Chadd Van Zanten looks at tension in a fishing sense and much more too. I am sure there will be aspects of this article that will resonate with many of you reading it!
The chubby kid with the freckles isn’t getting it. He hunches at his vise with his thread in the wrong hand, nose so close to the fly his eyes begin to cross. From where I’m standing, it looks like he’s dropped all his feathers and is slowly lashing his own index finger to the shank of the hook.
“Jeremy,” I say, “hold up. Jeremy, stop.”
He can’t hear me. I’m in front of the class and around the table are five other junior fly tiers, each raising a racket such to wake Frederic Michael Halford himself from his very grave. The tabletop lies beneath several inches of garish feathers and chenille. We’re tying the Wooly Bugger, so there’s lots of marabou feathers. They’re wispy and weightless and they blow around in the commotion like debris in a typhoon. The flies are all dressed like tiny drag queens. This one’s got a misshapen body of hot pink with orange tail. That one has black chenille with sky-blue hackle.
Jeremy leans closer to the vise and his eyes cross alarmingly.
“Jeremy,” I holler. Then I think maybe his name isn’t Jeremy.
“Jacob.”
No response. All I know for sure is that it’s a “J” name.
“Jason. Jared. Jeff.” He keeps winding.
I can’t just shout, “Hey, fat kid in the blue shirt,” so I walk over to his tying station and take the bobbin from him as gently as I can.
“Tell me your name again. Jason? James?”
“Skylar,” he says.
“Seriously?”
He raises his eyebrows and nods, as if it’s a surprise to him, too.
I hand the bobbin back to him and say, “Skylar, this goes in your other hand.”
He forms an “O” with his mouth.
It’s a three-day fly fishing camp for twelve-year-olds. We teach them how to tie, how to cast, how to fish. A few of them know a little about fly fishing. Most know nothing about everything. They move from class to class like a small and barely contained circus, becoming only a little quieter when the instruction begins.
Skylar unravels his botched fly and starts over, but the feathers fall off again. He looks at me.
“You gotta keep it tight,” I say. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
He leans forward. His eyes cross again and his tongue slides out of the corner of his mouth as he winds the thread. This time the feathers stay.
When we finish up, there’s marabou all over everything and everybody. The kids clean up, kind of, and I shoo them on to the next class. Everywhere they go, we tell them to keep things tight. Tight thread, tight loops, tight lines.
That’s because at the center of fly fishing there is only tension—harnessed and modulated, then applied. A fly is little else than a moment of time wrapped into a tight and complicated knot. The cast is a nylon line drawn taut by energy stored for a split second in a fly rod. As the fly touches the stream, tension between water molecules bears it downstream to the trout. And the angler who does not understand the importance of maintaining tension on the line after the trout takes the fly is not yet an angler.
My neighbor Rick once asked me, “So, you’re into fly fishing?”
I shrug. “That is one way of putting it.”
“I’ve always wanted to try it. Is it relaxing? It looks relaxing.”
“No,” I answer, “not really.”
“Oh,” he says. Then he looks at the ground.
It’s true. The big tailwaters—the Missouri, the Green—fly fishing there is seldom serene. The wide-open and indifferent water. The beefy, torpedo-like trout whose sole purpose seems to lie in making grown men feel inadequate, irrelevant, silly. These are not places for relaxation. The smaller streams are but a little more accommodating, with their brushy, technical lanes and ever-changing moods.
When you fly fish, you fly fish. That’s all. If you wish to relax, drink beer, nap, or consider your place in the cosmos, you must stop casting. And when you begin to cast again, you have to clear your mind. This may explain fly fishing’s rumored association with relaxation and thought experiments on the meaning of existence—these pursuits may become easier once the trip is over.
I didn’t explain any of this to Rick. Didn’t even try. Because there is also tension between the angler and those around him. When the angler tries to tell his friends or neighbors about the last fish he caught, they nod absently or change the subject. They do not understand. Many anglers can scarcely abide the company of other anglers—they can’t be made responsible for enlightening the unwashed.
Then there are the wives. Those ladies who wait for their angler-husbands. The man who fishes and claims things are never tense between himself and his wife is either a liar or a right bastard. From her perspective, the matter is very simple: if he spends more time fishing than he spends with me, then fishing is more important to him than I am.
No angler has ever managed to disprove this equation.
Saturday morning arrives. I throw my rod and waders in the truck. My wife appears on the back steps and asks, “When will I see you?”
“Oh, I dunno,” I say, acting as if I hadn’t thought about it until just then. “Three-thirty. Maybe four.”
“Which means five or five-thirty.”
Actually, I’m thinking seven, but I don’t tell her that. Instead I pause by the truck and say, “Well, when do you want me home?”
“I don’t want you home at any certain time. I’m asking. When will I see you?”
We watch each other for a few seconds across the driveway, her with arms folded, me grasping the door handle of the truck.
“It depends,” I answer. “I’m thinking no later than five-thirty, six.”
“See you at seven.” She goes inside.
I pull away from the house and try not to drive too fast. The responsibilities of home and office protest. Every stoplight takes so long I convince myself that the town’s entire traffic-control system is malfunctioning.
Then I reach the canyon and begin to climb. At certain bends in the highway I steal glances at the water. There is nothing I can learn from a half-second glimpse at a river fifty yards down a ravine, except maybe that it is still where I left it, but I keep looking, anyway.
Depending on the timing of the trip and what there is for me to do at home, there may be a twinge of guilt eight or ten miles up the canyon, as I pass through the threshold beyond which the everyday world no longer holds sway. Like a thermocline. After that, I feel only the constant gravity that pulls us all toward the wilder places.
And so at last there is tension between the angler and the stream. It’s a little like the electricity between two rivals. The stream necessarily stands as a challenge to the angler, who has come to unlock her secrets—streams do not give those up easily. To step into the water is to accept the challenge. But it is also like the tension between lovers. Waiting to enter the stream is like waiting for the touch of a lover’s hand.
I park, pull on my waders, and hike down a trail to the bank. Swallows dive and swoop over the stream, picking off insects as they drift up and into the sunlight. I step into the stream. I accept her challenge, feel her touch.
The flow, temperature, time of day—everything’s good. There will be fish today. A lot of them. I situate myself among the rocks and cast to a slender ribbon of smooth water, the seam between fast and slow currents. A trout takes the fly. The tension does not dissipate, but it shifts. It equalizes. I lift my rod tip and come tight to the trout. I feel his soft weight on the line.
Read more from Chadd via his blog