Posts from the ‘Creative Nonfiction’ Category
“It’s veal. It probably came from a very depressed calf, can we just eat in peace? And get LOIB out from under the table!”
I get glares from TOO and BOB but TSWITMLM just smirks.
Oh, you have not met my family; introductions are in order: As always, there’s the Big, Old Brunette (BOB) and her two daughters, The Step-Daughter I Adore Like She Was My Own (TSDIALSWMO) and her younger sister, The Other One (TOO) and Her New Beau, (HNB). A last-minute invitee is My First Wife (MFW) with our only offspring The Son Who Is Too Much Like Me, (TSWITMLM) and next to him is, of course, My Mother, Big Sigh (MM,BS) a recent widow. The Grand Kids X 2 (GKX2), whose mother is TSDIALSWMO are there as well.
Photo copyright 2010 by Spappy Jones.
Intermittently under the table, on the couch and whining at the back door is Lucy, Our Incontinent Beagle (LOIB) who adores MFW much to the annoyance of the BOB and we all have congregated in Our Little Love Nest (OLLN) for Christmas dinner. Joining us is the BILFM, a recent widower who is the BOB’s brother-in-law from Minneapolis, an infrequent visitor and a terrific guy.
The Fly Shop did well this Christmas season, the whole year in fact and I’m beat from several 60-hour weeks but happy to have my family here as long as they behave. In a prior life, I was in the food service business and after standing on my feet all day at the shop I find that cooking relaxes me. It also brings out my creative side; it drives me to the other side of my brain, if you will.
“Could somebody let LOIB out?”
Some think that being a fly tyer is creative but it’s glorified factory work. I’m a production fly tyer who annually cranks out 600 dozen flies and they all need to match the original pattern with precious few variations so there is no creative outlet for me there. Researching menus and spending time in front of my stove at OLLN is a creative outlet I crave. When I cook for my family, I need to be creative and here’s why.
TOO is a militant vegetarian. There are already some ill feelings between us about my stocking animal parts in the Fly Shop as fly tying materials, but I digress.
Her sister, TSDIALSWMO won’t eat cooked tomatoes but fresh ones are O.K. (or is it the other way around, did I not see her eating a pizza?), garlic does not agree with the BILFM and the GKX2 will eat everything they recognize but nothing they don’t. The first B in the BOB is because I cook for her well and often. MM,BS feigns a cholesterol issue except for ice cream, a sweet that she cannot live without.
Her hunger for sweets is a leftover scar from her battle with alcohol, (BWA) which she has won triumphantly. I found the hard way that the BWA is somewhat hereditary so I have had my own issues to face and my BWA got in the way of a whole lot of living. I love my family and my BWA was affecting them so I waged my own quite war because when it came to Martinis I knew my limit but I got drunk before I got there.
“Can’t you hear LOIB whining to get back in? Somebody let her in!”
So I now drink non-alcoholic beer, cook without garlic when the BILFM is in town, omit cooked tomatoes from the menu (or is it fresh, was TSDIALSWMO eating a B.L.T. earlier?) and go lightly on the butter when MM,BS is here. GKX2 kind of fend for themselves and are fairly good eaters except when TOO is in town and then they become pickier.
Good Eaters are who Foodies like me love to cook for. When TOO announced earlier this year that for Christmas she was bringing HNB, my first thought was: “Is he a Good Eater?” OLLN was getting too crowded and my BWA was rearing its ugly head, maybe just one real beer? This thought aloud brought a glare from the BOB. No, we have guests for dinner.
“Push LOIB off of the couch, would you please?”
Back to the GKX2, they were not thrilled to find out from TSWITMLM that the mushrooms they used to eat are a type of fungi. The word mushroom is fun to pronounce when you’re a little person but the word fungi is not. Based solely on the pronunciation, mushrooms are now out.
The salad course went just O.K. TSDIALSWMO picked off the fresh tomatoes wordlessly; the GKX2 would not eat the mushrooms after TSWITMLM’s fungi comment and the dressing did have a whisper of garlic but the BILFM did not seem to notice. MM,BS, MFW and the BOB were fine.
My Blanquette du Veau with fresh pasta was a disaster. Too much cream for MM,BS and TOO was livid that I had an innocent calf slaughtered for a dinner to celebrate the birth of our Lord, an act I found comforting in an Old Testament kind of way. “Am I the only one who hears LOIB whining to be let out?”
