It’s around 6:30 PM, maybe 7. The sun has gone behind the hill in front of us. The river has been in deep shade for hours. This stretch, due to the topography around us, creates what Joe, our guide, calls a “false sunset”. Trout can’t see us as well as they can in full, bright sunlight.
We’re standing in about three feet of cold water. We’re positioned at the top of a section of slack water that, due to the riffles above it, provides everything trout like. The riffles oxygenate the water. The shade and depth of the water keep it cold. The riffles also deliver a steady parade of food to fish, either mayflies or stoneflies, their favorite food. The trout can hover in the water, expending very little energy, and wait for dinner to be delivered. It’s the underwater equivalent of one of those sushi restaurants where dish after dish arrives in front of you on a trolley.
And like some kind of fly fishing artillery spotter, Joe is calling in targets for me.
“See that line of bubbles? Drop one right there, in line with that flat rock.”
I do. It’s a nice cast. The fly is sitting high on the water, at the end of nine feet of transparent tippet and leader. It’s exactly where Joe told me to put it. I glance back at him, and he looks pleased. It floats with the gentle current, looking just like the insect it’s meant to imitate.
The fly slides past the target. Nothing.
Joe calls in another strike. “Okay,“ he whispers. “Drop another one about two feet to the left of that one, and about three feet out.” I do.
I am silently congratulating myself on my skill with a fly rod. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I was taught by my father, by Troy, my teacher in Santa Cruz, and by endless hours on the water, everywhere from the Sierras to creeks in the. There’s no wind, and the water’s moving slowly. I can hit what I aim for. I’m not the best. I’m not even really good. But I’m not bad, and paired with Joe, who has eyes like an owl, we’re a two-man precision-guided bombing team. He aims, and I don’t miss.
I am completely, totally focused on what I’m doing. All I can think of are the trout under the water, and dropping that fucking fly exactly where Joe tells me to. There are fish in there, and I want one.
Joe is Joe Cauvel. He’s a full-time fly fishing guide in the Catskills, one of the most hallowed regions of the United States for three things I care about a lot: literature, art and fly fishing. These waters are legendary, arguably the birthplace of fly fishing in the United States. People have written books about them. The Beaverkill, Esopus Creek, and the East and West Branches of the Delaware are particularly famous. Because we’re looking for cool fly water, Joe has taken us to the East Branch.
He is, of course, a ridiculously skilled fly fisherman. But more importantly, he’s also a teacher. Like any guide, when you hire him for the day, he provides everything you need – waders, boots, fly rods, reels, line, and all the flies we need, each one of which he ties himself. Groups of finance bros from New York City, hotshots from Montana, rank beginners – he guides them all. He also has a mind-bending amount of knowledge about every aspect of this absurdly arcane, frustrating sport, and he teaches it. Since meeting him at the also legendary Roscoe Diner, we’ve learned about insect life, stream flows, trout behavior, casting techniques, on and on and on.
And for me, the entire day has come down to this. Twenty intense minutes at the end of the day where, with him standing at my elbow, I’m putting into practice one of his lessons.
The day didn’t begin well. It began absurdly. We meet Joe, drive to the first spot, don our gear, rig up, and are about to set out when he asks the final question: “Oh, do you have fishing licenses?” No, we do not. Shit. SHIT. SHIT!
If we were here alone, we’d chance it. There aren’t that many game wardens, and getting busted would mean some little fine. However, Joe is a professional guide. If a warden nails him with unlicensed clients, they’ll take his guide license away. This cannot be risked. We begin the day, then, using our cell phones to painstakingly navigate the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation licensing webpage. It is a slow, difficult pain in the ass, but we have to do it. It takes what seems forever. In boots and waders. Finally, we get it together, and can start hiking out to the river.
Finally, we buy our damn licenses and set out. We practice on one stretch of river, then sit down around 3 for a late lunch from the diner. It’s time for the late afternoon main event – a special spot on the East Branch. We drive over there, climb down to the river, wade across to the spot, and start to fish.
I spend the afternoon fishing water in several sections of the river without really knowing whether or not there are fish in it. This isn’t uncommon – I don’t have X-ray vision, and often, the best I can do is a slow, careful, methodical process of presenting a fly to whatever fish are in the area I’m fishing, patiently, foot by foot. If there are fish in there, and the Venn diagrams overlap properly, they’ll see it – I hope – and go for it. I’m carpet-bombing, covering the whole area hoping to hit something.
Joe has spent most of the afternoon with my companion, Freya. Freya has much less experience than I do, and is working on mastering the basic mechanics of using a fly rod to cast a line. It takes a lot of muscle memory, and a kind of unconscious sense of where a twenty-foot section of monofilament line is in the air above and behind you.
I’m largely left to my own devices, and as a result, despite working pretty hard, I’ve yet to catch a trout, or even come close. Working with Joe, Freya bags a couple and just misses with a big one which she hooks, but loses. Finally, she gets cold, and wants to park herself on the bank wearing my shirt to warm up and rest. And I want to catch a damn trout, so I return to Joe, who’s now guiding me, and we begin our bombing runs.
According to him, there are definitely fish out there. In fact, there are specific, individual fish, which he identifies and locates. He knows this from the way they rise. Rising is when a fish breaks the surface to feed on a floating insect that’s passed by his territory. Sometimes they’ll leap out of the water, creating a splash. That’s hard to miss.
