Word: fisherman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With split-second timing, the rod tip is lifted and the battle begun. Since the fly is attached to the line with a gossamer-thin tippet, a fisherman must use the long, sensitive rod to tire the trout as it surges and runs, leaps and sometimes literally walks across the water's surface on its tail. There is no mistaking this magic. The fish explodes again, up through a silver shower of water, shaking its head in an effort to throw the hook. You notice the color. It is gorgeous, almost surreal. The trout's meaty flanks sport outrageous spots...
...fisherman is lucky, the passion becomes manageable, second nature, like tying knots in the dark or reading a deep green pool by an undercut bank and knowing where the trout are holding and which fly to use. But having gone through the novitiate, fly-fishermen are never the same again. They scan rivers and lakes, seeing water but imagining the life underneath. They concentrate for hours, zenlike, watching thunderheads build and billow above, gazing at streams running over moss-covered rocks, searching for the sight of a trout, that near perfect fish, as it fins and darts, drifts and feeds...
...apprenticeship is not over, not yet. One day some fisherman with a pipe stands in the stream nearby releasing fish and announces that the trout are hitting bugs with an unpronounceable Latin name. You nod but don't know what he's talking about. Then back to the books for a quick course on streamside biology, matching the hatch, figuring out what the trout is eating and which artificial flies imitate those insects. Armed with a little entomology and inflamed with trout psychosis, you start buying everything that countless catalogs offer: stream thermometers, a flashlight for nighttime fishing, hook- sharpening...
...flies that bring you luck and that your friends use successfully. Gear gets stowed in familiar pockets as your fishing vest softens and fades with age. It is a delicate time, for as the addiction grows, the fish begin to invade your thoughts and dreams. At unpredictable moments the fisherman's mind fills with images of wide water, where brown trout hit large dry flies and pull long and hard...
...once mattered in this region of Rhode Island, but not any longer. A succession of bad breaks has "squeezed him up Pierce Creek to an acre of scrub," where he lives in a ramshackle house with his wife May and two teenage sons and scrabbles a living as a fisherman. "He'd had a plan: by age 40 he would be master of a ship. Here he was at age 40-plus in an 18-foot skiff...