FISHING: MYSTIQUES AND MISTAKES

Perhaps all you can say is that there are great lapses or discrepancies in time; that and the simple if inexplicable fact that some people have fishing in their hearts.

- Russell Chatham

In some ways fishing has Gone Modern, although it’s a good way behind the injection-molded consciousness of skiing, or almost any other sport you can name. I for one am not complaining; some nineteenth-century attitudes are looking better and better. If you happened to be amusing yourself at the Palladium in Manhattan, stoned, naturally, right to the eyeballs, and began muttering about “tight loops on the Tongariro” or something like that, people might naturally assume you'd gone beyond simple leather and nipple clips. Only the bold would inquire directly.

Do fishermen eat avocados? This is a question no one ever thinks to ask.

The distance from the barren lands north of Reykjavik to the Plaza at Century City is well over a hundred years. Several southern Californians who visit Century City frequently, and who see nothing terribly unusual about it, also visit Iceland to fish for salmon. They don’t see anything very unusual about Iceland either.

I was invited once to equally remote country, where I was given to understand fly tying was done under suitable cover because there were so many fish. The invitation, I might add, meant only that there was space for me on the river; my hosts were not picking up the tab.

That little item was to run around $6,500 for the week.

“Gee, that’s a lot,” I said, with the same sense of helplessness a seven-year-old might feel looking at a full plate of string beans.

“The gillies fix a wonderful hot lunch every day.”

“I got that free in public school.”

Fishing is one of the least complicated endeavors available to human beings, yet of all the popular sports its devotees are the most likely to go off the deep end equipment wise. I recently saw a new fishing vest with so many pockets inside and out that you’d be round if you put something in each one.