More About Fashion (Is This Really a Fly Fishing Travel Blog?)

I’ve circled around the topic of fly fishing in my blog recently, but my life is a little complicated.  I’ve been in the Memphis area the past week, helping out my parents – no time for fly fishing just now.  But there is time, sitting around my folks’ house much of the day, to refine plans and preparations for my long trip commencing in late May.  I’ve also been thinking more about the subject I covered in yesterday's post – the meaning of one’s personal fashion style.

Yesterday I mentioned how I was advised long ago to dress like the person I aspired to be.  Today I wonder whether that advice still applies to me.  If it does, I need to study old episodes of Walkers Cay Chronicles, because I aspire to be like Flip Pallot.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Flip, he’s one of the most famous and respected masters of saltwater fly fishing, and an accomplished author and freshwater fly fisherman as well.  For over two decades he has hosted a variety of television fishing shows including, most famously, Walkers Cay Chronicles.  I don’t know him personally.  I shook hands with him once at a fly fishing show in southern California – I’m certain he has zero recollection of that.  A few years later I spotted him sitting in the Philadelphia airport with his wife, Diane.  I thought about approaching him and considered what I would say.  The first thing that came to mind was something like, “Dude, I am so in awe of you!  You’re my hero!”  I was embarrassed for myself and decided not to bother him, but have speculated many times since then what kind of conversation would have transpired if I had blurted out my worshipful sentiments.  I’ll never know, but I still have an opportunity to dress like Flip, and I’m almost there.  My beard is gray and full like Flip’s, and I own several of the requisite fishing shirts.  I may soon break down and buy a Yeti, which is a brand of cooler Flip advertises.  According to Flip, I’ll never have to buy another cooler in my life, and I believe it.

On the subject of hero worship, I once made an actual declaration to the artist/sculptor Harry Jackson very much like the one I contemplated making to Flip Pallot in the Philly airport.  It happened in the Cowboy Bar in Meeteetse, Wyoming, so there’s a good chance my normal inhibitions were diminished by alcohol.  The effervescent sentiments I expressed to Harry were over the top, but I must have stroked his powerful ego.  Apparently he was quite pleased with the praise, a result that reminded me not to underestimate the power of flattery.  The first time I saw him, he was almost a ringer for Buffalo Bill Cody, sporting long pale hair and a beard, a fringed leather jacket and an oversized brass belt buckle.  I love that look, although I’m not quite ready to go there myself.   Sadly, Harry Jackson just died yesterday.  The world lost one of its true characters.  I only met him a few times, but he made an indelible impression on me.  If I owned a six-gun, I’d shoot it in the air a few times to salute the life of Harry Jackson.  I think he’d like that.

As for Flip Pallot, maybe I’ll get another chance to speak with him some day.  I’ll be sure to ask him for some fashion tips.

Couture and Coiffure

Here’s something you probably won’t read about in any other fly fishing travel blog.  This morning on the Today Show, Meredith Vieira was in London covering the royal wedding.  Her segment was about Kate Middleton’s fashion style and the monumental significance of her wedding gown selection.  It was interesting that Meredith’s guest commentator attached profound importance to how Kate dressed and wore her hair.  She repeatedly stressed that Kate is not just a country girl; she is the FUTURE QUEEN OF ENGLAND!  As such, she is the essential embodiment of the British character – a symbol of the nation more than an actual person.  Every element of her appearance is a reflection on the whole of Great Britain.  I wonder if Kate Middleton really knows what she’s in for.

All that talk on Today about the significance of couture and coiffure got me thinking about my own past and my immediate future.  (Soon you’ll see where the fly fishing travel connection comes in.)  Over the past 30 years I spent most of my waking time outfitted in suits and ties and carefully polished shoes.  When my career was newly launched, I was repeatedly admonished to dress like the persons I aspired to be.  Initially I wore bow ties and braces, emulating the CEO of my principal client, who later became President of NBC News.   I shaved my moustache, trimmed my unruly hair, and upgraded my business attire as quickly I was able to afford it.  My dark, traditional suits and French-cuffed, heavily starched shirts were custom made by Thomas James, Brooks Brothers and a couple of tailors based in Hong Kong – it was truly haute couture, within the bounds of business fashion.  Over time I developed into a suitable face of my firm, representing my fellow partners in service to the captains of Wall Street.  As my hair gradually became tinted with gray, documenting my experience and presumed wisdom, I commanded respect from just about everyone who hadn’t actually known me back in the days when I was just another young schlepp.  It was a nice feeling.

