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Histories evolve. Rather, the stories of histories evolve.
Suppose I told you that Carlton Fisk’s home run in the bottom of the 11th in the ‘75 World Series came in Game 7, and the Sox were the champions, hallelujah. Next, you come back and say, “Hey, what the hell? It was Game 6, and the Reds went on to beat the Sox in Game 7!” We’re making progress. We’ve course corrected – you corrected me – towards the truth.
Suppose you argue that the Vikings have never been NFL Champions. That they lost all four of their Super Bowls. Well, I come back and correct you: They won the ‘69 NFL Championship (before the NFL – AFL merger), even though they lost the Super Bowl to the Kansas City Professional Football Team (we don’t use their incorporated name in this column) a week or two later.
Yes, the stories of histories evolve.
We can demonstrate some mistakes in Xenophon’s history of The Anabasis, even though he was there. He himself led the great march up country. He wrote the history. Still, 2,300 years later we can piece together bits of more accurate knowledge about it.
I thought we could do a re-introduction to fly-fishing; not sure if I’ve done this recently. “Theory and History” as we said in college when we began to learn our big things.
Let’s begin at the beginning of this, our big idea of fly-fishing.
In the British Isles, some few centuries ago, Sir Izaak Walton (or someone) noticed the resident fish – brown trout (Trutta trutta, the true trout) and Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar, the true salmon) fed lightly at times and voraciously at others on insects, often very, very small insects. Maybe he (or she; history as a subject, too, has evolved) saw the fish sipping insects like midges (Chironomid) off the surface of the water, or possibly even saw a fish jump in the air to catch a flying insect like a stonefly (genus Plecoptera). Or in gutting one of her (we’ll use this) caught fish, found half-digested insects inside. So, our proto-fly-fisherperson decided to turn to the use of insects to catch fish, rather than worms or tripe or chicken livers.
Good luck getting a gnat (a biting midge) or a caddis (g.Tricoptera, a tiny moth-like bug) on a hook.
So, what our fisherperson does is to take a little dainty, delicate feather off the side of a mallard duck, and tie it with silk thread onto a small hook, and indeed we’ve got imitation wings. And the first fishable insect, the “fly.”
But you can’t cast this new lure, this tiny, light feather fly. It’s imperceptibly light. Have you ever tried casting one of the #00 Mepps Aglia spinners in red and white? It doesn’t go very far. It’s too light to have any centrifugal force during the rod’s arcing casting motion.
Then the fisherperson gets an idea. She thinks of a whip. A leather whip. A heavy leather whip. A drover’s whip. Tapered.
She makes a fishing line that has weight, made out of cut gut; that is, a thin string of tanned or dampened intestines. She casts that line over her head with her long fishing rod, made of yew (g. Taxus) or rowan (g. Sorbus) or willow (g. Salix) and voilà, there it is. The first fly-fishing system.
The feather and hook idea then took off. We can choose feathers from other birds: neck and saddle (backtail) feathers from hen and rooster chickens, or “marabou” from turkey or long fibers of peacock feathers called herl or hairs from a ring-necked pheasant tail feather. With these we can make wings or insect tails or insect legs. Or antennae. We can use the hair and fur from small animals like rabbits and squirrels, skunk and muskrat for the same. Eventually we find ways to make a light wire hook float: the hackle feather from the chicken can be wound around the shank of the hook making the fibers of the feather stand up, creating long legs and surface area that allow the fly to rest on top of the water. The hair of cervids like elk and deer is hollow, so it is buoyant; we can tie the hairs onto hooks and mimic insects floating on the water. We can glue cork onto a hook to make full-bodied larger floating imitation flies like Junebugs (scarab beetle) or ladybugs.
That, anyway, is the Anglo-American history of fly-fishing in 300 words. A better, broader, more accurate history would mention the use of fishhooks by Amazonian’s 5000 years ago, and the tying of fur to fishhooks by the great nomads of the American Arctic 3000 years ago and the contemporaneous development of Japanese fly-fishing called “Tenkara.”
My Theory is slowly evolving, with my History. That’s progress. That’s a big thing for me.
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