MFW, a farm girl who followed in her mother’s footsteps and cooked everything to death was never a foodie. She had her own peculiarities with food; she called them noodles. Fettuccini, linguini, angel hair and even macaroni were never referred to as pasta down on the farm; they were noodles.
When MFW asked to have the noodles passed to her, TSWITMLM snickered at his mother’s hick-ness and the GKX2 who knew the home made effort in the serving bowl borrowed from MM,BS should be called pasta, immediately put their forks down. TOO alternated steely glances between me and HNB who was shoveling in the Veal; he’s a Good Eater!
One of the GKX2 hopped down off of his chair to let LOIB inside and I noticed that LOIB seemed far too happy to see him. I looked over to see that he had pasta in one hand, fungi in the other and was feeding LOIB; she’s a good eater, too.
“Stop feeding LOIB!”
Desserts were individual Pannetone bread puddings; a delicious but questionable menu choice. I had forgotten that the BOB liked neither raisins nor currants, the pudding base had both eggs and cream so MM,BS was honked off but her mouth was too full to object. There wasn’t a suggestion of garlic in the dessert and the BILFM was looking a little bloated from the salad dressing but he devoured his pudding anyway. MFW was puzzled that pie was not served as it always had been on the farm and why would pudding have bread in it anyway?
I told you, she’s not a foodie. Much eye rolling from TSWITMLM and I whispered to him, “that’s why I divorced her.”
He quickly reminded me that MFW had her version, which was this: Ever since Dad was a teenager, he liked to, um……… shop. The world was his shopping mall and he liked to have many stores to shop in. Marriage never stopped Dad from shopping around and Dad really used to like the younger stores that were not brightly lit and had a big shelf. His mother did not like his Dad shopping around so we needed to not be together anymore.
Now I happily shop in one store and one store only. Have for 18 years.
O.K. back to dessert where one future relative was happy but TOO announced the white flour was poison and for her, dinner was so over and flounced away from the table.
“Whose shoes is LOIB throwing up on?”
OLLN was turning chaotic and my BWA was raging. Christmas Day Steelheading on the St. Joe River in Indiana was looking better and better.
Coffee after was no picnic, either. A half-caff here and a de-caff there and what do you mean you have no green tea? More eye rolling. “Dad, caffeine is so bad for you”; it’s the only thing TSWITMLM remembers from his health class.
“Fine, no coffee for me. Would you be happier if I had a Martini? And get LOIB off of the couch!”
We opened presents after dinner, the GKX2 were dynamos filled by sugar and laughter and the BILFM belched quietly while sitting in my easy chair. He is a terrific guy. MFW and the BOB sat at opposite ends of the couch avoiding each other like cats.
The BOB beamed while watching the GKX2 open presents and even TSWITMLM was in a decent mood although it was hard to tell as he had a new Ipod clamped over his ears. With a grunt, LOIB finally settled in under the dining room table.
When there was a lull in the unwrapping process I noticed that the BILFM was eyeing MM,BS and she was not objecting. Too much wine or maybe the BILFM was not such a terrific guy after all. The thought of them shopping together made my bile rise.
TOO and HNB were far too cuddly for my comfort level and then came an announcement that distracted me from the BILFM and MM,BS.
We’ll soon have GKX3, thanks to TOO and HNB. I hope one day to teach our newest GK to fly fish and I hope he’s a Good Eater.
Joseph Meyer is the owner of the One More Cast Fly Shop in Countryside, Illinois. Previously, he was an instructor for Orvis where he discovered his love of teaching the art of Fly Fishing. He commercially ties over 600 dozen flies per year and is a Certified Casting Instructor with the Federation of Fly Fishers. He has been published in the Chicago Tribune, American Angler, Yale Anglers’ Journal, Far & Away, and Hatches magazine.
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Fly Fishing Tales
A friend and business acquaintance sent a parable to me today as, I think, something of a cautionary tale. It’s too nice not to share, particularly with fellow anglers. I am probably violating all sorts of copyright in sharing it this way, but what the heck:
The Virtues of the Trout Stream
Few experiences can be as cathartic as a day spent fishing on the river. Life’s nagging problems can safely be left on the bank, leaving us with a time for relaxation, reflection, and the appreciation of the natural wonders hidden in our busy world. What it took me a while to realize, however, was that the purity of the experience lends itself to exposure to some of life’s most important lessons. Perhaps if we were more willing to open ourselves to the teachings of trout, far fewer problems would be waiting for us when we get back to shore.
