| Editors Note: This essay was commissioned for an extensive catalog of the exhibit, "Confluence: Art and the Trout Fly" at The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art last summer. For various reasons, having nothing to do with this essay, the catalog as first conceived did not materialize. Wickstrom's essay will now appear for the first time here in RN in this and next month's issue. |
Part I
I wish I could remember everything about the trout fly. I guess I remember quite a bit. But I like to think about the promise of depth psychology that we, everyone of us, possesses, not only our own particular, personal memory, but also the Collective Memory of the history of our species way down deep in our Unconscious. If I were able to get down deep enough into that great memory bank, I would certainly wish to remember all the centuries of the artificial trout fly and its use.
I wish I could remember standing beside that Macedonian angler who, in the earliest centuries of Our Lord, bound red wool and a cock's feather to a hook and with six feet of rod and another six of line, tossed that ur-fly to those lovely spotted fish in his little river in that ancient Grecian land. Of one thing I'm certain: though those antique brown trout may have been important on that early angler's table, there was joy in his heart when he caught them. There was the pleasure of the artificial fly from the beginning.
I wish I could remember, too, watching that Medieval angler tie the dozen flies described in the Boke of Saint Albans "Treatyse" of l496. How did those flies really look? I would remember who the mythical Dame Juliana Berners really was, and she or he would tell me who really wrote the "Treatyse." How did those folks back then come to use artificial flies? Did they come over with the Conqueror from France? How did that great, mythical Lady Abbess develop such techniques and such an exquisite angling philosophy?
I wish I could remember how deep Charles Cotton sank his flies when he fished his beloved Dove with his mentor Izaak Walton. Or did trout sometimes take them before they sank at all and so set Cotton to wondering.... How often did fish break his line of horsehair? How big or small were his flies, those flies that we remember well enough for them to have inspired all our flies since then?
Did Cotton urge Walton to fish the fly? I wish I could remember what sort of man our American Theodore Gordon really was. Who was that fetching young woman in the snapshots whom he called his "best fishing chum?" I wish I could recall the mystery of the man more clearly, the man who, with genius, gave the dry fly a local habitation and a name on this side Atlantic in the 1890's. I wish I could remember all that I might have remembered and carelessly neglected when as a boy sixty years ago I took up the fly and fly rod along Colorado's Front Range.
I would remember, for instance, everything about the pioneers of Colorado angling: L.B. France, Arthur Carhart, Goodwin Granger, Phil Phillipson, Jim Haywood, Ed Hunter — even of Boulder's E.B. Edwards and Hank Roberts. I would remember when the fastidious Ernest Schwiebert fished Colorado as a boy, or the great James Leisenring came from Pennsylvania to fish the South Platte and caught enough trout to sell to the local hotel to pay his tab.
Whom have I forgotten?
The work of all these extraordinary men is my inheritance. Just think, for instance, what it meant to us when Hank Roberts around 1946 proclaimed the challenging formula:"Western tackle for Western fishermen!"
And so it goes: I scrounge in my memory knowing that I shall have to be content with the patchwork of random recall. Perhaps such digging will yield a pattern that, if unworthy to be called history, is nevertheless the record of a devoted angler's experience over a lifetime of belonging to the trout of the Rocky Mountains.
In The Beginning
The trout fly did not have to develop out here in the Rockies. It came fully fledged from the East and from the British Isles. If the early settlers of the West fished for food, and they did, they also, from the outset, like that ancient Macedonian, fished those lovely Front Range greenback cutthroats for pleasure and sport. The record is full of those first arrivals' appreciation of the superb mountain landscape — when, of course, they didn't have to struggle with it for survival. They were not purists. Not until, say 1960, did anglers begin to think of themselves as "fly fishermen" and snootily exclude bait and hardware from their methodology. I would suggest 1960 as as good a date as any to mark the beginning of the contemporary popularity and growing decadence of trout fishing.
As a boy, lets say in 1939, I remember clearly that all the fishermen I knew fished worms in the high and roily streams of the Front Range up until the spring run-off ended and the "fly season" began. No, the old anglers, fished for a full creel, in the most efficient way they knew. There was no notion yet of the exclusivity and moral superiority of fly fishing. They wanted to catch a mess of fish because They wanted to eat them! And eat them they did, with a zest, certainly without apology.
In fact, I remember always hoping for a creel full of twenty-five trout, the legal limit back then! Think of it! Think of lugging twenty-four twelve-inchers around in your creel for a couple of hours while you fished for yet one more! I seem to remember that fishing was generally harder to do back then. It was harder to get to our fishing, given the limitations of our automobiles and slow, dirt roads — not to mention the six-day work week of most people.
Our tackle was more demanding, problematic and ill-assorted. Our rods were apt to fail when glue joints between the bamboo strips sweated loose. We fought off rot in our silk fly lines and had to dress them daily to keep them floating. Our leaders of silk-worm gut required constant soaking to keep them pliable. Many of us used a mixture of glycerin and water in felt pads to soak them. When, occasionally, between trips, we forgot those leaders soaking in their round aluminum boxes and opened them up, the smell could be quite overpowering. Gut, remember, is an organic material and so given to smelly decomposition.
My first leaders were only three feet long, level, and heavy! I discovered that I could buy a six-foot Japanese gut leader for five cents at Woolworths, cut it in two, and have two leaders for the price of one! Thus began my tackle tinkering.
Ten cents was too much for me to spend for a wet Rio Grande King in Depression-bound 1939 and so I began to tie my own flies. Hooks were ninety cents the hundred, but materials were limited and variety was hard to come by. We used mostly conventional wet flies, mostly sized ten, mostly snelled to six inches of gut. These snells often failed at the eye of the fly where stress on the gut was greatest. I remember reading the catalog of the Weber Lifelike Fly Co. in 1939 in which O.L.Weber advocated the use of eyed flies, doing away with those troublesome snells. I cannot overstate how liberating that idea was: to be rid of snells, to be able to keep our flies in orderly, compartmented boxes. It was a Revelation.
Of course, I remember a few dry flies, trying to use them, trying to tie them with severely limited materials, hardly understanding them. Grown-up, advanced anglers had to go to Denver to buy ready-mades.
When I think of the tiny flies I use today, I suspect they would have been terrible killers back then. But they would have been impossible. If we could have got the necessary size 20 to 26 hooks, and we could not, we would not have been able to get gut tippets fine enough to get through the eyes of those hooks.
Then too, we lacked the entomology to understand such small insects. We lacked the entomology for any size insect— or at least I did. I blush to say that most of the insects we saw astream we called simply "mosquitoes" or "gnats." I blush to say how unobservant, how ignorant, I was of stream life back then. I now know that there were always tricos in lower Boulder Creek, but I never saw a one of them until I was fifty years old!
To be continued next month...