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Relaxing?
I'm sure everyone with a significant other has had a similar experience. She has a friend over. They're in the other room. You're at your fly-tying bench. They're talking about you. Inevitably their conversation turns to why you waste (the friend's words, not your S.O.'s) so much time on that fly fishing thing.
"Is he obsessive-compulsive?"
"Well, he finds it relaxing," your one true love says, leaping to your defense.
As you listen to them talk, you begin trimming the densely packed deer-hair head of a muddler you've been struggling with for 20 minutes. After a few snips to tame the wildest hairs, you steady the scissors to flatten the bottom a bit. The cut is off kilter, so you snip again to straighten it out. This continues, each snip slightly off plumb until you realize the damn deer-hair head is practically gone and the fly is useless.
"Motherf@%$er!" you scream.
"Well, not the fly tying," your wife quickly offers, "but the fishing. He finds the fishing wonderfully relaxing."
Sitting there, your lap littered with fly-tying flotsam, deer hair having sneaked up the legs of your shorts, you begin to itch. And as you scratch, you find yourself remembering some of those wonderfully relaxing days astream . . .
The day you got to Silver Creek three hours before the trico hatch to secure a place on the river. How you began casting your favorite little poly-wing spinner as soon as trout began rising to the dead mayflies that suddenly littered the water. How the trout snubbed your offering, so you lengthened your leader. How they rose to look at it, even bumped it with their noses, but refused to eat. How you dropped down a few thousandths on the diameter of the leader, and they looked harder. How this went on, playing with the leader, casting furiously, making changes, finally changing the fly to one a size smaller and a trout finally ate it! How you struck too soon and yanked the fly out of his mouth, but confident you finally had the winning formula you cast again, only to realize that there were practically no bugs on the water. The hatch was ending. The trout stopped rising - and you were fishless. Remembering, sitting there at your bench absent-mindedly scratching your animal hair-infested crotch, you mutter it, again. "Motherfu@%$er." And your wife's friend casts you a disapproving glance through the open door.
Turning away from her withering gaze, you remember another day on the water. This time a rainy day on Vancouver Island only a couple of miles from saltwater on a little river almost nobody knows about, one you'll never mention back home. The day you cast a 6-weight even though you were fishing for steelhead, because the river was small for a steelhead stream. How you cast and retrieved, cast and retrieved, cast and retrieved over barely-visible steelies hugging the bottom in rising water that was growing murky. How the index finger you were stripping the fly line over had been cut until it was bleeding. How the rain kept pouring down, and you were soaked and shivering . . . when one of those chrome-plated beauties finally ate your fly, screamed to the surface and jumped trailing diamonds of dripping river. How you slipped and fell following him over wet cobbles with studded boots - the absolute wrong choice for hard, shiny river rock - splitting your lip and bloodying your nose against a boulder, and then felt the line go slack. "Motherfu . . ." you catch yourself, remembering S.O. and her friend in the next room. But it's too late. Another disapproving glance from Friend.
No matter, your memory is on a roll now. The canoe trip on the Current. The soft green light of the gentle Missouri Ozarks. The canoe your buddy built years ago as a teenager and stored in his grandparents' barn on the rafters. All the planning. The long day driving to get there from Chicago, and the reward when you finally set that lovely little wooden craft in an eddy and loaded it up with gear until the gunwales were inches from the water. How you felt strong and confident as you paddled. How you smiled in the bow, your good buddy ruddering his pride and joy around the obstacles of a river he'd known since he was little. How you smashed the bow into a rock your bomb-proof draw somehow failed to pull the overloaded canoe away from, and how the boulder pierced the hull. How fast you took on water. How abruptly your trip ended. How your gracious friend never blamed you.
And you smile as you continue to scratch.
It may not exactly be relaxing, you think, but damn I love it.
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.
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