Tenacity
This is an often overlooked and simple solution to most of life’s problems, and fishing requires it in healthy doses. Whether fishing entirely new water or familiar settings under different conditions, an angler cannot give up easily if he is to succeed. So many things today come packaged with an expectation of ease. My generation especially seems to have largely forgotten that not everything in life will be given to us when we need it. The refusal to submit to finicky fish or poor conditions can turn a miserable day of fishing to a good day of catching. An extreme example is the angler who continues to fish through buffeting winds and driving rain. One wonders what things would be like if that person approached all of life’s problems with a similar veracity.
Adaptability
It may seem like an obvious lesson, but it is doubtful many fishermen really practice it like they need to. How many out there have ever refused to switch from the fly that was working yesterday, or move from the hole you caught fish in at this time last summer? If you claim to have not ever done this, you are lying, and your untruths have no place in the honest sport of fishing. But whether it is due to the fear of an unknown take on a problem or simple laziness derived from the reliable comfort of occasional success, people become entrenched in their approaches to situations. Nowhere is it more apparent than in fly fishing that no approach is universally applicable. If widespread success is to be found anywhere in life, we must be willing to try a range of solutions to any given obstacle.
Humility
I haven’t met many fishermen who suffer from an excess of humility. Come to think of it, I haven’t met many people like that in general. Very often, however, we are faced with situations in which all our efforts simply can’t get the job done. Trout have brains the size of garbanzo beans, yet every so often we can’t outsmart them. Humans like to think of themselves as apex predators; the smartest and most unbeatable organisms on the planet. What fly fishing shows us is that we are not the kings of every domain. This idea makes many people uncomfortable, so they blame problems on equipment, weather, or any number of external factors. But the plain and simple truth is that sometimes we do everything perfectly and still the fish just flat out beat us. And there is nothing we can do about it, save admit fault and marvel. The most important thing we can do is realize that sometimes we might not have a rung reserved for us at the top of every ladder.
Gratitude
Everyone once in a while, things seem to fall in to place. When they do, we are granted a prize for which we should be grateful. Sometimes simply being allowed to see a fish with a trout’s unparalleled natural beauty is enough, but the best thing about fish is that they are a reassuring glimpse of a realm far different than our own. They have managed to survive without so many of them annoyances humans have created, and will continue to do so. Perhaps it is the knowledge that such a world exists that helps us cope with the problems in our world. Whatever solace we take from trout fishing, we should never forget to be grateful for the experience, the fish, and the lessons we take from each.
Trevor Pellerite writes to T|N|T from his Upper Michigan home in Marquette — Robert Traver country. He is a senior English major at Northern Michigan University. After he graduates, he would like to become an outdoor writer and fly fishing guide.
When I first got to know the Boardman River I had another, secret, name for it. My private name for it was the “Compromise River.”
On the River
I called it that because the Boardman ultimately empties into the Grand Traverse Bay, an arm of Lake Michigan, right in downtown Traverse city, a sophisticated northern Michigan resort town known for – among other things – its shopping. Once upon a time, when I had to be concerned about such things, I could drop the lady in my life in town with the cash and scoot a few miles out of town for some fishing. So everybody was happy, more or less. Though sometimes I would get, “But I thought we were going to spend our vacation together!” Never mind that there are 168 hours in a week and I was going to hog a mere 6 of them for myself. Besides, I would tell her, when you’re having lunch on the terrace at the Bean Pot, look down at the river and remember that the water you’re seeing flowed right around my waders a little earlier. It’s sort of like being together.
That’s how I came to secretly call the Boardman the “Compromise River.” You can bet that I had dozens of no-compromise rivers all over the state but trout streams being what they are, you don’t usually find them flowing through the basements of designer-label boutiques. The Boardman is a real Christian river in that regard and I was thrilled to discover its benefits. I even thought about presenting a marketing proposal to the Chamber of Commerce – ‘SHE SHOPS/YOU FISH!” – but had second thoughts when I realized the idea was self-defeating in the long term. True, the local merchants might have been grateful. But I couldn’t imagine a trout fisherman on every bend of the river for one thing. For another, I’d know that they were stooping to my level of sickness – paying (literally) for a few stolen moments. It wasn’t a club I wanted to start.
