A shout out to a new friend with a lot in common

...and a shameless plug to myself:
http://tippetsandleaders.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/tippet-and-leader-blog-no-not-this-blog-by-another-guy/#comment-235

Passing down gifts from one father to another

Note: This blog was published Sun, Jun 15, 2008, in The Beaufort (S.C.) Gazette

I don't know how old I was or whether I opened a suspiciously long package tied up in gift wrap one Saturday morning. I don't know if the rod and reel inside that wrap was new or used, if it was old and had been polished by my dad or whether he bought it one night while he moonlighted selling lawnmowers at the Montgomery Ward just up the road from our house.

I don't remember the first time I cast it or the last time. I wish I knew where it was today.

But I do know the reel was a Johnson Skipper 125 with closed bail and the little thumb trigger on it, and it was green and sort of an off-white with a white handle.

The rod it was attached to might have been 3 or 4 feet. It was a two-piece, though; I remember this because Dad had shown me how to rub the tip of the ferrule behind my ear to get it good and greasy so that it would slide into the female end. It, too, was sort of an off-white with a tint of green to it, like an Easter egg that was taken from the green food-coloring dye way too early. It had red threaded wraps around the shiny steel guides.

As I sit in my office writing this, I can occasionally glance at an old photograph of that rod and reel in the small and clumsy hands of maybe a 5- or 6-year old boy. But the rod is holding steady because my father's right hand is gently guiding it as we fish off a small bridge over the Erie Canal near a place called Poverty Flats in central New York State.

Although I can remember my first open bale reel — a brand called Match, which my dad must have thought was "Mitchell" when we bought it from an old fly-tier who worked out of his garage a mile or so from our house. It was green, just like a Mitchell, and the style of lettering was very similar. Of course the price was far cheaper, and Dad thought we got a great deal on it.

I couldn't tell you how happy I was to have a better reel than the Montgomery Ward Speed-King my dad used. He often reminded me.

It's been years since I had replaced the Mitchell — or Match — but I never noticed that it wasn't the real deal until a year or so ago when I pulled it from an old fishing box that my dad gave me and looked at the label. I was half expecting to find a vintage Mitchell from 1972 or so. I found a Match.

I never bothered to search for the brand on the Internet; 35 years later, it hardly matters. I still have that reel, and it means the world to me, even though it doesn't work anymore.

The box in which it sits is of old wood, a bit bigger than a shoe box, with a picture of a tall ship shellacked onto it. Inside are several old reels; Shakespeares, Speed-Kings, Pfluegers and the old Match. Each reel has a story, and none ever worked for me except the Match, which, of course, no longer works, either.

The Shakespeare is the one my dad used for years and years as we plunked from stream to river to pond to lake all over the wilderness of my childhood. The Speed-Kings are baitcasters, and I never recall my dad fishing with those. They make great paperweights, though. The Pflueger "was retired," my dad used to say. It was a present from his bride. That one's very special to me.

The one reel that's not in the box, however, is the Johnson. Why did I memorize that model? Why can I close my eyes and feel it in my hand? Why do I feel very close to my dad when I think about it? He's been gone from this good earth for more than a decade, and I hadn't fished with it since I maybe I was 6 or 7.

I do remember the day that picture was taken, although, for the life of me, I can't remember who took the picture. Girls weren't allowed, so it wasn't one of my four sisters and definitely not my mom. It could have been my Uncle Fritz. Or it could have been my dad's best friend, Lenny.

Man, that photo — my dad's grin is ear to ear. It's the way I most remember him: A smile as though it started somewhere far down deep in his soul, gained steam in his heart, and, like a full-body exhale of pride and satisfaction, lit up his face. Even the bushy 1970s mustache couldn't hide it.

The love for the outdoors and fishing had been instilled in me one Saturday morning at a time. And even walking into the garage to look at my fishing tackle hanging from the wall on any given day sparks feelings of pride — a strong connection to my father.

A social psychologist may link it to the ritual of hunting and gathering, a skill and art passed down from father to son, instilled young as we watch and learn to survive. Maybe that's bunk. Maybe it's just the enormous and swollen pride that my father felt as we hopped in the car on a Saturday morning to adventure off to uncharted territory, free to eat cheeseburgers at greasy diners, listen to the radio loud and bang on the dashboard, trespass on property and fish in rivers that only the Mohawk Indians every fished in, so he'd tell me as he kicked the shale underfoot to uncover a genuine Mohawk arrowhead, as if on cue.

I can honestly say that I couldn't have written this memoir a year ago. While the reel has been on my mind since the day it was presented to me, I didn't know the feeling of pride that it was packaged with — that is until I had a boy of my own one year ago.

Kostyn Orrie shares the middle name of my dad's first name by no mistake. I have plans for us. And they involve retelling the tales my own father told me when I was just a boy. They involve us ramrodding the unpaved roads of this world until they end at a trout stream or a bass hole where we will fish, eat wild berries and catch fish.

So one day recently, out of these fond memories and the promises of days fishing together, I searched and searched and found what I was looking for.

A Johnson Skipper 125.

There it was, sitting behind the glass of an Internet shopping store. It was listed under the vintage items, and I would have paid $300 for it in a second.

It was, however, not quite 5 bucks. The postage was another $4. Funny thing is that it was only barely used, still with the box. And it's the same exact model that I had back in 1970.

Despite that my son is too young to use the reel — and even when he is old enough, he might not understand the significance of an old green reel when all his friends have bright gold Penns — my heart will glow.

He may not cry when it breaks, and someday he'll probably forget he even held it in his hands.

But maybe he will remember.

Either way, I'll make it a point to keep it running, just like my dad did, and when he retires it, I'll put it in that old box, and maybe someday he'll pick it up, spin it in his hands a few times and smile.