All that was well and good in its place and time, but I’ve discovered I had more in common with Kate Middleton than I would like to think.  That is, before I quite knew what happened, my outward appearance became intertwined with my inner persona.  My suits and ties were a costume, and in some respects a disguise, but I became the person I resembled.  Since I retired last October, I’ve reverted.  I’ve let my hair down, literally.  My hair is longer than it’s been since I was in college, and I’m sporting a full beard.  Sometimes I look in the mirror and think of a line in an old David Crosby song about letting my freak flag fly.   I’m rarely seen in anything other than jeans, shorts and casual shirts.  I’m just fine with that and believe that my current appearance accurately reveals my interior self.

Here’s the thing – I’m finding that my new look (a gray version of my old, pre-career look) produces a different set of reactions in people than what I’m accustomed to.  Old acquaintances are visibly startled when they see me for the first time in my new state.  If and when they recognize me, some of them smile and seem genuinely pleased.  Some of them are believable when they say I look better.  Others are obviously not so happy to observe the change.  Strangers often look at me more suspiciously than they used to.  Guys who dress the way I once did sometimes show genuine disdain for my scruffiness.  If anyone is intimidated by me now, he or she is more likely to be motivated by fear than respect.  So I’m finding that this change is a little less innocuous than I envisioned it would be.  It’s turning into something more like a social experiment.

This is where fly fishing travel comes in – at last, you may say.  As I roam around the country in my pickup and camper, and my hair and beard continue to grow, what are people going to think?  I’m mostly beyond caring what they think, in terms of how their judgments may cause me to judge myself, but I am quite curious about it.  If they see me fly fishing, they shouldn’t be surprised by my rough garb or hirsute head.  Comparing myself to other guys in my Trout Unlimited chapter, I find that I resemble a lot of other fly fishers in my age group.  That isn’t by design, but where there’s correlation there is often causation.  There is probably something about fly fishing that appeals to guys who also like to grow beards and buy their clothes from Cabelas.  I can easily imagine that.

Here’s the critical question:  If Kate Middleton’s couture and coiffure are appropriate for a future queen of England, are mine right for a once and future fly fisherman?  Apparently so.  I might seem a little odd when I stroll into a nice restaurant or take my stance on the first tee at a country club.  But then, Kate would look awfully strange wearing one of her milliner’s feathery, tilted creations while standing in the prow of a drift boat in the middle of the Madison River.  I’d like to see that, however.

Big Bushkill Creek

Friday was a warm sunny day - the kind of day we haven't seen many of so far this year.  Jeff Landis and I drove up to his family's place on Big Bushkill Creek where we joined his brother Aaron and our friend Dan Stephano.  Here's Dan (left) and Jeff:

I was able to sneak away for a few hours of fly fishing that afternoon.  The creek was running high but the insect hatches were spectacular.  In Eastern fly fishing culture, the prominent mayflies that hatch on many streams in mid-April are called Blue Quills and Quill Gordons, and both were in abundance.  Both flies are pale and closely resemble one another in flight, but I could distinguish the Quill Gordons by their larger size.  I also saw hundreds of small pale stoneflies fluttering around in the clumsy manner of their species.  Some of them were dropping from trees and bushes into the water, presumably to lay eggs. But even while the flies were having their crazy party, there were no rising fish, which seemed strange to me.  I tied on a lot of different imitations, eventually settling on a size 18 flashback pheasant tail nymph on 6X tippet underneath a small Royal Trude dry fly that I used as an indicator.  With some direction from Aaron, I finally found some hungry brown trout in a strong riffle downstream from Little Falls.  The first couple of fish predictably ate the nymph.  To my great surprise, the largest and last trout I caught rose to take the Trude, perhaps mistaking it for a stonefly.   Here was the scene on the Big Bushkill:

Friday night stretched long into Saturday morning after we all ate grilled steaks and stood around a campfire swapping tales and sipping wine.  We were a little slow to get up and around on Saturday, but pulled ourselves together enough to venture out and cut down some errant trees threatening the Landis's road and apple trees.  By noon a light rain turned into a cascade of water and we were forced inside.  I thought about donning my waders and raincoat and heading back to the creek, but the wind kicked up and the downpour was out of hand.  So I took a nap instead.

The sky had brightened again by the time we got up Sunday morning.  When I got out of the shower and looked out the window of my bedroom, I saw a large tom turkey and several hens on the driveway.  A short time later Aaron spotted the tom in the front yard, following two jakes.  Apparently he was trying to drive them away from his harem.  When he had sufficiently harrassed the younger males, he turned back down the drive and rejoined the females.  The tom was quite a sight:

All my fishing adventures this year, from Florida to Wyoming and several spots in Pennsylvania, have had a common element - less-than-ideal weather and water conditions, making for tough fishing.   But I'm not complaining, because these outings have been as much or more about the camaderie of friends and my love of nature than anything else.  Good companions, flora and fauna - I don't need much else.