The Boardman really does flow right through downtown Traverse City and actually gets a limited salmon and steelhead run. The salmon are captured at a permanent harvesting station and stripped of their eggs, practically in the shadow of Milliken’s Department Store. At certain times of the year, you’ll see mom and dad and the kids with their noses pressed against the viewing windows of the egg-stripping station, Gucci shopping bags overflowing. I swear I once saw a guy cooling his credit cards in one of the raceways. read more…
Capt. Tony Petrella
If you want to teach your wife or girlfriend how to shoot, simply put her into a pair of borrowed waders that force her to waddle around like a penguin. Then make her lurch around for six hours in a frigid steelhead stream in early March, sublimely confident the whole time that all of this is a wonderfully exhilarating experience that every woman should be absolutely thrilled to share with her man.
On the drive home that evening, you will have visions of a warm fire and cuddly mate. She, on the other hand, will have revenge in her eyes and murder in her heart. Lock the gun cabinet before you pour a drink, then swallow the key. Better yet, throw it far back into those raging flames that mirror your mate’s soul. There’s danger afoot, Watson!
And, guys—you can believe me because I was there. Been that stupid. Done that insane deed. Talk about being blissfully unaware of the female psyche! Brother. And Kate already knew how to shoot!
In retrospect, I think the only thing that saved me was that by the time we got home from that foamy torrent called the Little Manistee River, Kate was utterly exhausted. She did, however, vow to never again set foot in a steelhead river.
Twenty-nine fishing seasons have glided past our waders since that frosty day with good friends Dan Cogan and Dave Arnold. And, although she has kept that vow against steelhead as devoutly as a monk eschews speaking, Kate has logged hundreds of days astream and has caught thousands of trout.
All of which is astonishing, considering that although she was raised only a few blocks away from Lake Erie, her previous fishing experience was limited to dangling a worm off a pier while sitting next to Dad. The perch ended up on the dinner table; the sheephead were dug into the garden. Trips to Metropolitan Park meant netting minnows in the creek and never straying out of sight.
In fact, there wasn’t much straying at all from the safe haven in the suburbs. Theirs was a picture-book house of brick-and-boards, a house with friendly neighbors, and trees, and a big backyard. But even in those bucolic days of Ike and a skinny rich kid from Boston who would be President, Mom didn’t want her chicks wandering far from the nest. She worried about Kathy and The Twins even as a momma duck fusses about her brood, counting and herding and counting again.
To this day, Kate loves telling about her most memorable outdoor excursion. “Once when we (Kate and her sibs Steve and Vicki) were all pretty young, we convinced Mom that we should have a tent out in the back yard. Dad threw a blanket over a clothesline and pinned down the edges somehow. The three of us thought it was great fun, but Mom must have worried about wolves snatching up her babies. It was barely dusk when she started scraping a spoon across the porch screen to scare us. She wanted us back in the house. End of camping trip.”
I can only give thanks that Jennie never knew what her eldest child has endured at various times over these past 30 years. The list of outdoor atrocities committed against my wife begins with blackflies sucking away her very lifeblood and gets worse from there.
Perhaps it’s that stubborn Slovene streak in her that absolutely forbids whining or complaining. I remember a night years ago when we were being assaulted by mosquitoes in a swarm the size of a Kansas grasshopper plague. Finally, I couldn’t stand any more torture. “I’m getting out of here,” I yelled. “This is murder!”
From upstream, I heard a grateful sigh. “Thank God,” Kate said quietly. “Let’s go! I can’t stand it either, but I didn’t want to be the one to quit first!”
Kate’s first “boots” had three-inch heels and came from Jacobson’s. Her lipstick matched her nail polish, which matched her outfit. Now, she calls herself a “River Rat” and shops for function. Vintage wine has given way to a never-ending search for the ultimate in high-power bug dope. And Jim Beam whiskey. The only “line” she cares about is the one on her fly reel. And she cleans it far more religiously than I do mine.
Kate Reels One In
She hides herself in the streamside vegetation as if she’s stalking an elk. And no winged or floating trout food is safe from capture in her little fishnet so that I’ll have more patterns to tie when we get home. Sometimes when I sneak up on her she’s cussing herself like a Drill Sergeant for making a sloppy cast.
About the only thing she won’t do is go out on the flats boat with me for snook or redfish, let alone tarpon. “Nope,” she says firmly. “Those big rods are too much for my bad shoulder. I’m not gonna screw it up and then miss trout season.” End of discussion.
Inevitably, people ask who catches the most fish. I truthfully answer that we take turns. Kate changes fly patterns like a runway model sheds her clothes, which sometimes gives her the edge. But I cast into trickier spots to fish that don’t often see a fly. So, it evens out. When they ask who catches the biggest fish, I also truthfully answer that Kate caught a Michigan brook trout that weighed in excess of five pounds.
