Purple Worms and Oreos
In the absence of any hard empirical evidence, I’d have to say that more than half the fly-fishers I know were introduced to the lovely art by their fathers. I know that I was. My father was never a driven, or particularly skilled, fly angler, but it was he that clarified to me, with the kind of gravity reserved for sex’n’drug talks, that fly fishing was not only one of life’s simple gifts, but also the way in which proper gentlemen took fish. From there, I just followed his periodic and rudimentary example, and learned to tie ineffective knots, snag branches, and tail every loop that I threw.
During the bouts of nostalgia that hit me sometimes, I realize now that I’ve always assumed that the gift of fishing was bestowed upon me wholly by my dad. It affirms a certain aesthetic that remains sympathetic to the worsted wool and peatey Single Malt and harness leather, an appreciation for which he also handed on. But when I stop to think about it, the one that really greased the gears for me, from an on-the-ground angling standpoint anyway, was my mom.
I was reading through Dave Skok’s web biography recently, on a night when my kids were long asleep and my wife had followed suit, and a box of red wine on the counter afforded me the luxury of not witnessing the rapid descent of the level within. Skok is, to my mind, a big name among fly-fishers, and I like to think that only a few degrees separate from the two of us in the spider’s web of angler-writers that call the Bay state home. What struck me immediately about Skok’s memory of childhood fishing was his admission, perhaps commemoration, of the fact that his mom was as much a player in his early fishing as his dad. Seemingly, she was not the one offering instruction in the finer points of the entomology or presentation, but she dutifully got him there, took him to the places where he could sink himself waist-deep in the wide watery landscape that spreads before an aspiring fish-bum. A good Connecticut mom, she no doubt sprawled in the sun to tan and think her thoughts while her young son flailed away. This is my slant on it anyway; truth be told I don’t know Dave and I wasn’t there. But the image conjured in my wine-sloppy mind that night brought to bear some long forgotten memories of my own evolution as an angler.
My dad paid for my first fly rod. He paid for the bugs and the boxes and the subscription to Field & Stream, not to mention the TV that afforded me weekend mornings watching ‘Days of A Sportsman’. But my mom took me to the water to catch my first fish. She also took me to the water to catch the first few dozen that followed. It’s not that my parents were lacked unity on domestic fronts, and they remain closely married to this day, it’s just that, like many suburban moms, my mother’s summer work revolved largely around entertaining me and my elder sister, and keeping the injuries we bestowed upon each other un-needy of medical intervention. This required that we kids spend the bulk of our time apart, and my sister’s enlistment in art classes and horseback riding lessons gave me a window to demand some fishing time. I was young at this point, maybe 4 or 5, but driven by an innate desire to be a fisherman, and a fly fisherman by my father’s commandment. Through those early summers, my mom’s Volkswagon would swing past the art studio, eject my sister alongside a flurry of charcoal pencils and pastels, and splutter off to land astride the nearest body of water. This usually meant some accessible stretch of the Charles River watershed near our suburban Boston home.
What my mother lacked in enthusiasm for or knowledge of fishing, she made up for in best wishes for her obsessive son. We fished, or I should say I fished, steadily through my first summers, using a fly-rod, from which dangled a four-year-old’s notion of whatever might work. There were bare hooks and bits of Oreo cookie, earthworms and chipped bass poppers and raisins. It’s a beautiful thing in a sense how simple a child’s needs can be: of course I wanted to catch something, but as long as I was fishing, I was happy. I think my mom was glad that our catch rate hovered around nil for the best of the summer, and neither one of us got skewered.
I caught my first fish on a day that revisited my wine-soaked mind with such a flourish of color and emotion it caught me off guard. On that faraway day, my mom and I, absent my sister, had split a sandwich and a root beer on our preferred road-covered culvert, where we could dangle our bare toes over the edge and watch mats of weed heave in the lazy current. It was a tea-colored trib of the mighty Charles, with water moving just fast enough to be moving, but slow enough to retain that frogginess that spells largemouth and carp and panfish. I had no desire to wade the leechy margins. When we’d finished our lunch I held out to my mom a preferred artificial. It was a crusty hunk of rubber worm, reminiscent of a tiny, grape-purple phallus, and it was a mess of hook digs and dog hair. Why I loved it so I’ll never know, but I beseeched my mom to secure it to the pigtail remains of my leader. A keen observer of the ‘if you don’t know knots, just tie lots’ school, she used up a good foot of mono in the connection, wished me luck, and leaned back to get some sun and read her People magazine. I lobbed the purple pecker out, fed line, and found myself connected to something decidedly alive, and none too pleased about the nature of our relationship.
Together, my mom and I horsed in a palm-sized crappie, and she unhooked it valiantly, with the assistance of an eyelash curler and a pair of London Fog driving gloves jerked from her purse. As we admired the little Calico there at the edge of the culvert, my heart filled to bursting. Never had a boy loved fishing, and catching, and his mom, so much.
Since this memory re-found me, I’ve been taking notice of fishing mothers more and more (and not always with the purest of thoughts…). I’ve watched Jennie Grossenbacher and Heidi Andrews, both world-class anglers in their own rights, nurturing a budding interest in their respective children. They do so with a sincerity, and a simplicity, that is captivating, as the purest gestures of love often are. And the thing that stands out to me, as I try wantonly to communicate discipline and rhythm and elegance into the fishing I offer my own two daughters, is that I lack a mother’s touch. I lack the tenderness and calm, the poise and beauty and simple pleasure of understanding that just getting a child out on the water, full of joy and possibility, is the most important part. I should have noted my mother’s genius more closely.
On a recent trip to Virginia, my own wife Kim, one of the hottest MILFS around, took my daughters fishing. She pointedly asked me to stay home. She denied the box of flies, and the tippet spools, and the various and sundry lines I pushed on her. She knew how to use them, yes, but had no use for them. With a clunky fly rod and reel, a corroded sink tip, and a bag of raw squid, she took my daughters down to a dock on the brackish waters of the Lafayette River, and made anglers out of them.
Now I know that bait, fished on a fly rod, is marginal at best, and may offend the finer sensibilities of well-heeled sportsmen, but watching that trio from the shore cleared the slate for me. My girls, all of my girls, caught fish. All of my girls laughed and laughed, touched and held little wriggling masterworks of nature in the form of puppy drum and croakers. All got wet and sunburned and salt-crusted, and came home tired, talking already about the next-day’s fishing. And when the little ones asked to go again, it was their mother’s approval that they looked for, not mine. That alone struck me as quite wonderful.
As I’ve watched my wife become a mother, I’ve not always taken the time to thank her for all that she’s given me. Perhaps, I’ve forgotten to thank my own mother for the same. Looking down the dock that day in August, and looking at Dave Skok’s website that carried me back over the years to that culvert in July, I have mothers to thank for the best things in life, and the inheritance that I so longed for, and longed to pass on. I give mothers props. And I vow, here and now, to clear a space amidst the shooting heads and trico spinners and crisp stops at 10 and 2 to remember that fishing is all about joy, and the folks who give it to you.
An edit of the above was first published in the Drake Magazine
