Look, Snook
John Gierach is the writer that I discovered most recently, or, shown rather from my good friend and fishing partner Andy (otherwise known as “Larry” to his “Garry”), who forced me to try my hand at writing…again. Gierach has had a lifetime of fly fishing and knows his topics and themes well. His formula, as far as I can tell, is to start somewhere, let the mind do what it wants to, and then clean it all up in the form of a personal essay disguised as a fly fishing story. And they are fly fishing stories but they’re more about life, death, and love than anything else. He’s a poet dressed as someone’s uncle, which, being someone’s uncle, appeals to me.
During covid, Andy and I began fly fishing in the Trinity Alps with a guide. To this day, after at least a dozen guides, I’m convinced that their role is really more as chaperone than anything else, and ill-tempered at that. I made the false assumption that guide meant instructor, friend, or some kind of teacher with a pedagogical philosophy. Not to downplay the difficulty of their profession, especially when you’re instructing two beginners while rowing a boat backward. I’ve never been behind the oars and can only imagine the frustration. However, after a handful of years now on rivers, creeks, and streams, I’ve made it a special point while teaching friends, to actually “teach,” rather than instruct. What’s the difference?
The subtle difference, I might make, is that teaching takes into account all that is known, providing the facts (as far as you know them), and allowing the student to assimilate and connect ideas so that they may acquire the new skill over time. Too often, “instruct,” feels as though you’re being told what to do without an explanation of why you might do it. A complaint, if you can call it that, that I’ve heard from Zen Buddhist teachers is that Westerners always want to know why. And it’s this kind of inquiry that keeps those Western students lodged in their minds as opposed to the type of inquiry needed: acceptance of how things should be done to experience things as they are.
Despite the similarities between Zen practices and fly fishing, I think there is space for the very complaint that those teachers make. Inquiry into the why is tremendously helpful to the novice to understand how to, as has been famously stated, “think like a fish and act like a fly.”
There is much to consider but since the percentage of anglers to the population of non-anglers is so few—even though the sport seems to have grown tremendously since covid—I’ll keep this brief. If I were to teach someone how to fly fish, I might outline a freshwater crash course as follows:
1 - Casting: overhead, roll cast, mending
2 - Knots: improved clinch, double surgeon, blood, perfection, loop to loop, nail
3 - Line: backing, fly line, leader, tippet
4 - Entomology: mayfly, caddisfly, stonefly, terrestrials
5 - Flies: nymphs, emergers, streamers, dry flies
6 - Tying: hooks, thread, yarn, beads, wire, feathers, hackle, dubbing, head cement, tools (vice, bobbin, bobbin threader, bodkin, hackle pliers, scissors, whip finisher)
7 - Fish: brook, rainbow, brown, cutthroat, steelhead
8 - Gear: rods, reels, waders, boots, nippers, forceps, floatant, indicators, split shot, nets
9 - Water: upstream versus downstream, shelter, feeding lanes, holding ground, seams
10 - Discovery: fishing reports, matching the hatch (regions and seasons), Google maps, books
That’s it. Not too difficult. It’s taken me just about three years to learn all of that, most of which, I looked up and tested. I think one guide taught me how to mend and another, well, maybe that’s it. They’re usually busy trying to put us on fish and depending on your curiosity and their patience, are somewhat willing to answer questions. To be fair to the guiding business though, I’m something of an autodidact with a visual learning style. I have the habit of observing and prefer physical demonstrations as opposed to hearing instructions. Mostly those instructions are, “…dude, what the fuck was that? That’s not a roll cast.” More of an admonishment than an education.
Most recently, since I live in Florida full-time, I’ve been walking the beach looking for snook while I wait for further trout fishing opportunities. I know very little about snook other than that they live in salt and freshwater, like to hide in mangroves, and swim along the trough of the shoreline. When exactly, I’m still not sure. I’ve caught only half a dozen snook since living here and only in the Everglades. Since I was with a guide, I handled not even one of them and have been slightly afraid that I’ll catch one and have to figure out how to avoid their razor-sharp gills. The internet says to mouth them while holding them by the belly so you don’t break their jaw.
I’m not sure when saltwater fly fishing takes over an angler. I’ve heard plenty of stories of flats fishing in Key West and the Bahamas for bonefish, outside of New Orleans for redfish, and in my own area here in Southwest Florida, along with snook, for the “silver kings” themselves: tarpon. Supposedly, tarpon can jump through the air as high as ten feet. I’ve never seen it before. I’ve only caught a baby tarpon, no larger than my hand, that did very little when it was hooked other than make its way to the boat. Despite the amount of fresh and saltwater species that live in the area, I’m partial to trout and the occasional anadromous steelhead (also trout) in freshwater. There’s just something about the companionship of sharks, snakes, and alligators that I find disagreeable while casting.
This past year, I had gone through the grueling process of applying to graduate school again. I had decided on a program with a longer name than the application process itself: Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. The program was “low-residency,” which meant that as a remote worker, I was about to spend a couple of more years alone and in front of computers. Weeks before the program was to begin, an apprehension had been growing that was keeping me up at night more than usual which isn’t saying much. Sleep has become increasingly elusive over the years and has required more breathing techniques to fall and stay asleep than I’m comfortable admitting.
On the day the program was to begin, I woke at 1:30am and stayed awake until 8pm that night. At about noon, after many phone calls with family and friends, I decided to formally withdraw. Luckily, it was also the final day for a 100% refund. More than anything, and probably with more guilt than enthusiasm, I realized how little fly fishing I would have been able to get in had I gone through the program. I would have spent two years reading about Jungian archetypes, transformative fairy tales, and individuation followed by an additional four to six years pursuing a doctoral degree of some sort. It’s dangerous territory when you’ve decided all you really want to do is fly fish, tie flies, and read and write about the angling life. It leaves very little time for things like work, relationships, and study. In my experience thus far, I’ve never come across a more expensive and time-consuming leisurely activity, nor a worthy one.
In either case, the case to make for fly fishing is in finding a balance somewhere between a habitual diversion of adult responsibilities and actively pursuing something of a meditative practice that removes and relieves one from the mind’s incessant thinking. More important than catching fish, it’s an activity that puts you in water, under trees, and most often, with a good friend. However, when life becomes challenging (and when isn’t it?) there is fly fishing. John Gierach advises that “…the solution to any problem—work, love, money, whatever—is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be.” The best-case scenario is that life’s problems are so few that when they do arise, there is fly fishing and when there are none to be found, there is still fly fishing.