As I celebrate my second Father's Day, it's impossible not to tie the intangible gifts that were handed down, those that stay within us, and those that we pass down to the next generation.

PMD hiaku

Pale morning dun glows bright,
stuck in a spider’s web
The cycle of life.

Saturday stream

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’m planning on waking before dawn, schlepping on the rain gear and heading out to the stream just across from my house. The fish here are spooky. In fact, their spookiness is legendary. The Letort Spring Run is a limestone spring-fed creek with all sorts of natives and stockies that tend to hug the underbrush of the banks and flat-out refuse to take a fly if you, your reflection or your shadow are anywhere in sight.
A buddy of mine who’s fished this stream all his life tells me that while he’ll show up in his hip waders, he doesn’t usually enter the water at all. He fishes from the bank. He’d know. Like I said, all his life, and judging from the looks of him, I’d say that’s probably around 30 years. He actually gave me three spots on the creek that he’s had some degree of success on. One right near his grandparents’ farm, one down the road from a supermarket, and the last, near and adult video store.
I’ve not been on Letort. See, I just moved to this town from about 20 miles up the road, and there was plenty of good fishing in that neck of the woods. But who can pass up a renown stream such as this, often called “the birthplace of American flyfishing?” Not me. Five-hundred yards away, the stream runs from my front door, right near an abandoned railbed, so public access shouldn’t be a problem.
It’s one of the three places Mark told me about; but I could wade up stream to the one near the grocery store.
I’ll let you know how I do, but I’m not expecting much.
Hoping, sure, but not expecting.

Hackle up

Some of the best fly-tying I’ve done has been sitting at someone else’s kitchen table the night before a journey to a new trout stream. Or in the way back of the SUV, rushing to figure out that pattern of that rust-colored caddis or bright sulfur dun.
I’m not one of those guys who packs the tying kit into his vest or even leaves it in the SUV, but I will bring it along for a long weekend of fishing, especially in places that I haven’t fished before and mostly in odd geographies.
I remember bass fishing in a series of central Florida lakes not too long ago with my father-in-law, Tom. You could kick a pebble into the lake and these ugly lunkers would eat it, but cast a dry fly above it, and for get it. They’d nuzzle it, and not liking the tickle on their noses, turn away, one by one. I’m sure if I have a hotdog or some popcorn, I’d have been all set.
The bass, however, were eating these small dragonflies, so dark blue they were black.
So that night, knowing that we’d be back fishing the next morning, we tied a couple of these things over a couple of Samuel Adams and slices of pizza. Not much too it: Take a streamer hook, spin some black muskrat onto the thing, section off the body with black thread, leave a nice long “tail” hooking up, bead the head and tie in a couple of small black mallard wings, and poof, the perfect little dragonflies.
I thought that was pretty cool. They were astonishingly lifelike creatures and sat nicely on the table.
The next day, we went back to the lake, tied on the dragonflies, but the bass had moved on and were no longer interested in the dragonflies. First of all, we were fishing in the afternoon the day before, and you couldn’t cast without almost hitting a dragonfly. But the next morning, the dragonflies were nowhere to be found.
(We ended up using some colorful dry flies, and did OK. But I have to say it was a little disappointing to not have caught a five-pounder on a home-tied and concocted dragonfly pattern.)
Then there was the time Tom and I fished the Holston River in eastern Tennessee while the snow was still dripping off the Blue Ridge. We had a load of nymphs, and it poured rain most of the time we were there. Except one night, near the Holston Dam, as we were heading in, a man who looked like an Orvis model walked out, beaming ear to ear. Most folks were getting out of the river, and we had merely come down to see what the access was like, to return the next morning.
The man clearly was happy to be back in the river after what was probably a long winter, even for eastern Tennessee. I had to ask how he did. He said great. Then he handed me a No. 20 hook with a bead of brown thread woven around it. “I caught a few monsters on this.”
I took the gift, thanked him, jumped into my waders and sprinted for the dam.
With about a half-hour of daylight left, I made a cast, felt a tug, set the hook and pulled. The tipped snapped, and the fish took off with the gift. I tried some other small nymphs, ornately tied. Nothing.
Raging against the dying of the light and Tom waiting patiently on the bank, I felt my way back to the bank and told Tom, “Let’s go tie a bunch of these tonight.”
We ate a couple of greasy cheeseburgers, headed back to the cabin, got out the beer and the kits, and tied caviar.
That night, a cold front rolled through like a hurricane, and brought with it torrential downpours. The rain was so cold, it should have been snow. It stung our faces and numbed our hands, but there we were, back on the river waist-deep, shivering and throwing copper eggs at inactive fish.
Skunked again.
Weather changes, fish change, streams rise and fall. Sometimes they ice over, sometimes they warm up. Hatches change. Sometimes they look more brown, other times more gray. You just don’t know. Fly tiers, then, have to be prepared and willing to walk out of the river, sit down on the bank or back in the way back of the SUV, and spend a half hour or hour tying the insect du jour. Not everything exists in a fly box, although I’ve seen men with libraries in their vests.
It’s easy to catch fish on your home waters, and it’s easy when a guide points you in the right direction or a buddy has done his homework. But to be truly prepared, well, that takes the ability to shift gears and hackle up.

