Guy: “Jimmy, let me ask you something and you tell me what you think of this. Last August I was sitting on the bank of a river in Michigan waiting for it to cool off and for the fish to start feeding, and I saw this white thing bouncing along the river bottom, and when it got close enough I saw that it was a peeled potato, and when it came closer I saw that a twelve- or thirteen-inch trout was
bouncing
the potato along the river bottom with his noseâ”
Deren: “You sure it was a potato?”
Guy: “It was either a peeled potato or maybe a peeled apple. This trout was bouncing it; I swear, he was dribbling it with his nose along the bottom like a ball. Friend of mine and I followed him downstream a long way. He just kept dribbling that potato. Now, what in the hell could that have been?”
Deren: “I don't know. I've never seen a trout do anything like that. But that reminds meâdid I ever tell you about the time I saved a trout from drowning? The reason it reminds me is that I saw the trout bouncing and flopping along the bottom with the current. Good-sized brook trout. I caught up with him and netted him, and I discovered that he had a caddis caseâyou know, the protective covering that the caddis worm spins around himself, it looks kind of like a twigâwell, he had one of these caddis cases, about an inch long, stuck between his upper and lower jaws. It was stuck in his small teeth, so he couldn't close his mouth, and if a trout can't close
his mouth he can't filter oxygen through his gills, and he drowns. I took the caddis case out, and I put the trout in some shallow water, and pretty soon, proud as beans, he swam away.”
Guy: “I was reading in some sporting magazine about a man who was fishing in a boat and he had his retriever dog with him, and as he made a cast he accidentally let go of the rod and it flew out into the lake, and the dog immediately jumped in after it, and he started swimming to shore and the lure was trailing in the water, and a fish hit the lure, and the dog kept on swimming, and he ran up on the shore and kept on running until he'd pulled the fish all the way out of the water.”
Deren: “Could happen. Could happen. I remember once I was out in a boat casting a deer-hair bug for bass, and my leader was frayed, and when a big bass hit I broke the bug off in his mouth, so I put on a new leader and continued to fish, and then a couple of hours later I decided to quit fishing, and I was coming back to the dock, and suddenly there was an enormous splash next to the boat and this big bass came out of the water into the air and landed in the bottom of my boat. It was the same fish I'd hooked earlierâhe still had my lure in his jaw. Of course, there's a simple explanation. The fish was jumping trying to throw the lure. He would probably have kept at it until he succeeded, but instead he landed in my boat.”
Guy: “That doesn't surprise me. Did I ever tell you about the time ⦔
Other customers are men of considerable personal force, but when they come into Deren's shop Deren is sitting, they are standing; Deren knows where everything is, they don't; they are asking, he is telling. After an exchange like “Hi, I'm
looking for some leader sink,” “Look on that shelf right next to youâno, not there, the other direction. Second shelf.
Second
shelf, that's the third shelf. Move that fly box. Look to the left of that. No, the left. That's the right. Move your hand back where it was going originally. Right there! Right there! It's right in front of you! Look right where your hand is! You're looking right at it,” this particular type of customer's ears, having heard more sentences in the imperative mood in the last few seconds than they probably hear in a week, turn pink with embarrassment.
An important customer who has been coming in for many years, or an old fishing buddy, or a fellow angling expert, or any of the guys Deren has got to know over the years, he calls a son of a bitch. If the guy is present, he's “you son of a bitch”; if he's not, he's “that son of a bitch.” Deren says the phrase with mastery, with delicate tonal shadings to indicate everything from a wonderful human being to a horrible human being. He says the phrase with the ease of a man turning into his driveway for the ten-thousandth time. When the subject of any one of these guys comes up, Deren will say, “
That
son of a bitch.
âhe'll never die, the Devil wouldn't have him.”
âhe tied saddle hackle on streamer flies with greater intensity than any man I ever knew.”
âdon't ever let him around a car, he'll destroy it in a second.”
âhe was a real screwball, a big, tall, good-looking guy. Slept with, lived with, married I don't know how many women.”
âdid you know he invented the après-ski boot?”
âI've seen drunks dive under the table when he appeared on the scene.”
âhe's a pinko crêpe-hanger of the first water.”
âhe married a girl in Greece.”
âhe's basically a correlator. He's not an originator. He doesn't have spontaneity. Spontaneity is what advances the sport.”
âhe fathered half the illegitimate children running around [a large American city].”
âhe had a compass in his head.”
âhe would have made a great President, but he wouldn't touch it.”
âhe could tie flies down to size 28 in his fingers without a vise.”
âhe was incredible. He'd make bets he could sight a rifle in to zero in three shots. And do it, too.”
âhe was always into me for something, as well as I knew him.”
âhe asked me to be the best man at his wedding, and when I got to the wedding he told me to put on my waders, and he was married in a pool on the Ausable River.”
âhe asked me to sign a bank note for him when he bought a new car, and then he skipped town and I had to pay the bank, and meanwhile, I'm getting these postcards from him, he's out in British Columbia, and he says he's having the best salmon fishing of his life and he wishes I was there!”
âhe's a very enthusiastic angler. It's the Indian in him.”
âforget it. He's a three-dollar bill. He'd write any kind of angling misinformation he could think of. He prostituted his sport for money. He's not a sportsman.”
âhe's an enthusiast of an extreme caliber. He won't eat, he won't sleep, he lives by the goddamn tides. This lends him a cloak of irresponsibility, but he is responsibleâto the striped bass. He was fishing on the bridge out at Jones Beach, which is
illegal, and he had just hooked a big striper when the cops came along, so he jumped over the bridge and hung from the railing with one hand and held all his tackle and played the fish with the other until the cops went away. He's an angler at heart.”