She caught that deeply-colored monster in a “secret” little creek our old friend Al Rockwood took us to, a special place with casting spots cut out of the trees and weeds at each “beat,” much like an English chalkstream. The fish was lying in a deep pool formed by a wing diverter, and I had passed a dry fly over it just minutes before Kate let one of Al’s “Sweezle” streamers swing through.
I was proudly releasing my third 21-inch brown trout when I heard her whooping. Leaving my rod propped against a pine tree, I ran back upstream to find out what the commotion was all about.
Kate was kneeling on a little footbridge, her rod bent like an elbow macaroni. Al threw me the net and said he’d take pictures. All four of us performed our assigned tasks perfectly, and today that fish hangs next to the liquor cabinet. But only in an original painting by Kalamazoo artist David Ruimveld.
I still can feel Kate trembling as we held that big fish, and her urgency to release it back into the dark water lest it die from being exposed too long. When asked later why she didn’t keep such a trophy, she looked puzzled for a moment, then quietly replied, “because I didn’t want to be the one to kill it.”
We have yet another photo of Kate, proudly holding her very first trout. She’s wearing a vest that looks like an apron, and a big, floppy, blue hat. She’s also wearing a million-dollar smile. I don’t believe that five-inch brookie was smiling, but I’m positive it was greatly relieved to be ever-so-gently released back into the Au Sable River and the bosom of its family.
“I never knew they were so beautiful,” Kate said. She wiped perspiration from her brow in the heat of that unseasonably warm May afternoon so long ago and practically whispered the words every man longs to hear. “I understand, now, why you love it so much. You’ll never get an argument from me any time you want to come fishing!”
Capt. Tony Petrella formerly covered the National Football League and National Hockey League for the Palm Beach Post and the Atlanta Constitution. He now splits his time as a hunting and fishing guide in Michigan and Southwest Florida. His web address is www.tightloopsflyfishing.com.
Every Michigander knows that the lower half of his state is shaped like the back of a left-handed mitten. If you were to draw a line from the tip of the thumb on Lake Huron, straight west to the City of Ludington on Lake Michigan, you’d more or less divide the Lower Peninsula in half. You get the bottom half; I get the top half. Now take the index finger of your right hand and put it at the exact center of my part. If you missed the town of Grayling by more than half an inch I’ll buy you lunch. At any rate, your intruding finger is also smack in the middle of Michigan’s most famous trout country.
Named after Thymallus arcticus, the arctic grayling, the town sits astride the main branch of the Au Sable River. The river was once loaded with this lovely and too-easy-to-catch fish. They are long gone, thanks mainly to the logging boom of the late 1800’s, which stripped the banks of Michigan’s rivers, warming and fouling them. But overfishing didn’t help either. The grayling were caught literally by the barrelful and shipped off to commercial markets.
Flowers in the River
Now the river is full of trout: browns, brookies, and some rainbows. And Grayling is Michigan’s trout capital.
Never mind that Kalkaska, twenty-five miles to the west, hosts the annual Michigan Trout Festival. Although it has a statue of a giant brook trout – I would guess fifteen feet tall – in the center of town, it doesn’t have the equivalent of an Au Sable River in the center of town, or anywhere nearby for that matter. So, sorry Kalkaska, you’re a nice town and all, and I think it’s hilarious and wonderful that you put on the trout festival – and I love the towering brookie – but you’re not the epicenter of trout fishing in Michigan. Close, but not nearly close enough. read more…
Joseph Meyer at the Vice
After teaching fly casting for several years now, I have found that my line of demarcation is about twenty years old. Younger than that and the metaphors that I use to teach fly casting are worthless. It must be a sign of my aging process but I am mystified that those young students who come to me for fly casting instruction just don’t have the worldliness to grasp onto the tools that I have always used to illustrate the dynamics of the cast.
When I teach the false cast, I want students to get into a rhythm and to become aware that when casting a shorter length of line, they need to have a quicker casting cycle than they do with a longer length of line. A simple concept but it sometimes needs illustration to be grasped.
“Be like a metronome,” I advise my students and at this admonishment I am often met with an owl-like stare. The eyes widen, and then blink repeatedly but no awareness sets in. “You know, the thing that sits on top of the piano and keeps time.”
Nothing.
“But you told me you took music lessons!” Blink, blink. Nothing.