Anticipating the season's end

Here it is, mid August, 91 degrees, a thick haze cloaks downtown Harrisburg.
And all I can think about is winter.
Am I nuts?
I’ve often written and spoke about the seasons, how they force you to uproot routine, adapt, adjust... These are good traits to have. As a Northeasterner, you’re forced deal with uncertainty. Maybe not so much as an Alaskan or New Foundlander (although, there is a definite rhythm to their lives, because the alternative isn’t merely whether you can fish on a Saturday morning in the rain or snow, but whether you might actually live to tell about it). Spontaneity doesn’t just come from a serendipitous persona or a Picabo Street upbringing (although these things are important ingredients); you have to have an open mind and your fishing gear in a pile by the door (or better – already in the back of your SUV) so that when the thunderstorm stops, the wife takes the babies shopping with your mother-in-law on a Wednesday night, or the lawnmower won’t start on a Saturday morning, you can be in your waders, on the river, with the correct pattern all in about a half-hour.
But with the changing seasons, the weather, the type of precipitation, come changes in the way you fish, the flies you use, the rivers you chose.
Then comes winter, and, for the most part, you’re replacing the rods, waders and vest in the back of the SUV with sandbags and an emergency shovel. You start thinking more about clearing off the desk, maybe moving it back under the window so that you can gaze across the road, field, mountains in between adding a band of elk hair to a caddis or tinsel to a coachmen. There’s all the hope that comes with a new season, although it may still be months away from opening day. You’ll fish: Down South, or when you feel pent up enough to venture into the frigid streams on a balmy winter day. Your fly inventory will grow, as will your skills. Most importantly, you’ll become a better fly tier and take some time to think rather than do. Meticulously plan. Take apart ever gear in each reel. Pore through catalogs for that perfect five-weight.
You’ll think back on all those little weekend jaunts or big fishing trips. Maybe even those perfect river days with a buddy or by yourself. That huge brown, that fighting rainbow. The mountains, scent of balsam, sting of cold morning that changes so sudden into a warm summer day. The blooms that weren’t that just last weekend. The school of fish that are getting smarter, bigger, stronger.
You’ll go over your favorite spot on your favorite creek and wonder how the ice, the strong spring currents and the winter storms will change it. How you’ll adapt.
It’s a seasonal meditation, and it’s something I long for.
I used to have an old sailboat. She was a beauty – a real Yankee catboat. She was eighteen feet, eight at the beam, with the most gorgeous lines. I secretly loved the comments that I would get when I passed by fellow sailors on their gargantuan yachts or folks on the dock saying how lovely she was. I knew it. I loved her, too. It’s why I acquired her in the first place. She was art on the water. Brightwork and brass.
And I loved to sail her. To feel the spray from her bow, to smell the salt and spartina on the rivers and sounds, to hear the water lapping at her hull.
But as much as I loved sailing her, I loved sanding and stripping the boat each spring, varnishing the brightwork, polishing the brass, painting the hull, oiling the teak. Setting her slowly in the water, and she’d reflect hard.
See, the planning, the preparation, the purchasing of the right materials. Spending time on the craftsmanship of it. Improving her. Anticipating what she’d look like when the last of the bootstripe was painted on, when the great white sail was hoisted, when she cut the first wave under sail.
They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I believe this of just about anything we do. Sure, you don’t want that absence to be so long that you forget; but just long enough to allow you to appreciate what you’re missing. It’s a good discipline, and it translates well into fly fishing.
So, sure, it’s mid August, and the rivers are warm and the evening hatches are abundant. But there’s anticipation for the end of the season, and the beginning of a new one.