Bass Fever Continues

For some reason, many fly fishers aren't keen on bass.  I have to admit that for many years I wavered between apathy and antipathy for bass, but when I moved to Pennsylvania I hooked up with a local guide who introduced me to fly fishing for both smallmouth and largemouth bass.  The first time a largemouth came flying out from under a submerged picnic table and crashed down on my popper, I was sold on bass, big time.  I still love trout, but in the area where I live, the average bass puts the average trout to shame in terms of size and strength, and they are often more of a challenge to catch on a fly rod.

Yesterday I took my kayak to a small lake in Delaware Canal State Park.  I often go there in the early spring, just when the bass are waking up, but this was a little earlier than usual.  I tried several kinds of poppers and a few flies that imitate leeches, minnows and crawfish, but to no avail.  I couldn't crack the code with flies.  So I went to Plan B, pulled out the spinning rod and caught two solid largemouths before the sun dropped behind the ridge.  It was another learning experience, and a great day on the water.  Waterfowl were abundant, mother geese were nesting, and there was only one other boat on the lake.  Very nice.

If the weather cooperates this week, I hope to take the kayak out one more time before I return to trout environs and start acting like a respectable fly fisherman again.  I'm fortunate that one of my friends, Jeff Landis, has some private property on Bushkill Creek in the Poconos, and we'll be going up there on Friday.  Should be very interesting to test my skills at matching the insect hatches to trick the wily wild browns of the Bushkill.

Spring Bass - Back to School

Wednesday was another of those variable spring days typical of early April.  Trish and I spent four hours midday enjoying the sunshine while pruning and cleaning out our raspberry and strawberry patches.  When we finished I decided to make the short jaunt to the Schaffhausen's pond to see how the bass were behaving.

By the time I climbed out of my truck and starting casting, dark clouds had rolled in, spitting little raindrops, and the temperature was in free fall.  Conventional wisdom has it that a sudden pressure drop turns off the fish, so I wasn't expecting much action.  But I started with a Texas-rigged Senko worm on a spinning rod and caught a 3 lb. largemouth on the first cast.  Within 20 minutes I caught a couple more and  decided to shake things up by using my Sage Smallmouth fly rod.  After about 20 casts with a popper I decided that it was pointless to try to entice the bass to the surface - they just weren't going for it.  So I checked my bass fly box and found a few size-4 weighted crawfish imitations that I tied last summer.  They were experiments, not quite like any other crawfish "flies" I've ever seen - I remembered tying them with materials that I had on hand, trying to be creative.  I noticed that one of them had heavy dumbbell eyes and a set of semi-realistic claws made of shaped and laquered feathers.  It looked like something that might fool a bass and that could be cast in the rising wind, so I tied it on, slung it as far out into the pond as I could, and jerked it very slowly along the bottom, trying to imagine how a real crawfish might scoot along.  Sure enough, I hooked another 3 lb. bass, and found that the fight was a bit more exciting on the fly rod.

By that time I was seriously wet and cold and my hands were getting numb.  A glance up at the sky didn't give me cause for optimism, so I decided to cash it in and drive down to Doylestown to attend the monthly Bucks County Trout Unlimited chapter meeting.  It was a great call because not only did I thaw out, but I also got to hear a fascinating presentation by Mark Sendotti, who is a reknowned fly caster and an innovative fly tier and streamer fisherman.  If you are largely unfamiliar with fly fishing, you may not know that "flies" include not only imitations of actual flies such as mayflies, caddis flies, stoneflies and midges, but also imitations of terrestial insects such as grasshoppers and crickets, and aquatic creatures such as crawfish and minnows.  The category of imitation flies commonly called "streamers" includes subsurface flies that primarily imitate minnows, and sometimes also leeches, crawfish, hellgrammites and other relatively large animals.  Streamers often attract larger-than-average predator fish.  Sendotti's presentation was about how and why these streamer flies catch large trout when they are properly presented.  To make a long story short, streamers attract a target fish based on the target fish's hunger, its territoriality, and/or its predatory attack instincts, which can be triggered by the type of movement the streamer makes.  That movement is controlled by the fisherman.  It made me think about my experience on the bass pond that afternoon, and the way I had slowly jigged my crawfish "fly" along the bottom to imitate the natural movement of such an animal.  Sendotti taught us a lot about how to vary such movements to fit different circumstances and targets.  It reminded me that fisherman, like everyone else, can always keep learning, and should.

As I progress through my third stage of life, I'll keep going to school, figuratively if not literally, as often as possible.  I remember reading Erica Jong's novel "Fear of Flying" when I was in my early twenties, and how I came away from that book with a powerful desire to keep learning and growing.  That feeling has never escaped me.  The acquisition of knowledge is what keeps life interesting and cultivates the sensation of vitality we all crave.

The Spice of Life

As clichés go, “variety is the spice of life” has maintained its richness better than most. I am thinking of it because my life last week was a stew seasoned with everything from anise to wasabi. Some of the flavors were bitter, some were sweet, some were savory and some packed heat. All in all, there was almost too much to fully digest. I didn’t have time to write a blog post then. I can’t cover it all now and won’t try, but I'll give you a taste.

