Sometimes you get the eleva...

Those who fish without an appreciation of "the interconnectedness of all things" miss so much. In our fathers' day, atmospheric pressure, prevailing winds, water temperature, solar and lunar aspects, and the blessing of the Red Gods must all be aligned on a good day to fish. And, even after you looked in the Solunar Almanac for the most auspicious hour in which to begin casting, you still knew that one of forty-three billion other indicators necessary to angling success might put the jinx on you. For if the anglers of yore were unfamiliar with the Latin names of emerging flies and used leaders like hawsers, they had one thing the scientific anglers of today have lost - a firm appreciation of dumb luck.

I've watched this transition in angling for years. If you read the old hook-and-bullet magazines from the 1920's through the 1970's you will notice a slight, ever so slight shift away from the clear understanding that the world is far too complex for mortal man to comprehend, to a mild hubris that man can not only encompass all the wonders of the world, he can alter them for the better. During the 1980's through today, the worship of the "scientific angler's" cleverness has grown beyond mere hubris to a pompous disdain for the intricacy of the natural world. But I digress...

To this matter of Luck. I don't know why or how fly fishermen lost their appreciation of Providence - hunters still know when to spit. If a hunter were to do a long stalk over a fairly barren hillside in order to get within range of a herd of deer, he would know that for all his clever planning and skillful crawling, a vagrant, momentary shift of the wind could undo all his work - but he would trust to Luck and attempt it anyway. Just so the fly fisherman of old knew that, wade as silently as he may and cast as true as possible, without the benediction of the Red Gods he might:

• line a small trout which would pass it's panic to the old brown he was pursuing, or
• through a mis-step cause two rocks to grate together, or
• hook the brown and lose him to a snag, or
• have a fleet of aluminum canoes round the bend, bearing down upon him.
(some of us have all these occur simultaneously)

I fear that the fly fisherman of today has begun to believe that his quarry are mere automata - that if the angler presents the correct fly in the correct manner, the trout must oblige by placidly ingesting it. How sad, for if that is what the fisherman believes, that is all he will see - he won't perceive the blessings that abound to make his fly land aright (the likelihood of an errant zephyr is probably greater than not), or the mink patrolling the far side of the pool not choosing that moment to enter the water, or the fact that he hasn't stumbled once in his approach. How could such a fisherman, not clever enough to see his Luck, believe in anything but his skill? Poor lad. Well, sometimes you get the elevator -- and sometimes you get the shaft. Funny how dark it is in the shaft.