O
ften during the past seven years, I have taken a walk from the offices of
The New Yorker
along Forty-third Streetâacross Fifth Avenue, across Madison Avenue, across Vanderbilt Avenueâthen through Grand Central Terminal, across Lexington Avenue, up to Forty-fourth Street, into the elevator at 141 East Forty-fourth Street, up to the third floor, and through the belled door of a small fishing-tackle shop called the Angler's Roost, whose sole proprietor is a man named Jim Deren. Since I've been taking this walk, the Biltmore Men's Bar, which I used to pass at the corner of Madison and Forty-third, changed to the Biltmore Bar, which then became a different bar, named the Café Fanny, which was replaced by a computer store called Digital's, which moved (along with a lot of other stores on the block) after the Biltmore Hotel closed and disappeared under renovators' scaffolding. Once, on this walk, I had to detour around some barricades inside Grand Central, because a film crew was working on the movie
Superman
. Valerie Perrine and Gene Hackman were supposedly there, but I did not see
them. Since then, I have seen the movie in a theater and have noted the part that the crew must have been working on when I passed by. During these seven years, the huge Kodak display in the station near the Lexington Avenue wall, which people say ruins the station's interior light and makes it difficult to distinguish the beautiful Venetian-summer-night starscape on the ceiling, has featured photographs of water-skiers behind motorboats, a Bicentennial celebration with men dressed as Continental soldiers, the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán (by night, lighted), the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, the Great Wall of China, and, one spring, a close-up shot of a robin, which looked frightening at that size. One time, I came in through the door at Forty-third Street and there before me, across the echoing well of the concourse, was a view of a rock-cluttered desert, barn red under a pink sky, with a little piece of the foot of a space probe visible in the foregroundâMars, photographed by Viking 2.
A fisherman can look at some sections of any trout stream clean enough for fish to live in and say with confidence, A large fish lives there. The water should be deep, and it should be well aerated; that is, it should be free-flowing, rich in oxygen, and not stagnant. There should be a source of food: a grassy bank with beetles, grasshoppers, field mice, and frogs; or a little tributary creek with minnows, chubs, dace, and sculpins; or an upstream section with a silt bottom for large, burrowing mayfly nymphs. There should be coverâdowned logs, overhanging tree branches, undercut banks. Where these conditions are found, the chances are very good that at least one large fish will be found as well. Such sections of a river are called good lies. A good lie will usually have a good fish lying in wait, gently finning, looking upstream for whatever the current may bring him.
I have always thought that, as lies go, it would be hard to find a better one than Grand Central Terminal. It is deepâwater that deep would be a dark blue. Aerated streams of humanity cascade down the escalators from the Pan Am Building, and flow from the rest of midtown, the rest of the city, the rest of the world, through trains and subways and airport buses and taxis, into its deep pool and out again, and the volume of this flow makes it rich in the important nutrient called capital. Well, in this good lie, the big fish of the fishing-tackle business is Jim Deren, of the Angler's Roost. For over forty years he has had a shop in the areaâa shop that has outlasted changes in fishing fashions, changes in the economy, competitors who gave their shops names intentionally similar to his, and finally even Abercrombie & Fitch, his biggest local competitor, which closed its midtown store in 1977. All this time, Deren has remained in his good lie, gently finning behind the counter in his shop, consulting with fishermen from just about every place where there's water, selling every kind of angling supply imaginable, taking in cash and checks as gracefully as a big brown trout sips mayflies from the surface of a Catskill stream.