The last Sunday in March showcased the vagaries of spring – at once sunny, windy and cold. My friend Chris Doig, who is a professional pilot and lives at the end of a runway, kindly offered to take me for a plane ride. She brought along the barf bag and seemed quite concerned that I would lose my lunch before it was all over. The ride was in fact a little bumpy but I guess I’ve done enough flying, sailing, rafting and mountain driving to immunize myself against motion sickness. We soared up the Delaware River to the Water Gap, back over Lake Nockamixon (where I do a lot of my bass fishing), and circled our Bedminster Township neighborhood a few times before touching back down without nausea. It was particularly interesting to view Drumbore Farm (where Trish and I reside) from the air and compare the scene to our enlarged 1930-something aerial photo showing the same perspective. Here’s what our property looked like last week (that's the barn in front). Thanks Chris!

The next day I finished preparing our tax returns for 2010. Ouch! That was definitely one of the bitter spices. Someone get me a Rolaids.

There was plenty of sugar in the next spoonful. I sought recovery from the tax hangover by going fishing, of course. My friends Eric and Bernadette Schaffhausen have a great pond on their farm. Bernadette was skeptical whether the bass would bite so early in the season but I’d gotten a good report from a guy fishing nearby so I decided to give it a try. As it turned out, the largemouth bass weren’t pushovers, but a slow, deep presentation of a crawfish imitation was adequate to fool them into biting, and within a matter of minutes I had a hefty specimen in hand. I yanked out my Droid and snapped a picture before sending him back to his lair.  Thanks Eric and Bernadette!

When I got home that evening I received some downright painful news from an old friend. It felt like getting a Chinese hot pepper stuck in my throat. It took a couple of days to swallow it, along with my pride, but I believe some good came out it in the end. The flavors of introspection are exceedingly complex, but when you indulge in them, your psychological palate becomes more sophisticated. I’m stretching the spice analogy pretty far, I realize, but the truth is that my emotions drew from the full rack. In any case, my stomach has settled back down now and the friendship is richer. Sometimes you have to adjust the salt and pepper even after you think you’ve finished cooking.

On Thursday evening I attended my monthly Writing Club meeting. Suffice it to say that we chopped up some powerful herbs to ingest alongside Bernadette’s marvelous seafood bisque (that’s not an illegal drug reference, trust me – just more play on the spice theme). We all seemed to have some issues to sort out. Good wine, a great meal and some excellent poems and essays made for a fascinating evening and we all left satiated and wiser. Thanks to my fellow Writing Club members!

On Friday night Trish and I had dinner at the Black Bass, which sits high on the banks of the Delaware, with a couple that we just met. We quickly learned that we had a lot in common. The tastes and colors of our conversation did a lot to lift my mood, which had been declining until then. Thank you Jim and Gayle!

Saturday dawned bright and warm, which was very welcome after a chilly wet week. I got up early to join some of my fellow Trout Unlimited members and assist the Cooks Creek Watershed Association in a road cleanup project. We spent the morning picking up litter along a highway near Springtown. I was hoping that no one I knew would drive by.  Wearing orange vests and carrying garbage bags under the watchful eye of local law enforcement, our crew appeared to be a group of convicts performing forced public service. In fact we were just volunteers. This work is important. All those bottles and cups and other pieces of trash don’t just blemish the natural beauty that people enjoy in the Cooks Creek area, but they also wash down into the creek and ultimately into the Delaware and then into the ocean, where they aggregate and swirl around in vast seas of garbage. Check out a few of the images at the following link – incredible. Thanks to TU and CCWA for caring!

http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1T4SKPT_enUS424US425&q=seas+of+garbage&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=f-aZTfKiCOfI0QHtoPCADA&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=1345&bih=601

Later on Saturday Trish and I attended Kristine Keating’s terrific show at the Stovers Mill art gallery, which also sits atop the banks of the Delaware River. We purchased a moody, moon-infused, impressionistic acrylic rendering of the river painted by Kristine. I was fascinated that such dark, mysterious paintings emanate from such a warm and smiling person. We ran into several friends at the gallery and chatted for a couple of hours. Then we hooked up with two other couples with which we share a lot of fun time, and enjoyed drinks at the Boat House and dinner at Rick’s in Lambertville. Thanks to Kady, Melissa, Jo Ann, Will, Christine, Pat, Jill and Harlan for a great afternoon and evening! All in all, Saturday had an aroma evocative of our little greenhouse and its pots of rosemary, thyme, sage and chives. The tastes and smells of the week lingered on my tongue and in my nose all day Sunday as I worked in our gardens, preparing the ground for new flavors to enjoy later this year.