Puzzle pieces

I’ve mentioned a couple things about my fishing or personal ticks a time or two, but it really takes going back through a year of one’s own notes to pluck out the really consistent ones – those that, if you were popular enough to whatever group, when mocking you, they’d personify these traits.
I’ve had reporters in my newsrooms do or say “Chrisisms:” Rubbing their foreheads with two hands while pretending to edit a particularly grueling story; saying, “Here’s the thing,” as they pretend to enlighten a reporter or just stand there with their hands in their pockets aloof, as if they’re a million miles away.
You get the idea.
But back to that list of ticks. And mind you, I’m not complaining.
I like to fish alone, generally. This way, there’s no one to perch upstream of me, no one to tell me when to go home (or the converse of that), no one to think I’m nuts for wanting to wade up the river a couple of miles or camp in a den of rattlesnakes.
Then again, there’s no one to carry me out of the woods after a rattlesnake bite or to cut off my waders when they’re filling up with water… I realize this, so I tend to be more conservative out there alone.
The second tick is that I tend to not be conservative enough out there. Oh, sure, I carry a first-aid kit, don’t go chasing bear cubs or throw rocks at copperheads, but I have an odd broken compass somewhere in my mind that always seems to point “through there,” or “just up over that ridge” or, worse, “just across that deep part there.”
I’m 43 and relatively healthy. I haven’t been bitten, attacked, mulled, shot at (well, once, but that was on a mountain bike in a farmer’s field in deer season), or drowned. I have two small boys and a lovely wife, and although my life insurance payments are current, I have no plans to not enjoy a long life with them.
I’m a bit antisocial. If there are 70 miles of river, and the first 10 are shoulder-to-shoulder, I’m going to hike or drive up to find the place that I don’t see signs of people or modern life for that matter. I don’t want to see another fly rod – or worse, a bait caster – upstream, don’t want to hear road noise, if there’s a power line, I’m out of there, and God forbid if there is a No Trespassing sign.
I know this: I need therapy.
But that’s exactly why I’m out here. The wilderness of it all, a simpler time (with the cushion of knowing modern life -- which include snake-bite units at the local hospitals, Dunkin’Donuts, a warm, dry bed – is about an hour from the trout stream) is what I’m after. That and trout, and both being equal to present the result of the perfect fishing spot.
I also prefer to listen to Gordon Lightfoot or some other sort of folky old music on the way to the stream – or nothing at all. I’ve been known to drive 1,000 miles at a time without so much as looking down at the radio or thinking about popping in a CD. I couldn’t tell you what’s in my CD deck right now. That doesn’t mean I don’t like music; it’s just that I relish silence. Like to hear the wind with the windows down, feel the rush of air, even if it’s cold, blowing against my face or elbow. I like my mind to wander over mountains, above the pines, over the ridges and out to that perfect 70-foot-wide river, just below the bend, where the silt’s built up on the near bank, and under the shade of the far bank, trout sit hungry, waiting for food to come downstream or fall from the rushes above.
It’s a selfish thing, I realize, but when putting oneself in nature, you want 100 percent on that connection.
As I’ve also mentioned, I have two boys, and I can’t wait for them to be old enough to join me streamside. I don’t know what it is, but I picture the three of us loading up the truck early on a Saturday morning, driving just long enough to be “out there,” and watching with pride as my two boys reel in the big ones much better and more skilled than their dad. What the heck, I don’t think I’ll even need to fish again. I might just sit on the bank and watch them as I make a pot of coffee or snap pictures.
And then there are the occasional fishing buddies (and I hope they’ve read this far. I fear they may not call me again). Jerry, Tom, Bob, Ian, BJ, to name a few. Folks I’ve come to enjoy fishing with over time, and have left me with a trove of great memories.
There was the time Ian got stuck in mud on a South Carolina riverbank, and I thought we’d have to call the fire department to run a line across the plough mug to pull him out (we were remote, so it would have been a very long line…). Or the time Bob and I had to be heli-rescued by the Coast Guard as the skiff’s engine refused to budge and the cold, February afternoon tides were lapping at us. That also was in South Carolina. There was the day Tom and I stood for hours waist-deep in a frigid east Tennessee river in a downpour worthy of the apocalypse with not so much as a snag. There was the great hurricane week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with Jerry, Ian and BJ, when we cast five-ounce British Sinkers and five ounces of mullet on thirty-pound test straight into a full gale.
Mind you, they weren’t all bad times – in fact, they were great. But, by and large, I had a hand in it. It was I who dragged Ian through the treacherous river banks. I who said we should leave the boat in the water rather than pulling it up on the bank (although it was Bob who left the key in the “on” position), I who said early March fishing in Tennessee would be warm enough, I who said, “screw it, let’s fish,” as the sand ripped at our clothing and stung our faces.
And maybe that’s another reason, or the whole reason, I venture off solo. Not that I mind taking grief for dragging people along on my hellish rides; that I feel guilty for doing so.
I apologize an awful lot to fishing buddies: “Sorry I dragged you through that muck; Sorry we walked all that way; Sorry I cast to your fish…”
And I’ve been doing it forever. This is the part of the story where I place blame, and it’s not at the hands of my parents. Well, my dad had an “adventurous” spirit, so it’s somewhat genetic. But it was probably my cousins, Cory and Stephen.
See, growing up, it’s not that we fished a whole lot together. But we got in trouble a lot together, and it was simply because: A. We were boys; and B. We had a lot to prove to ourselves and, mostly, each other. Stephen could climb trees higher than squirrels or ants. He’d get up so high, the tree would sway. Cory would climb down 200-foot waterfalls just to prove he was tougher than we were. I’d devise a cockamamie idea to traverse a busy two-lane road by running a rope from the top of one tree to the midsection of another across the way. Fortunately, we were busted before we could set sail…
These things tend to shape your personality, especially at such a young and impressionable age. And I realize, too, that one day, my boys are going to be padding over a small waterfalls, riding an ice slab down a half-frozen river, figuring out how to remove the expensive lure from a four-and-a-half-foot-long shark’s mouth or wondering if it’s safer to lie down flat on the ground or sprint the mile or two out of the woods to the car during the freak and powerful lightning storm (I vote run -- even in waders).
I wonder – and hope – whether they’ll want to fish with me.
But for some reason, and for all of that, my friends still want to fish with me, so maybe my kids will, too. Or maybe they’ll just feel sorry for me. Or maybe they go it’s because they know I’ll let them drink Mountain Dew and eat chocolate-chip pancakes for the breakfast that I’ll buy them, just as my dad did when I was a boy.
Jerry is one of my oldest friends, and he’s my newest fishing buddy. We were roommates in college a couple of times, and whenever we are sitting around a campfire, driving to a river, or retying tippets on the bank, I remember just how similar we are. That’s what brought me to being his roommate in the first place, thinking, “he’s kinda like the brother I never had” (without being too mushy). What I mean is that it’s like we grew up together. We had similar opinions of things, strong opinions, even. We understood the beauty of utility (although he recently bought an Audi that whenever we go fishing he regrets doing), we see through bullshit, although through different lenses: He’s a cop, I’m a journalist (and you’d think that would be a cat-dog thing, but we have a mutual respect for each other’s public service or gluttony for punishment), and, most importantly, we’re strong family guys with an enormous appetite, love and respect for the outdoors.
Which is why, while rifling through back roads between Coburn and Mifflintown, Pennsylvania as we sought the perfect – well, any good unposted – spot on Penn’s Creek, we drove a little slower as the clouds draped the Poe and Paddy ridges of the Alleghenies, took the foot off the gas pedal when we drove through a field of pre-dusk fireflies – thousands of them at chest-level, as if we were going through the time warp scene in the original “Star Wars.” Sitting around the campfire with a few ice-cold Newcastles, listening to the croakers on the pond. Staring up at the sharp ridge towering 1,000 feet straight up from Penn’s Creek, like the hand of a sundial blocking out the sun.
There were no fish that weekend. Too hot, perhaps, too something. The local fly shop owner was stumped. He told us there were something like 30,000 trout per square mile of river, square foot. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have mattered. They weren’t interested in the array of flies I brought or bought at the shop, the array of presentations, the yellow pale morning duns landing on the water or the sulfurs hatching on the near bank.
I can’t say that it didn’t matter – it always matters. Catching fish is nothing short of opening presents under the Christmas tree. So despite all the festive lights, the snowfall, the fire in the fireplace, or the scent of fresh pastries wafting from the oven, getting a new Orvis reel is always a treat.
So is catching a brown in unfamiliar waters.
The other quality the Jerry and I share, even though we’ve never talked about it and I’m only assuming this: Fishing buddies shouldn’t be obtrusive. It’s like when someone’s trying to talk to you when you’re reading a good book or write a blog post.
I sound like a hermit, I know. The whole Man v. Nature thing is different. The rules aren’t the same. There are laws. Or maybe there aren’t, and shouldn’t be; just respect.
Respect or the peace and tranquility, for the connection. Despite all our wires and fast-food coursing through our veins, we’re as organic as the next oak or bullfrog.
So maybe they’re not really ticks at all, just, I don’t know, particles connecting like a missing puzzle piece.
You step off the bank and into the river, and the picture becomes complete.

