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.