In Deren's world, an angler at heart is the best thing you can be. He describes many people as competent anglers or good anglers; he describes some as enthusiastic anglers; only a very few does he describe as anglers at heart. When I asked him what distinguishes the few anglers at heart from the fifty-four million other people who fish in this country, he said, “It's the call of the wild, the instinct of the hunt. It's a throwback to the forest primeval. It's the feeling of being in a state of grace in a magnificent outdoor cathedral. Either you have it or you don'tâit's inborn. The first time I went into the woods, it was as if I had been there before.” He looked at me significantly.
“You mean ⦠like in a previous life?” I asked.
“Well, that would be stretching it. Let's just say I didn't have too many surprises. I could sit all day and watch a field mouse fifteen feet away, watch a bird in a tree huntin' bugsâsometimes they're comical as hell. People would say to me, âWhat in the world do you do in the woods that long?' Well, Christ, you never run out of things to do in the woods. The woods are a constant unfolding story. But it wasn't the same if there was anything man-made in view. If you thought of man at all, it was a man who had gone through there silently. Maybe in some long-forgotten time an Indian who went to join his ancestors long before the Norsemen came to the American coast set foot on that same spot when he was following the buffalo. Or maybe it was pristine, the way the Lord of the cathedral made it. The romance of fishing isn't all just fish.”
In
The Compleat Angler
, Izaak Walton says, “For Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice, but he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practiced it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.”
More men than women fish. Sometimes this works out fine, but other times the shadow of angry excluded wives and girlfriends falls across the sport, and things get depressing. About women in angling, Deren says, “The Angler's Roost was the first place I know of that trained women. We pioneered in that field. A lot of women were getting fed up with this business of getting left home on the weekends, and so their husbands brought them to us and we trained them. Later on, the women we trained became the nucleus that infected a lot of other women. Of course, you had to indoctrinate them properly. Sit them on a rock and let the bugs chew them up and then ask them if they like it and you're going to get a negative answer. But if you can inculcate the angling mystique into them, you've got yourself a hell of a fishing partner. Some parts of some rivers had places where a female couldn't manage, and they needed different equipment sometimes, because their muscle structure is different from men's. But they became good casters easier than men, and they became experts with flytying and flies, because of their inherent gentility.”
Deren's wife, Catherine, is a nice-looking woman, who
was wearing slacks and a blouse and had her hair piled up in a bouffant hairdo the one time I saw her in the shop. She was as nice as pie to me then. Her perfume was unusual in that room filled with the smells of fly-tying cement, rubber, canvas, and True cigarette smoke. Another time, I saw her on the street, and she had just had some dental work done and she was really in pain and did not want to talk at all.
In
The Origins of Angling
, the author, John McDonald, says that angling existed in the ancient world, and that our knowledge of modern angling dates from 1496, when
A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle
, by Dame Juliana Burners, was published in England. He says that hunting and falconry were the sports of medieval chivalry, that books on those sports had existed for centuries, that the publication of the
Treatyse
occurred at about the same time as the decline of chivalry, and that the
Treatyse
is addressed to all who are, in its words, “virtuous, gentle, and freeborn,” rather than just to the nobility. He says that it cannot be definitely proved that Dame Juliana Berners wrote the book, as people say, or that she was a nun, as people also say. He says that people fished with tackle that was basically the same as that described in the
Treatyse
until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the invention of a better reel, of upstream fishing, and of the trout fly that floated rather than sank changed the sport tremendously. He says that over the centuries there has been much argument about trout-fly patterns, that the
Treatyse
presented twelve trout flies, for the different months of the year, as if they stood for immutable truths, that these twelve ruled for a hundred and seventy-five years, until Charles Cotton's
Instructions
How to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream
introduced sixty-five new fly patterns, that in the eighteenth century Richard and Charles Bowlker entered the discussion with their
A Catalogue of Flies Seldom Found Useful to Fish With
, and that the dispute continues to the present. The idea is that some anglers like to use the flies that have always worked, while others like to experiment. McDonald says, “The trout fly is still subject to a constant pull between classicism and innovation. In recorded history, the score is now even: three dominantly classical centuriesâthe fifteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth; and three innovatingâthe seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.”
So when Deren says, as he often does, “What in the hell is the point of using a famous fly that is some imported concoction from some Scottish salmon river which is probably the result of some guy having a couple of martinis a hundred and fifty years ago, which doesn't look a thing like any insect on any stream in this country, and which never looked like any insect in the British Isles, either, when you can pick a bug off a rock and copy it and catch a fish?” he speaks in the voice of his century.
Much of angling today is disappointing. Some of the best trout streams in the country are now privately owned, and it costs a lot of money per person for a day of fishing, and you have to get your reservations a long time in advance. The health advisory included in every copy of the fishing regulations for the state of Michigan says that because of the high PCB, PBB, and mercury content of fish from Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and many of their tributary streams, no one should eat more than half a pound per week of fish caught in these waters, and pregnant women or women who one day expect to have children should not eat any at all. The acid rain
that falls in the Catskill Mountains is bad for fish, so now fisheries biologists in New York State are trying to breed a strain of acid-resistant fish. In the absence of clean streams that are nearby and uncrowded and full of wild trout, the modern angler often concentrates on a particular aspect of his sportâone that does not require such a rare set of circumstances. Some people like to cast, and they become tournament casters; some people read about fishing all the time; some people write about it.