The Longest Silence

Tying Flies

IT SEEMS TO ME there are several schools of fly-tying: traditional, imitative, defiant, and autobiographical. Traditional tying produces a fly that is usually a generalist pattern and has a greater pure aesthetic component than those of my other arbitrarily named categories. Some of these high-concept flies, like other aesthetic ideas of their day, have gone into appropriate eclipse: the Parmachene Belle, Queen of Waters, even the Royal Coachman, as well as the elaborate salmon flies of the past that are now enjoying a resurgence but only as objects for display. In their prime, with ingredients drawn from the most recondite corners of the British Empire, they were the equivalent of Victorian architectural follies, far removed from their origins in utility. Other traditional flies have a restraint and beauty that makes them undiscardable: the Adams, the Quill Gordon, the Hendricksons, the Cahills, all remain useful and pretty. They remind us of the poetic history of our passion as well as its deficiencies. They don’t much look like the flies they imitate except in the most basic way, and they encapsulate certain preconceptions about fish which are aesthetic at base, such as the notion that trout really prefer beautiful mayflies to such tiresome things as caddises, stoneflies, midges, and worms.

Some great fishermen — fly-tyers have been generalists, including the French anglers who supply restaurants from hard-fished public rivers. Most flies for anadromous fish, like steelhead and salmon, are generalizations. The convinced generalist is often one who knows his water intimately and professes a great belief in sharp casting and good overall streamcraft.

The imitative school is looking for truth and often overshoots the mark. Fish are suspicious of perfect imitations of the naturals. This quest to copy, to some anglers like me, is not an interesting idea and may remind one of those superior grade-school companions whose model airplanes made one’s own efforts such objects of ridicule. Nevertheless, there is a passionate coven of fly-tyers using all the material the space age offers to make astonishing replicas of the things fish eat. It would seem to me that if some canny manufacturer succeeded in making plastic copies of blue-winged olives, pale morning duns, callibaetis spinners — and if they can make such nice outfits for Barbie, what’s to stop them? — that something has been lost.

The defiant and autobiographical fly-tyer is ofen the same person. Not awed by custom, they name their flies Chernobyl Ants, Egg-Sucking Leeches, Yuk Bugs, or name flies after themselves, in the manner of knot inventors, a modest and understandable quest for immortality. These tyers try to convey themselves as they wish to be perceived in their creations: the gonzo type, the bum, the aggressively unpretentious (brown fly) type. One brilliant steelheader refuses to play these games and only fishes with flies he finds or is given. Another hangs a strip of deerhide on a Gamakatsu Octopus hook and fishes it on a floating line. Among the innovators are those who design a whole genre of artificial flies, a nearly impossible thing to do, and let the individual tyers flesh out the idea with their own refinements. Such are the Wulff flies, Lefty’s Deceivers, Crazy Charlies, Clouser Minnows, and the Comparaduns. Others take such a degree of experience and sophistication to cross into a new innocence, reinventing fly-tying to produce a series of flies that seem as creative as the naturals. I’m thinking of Darrell Martin and Ken Iwamasa, who suggest fresh ways of looking at water, light, and insects as well as the materials we use.

One of the most difficult accomplishments in fly-tying is to reexamine an established category and do it better and more simply. One of the best instances of this is the Elk Hair Caddis, which combines indigenous materials and rapidity of execution, appeals equally to imitation and generalization, and produces a fly that if fished well will catch well. The Adams is another superb example; purportedly tied to imitate a fluttering caddis, it is so full of Catskill-style mayfly traits and general earthiness as to be an outstanding choice for the dry-fly fisherman who relies on casting and streamcraft instead of encyclopedic fly boxes. And in its downwinged version, it’s not a bad caddis. Frank Sawyer’s Pheasant Tail nymphs, or the Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ears, create a poetic economy from limited materials. But there are times when these flies will be badly outfished by more specific imitations. Those who believe that steadiness and acuity in presentation, the avoidance of lost motion and indecision, produce a better bag are drawn to such flies. The stalkers of difficult individual trout think more in terms of the fly that is perfect both in time and place.