Gingrich

"A trout is a moment of beauty known only to those who seek it."
- Arnold Gingrich

For Betters or for Worse

The first time I met legendary fly-fisherman, rod builder, fly tier and author Fran Betters, I was 20 years old and didn’t know a Wulff from a caddis. I also didn’t know that the west branch of the Ausable River in Wilmington, N.Y., or more specifically the trophy water stretch near Fran’s Adirondack Sport Shop, would come back to haunt me some 22 years later.
Yet here I am.
I spent my college years at Plattsburgh State studying journalism, environmental conservation and the rivers, trails, peaks and history of the Adirondack Park, a park so vast you could fit Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Glacier National parks into it and still have room left over. This place is familiar, if not sacred, to me.
Needless to say, perhaps, the park’s trout streams are also legendary, and none more so than the Ausable, which bounds along in two branches as it rushes its way into Lake Champlain nearly 40 miles east and over boulders so big and gorges so steep that only God himself could have created them.
Anyone who’s fought a brown trout in the blue ribbon waters or seen Fran cast a fly into a paper cup is probably a believer, too.
Some 23 years later, here I watch the mighty Ausable once more. June has given way to July, and the dry season has begun. The river’s level is by no stretch low, but the whitewater-adrenaline kayakers have long left the rapids brought on by the High Peaks’ snowmelt and spring rains.
Surprisingly, I don’t have a fly rod in my hand. Instead, I have a thought in my mind as my wife and two boys peer over the roadside from inside my slow-moving SUV up a 10 percent grade.
Could I do this again?

###

After a ham sandwich at The Evening Hatch, the restaurant attached to Adirondack Sport Shop, I chat with the eatery’s new owner, John. I ask him how business is, how long he’s run the joint and what the future looks like. Nine months in, he’s optimistic. But there is a little hesitation, because his landlord, Fran Betters himself, is approaching the end of his life. His heart is giving out.
I’d known this: It’s the reason I’m here, in a peripheral way. See, Fran’s selling his shop, and, although it still sounds a million miles away, I’m interested in buying it.
That is, me and just about everyone with a connection to this place.
Now, those of you who know me know I don’t have boatloads of venture capital, and I’m leagues away from being a trust-funder. But, as the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I walk back to the fly shop through a french door where Fran, now in his late 70s, occupies a chair at the opposite end, but stays still sort of in the middle of it all.
He doesn’t look too good. The first indicator is that he is half resting on a bed pillow, sort of propped up, and the second is that he is breathing somewhat laboriously through a tube. He also doesn’t look up from his fly-tying bench as I approach, but I pick up my oldest son, Kostyn, just a smattering over two years old, and tell him to say hello to Mr. Betters, thinking it will bring a smile to the old fisherman’s face.
It works. But I’m more than a bit taken aback by Fran’s condition. Admittedly, I choke. I want to tell him what an influence he was as a fisherman and a writer, and that, although he won’t remember me watching over his shoulder as he expertly tied his famed Ausable Wulff pattern or signed a copy of his book, “Flyfishing in the Adirondacks,” he is a giant. And although my son probably won’t remember this day either, at least he can say he met the man.
In the end, that’s good enough for me. Fran looks up from his chair, half-smiles and says, “I bet you’re going to be a fisherman someday,” or something along those lines, I don’t quite remember. It’s a nice gesture. I keep thinking that this might be the last time I come back to his shop, at least with him sitting here.