The first time I met Jim Deren, I was looking for a particular dry fly (a pattern called the Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear, with a body that goes all the way back over the bend of the hook), which had worked well for me in Wyoming and which I could not find anywhere. I came across the entry for the Angler's Roost in the Yellow Pages:
ANGLER'S ROOST FISHING TECHNICIANS
Tackle, Salt & Fresh, Lures, Flies
Fly Materials, Waders & Clothing
Repairs, Books & Advertising Props
JIM DEREN ADVISOR
That impressed me. I called the shop one Saturday afternoon around six o'clock and was surprised to find Deren there. In later years, I have learned that he is in his shop at all hours: I have found him in at seven-fifteen on a beautiful Sunday evening in June; I have found him in on all sorts of holidays, when midtown is nothing but blowing papers. On that first Saturday Deren told me that he was about to go home but that if I came in soon he would wait for me. I arrived at the shop half an hour later. He did not happen to have the exact fly I wanted, but he told me where to get it. We talked for a while, and I left without buying anythingâthe only time that has ever happened.
A few months later, during a really warm April, I decided I had to go fishing, even though I had never been fishing in the East and knew nothing about it. I bought a fishing license at the Department of Environmental Conservation office on the sixty-first floor of the World Trade Center, and then I went to see Deren. He told me the book to buyâ
New Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations
, by Art Flick. He said that, because it had been so warm, certain mayflies that would usually be on the stream later in the season might have already appeared. He sold me flies imitating those insects. He told me where to fishâin the Beaverkill, the Little Beaverkill, and Willowemoc Creek, near Roscoe, New York. He told me what bus to take. I left his shop, went back to my apartment,
got my fly rod and sleeping bag, went to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, boarded a Short Line bus, and rode for two and a half hours with Hasidic Jews going to Catskill resorts and women going to upstate ashrams. On the bus I read the
Streamside Guide
, which says that mayflies live for several years underwater as swimming nymphs, hatch into winged insects, mate while hovering over the water, lay their eggs in the water, and die; that recently hatched mayflies, called duns, float along the surface and are easy for trout to catch, and so are the stage of the mayfly's life cycle most sensible for the angler to imitate with artificials; that different species of mayflies hatch at different times of the year, according to water temperature; and that the different species emerge every year in an order so invariable as to be the only completely predictable aspect of trout fishing. I got off the bus in Roscoe about four in the afternoon, walked to the Beaverkill, hid my sleeping bag in some willows, set up my fly rod, and walked up the river until I reached a spot with no fishermen. I noticed mayflies in the air, noticed dragonflies zipping back and forth eating the mayflies. I saw a dragonfly pick a mayfly out of the air so neatly that he took only the body, leaving the two wings to flutter down to the surface of the stream and float away. I caught a mayfly myself after a lot of effort, compared it with the pictures in my
Streamside Guide
, decided that it was the male of the
Ephemerella subvaria
(Deren had been right; according to the book, that insect wasn't due for about two weeks more), tied on its imitation (a pattern called the Red Quill, in size 14), made a short cast, caught a little trout, made a few more short casts, caught another little trout, and waited while a fat guy with a spinning rod who said he wasn't having much luck walked by me up the river. Then I made a good, long cast under a spruce bough to a patch of deep water
ringed with lanes of current, like a piece of land in the middle of a circular freeway-access ramp. This patch of water had a smooth, tense surface marked with little tucks where eddying water was boiling up from underneath. My fly sat motionless on this water for a time that when I replay it in my mind seems really long. Then a fish struck so hard it was like a person punching up through the water with his fist. Water splashed several feet in the air, and there was a flash of fish belly of that particular shade of whiteâlike the white of a horse's eye when it's scared, or the white of the underside of poplar leaves blown by wind right before a stormâthat often seems to accompany violence in nature. The fish ran downstream like crazy (I don't remember setting the hook), then he ran upstream, then he ran downstream again. He jumped several timesânot arched and poised, as in the sporting pictures, but flapping back and forth so fast he was a blur. Line was rattling in my line guides; I was pulling it in and he was taking it out, until finally there was a big pile of line at my feet, and the fish, also, in the shallow water at my feet. He was a thirteen-inch brook trout, with a wild eye that was a circle of black set in a circle of gold. The speckles on his back reproduced the wormlike marks on the rocks on the stream bottom, and his sides were filled with colorsâorange, red, silver, purple, midnight blueâand yet were the opposite of gaudy. I hardly touched him; he was lightly hooked. I released him, and after a short while he swam away. I stood for maybe ten minutes, with my fly rod lying on the gray, softball-sized rocks, and I stared at the trees on the other side of the river. The feeling was like having hundreds of gag hand-buzzers applied to my entire body.