When a beginner asks me about casting lessons, I tell them that it is easy to learn the basic cast. Kids pick up on it easier than adults, especially those that have had some musical training, so I always inquire about any music lessons that a prospective student may have taken, yet the wood pyramid with the brass pendulum that graced the piano that every student plunked away at is a foreign concept to younger casting students.
“Well, if you don’t know what a metronome is how did you keep time?”
They reply that the device used during their lessons was di-gi-tal. Everything that comes out of a teenager’s mouth is said with that odd accent. Everything is di-gi-tal.
It’s the new millennium.
So, we press on. I need to illustrate that they need to come to a more definitive stop on their forward cast and I ask that they pretend that they are swinging a hammer. The scenario is this: they need to drive a nail into a wall to hang a picture. The Big, Old, Brunette at home always wants pictures hung at eye level so I borrow her advice and tell them that they need to drive the nail into the wall at eye level. Further, they need to swing a hammer big enough to drive the nail in with one stroke. This illustrates that they need to break their wrist at the very last second to apply power at the end of the stroke and come to a complete stop. If they don’t break their wrist ever so slightly, they will be pushing the nail into the wall instead of driving it in. I remind them that when they are swinging a hammer, they do not hold it with a death grip but just tightly enough to keep control. It’s the same way with a fly rod.
This analogy works for me and has worked with every student I have ever had that was older than twenty.
I was slack-jawed speechless when a casting student told me that neither she nor her brother had ever held a hammer. “Never?” No, was her reply, they always had workmen to do that kind of thing.
Now, I am blessed to own a fly shop in a Chicago suburb that is surrounded by economy. This brings new fly fishers into the shop and is an economic boon to me. The downside is that the younger students that I teach come from homes where things are done for them; they have people to do that.
She told me not to yell at her, it’s not like her family had a ranch and she had to string barbed wire fences all day. She and her brother lived in Moneyville, for gosh sakes. This was coming from a teenager who drove up to her casting lesson behind the wheel of a new Range Rover with a brush bar on the front.
Now it’s my turn to offer up the Owl Look.
“Never swung a hammer before have you Punkin?” Pity.
Another common casting error that beginners (as well as an old fishing partner) make is to reach back for more power. When executing the back cast, they tend to reach back as if they were making a softball throw which tends to dump their line on the ground and lengthening their casting arc and loosing power instead of gaining power. It typically happens when casting for distance or casting into the wind.
The correct technique is to come to a more complete stop on the back cast, let the line unfurl behind you and then apply more power to a complete stop on the forward cast. Left Kreh describes this as an acceleration to a stop.
The description works in theory but needs illustration, and my next casting student was a young buck of about nineteen. I took his fly rod away from him, laid it on the ground and told him that the fly rod on the ground is now the painted line on the saloon floor and he would need to step up to the line to throw a dart. I told him that instead of a fly rod in his hand, he now has a “pretend” dart and I asked him to get ready to throw the dart at an imaginary dartboard. This illustration shows that when he is ready to throw the dart, his hand is up by his ear in the position that he should be in if he had made a back cast. Once I asked him to throw the dart, I could show him that the forward stop is at about eye-level.
The next teaching step was to move the imaginary dartboard a bit farther across the saloon so that when he makes his next dart throw, he wouldn’t reach back for more power, he needs to come to a harder stop to get the dart to fly farther.
The first time I used this analogy, I damn near broke my casting arm patting myself on the back in self-congratulation; I was a genius at getting this point across.
From the nineteen year-old I got that Owl Look again, blink, blink.
Not only had he never thrown darts before but he was truly confused about the concept of a saloon. Here came the accent again. “Whoa, a saloon, is that, um,…. like a bar?”
“No, dude, a saloon is not, um, like a bar. It is precisely a bar! It’s a comforting place where aging, harried fly fishers go to apply liquid salve to bruised egos after trout have made fools of them. As part of our therapy, sometimes we throw darts. You should try it, I think it helps your casting stroke.”
Sometimes I think I am getting too old for this.
Joseph Meyer is the owner of the One More Cast Fly Shop in Countryside, Illinois. Previously, he was an instructor for Orvis where he discovered his love of teaching the art of Fly Fishing. He commercially ties over 600 dozen flies per year and is a Certified Casting Instructor with the Federation of Fly Fishers. He has been published in the Chicago Tribune, American Angler, Yale Anglers’ Journal, Far & Away, and Hatches magazine. “Am I Too Old to Teach Flycasting?” originally appeared in Yale Angler’s Journal.