###

As the story goes, when Fran was a young man with dreams of becoming an engineer, he was in a horrific car accident and suffered a broken back and some other bones. He was lucky to be alive let alone walk, and he was told he probably wouldn’t live into his 40s. In the mid ‘6os, he traded cut logs for the property that his former shop sat on -- less than a half mile up Route 86 from where the current shop is. For nearly 50 years, he has continued to inspire, teach and motivate thousands of fishermen -- like me -- as they plied the waters of the Ausable, Saranac and Bouquet, or some other waters around the planet.
He’s a master fly tier, and at least two of his patters, the Haystack and the Ausable Wulff made him world famous. Field & Stream magazine named his Wulff a top 10 pattern of all-time. That’s saying something in a fly fishing world that has literally thousands of patterns and variations, and more coming every day.
Fran likes to share his knowledge, holding clinics, classes, writing guides and books and just chatting casually from his helm in the fly shop. That’s where my education began. I flipped through a book in his shop one day after a unsuccessful jaunt on the river, and I decided I’d buy it. The author, after all, was sitting right there. The woman behind the counter told me he might just sign it for me, as if to help make the sale. He did. Then I asked about the river and the fly patterns. When I left, I had with me more than a few famous flies and a signed book; I had inspiration and a bit of knowledge I knew even then I probably would have to grow into.
It’s probably worth noting that I didn’t leave Plattsburgh that summer to go home like most of the other students did. Stupidly, I was married young, and I took a lot of the mornings I didn’t have to work and headed into the mountains to hone my fly fishing skills. Little did I know that learning to fish in the Ausable was at least as stupid as getting married as a college kid. No use in dredging that up, but I did have a lot of time in that short year of matrimony to fish and learn a lot about the area.
But once my studies ended, I left the region and never went back.
Here are some highlights from that time (out of order merely for effect):
1. Catching a 12-inch brown in the trophy section of the Ausable out of probably nothing but dumb luck;
2. Learning how to fish pockets and cast long in the Saranac;
3. Stumbling through logging roads and coming across the most beautiful stretch of the Bouquet River imaginable;
4. Learning to nymph in the early spring’s ferocious cold; and
5. Watching Fran Betters tie an Ausable Wulff.
Years later, I spent some time in the Catskills, then back up to Albany before leaving the Northeast for Florida then South Carolina. It was in South Carolina that I hit what may have been my midlife crisis, and wanting all things from my childhood and the glory days that followed, I bought an old hot-rod truck, started drumming again, plotted to move back to the Northeast and began fly fishing exclusively (except when I went to the Outer Banks, but I promise that this year, I’m bringing the 10-foot saltwater flyrod).
Now, back in the Northeast and fishing some pretty incredible waters in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area, and the Adirondacks closer within my reach, I find that, like a magnet, the peaks and the Ausable are tugging pretty hard. After all, this was the place this once-young idealist thought he’d end up. And maybe it’s not too late.
Or maybe it’s not meant to be, who knows? But it’s a load of fun to think about, and I’ll always have those memories and be building more as time and the good Lord allow.

###

As I leave Adirondack Sport Shop in the fog Fran leaves me in, I think about a life back near Lake Placid, in the shadow of Whiteface Mountain and the High Peaks. I think about mountain biking, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing and fishing. I think about my boys running around a lodge that I’d have built up with the help of family and friends. I think about the satisfaction of handing it down to those boys, who would grow up, much like Fran, solid and knowledgeable fishermen and all-around good men. I think about my wife, our families, working hard to build a dream, and that this dream wouldn’t be mine alone.
That’s all the stuff you think about when dreaming, isn’t it?
I wonder how many other folks who have been moved by Fran feel the same way. I wonder if they’re contemplating looking at his tax returns, what’s coming in, what’s going out. Talking to Realtors, banks, family. I wonder if it could work. Is it too much a gamble? Is the competition too great? Too emotional to be a good deal? How would I run a shop that a master fly tier and rod builder, a practical legend, built? Who would come to see me?
Maybe I can tie a fly that would make Field & Stream’s top 10 of all-time. Probably not. But maybe I can make a go of it.
God puts us all in places that we never know we’re going to be, and whether we’re OK with that idea or not, I tend to find comfort in that. Testimony: I’ve never found myself eating out of garbage cans or shivering under a bridge, for that matter.
So I’m doing three things this week (again, not in order, for effect):
1. Calling the Realtor to look at those returns;
2. Putting together a simple business plan; and
3. Writing a letter to Fran to properly thank him.