Since that day I have always loved the Red Quill dry fly, and particularly the Red Quill that Deren sells, which is the
most elegant I have ever seen. For me, the Red Quill is a shamanistic medicine bundle that called forth the strike, the flash of belly, the living palette of colors from that spring day, and years later, even in situations where it is not remotely the right fly, I find myself tying it on just to see what will happen.
Also since that day I have believed that Jim Deren is a great man. He is the greatest man I know of who will talk to just anybody off the street.
In appearance, Deren is piscine. He is stockyâprobably about five feet ten inches tall. His hair is in a mouse-brown brush cut, about half an inch long. His forehead is corrugated with several distinct wrinkles, which run up and down, like marks of soil erosion on a hill. His eyes are weak and watery and blue, behind thick glasses with thick black frames. There is a large amount of what looks like electrical tape around the glasses at the bridge. His eyebrows are cinnamon-colored. His nose is thick, and his lips are thick. He has a white mustache. His direct, point-blank regard can be unsettling. People who have fished their whole lives sometimes find themselves saying when they encounter this gaze that they don't know a thing about fishing, really. Deren has a style of garment which he loves and which he wears almost every single day in his shop. This garment is the jumpsuit. For a long time, he wore either a charcoal-gray jumpsuit or an olive-green jumpsuit. One or both of the jumpsuits had a big ring on the zipper at the throat. Recently, Deren has introduced another jumpsuit into the repertoire. This is a sky-blue jumpsuit with a green-on-white emblem of a leaping bass on the left breast pocket. Deren's voice is deep and gravelly. I can do a good imitation
of him. The only sentence I can think of that might make his accent audible on paper (in the last word, anyway) is one I have heard him speak several times while he was talking on one of his unfavorite topics, the “flower children”: “In late October, early November, when we're driving back from fishing out West, with the wind howling and huge dark snow clouds behind us, sometimes we pass these frail girls, these flower children, standing by the side of the road in
shawwwwwwwwls
.”
I say Deren is probably about five feet ten inches tall because even though he often says, “I've been running around all day. I'm exhausted,” I have actually seen him standing up only a few times. Like a psychiatrist, Deren is usually seated. I have seen him outside his shop only onceâwhen, as I was leaving, he came down in the elevator to pick up a delivery on the first floor. (Ambulant, he seemed to me surprisingly nimble.) It is appropriate for Deren to be seated all the time, because he has tremendous repose. There is a lot of bad repose going around these days: the repose of someone watching a special Thursday-night edition of
Monday Night Football
; the repose of someone smoking a cigarette on a ten-minute break at work; the repose of driving; the repose of waiting in line at the bank. Deren is in his sixties. The fish he has caught, the troubles he has been through, the fishing tackle he has sold, the adventures he has had lend texture to his repose. On good days, his repose hums like a gyroscope.
Deren talking about the Angler's Roost while sitting in his shop on a slow afternoon in March: “It seems only natural that I would have gravitated to this business. I've been tying
flies ever since I was in short pants. When I was in grade school in New Jersey, I used to go without lunch because I wanted to save my money and buy fishing tackle. I remember fashioning a fly from a jacket of mine when I was a kid just barely big enough to be let out of sight. I tied it out of a lumber jacket that my mother had made for meâ”
The phone rings.
“Hello. Angler's Roost.”
“ ⦠. ⦠. .”
“Christ, I don't know a thing about Chinese trout fishing, Doc.”
“ ⦠. ⦠. .”
“Well, they gotta have trout fishing. The Japanese have trout fishing. Just the other day, I sold some stuff to Yasuo Yoshida, the Japanese zipper magnate. He's probably got more tackle than I got. He's
kichi
about trout fishing.
Kichi
âthat's Japanese for nuts.”