We walk out today into a magical winter day, like when you step into The Wardrobe and part the soft fur coats and pass through the prickly firs into the evergreens dusted with snow. The only “sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake” (Frost), and my bird dogs panting as they crisscross the road, quartering in and out of the silent white dark woods.
And me? I’m thinking about fly-fishing.
Back inside the shack I get out my fly reels and lines and leaders for the annual preparing: washing fly lines by hand in dish soap, taking out the resulting knots, then knotting them up again. Line backing to reel with Arbor Knot, Backing to fly line: Albright Knot. Fly line to butt of leader: Nail Knot. Later, the Surgeon’s (or Doctor’s) Knot to build different strengths and lengths of leaders. Eventually the Improved Clinch (which my grandfather used to call the Fisherman’s Knot). Or the Palomar or Loop knots. Then one or two types of dropper knots.
And I think to myself, I am fifty, and I have finally mastered something.
I may not be a great fly-fisherman, but I can tie the knots.
And I can cast the fly with absolute precision under normal – that is, difficult – brook trout situations, not to mention for bass and steelhead. Casting learned through many years of studying and practice, and with words of encouragement from Ron Manz on the Bois Brule, and Carl Haensel from Namebini on the Kinnickinnic, and Paul Stegnam from Adrenaline in Tasmania.
It is said that Bird became Bird sometime after he shot 10,000 free throws, and Jordan 10,000 jump shots. I don’t have that kind of drive or ambition, but some things that are of much less importance to the world I have mastered.
By the time I had finished the university I had mastered Ernest Hemingway, which was no small thing in a pro-Fitzgerald state and an anti-Hemingway epoch. I had mastered his diction, syntax, morphology and could, as is evident, mimic him. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, never so. Yeats and Joyce, never ever so.
By the time I had finished senior high school I had mastered muskrat trapping. I could never claim fox trapping, since I caught more feral cats, farmers’ dogs and skunks than fox.
And by the time I had finished junior high, I had master the Beatles – voices, words, references, catalog, notes, keys, and chords.
Before that I was a blank slate, and my mother and father were giving me every advantage to take on not only The Witch, but The Lion, too.
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