The Birthday Trout

There are two types of old men in this world: Those with the patient, gentle-breathing tranquility and perspective only years of experience and perseverance can bring, and those too impatient to look behind them when they’re backing out of their driveways, blaming the kid who put his now-flattened bike beneath the grump’s Buick in the first place.
And it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that the older I get, the more I am in the former camp, but still have the tendencies of the latter.
Fortunately, though, and for the record, I am neither, simply because I’m a mere 43. I seem to be, however, at sort of a crossroads deciding which direction to take.
I know this because when Jerry and I made plans a month ago to fish on West Canada Creek, I had to hold back from telling him that I wanted to be on the river bank before the sky even considered graduating from coal black to that steely silver, you know, were you have to squint really hard to see where the land ends and the water begins.
“OK,” was all he said when I called when I got into town and asked if he wanted to pick me up at 6. It’s not that he didn’t flinch. It’s that he paused a second to calculate from 6 a.m. just when he’d have to wake up.
See, Jerry lives about a half hour from my Mom’s house in Rome, New York. That’s where I was staying along with my two sleepy kids and an even sleepier wife.
(Generally, when my fishing alarm goes off, the dog wakes up, which sets into motion a cadre of dog noises: the dog-collar jingle when she shakes off, grunts, groans and scraping her nails on the hardwood as she stretches, and the flit-flit-flit-flit-flit-flit of her scratching an itch on her belly. All of this, of course, wakes the baby, who begins to coo, kick and flail and, without fail, cry. Which wakes up the toddler, who roles over, asks for Mama or Dada’s hands, and when he doesn’t get them, moans, then cries, then sits up. Which means Mama is up with two crying boys and an itchy dog, and Dada is scooting out the door trying not to make eye contact with his bride.)
So Jerry had to get up earlier than I did, and, as unwritten home-rule protocol suggests, he had to stop at the coffee shop for both of us and also fill the Thermos with coffee for the rest of the morning. I do the same when he fishes my home waters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It’s a good system. All told, my guess is that Jerry had to get up at least 45 minutes before I did.
But, what I wanted to say on the phone the day before as we made plans was, “How’s 5 o’clock sound? (Or 4:30?)
I’m freakish that way. And it’s not as though I don’t enjoy sleeping. I do. Hell, I’m tired right now. And with a baby and a toddler, well, sleep is often hard to come by as it is, never mind waking up in the middle of the night to get to the river before anyone else steps foot in it or to get that extra hour in or just to have something to talk about in the off event that you didn’t catch a fish that day. Something along the lines of, “Oh, but you should have seen that osprey nest up there on the far bank. The chicks just hatched and were chirping up a storm.”
So I was patient as I waited in the driveway, gear in hand, for Jerry. And we drove the 20 or so minutes up into Trenton Falls to a place just up river from where the Cincinnati Creek tributary intersects with West Canada Creek.
And even as we drove by the dam, the Cincinnati and a few choice parking areas, I breathed easy. I knew we’d be on the river shortly. Even during these longest days of summer, when the sun rises at 5:30 and already it’s at a 30-degree arc. Soon, I thought. Soon.
So when we pulled up to a little-used trailhead outside of the trophy water section, I thought, “There are bound to be fish here, too. After all, we’re only a mile or two downstream from the dam and a mile from the tributary. We grabbed our gear and made our way down the trail to the river. Greeting us was a wide expanse that was nearly glass smooth and too deep to wade across. Upriver, though, there were plenty of riffles and some boulders placed by God himself. Good feeding channels. Problem was we’d have to huff it nearly a quarter mile along the rocky banks.
More time ticking off the clock.
But there is a correlation between fishing the right spot and catching fish, so the effort would more likely give us a greater return on investment if we could avoid spooking the fish and getting below them.
I should mention that it was my 43rd birthday, and Jerry let me wade in a few yards above him. I picked a good cut, got in to the top of my hip waders and began casting a No. 16 pale morning dun that I guessed would hold me over till I could better study the river’s bugs and, hopefully, hatches.
There were a few PMDs floating by, but more light drakes than anything else, so I retied the same size in that pattern and just like that, I had an 8-inch brown trout in the net.
Some of the fish on West Canada are stocked, and they have tags affixed to them. You’re supposed to write down the number and call the game warden to let him know how Fish No. 423785 is doing, length, weight, spunkiness, etc. This one didn’t have tags. The New York State Department of Environmental Control stocks the creek pretty hefty, which brings throngs of fishermen nearer to the dam upstream. We’ll call the untagged fish the “real” fish and feel a little better if it isn’t in the 12-inch range.
West Canada Creek starts in the southern Adirondack Mountain foothills and weaves its way to Herkimer, New York, where it empties into the Mohawk River At one point, a dam in Trenton Falls creates the Hinckley Reservoir, where camps and homes line the picturesque water body. If memory serves me, there’s even a beach. Interestingly, folks seem to think the West Canada Creek begins or somehow has a connection to the country to the north. Not so. “Kanata” means “settlement” in Mohawk Indian speak.
Though all that thinking, though, I realized that an hour had passed, and the fish were probably going to slow as occasional shower bursts let go from the low clouds that brought with them a steady 10 mile an hour wind and a few short bursts that squelched any ideas of fishing like a gentleman, into the current.
So I got just below and to the side of a nice-sized boulder and made my cast. The current was pretty strong, and the rain was steady, so I figured the fish wouldn’t notice me even if it wasn’t a great presentation.
Turned out it was good enough. Funny thing, though, the line went tight once it all was a good distance behind me, and I was just thinking of pulling it out to cast again. It felt good to have a little more heft on the end of the 3X tippet and the No. 16 Cahill. I felt as if this was a fair fight. I’d never fished this river before, I couldn’t get in any deeper without tea-bagging or, worse, drowning (you always hear about the poor guy who drowned on his birthday, or his honeymoon, or some repeating holiday that makes the untimely death all that more ironic or, at the very least, more sexy for the newspaper headlines). I also didn’t know what was in that deep green water that was muted by the overcast sky and rain. Might just as well have closed my eyes.
He did surface a couple of times, enough for me to see his head, brown belly and tail, all in that order, and after a minute or so of getting him close enough to the net, he was tired out, all but flipping futile just to see who was handling him.
We only kept him out of the water a matter of seconds to snap a few pics. I thought he was a foot long, but Jerry said 14 inches, and he’s a better judge of distance because he’s an investigator and I’m a writer, so I’ll give him that.
I set the trout back in quietly, pushed the currents into his gills and eventually scooted him away from the bank and into the current where he swam away, albeit dazed.
No tag, either.
After a coffee break and a bit of time to admire the irises along the bank, we fished another hour, which was largely unproductive. Another 6-inch untagged brownie, and we called it a day.
I wonder what another hour or two in the river would have gotten us. Probably just more soaking wet.
Then again, you never know, do you?
Still, on the ride back, there’s the usual reliving of the morning, the details, which we compared to how far you got with your prom date in high school. If you’re lucky, you have them, and if you’re really living right, there are a few swigs of coffee left in the Thermos.
Thing is, there are never any regrets. Sure, you could do this all day long, and you make plans, as we did, for the next time. Maybe in a canoe. Maybe back down in Pennsylvania. Maybe a fishing weekend, camping out, fishing the morning and the evening hatches.
Maybe, hopefully, all of the above.
Life is finite; it isn’t there forever. And you can’t depress yourself counting how many potential fishing weekends there are left in your life (believe me, I’ve done this. Tally up your life expectancy foregoing any accidents, such as drowning in a trout stream, figure out how many possible fishing weekends or Saturdays there are in a normal year, subtracting the winter months, of course, and time spent with family, at weddings, with the crud or watching Penn State play, and add it all together).
But you know there’ll be a few more, and although an hour here and an hour there may add up to a few days and a few fish, the important thing is that you enjoy the company and the time. And coming to grips that time isn’t really a unit of measure after all, but that it’s ethereal, and it allows us only a place to connect, and go in and come out of green-gray rivers, and fish among untagged brown trout.
At that crossroads, I prefer the gentle calm of that silver morning. So I think I’m heading in the right direction.

A trout bum once more

The beginning of trout season is something that has rang through me like an alarm clock bell since the time I’d begun swatting the water with flies.

That came at a not-so-young age. I was, I think, 21, and I’d received the gift of a fly rod, reel and a vest from an old girlfriend who ended up being my ex-wife. It was a Fenwick rod, I think a 6-weight, with a crumby graphite reel. I still have the reel, which is no more than a paperweight, and probably shouldn’t have been anything but. The rod tip, however, skid unnoticed down the wall and right into the space between the door and the doorjamb just as she slammed the door to leave me for good.

