I too started out with an inexpensive bamboo rod, one my grandfather who was my fishing partner and mentor had put aside in the closet when he had gotten a new rod. It was permanently bent from years of still fishing and, I was sure, from epic battles with lunker trout.
It was mine, but I would not have dreamed of asking to use it for my occasional solitary fishing explorations to the tiny creek that wandered past our property in the Okanogan valley. It was reserved for our weekend fishing trips together, and at the end of each trip safely put away in the the tackle closet. For those early treks along the creek I cut a sapling from a willow in the yard and attached a line and a single hook. There was no need to cast; the stream was at best a yard wide. The troutthey were small and unsophisticatedbut they were plentiful. I would always come back with a couple that might, just might, have met the six inch rule. Though they were mere minnows beside the trout my grandfather and I caught, I prized them. I had found the stream. I had enticed them with my own offering, with a pole I had cut. It was my stealth and my cunning that had fooled these mighty minnows. I was a fisherman. I graduated in a year or so from the willow pole to an old second hand steel telescoping rod and a small bait casting reel. It was high tech for the time, and from behind a screen of creekside grass I could now reach the pools where the most wary and largest of the trout lay. Soon I was returning from these summer afternoon excursions with fish that when exaggerated considerably were measuring seven inches. Monsters of their tribe. The steel rod, however, did not last. A kink in the lower section due to an untimely fall ended its usefulness. But by then I had a paper route and could afford a new pole. Though I can not recall the price now, some 50 years later, it could not have cost more than a few dollars for that's all I had. I'd carefully selected it from a barrel full of similar three piece bamboo rods offered for sale in the local hardware store. Though cheap it was a beauty, gleaming with fresh lacquer, the windings cool green in contrast to the warm wood. I had begun to have an interest in fly fishing, and I found somewhere in my grandfather's fishing gear a very simple fly reel already loaded with line. How it came to be among his tackle I do not know. I had never known him to fish with a fly. But there it was. He turned it over to me glad to make room for real tackle, a new Johnson enclosed spinning reel he'd gotten to replace the old one that was showing wear. I picked up a few flies at the local sporting goods store I had begun to frequent, mosquitoes and coloerful royal coachmen. Since my casting skills were almost nonexistent at that point I tried them out in small beaver ponds I and a friend had located on small tributary of the Okanogan River. We didn't need to cast. We could simply flip the fly out onto the pond. Miraculously we caught fish, big fish, sometimes twelve inches - without exageration. And a different kind of fish, brookies. I fell in love with them and with fishing beaver ponds. There was something about the swift rise of a brightly colored brookie from the dark waters of a pond and the sudden disappearance of the fly in an expanding boil that stirred my blood. It still does. We searched for bigger ponds thinking that bigger ponds meant bigger fish. That forced us to improive our casting skills. Before long we were longing for even bigger water. The tiny lakes hidden among the granite mountains of the Okanogan highlands, lakes that were simply intriguing blue spots on our maps, began to beckon us. One such was Tiffany Lake, a jewel of a mountain lake we'd heard, about a four mile walk in those days from the trailhead. We checked it out on the map and kept our ears open to any rumours of the fish that surely inhabited its waters. Finally I persuaded my mother to drive us to the trailhead and give us two days. As I look back, she was a real pushover. I would not allow my 13 year old to hike into the wilderness, and wilderness it really was, for two days of fishing on a mountain lake. But she did, and it was an adventure to remember. My mother drove us into the mountains and dropped us off. We shouldered our packs, old Trapper Nelsons, and headed out. It was up hill for the first three miles. Our stamina and determination were sorely tested. In fact, the only thing that kept us going was the reality that if we had turned back we would still have had two days to wait for a ride home, that and the promise of a lake just over the ridge that the rumours said teemed with trout. We topped the pass at noon and caught our first glimpse of the lake below us. Nestled in a setting of lodgepole and tamarack with an emerald meadow at one end, it was incredibly beautiful. We flew the last mile. As we stepped from the trees at the edge of the lake trout were rising in the transparent waters - but rising, we realized, beyond our ability to cast to them. The trees behind us prevented any decent backcast, but our casting ability and the strength of our old bamboo poles were so meager that had there been a level football field behind us we could not have reached the fish. But we were not the first to encounter that challenge, and we soon found a half submerged raft in the reeds at the far end the the lake. With the addition of a couple of downed lodgepole scavanged from the forest it would just barely keep us afloat. But that was all we needed. By late afternoon we were on the lake. I wish I could tell you that we wore our arms out on eighteen inch heavy shouldered brutes, but the reality was that we flailed the water for an hour without a rise. I tried every fly in my small arsenal. My fisher friend finally resorted to throwing spoons. Nothing worked. Finally, down to my last untried fly, a gray hackle with a yellow silk body and a red tail, a fish rose. I could see him come from the deep as though in slow motion. He slurpped the fly, and I was into the first fish. He was fourteen inches, though time and the incandescence of the moment might have magnified him, a magnificent fish darkly spotted with a yellow tinge on his belly and dark red slits under his jaw. A cutthroat. My first. We did not catch many more. But it hardly mattered. One fish like that was reward enough. I was truly hooked on flyfishing. Several years later my bamboo rod gave out and I graduated to a fiberglass flyrod and then to a graphite. None of them were expensive nor were the reels. I still fish with two old Medalists that have provided more than twenty years of excellent service. My skills improved as well, though I don't consider myself an expert. I've fished with some really good fishermen. For several years I did the photography for the Umpqua Feather Merchants catolog and fished for steelhead with Bill Black, then the owner of the buisiness and a world class flyfishman, on the North Umpqua. He was a magnificant fly caster and cast that day over summer steelhead in one of his favorite runs. Bill could lay a fly down on the water as lightly as a golden October maple leaf, and he, of course, had the finest of equipment. I photographed his efforts for an hour and got some great images. But no fish. While he was gone to the car to get us a lunch I rigged up my purchased-in-Payless-for-$30 beat up graphite and on the second cast was into a nice fish. It was as much blind luck as anything, and I must add he headed downstream and broke off before I could stumble after him. But the point is it was not the price of the tackle. Flyfishing is about fishing, not about gear. It is about those moments when time stops and your line tightens and you know you are into a heavy fish. It is about the the end of the chase when you've found a secluded beaver pond and on the first cast - or the tenth cast - a bronze brookie rises to your fly. It is about a still evening on a quiet lake in B.C., or on a desert scabland lake in eastern Washington, or on the wild Snake River, and the water is alive with rising trout. It is about a kid with a bent steel rod coming home with two seven inch rainbows. It is about the moment. It is about fishing.
