My first year with a flyrod

FlyRod & Reel magazine each year publishes the 1st place winner of the Robert Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award. A compilation of these wonderful fishing stories is available in a book entitled, In Hemingway's Meadow.

Last year I entered the contest with a submission about my first year of fly-fishing. I didn't win, and when I opened the Autumn 2012 edition of FlyRod & Reel magazine to see Dave Karczynski's entry, "Awake in the Moonlight: Notes at Hex time," I understood why.

May 29, 2012

Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award

Fly Rod & Reel Magazine
P.O. Box 370
Camden, Maine  04843

Dear Sirs:

I am new to fly-fishing, but not fishing.  As you will learn from my essay, which I respectfully submit for your consideration, the culture and the sport itself have drawn me unexpectedly to the Robert Traver writing contest.

Just two days after my conversion to the sport, which I write about, I discovered references to Trout Madness. I could not purchase it quickly enough in Seattle, and had to venture into the open sea of the Internet to find a used copy offered for $5.97 by the Goodwill of Southwest Florida.  Amazon’s shipping and handling added another $3.99, but within days I had my prized catch for just under $10 bucks.

Quotes and other sentiments of Mr. Traver speckle my essay like the trout I enjoy fishing for.  I only made the connection mid-way through my essay that the author of Trout Madness was also John D. Voelker.  Soon my wife and I were watching Jimmy Stewart walk through the door of his house in Anatomy of a Murder.  “Look,” I told my wife, “he’s carrying fly rods and newly caught trout!”

And so, regardless of the outcome of this contest, I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience both of learning about Mr. Traver and constructing an essay that I hope you enjoy.

Sincerely,

Greg Shaw
Washington state

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“Remember," as my father kept saying, "it is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm…."
                                                                            --Norman Maclean

1.

This is the story, set to my own four count rhythm, of a first year fly fishing.  But this fish story starts, of all places, not in the water but on a baseball diamond.  In the country, where I lived and grew up in rural Oklahoma, baseball and fishing went together like fried chicken and church on Sunday.  If we weren’t working we were on a ball field, a farm pond or a creek bed.  I remember being happily surprised the first time I learned that Ted Williams had become a world-class fisherman after his retirement from the Boston Red Sox. Baseball is a sport that has inspired writers in much the same way fly fishing has.  In fact, I’d like to weigh these respective bookshelves to see which genre has the edge. Pitcher and writer Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four, "You spend your whole life gripping a baseball, and at the end you realize that it was the other way around."    Do we grip what we love or does what we love grip us?  In such an economical, literary way Bouton reminds us of the self-absorption of our youth and the inevitable realization later in life that our history and our culture reach out through the generations (and, yes, the waters) to grab us and hold us fast.

I got to thinking about that the other day as the Winston 5-weight fly rod I was gripping bent and twitched against the fight of a small coastal cutthroat trout on the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River in Washington state.  In my left hand I held the familiar cork handle of a graphite rod and in my fingers ran a silky fly line which stretched out into the oblivion of cold water beyond a submerged boulder. There in the rushing water of a Cascades snowmelt, a freckled trout – a good size one for this stream -- had attacked my Hare’s Ear. The cutt dove deep into a pool and then rose to the surface as my rod tip reached for the sky.