The irony is no exaggeration.

We both heard the crunch, and she stopped on the outside doorstep, looked down, saw the broken tip, opened the door and apologized sincerely. She really meant it, I could tell.

At the time, she probably realized it although I didn’t: The rod meant a lot more.

Now, I was a young man, and had fished with my dad my whole life with the traditional-for-my­-generation bait-casting method that I today have only rare occasion for (see Outer Banks/Surfcasting). And, of course, there was my dad and I each trout season opening with our bait casters shivering in the cold New York Aprils generally not catching fish but having a good time nonetheless.

And some 20-odd years later, opening day in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania also came. Although I didn’t reach the bank on opening day, I did so soon after. Good Friday, actually. (What better way to honor the Lord by spending a half day in His glory of solitude, nature and catch-and-release trophy waters?)

Turned out I didn’t need the alarm clock at all to wake me at 5 a.m. My oldest son, Kostyn, just shy of two years, was awake, and had crawled into bed with us pleading with me not to leave.

I said I’d be back, and I was, although that didn’t assuage the enormous pang of guilt that tugged at me for the 20-minute trip to Clark’s Creek and sporadically throughout the rest of that morning.

But the commonwealth had spent a lot of taxpayer dollars to both dedicate the 2-plus-mile stretch of the creek as restricted waters and stock it with a portion of the 150,000 trout it raised for just this occasion, and, by God, I should at least reap a return on my investment.

It rained, it was cold, the water was colder. Bone-chilling, really. And a little north wind was bearing down the 30-foot-wide creek, skirting between the tight canopy and high banks as a shivered like an old man in the green-black water.

It kept the crowds away, and that’s not a bad thing.

Unfortunately, it kept the fish at the bottom, and no nymph was going to draw it out.

At least none of mine.

Clark’s Creek is a great little spot. It’s probably eight miles from my house in Susquehanna Township as the crow flies, but since I’ve no wings, just a Blazer, it’s a good 18 miles down to the flats of the Susquehanna, than horseshoe it back around the Chinese Wall – a 1500-or-so foot Ice Age scar, and one of five or so between my back deck and the icy-cold Clark’s Creek.

One day, I hope to find an old logging trail that brings me to the near side, or to one of the other more rivers right in this region – Fishing Creek, Stoney Creek and Manada Creek. It looks like the Blue Mountain Parkway reaches the first. The others are a tad more remote, and I will explore them.

Which is exactly what I should have done with Jerry, who visited with his wife and two really fantastic 7-year-old twins. Instead, I thought I’d go for the sure thing (and glad I did, knowing that this little tick I have about exploring dirt roads might have meant we would have wasted precious fishing time in the Blazer … but there’s always that chance, right?)

Jerry’s new to the sport of fly fishing, he’s happy to be here, we’re happy to have him. He, like me and a good deal of my friends, has an inherent appreciation for Brother Wilderness. Of course, the last time this old college roommate of mine and I had hooks within a few hundred feet of us goes back to the banks of the Barge Canal under the rising moon on Muck Road in our hometown of Rome, N.Y. At least I’m pretty sure Jerry was there: There was a contingent of guys, a lot of car trunks filled with coolers and a campfire. The year, I’m guessing, might have been around 1985 or ’86 … before we both headed up to Plattsburgh State University.

If I remember correctly, we didn’t catch fish that day, either.

Clark’s Creek on Saturday morning, however, was colder than opening weekend and much colder than the late spring night air chill of central New York. We should have brought the Thermos of coffee down with us. Next time, I swear.

Within a few casts of sunrise, my feet and fingers were numb. I’m pretty certain Jerry’s were, too, because, despite his novice, tying a fly in the river took quite a few extra ticks off the clock.

We fished a good stretch of the restricted area – flies only, and catch-and-release – without catching a thing. Three times I had fish on my green weenies, and each time, they spit them before I could set the hook. That seems to be a recurring issue with me.

Half the battle of being transplanted back into the great Northeast streams, where weighted nymphs bolt and bobble among the rocks and pebbles, branches and dendrites of a river bed, and where the plentiful fish are just plain smaller and smarter than their Southern cousins, either everything feels like a strike or, in my case, nothing does.

I tug here and there, the electricity of the fish travels from fly to tippet to leader to line to backing to rod to reel to fingers to wrist to arm to shoulder to neck to God only knows where to my brain before I think, NOW!

It’s like trying to connect your bat to a softball when you’ve surpassed your limit of Budweiser.

We moved both up and downriver, and I hogged a hole that’s been heralded to be one of the best spots on the river (thus getting up an hour and 18 minutes before sunup to secure the spot: sort of the equivalent of waiting in line for Springsteen tickets…). After awhile, I climbed a steep bank, tied on maybe the 14^th pattern of the morning and set out for another riffle a thousand yards below Jerry.

When I climbed the bank just before noon in search of Jerry, I couldn’t feel three of my left toes, and my hands itched from being cold and wet.

Once I rounded the bend and convinced Jerry, who also wasn’t having much luck, to abandon his spot and join me for a mug of coffee back up at the truck, we felt a warm breeze blowing right down the stream. By the time we got back to the truck, we had taken off our jackets.

Ah, spring in the Northeast.

Another hour and a half north spent swatting rising gnats, watching the buds literally bloom on trees above as the sun warmed the air, we called it a day, drove back down the road that parallels most of Clark’s Creek and vowed to get together again soon.

Jerry guaranteed as much: He bought a year tourist license even though he lives four hours north and across the border in New York.

That’s a good fishing buddy right there.