Vests, Bags and Boxes

With the last snow melting in the roadside ditches, I have taken to going through the tackle again, preparing for stonefly hatches and lengthening afternoons on the Millers River.  I like to conduct my inspections on the evenings of late winter, when a red-oak fire is dying in the woodstove, and the dog is chasing a dreamscape of partridge from the comfort of his bed.  Handling the gear always makes me think of seasons past, as I consider the patina that now dulls the bluing on reel-seat hardware, and mottles the spools from my Hardy reels.  I wipe fingerprints from the rods with a flannel cloth, and freshen the dry flies in steam from the tea kettle.  Then I empty the vest of its accumulated litter, and spin off into my annual vest-or-bag dilemma.

There is an aesthetic that is fundamental to the art and practice of fly-fishing, an aesthetic that has recently diverged into two distinct channels:  in one, which is drying up fast, the codgers still throw Catskill dries upstream, and carry wading staffs, and refer to any Salvelinus fontinalis as a squaretail or speckled trout.  In the other, the young bucks gain ground in their flat-brimmed caps, fishing their Czech-nymph rigs to great effect, and capturing it all on Go-Pro cameras. 

I long ago veered from the high-tech, high-modulus path, and instead emptied a bank account in the accumulation of good cane rods.  I choose wool jackets over nylon, fill my spring-and-pawl reels with limp double taper lines, and only under great duress fish a nymph under an indictor.  I suppose I do these things because I did not come from a family with a strong sense of legacy, and I therefore find tradition in whatever way I can, drawing on the silhouette and poetry of Hemingway as I prepare for a day on the water.  My father was sympathetic to my longing, and as a teenager, he gave me a vest from Orvis that I wore religiously for years, soaking a record of fish slime and floatant into the weave of its fabric.  It is a vest that is timeless and simple, traditional both in design and construction.  At points over the years, I have tried other vests, but the pockets are never quite big enough, or the built-in accessories only serve to snag my line.  So I have returned to the Orvis vest each year because in it I look like the fly-fisherman I always wanted to be, and I become once again a part of an angling heritage.  Or so I sometimes think.

Several years ago, my good friend Matt Breuer started spending his summers guiding in Alaska.  He returned home with a whopping case of big-fish snobbery and a certain efficiency in his approach to rivers.  He traveled light, with wader tops rolled around his waist, nips and forceps on a cord around his neck, and a bag slung over his shoulder.  The bag was only big enough to accommodate a stack of foam fly boxes, a pint bottle of booze, and a few tippet spools.  In this streamlined attitude, he was certainly no Sparse Gray Hackle, but he did look light, and quick, and decidedly competent.  I flopped along behind him in my twenty pounds of period equipment and moped while he took first crack at all the best holes, and proceeded to fish circles around me.  He overlooked no opportunity to ridicule my dowdiness, or to flaunt his prowess as a lithe and economical angling machine.  I hung the vest on a nail that afternoon, bought a nylon sling-bag at the local fly shop, and spent far too long trying to tidily roll down my wader tops.  I couldn’t figure out where to stow the suspenders, and while I fiddled with them hopelessly, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.  Aghast, I wondered what I had become.

I fly-fish because it brings both balance and quiet harmony to the commotion of my day-to-day.  Throwing something weightless with the precision of a dart requires humor and faith, and done properly, it is a thing of beauty.  When I step into a river, I know that the fish will be lovely, and the water, and the meditation of the cast.  So I pay my respects by completing the picture as perfectly as I can, in every way that I know how.  I fish graceful bamboo rods, built by craftsmen who I both know and respect.  I use reels that balance the elegance of the rods, reels of classic design, with simple drags and serpentine handles.  As I prepare myself for fishing, I seek muted colors, and I avoid the incongruity of such things as chartreuse lines on the tannic water of my home rivers.  When I am knee deep in a good pool, I want the transitions from water to fly to rod to fisherman to share a tone, a unity of feeling, and I want my appearance to reflect the provenance of the fly-fisher’s art.  But sadly, I’ve come to realize that when I am hip deep in a good pool, I start to wonder if the lowest-slung boxes in the vest-front are getting wet, and whether my nod to aesthetic tradition will keep me afloat if my next step proves untrue.  Somehow, every summer sees me through a few unexpected dunkings, and the vest never looks so good soaking wet.

Though I fish a good deal most years, on a handful of rivers, I have never been confident enough to set out for an evening without the full complement of flies.  I have always envied those who feel secure with a few patterns arranged in a single box, those who therefore have no need for the excess weight of a vest or a bag, or any other means of conveyance.  In keeping with my tweed-and-pipe smoke philosophy, I use Wheatley compartment boxes that fill up the old Orvis vest, and at capacity my load is both heavy and cumbersome.  The burden is focused largely on my chest, which tires my back and inhibits casting after an hour or so.  Watching Breuer at work, with a bag strapped high over a shoulder, I realized that his load (albeit a light one) was centered behind him, creating less fatigue and while maintaining easy access to the necessities.  As he laid out a hopper to the head of a riffle, I saw too that the bag freed up his arms to get more involved in the casting motion, which proved valuable when driving big flies in windy conditions.  A bag, cinched high under the armpit, rides out of the water during even the deepest wading, and the fly boxes tend not to undergo the periodic baptism that results in rusty hooks and ruined hinges. 

But like it or not, in a vest, I spell myself out as fisherman.  In or out of the water, when I wear a vest my purpose is plain, for myself and the whole world to see.  For years now I’ve lived by Norman Maclean’s assertion that ‘although I have never pretended to be a great fisherman, it was always important to me that I was a fly fisherman, and looked like one’.  The old Orvis vest is iconic, and though it may hinder my dexterity as a fly fisherman, in it I can be mistaken for nothing but.

So I suppose the solution to this aesthetic dilemma lies in a compromise.  As I sat looking over my gear this winter, it occurred to me that all I need do is search out a bag that accents the rest of my tackle.  Waxed canvas, brass buckles, a little harness leather…  something rugged enough to require years of breaking in, yet light enough to serve its streamlined purpose.  So I find myself in search of such a bag, and hopeful that I will locate one that will both pacify my aesthetic, and keep me nimble enough to beat my buddy Breuer to the better lies.  There is nothing in late winter that better announces the coming season than the discovery of some new, and expensive, piece of tackle.  I just have to remember, in the heat of the May caddis hatches, to hide the credit card bill from my wife.

First published in American Angler Magazine May/June 2013