| 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 conclusion now appears for the first time here in RN in this month's issue. |
The pioneers, the first settlers of our West, had to have got their flies by mail from the East or make them themselves. Arguably the most popular and productive of all flies for those old timers was the Brown Hackle with a peacock body. A brown hackle feather from the chicken coop and some peacock herl from a ladies hat or millinery shop was all that was needed to concoct this most productive of flies still perhaps the most winning combination of materials for a trout fly.
A somber pattern like the Brown Hackle didn't preclude the gaudy patterns, or fancy flies. When before going off to World War II the patrons of my fly tying wanted big size four and six Jock Scotts and Silver Doctors for the high lakes up on the Divide that they loved to fish at night. And for some reason, a beautiful, elegant pattern called the Major Pitcher arrived in Boulder in 1940. Everyone wanted them, and I tied them by the dozens a complex, hard-to-tie pattern, and at fifty cents a dozen! I emphasize again that these flies were snelled wet flies. No one I knew had as yet even heard of a nymph.
Tackle was to be had from hardware and general sporting goods stores, but out on the road, in every little mountain town, the local drug store and filling station carried a small supply of tackle. I should never have dreamed back then of the glamour of today's "fly shops." Few around here read books about fishing. We read the big three sporting magazines: Field and Stream, Sports Afield, and Outdoor Life. Some of us read tackle catalogs, still an important way to learn more about fishing. The media largely ignored fishing. The Boulder Camera seemed not to know that there was any such thing as a trout within a hundred miles of Boulder.
Perhaps because fishing wasn't fashionable, fishermen weren't a market to exploit. Fishing was a homely, nothing fancy, after-work, Depression-Era sort of thing to do. One didn't boast that he fished. Fishing carried the stigma of being the pastime of indolent, lazy people, a pastime for which only patience was required. It was mostly a blue-collar man's sport; few women did it. Back East, fashionable women may sometimes have fished for salmon and so spilled over into trout fishing, but not out West.
People didn't think fly-fishing was much different from ordinary fishing just stranger and sillier. Fishing was the butt of many tiresome jokes. It still is, for that matter. Out on the stream, we looked very plain indeed. We wore old clothes, work clothes, rough and ready leftover stuff. We have to remember that not until well after World War II did "sport" or casual clothing come to dominate the market in men and women's furnishings. Every angler wore what he had and so looked different from every other, there being none of the elements of the boring uni-form of standardized vest and grotesque neoprenes, in which the contemporary angler goes forth. If anything set off our angler of the past, it was his split willow creel and hip boots.
One never saw a pair of waders along the Front Range. Hip boots were the standard, and some of those were stiff, black, heavy irrigation boots. When my wife appeared on the Madison River in custom-made waders in 1951, traffic backed up to get a look at that woman in those funny pants. And, of course, those waders were a rubber backed cotton fabric that required as much attention as our lines and leaders, and glue joints. We forget today to what extent modern synthetic products have done away with the rot of organic materials of old.
Oh yes, so far from being dedicated exclusively to the fly, everyone I knew threw spinners as well as bait. I spent nearly three years consumed with interest in fly rod spinners and got good at using them. Who of my generation isn't drenched in nostalgia at the sight of a 4/0 Colorado spinner?
The advent of spinning in 1945 did away with the fly rod spinner and radically distracted our attention from our flies. Spinning exploded on us. The tiny 1/16- to 1/4-ounce metal lures we could cast a hundred feet killed fish right and left. It was embarrassing. This was, for better of worse, the decade of hardware. Some, but not I, I promise you, developed the abominable practice of casting flies off a spinning reel with the aid of a water-filled plastic ball for weight, a technique, I regret to say, still in use today.
Denver inventor I.V. Humphrey in 1945 came up with the very first enclosed-spool spinning reel, a terrible line-twisting tin can of a thing, but designed to be used on a fly rod. I rushed to buy perhaps the first one to go on the market, fought its problems, but loved it anyhow until the introduction of the open-spool coffee-grinder reels from France, that is. Denver, we should note, was more important nationally in the fishing tackle industry than most of us realized back then or even now.
Our fishing season back then ran from May 25 to October 31, and that was that. Winter trouting was unthinkable. Our spring season along the Front Range was plagued by mine and mill tailings washed down during run-off, turning our creeks a sickening milk-white. Somehow the trout survived, but it was an ugly situation. The governor of Colorado stopped this pollution, of allowing such wash-outs, with a stroke of his pen in 1947.
Otherwise, after the run-off and mill tailings, I remember that I drank the water from Boulder Creek right in town. Can you imagine!
Our trout had also to survive the Army Corps of Engineers which set out to channelize every free-flowing stream they could get their steam shovels into. Highway departments with construction programs loved the Engineers' projects, as did agricultural interests and municipalities seeking water supplies. Our trout took it on the chin, as it were.
What with the more or less responsible management of fisheries today, with the coming of the big tail-waters, with catch-and release, I feel sure that there are more and bigger trout within two hours of Boulder than in 1939. Still, in 1939 there was more public, open water. Privatization had not yet begun to take its terrible toll, in favor of the weathy and of corrosive corporate aggrandizement at the expense of the rest of us. Perhaps because we were fewer back then, and could not have paid for our fishing anyway, we were allowed freer access to more private land and water. It wasn't a problem.
We were "environmentalists" before the word was coined and formed a Boulder chapter of The Izaak Walton League of America in 1946. We "Ikes" were devoted to the welfare of the whole environment rather than the johnny-come-lately Trout Unlimited's fancier specialization in riparian concerns. Liberals began to take up the cause of conservation, and conservatives formed the opposition.
Our sport was generally less complicated. For instance, there were not the guides who today so severely complicate the politics and decorum of life on the stream. We thought fishing back then ought to be solitary if not private work. It would have been unthinkable to have a guide standing at one's shoulder telling one what to do next.
I am not sure that we enjoyed fishing more back then ... maybe we did. Today we know so much more about trout, ecology, entomology, and about tackle. We can get around so much easier and quicker.We live in a golden age of fly tying when even ordinary sorts of chaps like me can easily own a superb natural blue dun cape, unheard of before. We now build split cane rods that are the world's finest and most beautiful. Our fly reels are breath-taking in their precision and design. Nylon for our terminal tackle has been our chief-most blessing and perhaps most profoundly revolutionary.
I note, though, that it is still as exasperatingly difficult for many to tie a blood knot as it ever was and that that difficulty probably causes many serviceable graphite rods to lie forgotten on garage shelves. Thank Heaven!
But still, I wish I could remember more clearly what I actually lived through as an angler. I wish I could remember what some of the great old timers thought about fly-fishing. I wish I could better remember seeing their flies, casting their rods, talking to them...
I wish too that I could remember deep down, from out of that Unconscious collective memory of our species what it was like to pull nets for herring in the North Sea, when fishing was miserable, dangerous, beastly hard work, when it kept its fishers poor and often took their lives so far from the sun-lit sparkle in which I love to see my dry fly flirting down a Colorado stream to a rising brown trout.
Could I remember this, I hope I would still want to fish, even for those herring that I so love. And I hope that if ever I get a chance to live through this anglers life again, Ill have the good sense to take good notes.