Many of us are inclined to fish with flies we think are beautiful. Happily, some of the flies I find practical are, when crisply tied, beautiful. I think the Adams is beautiful. The jauntiness and efficacity of the Royal Wulff has a western, freestoner kind of beauty; it works so well that a whole school of sophisticated anglers will do anything to keep from using it. A. K. Best’s quill-bodied flies make me shiver. The defiant bugginess of Dave’s Hopper is beautiful for its go-ahead-eat-me legs and general profile. The fragile and austere quill-winged and hackleless duns of René Harrop, simple yet madly difficult to tie, make a silhouette on the surface of the water that causes a predator’s heart to pound. There’s an old pattern called the Borcher’s Special that gives me a heightened sense of empowerment, and a fly from the Dan Bailey catalog of thirty years ago, the Meloche, that makes me feel equal to the emergence of pale morning duns. Of course it’s all in my head; that’s the point. Any sustained perusal of the fly books of the world should demonstrate that fish have been remarkably tolerant of our follies. I’m afraid the exercise has made a presentationist out of me. Clearly, it is not what those long-gone or far-flung anglers offered the fish, it’s how they offered it.

The trouble is, you can’t properly present something you don’t believe in. There is a sort of infatuation when an angler looks at flies. We look through pictures of flies much as we search through our old high school yearbooks, a kind of a scanning process until something stops the eye. The same feeling is obtained when looking in the compartments of a fly shop or fly box. An odd transference occurs in the imagination. One holds up the fly and thinks both like a fish and like a fisherman, and perhaps as a species of prey, all at once; though maybe it is not thinking. A convergence of emotion is sought, the unknowable conviction of a sorcerer, the feeling that, yes, this will do nicely, a feeling that enlarges as the fly is knotted to the tippet, held again to the light to further charge one’s conviction, then off it goes at the end of a cast. If it catches fish, a wider smile opens within. If it fails utterly, it is subjected once more to the gaze at close range, the sorcerer feeling rueful. You ask yourself, How did I fall for this one? Though you return it to your fly box, you really want to throw it away. I once lit one with a match.

Very slowly over my life I have become a fly-tyer. There was a time when I was contemptuous of it, on the grounds that it took time away from fishing, which is not entirely untrue. Then, grudgingly, I tied some simple saltwater patterns, and finally, expendable freshwater streamers, leeches, simple down-wing patterns. While tying has grown on me enormously, my numerous deficiencies will probably never be overcome. If a fly has too many steps, I either simplify it or tie something else. I will never tie good feather wings, especially the no-hackle duns I so admire but will never successfully imitate. I get red-faced doing legs for the hoppers; mine look like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant. Instead, I have tried to do a cleaner and crisper job on the flies that give me confidence: hairwing and parachute Adamses, Royal Wulffs, Dave Hughes’s little parachute olives, pheasant tail nymphs, Prince nymphs, Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ears, Pale Morning Duns, Stimulators, light and dark Spruce flies, tiny green Crazy Charlies for bonefish, various versions of the classic Cockroach for tarpon, simple yarn crabs for permit, mylar-and-white Deceivers for snook, and so on. My real loves are trout flies, steelhead flies, and salmon flies. The latter are probably interchangeable but, since they express different cultures, are rarely mixed. I have been crossing the line in using Allee Shrimps for steelhead, though not the other way around, as the deep voodoo of salmon is something I am unready to disturb. I tie Rusty Rats, Blue Charms, Monroe Killers, Willie Gunns, and the fly with which I am most confident, the Black Bear Green Butt, awfully close to the steel-headers’ classic, the Green Butt Skunk. For steelhead, I vastly prefer the McVey Ugly, a knockoff of the classic McLeod Ugly, hatched by Peter McVey, the great chef, angler, and cane-rod builder of British Columbia.

I still have many friends who prefer leaving this to the experts, as I once did. But now that I know that the object is to please myself, that the machinelike finish possible for the professional who ties a hundred-dozen of the same pattern doesn’t matter much to the fish, nor does it necessarily subject the tyer to repetitive motion diseases or dark hours at the county nut farm. I try to tie flies that will make me fish better, to fish more often, to dream of fish when I can’t fish, to remind myself to do what I can to make the world more accommodating to fish and, in short, to take further steps toward actually becoming a fish myself.