman along the 12-mile length of the stream.
One was a spincaster. The other was a fly fisherman, who greeted me like a long-lost brother. We sat down on a log,
admired each other's fly boxes and talked about other places we liked to fish. That's how it was in the fly fishing
fraternity back then. There weren't as many of us, and it seemed everyone was eager to swap a few flies and a tale or
two.
Fly fishing has taken off for a number of reasons. Some blame the release of Robert Redford's movie based on the
novella, A River Runs Through It, for popularizing the sport, but I don't think we can fault the "The Movie"
for the crowded nature trout streams. There are simply more people these days - the population of the country has
more than doubled since I learned to cast a fly. Streams used to be harder to get to. Years ago, it was a rare
fisherman who had a vehicle that could handle four wheeling, and those who fished drove their everyday sedans and
two-wheel-drive pickups to a wide spot in the last decent road and hoofed it in from there. Modern fly rods are
easier to cast and good instruction is readily available. Fly fishing has become a little like golf in the past few
decades - many who really don't care for it as much as they might, don't care about watershed health or trout as much
as they could, have learned to do it out of a kind of economic or social necessity. Business is conducted on the
stream. People "network."
This week, I was able to sneak away for a few days of fishing by myself in places where there were no other
fishermen. I was alone on the water, fishing at my own pace, and maybe even more wonderfully, sometimes choosing not
to fish. I ceased expecting someone to appear around the next bend in the river. I walked the bank looking for trout.
I cast when I spotted fish feeding. Sometimes, I cast when I just liked the appearance of the water. Somewhere near
the end of my third day of fishing, it dawned on me that I had not been on a river utterly alone like this in years,
and it had certainly been decades since most of my angling days were spent this way.
In all those seasons, now gone, I never felt lonely. This week, I was greeted by wind and weather, felt the warmth of
the sun and an occasional chill when a passing cloud would cover it up. The promising smell of damp earth filled my
nostrils as tiny green shoots broke through. Ravens perched in the trees, sometimes silently following on the breeze,
sometimes speaking with raucous voices. An eagle powered past me, upriver, as I stood still in the current, the
whoosh of his wings loud in my ears. I felt the throb and tug of some magnificent fish.
It used to be like that most days. I intend to seek more of them. We live in a place where the word "remote" still
has meaning. It just takes a little more searching to get there.
On a river, one is the least alone number I can imagine.
Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of
Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans, and San Juan River Chronicle.
Email this article