More commonly they’ll gently break the water and sip at a fly, or roll underneath it. However they signal, it’s a clear sign that trout are feeding, and more to the point, shows us exactly where. At two or three spots, trout are hovering in the water, expending as little energy as possible. We are presenting the fly to individual trout, which we know are in there.
Joe calls in coordinates. I cast, and drop flies. Over and over. I cast, look for the fly, which gently floats past where the fish is. Nothing, He calls in adjustments. I strip in some line with my left hand, begin false casting, and drop the fly where he wants it. Under my breath, I’m swearing. I know they’re there. This isn’t fishing, this is stalking, hunting. “Fuck. C’mon you bastard, take the damn fly. There it is. It’s right there. Take it. Come on. What the hell are you doing?”
Perhaps the most overused cliche in describing any kind of sport is that it’s fundamentally mental. This is usually bullshit. Michael Jordan could psych out his opponents, admittedly, but he was also strong as hell, physically extraordinarily gifted and fit, and those things had at least as much to do with his greatness as his ability to focus, stay calm and emotionally dominate. Ron Gronkowski was a great receiver because he was enormous. And so on.
However, fly fishing is, in fact, extremely mental. It really is. You have to learn to think like a fish, for one thing. You’re in their world. They don’t care what you believe or want or need. They’re going to do what fish do, and you can figure that out our you can endure immense amounts of frustration. Sometimes you do both.
The basic concept behind fly fishing is that you’re trying to trick a fish whose life depends on not being tricked. You are using incredibly delicate tools – a fly rod weighs about an ounce – to imitate the insects trout feed on. They are beautiful, smart, finicky creatures who will turn away from anything that doesn’t seem quite kosher to them. The second you do something stupid or wrong, they’re gone.
And finally, for a lot of fly fisherman, there are memories. Those are maybe the most powerful part of the mental aspect of this beautiful sport. I think, of course, of my father, who’s been dead for almost twenty-five years. I think of how much he loved me, and how much I loved him, and all the hours we spent together doing what I’m doing now. He was the senior member of the Castle Creek Fishing Club, which has been in operation for over a century, and now I’m one, too. He learned in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, another ancient home of this sport.
I think of my friend Ted, who fished in Vermont and referred to it as the “gentle game” which is saccharine, but not wrong. I think of Dick Proeneke, writing about fly fishing for his dinner on a remote lake in Alaska, where all he needed to do was drop in a fly and he’d have big, fat trout for dinner. I think of Tom McGuane, in Montana, writing about running into the painter Russell Chatham, who was loping along with a fly rod, and explained that he’d wasted most of the day with errands and productivity, and he had to redeem it by fishing.
I think of Henry Lau, who fly-fished in the reservoirs in Singapore, which are heavily guarded. He’d get in about 45 minutes of fishing before the police would come, and he’d have to run. But due to the lack of predators, the fish were monsters. I think of Freya’s father, Fred, who passed away much too soon and I never met but was apparently a wonderful fly fisherman. I think of my teacher, Troy Mayers, who was teaching me how to do a roll cast. I pointed out that these were unbelievably ugly casts, and Troy growled back, “Yeah, but that’s the one I call “The Moneymaker””.
And I think about how much this, like writing, is an undertaking that’s basically the same as it was hundreds of years ago, and the strange pull that fact has on me. So is writing. So is painting. I suspect I was born in the wrong century, something several friends have suggested as well.
There are graphite rods, sure, and aluminum reels, and monofilament line. But it’s still me, and the water, and those trout, and that’s it. There are no fish-finding computers. I’m not out on a big, expensive powerboat deep-sea fishing for tuna. I’m standing in the water with a dry fly, the purest, simplest, hardest kind of fly fishing, doing something that would have been instantly recognizable to one of my fishing predecessors in this place a hundred years ago. Like my father before me, I’m one in a long line of people who have found this delicate, beautiful, very difficult sport engaging, and enduring and meaningful.
And then I get one. It’s the singularity the entire day has been aimed at, that instant when the rod comes alive in your hands. You’ve got a trout on. It’s exciting and brief and unbelievably addictive. A trout hits the fly. I’ve been watching, and the second it happens, I know. I abruptly raise the tip of the rod, setting the hook. I bring him in. In a graceful, expert motion, Joe unhooks the net, drops it into the water, and nets my beautiful little trout. We admire him for about ten second, as Joe holds him in his hands. He then says to me, “You know, you only want to hold him out of the water for as long as you’d like your head to be held under the water.” Got it.
He then carefully removes the hook from the trout’s lip, drops the net below him so he’s free, and the trout darts away at full speed, to feed another day. A few minutes later, I hook a big one, but he slips away. It’s getting dark. The day is over. We wade back across the river, clamber up the bank, shake hands, chat a little and go our separate ways.
It’s now dark, and getting cold. We have a long drive back to our hotel. The little, remote towns of the Catskills are illuminated by a spooky hunter’s moon, which is full and yellow and huge, and floating behind wispy clouds. This gives everything a weird, creepy air. After all, this is where Washington Irving’s headless horseman rode, and Rip Van Winkle slept. Nothing is open, and dinner ends up being Fritos and trail mix and M&Ms from a gas station. It’s disgusting.
I don’t care. I caught a trout.