Country Notes
Lord of the Flies
“Fly-fishing is a way of being in good places very quietly, with a pleasant purpose you can pursue with intentness and graceful tools.”
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He had a little outboard motor and a short tippy cartop boat, but no car to top with it, and once I prevailed on my father to get up at four in the morning and transport me and Hack and this craft out to Lake Mineral Wells, which was supposed to be a hot fishing spot in those days. Hack caught a four-and-a-half pound bass and a couple of smaller ones while trolling with a Crawdad plug, and expressed himself gratified. I didn’t catch anything and neither did Papa, who could not swim and had chosen to fish from the bank when he took a good look at the boat in the water and heard its owner say, rather belatedly, that no, he’d never had three people in it before but was sure it would hold them all right.
In his tackle box there was a pint of bootleg whiskey (I think this must have been about 1931, the year before Repeal), which he finished of on the ride home that afternoon, flinging the bottle toward the borrow ditch and breaking into a snatch of “My Darling Nellie Gray.” Then he began shaking his fist out the window and shouting at drivers who passed us, considering them reckless. “Oh, you pissant!” he would shriek. “Oh, you horse’s butt!” My father, not at all a stuffy man but decorous in the old way, had very little to say on this drive, and as I recall we engaged in no further outings of that sort. Hack and I stayed friends, though, and I guess I learned a good bit from him before, rather soon thereafter, he drifted on in his restless course toward other regions and other acolytes.
I didn’t learn much, however, from that ill-matched fly-fishing outfit he helped me to get wholesale. Spurred on by my reading and by bullheadedness, I flailed away with it on stock tanks beyond the edge of town and on the sluggish Trinity West Fork, whose bottomland was our main poaching ground in those days, and eventually got to the point where I could slap a fly ungracefully on the water 20 or 25 feet from where I stood if I didn’t hang it on a willow or bush with my back cast, as I usually did. I even caught a good many uncautious perch with it and finally a small bass or two. But it was discouraging work, and for serious fishing with adults I relied on a bait-casting rod and plugs.
Or maybe that dismal rig did teach me something after all, because I remember that when I first got to use a decent balanced fly outfit, just before or during the war, the smooth and rhythmic certainty with which it laid out a long line, checked it in the air, and dropped it gently on the water, had a feel of old familiarity for me. It wasn’t familiarity at all, of course. It was merely what I’d been looking for all that time.
Not long afterward I discovered trout in the mountains of New Mexico, and that was when fly-rod addiction truly set in. It has been with me ever since, though feebly at times during periods of travel or living in cities or absorption with country life and work, to the point that in recent years I have fallen into the habit of using non-fly tackle for Texas fishing about as often as not. Of late, though, for reasons I do not pretend to understand, the addiction has started coming back strong. In a world as fraught with mighty evils and fears and causes as ours is, this fascination of mine with trying to hoodwink fish in a particular fussy way does make me a bit uneasy, I confess. But there it is.
Texas, alas, is not trout country, and in general even those Texans who spend winter evenings tying trout flies and reading about the Rockies’ Madison and Yellowstone and Gunnision rivers, and about more venerably renowned Northeastern and British streams like the Beaverkill and the Test, base their ordinary fishing on what they can get at.
In the hinterland parts of the state the assortment of species they can usually get at with a fly rod doesn’t exactly smother them with choices. By and large the available game fish — those predatory types that will dependably assault artificial lures of some sort — are largemouth black bass, white or sand bass, striped bass, crappie, and a number of small sunfish most often lumped under the designations perch or bream (pronounced “brim”). In terms of size and strength none of the others approach the great stripers, ocean fish originally, a landlocked breed of which has been transplanted to some reservoirs in the recent past and is doing nicely there. But they tend to hand out in the depths of the lakes and are caught mainly by specialists trolling for them with heavy tackle and elaborate auxiliary rigs to force big treble-hooked plugs far down into the water. Neither are white bass and crappie easily accessible to a fly-rodder most of the time, though when they are, as on spawning runs up rivers that feed into the reservoirs, they can make for good seasonal sport.
This leaves the black bass and the bream, the old familiar native species in pursuit of which most of use prairie dwellers first learned a little about fishing. Or rather we learned on the bream and eventually, I suppose, knew enough to catch some bass, whose greater size and moodier habits and higher rank in the regard of our elders made them the standard achievement.
And despite stripers and other novelties, black bass are still the standard around these parts, as throughout much of the country, for the proliferation of reservoirs has hugely expanded their habitat and the importation of new strains has much increased their average size, the current Texas record being, I believe, around fifteen pounds, an unheard-of weight in my youth except in Florida. Furthermore a new and effective and highly American methodology, involving electronic depth finders and fish finders and, along with other lures, weighted soft-plastic worms bumped along the bottom where blacks forgather during cold or hot weather, has developed for catching them in recent years and has been cannily promoted and exploited.
They are also fine fly fish sometimes, especially for a few weeks in spring and in fall when optimum water temperature, the breeding urge, or whatever causes them to cruise and feed in shallow places during the daylight hours. There they will attack live things on the water’s surface, or imitations of live things, and the furious splashing strike of a mature bass at a cork-bodied or clipped-hair fly-rod bug that is being twitched along in representation, one hopes, of something good to eat has a startling effect that is equaled by only a few other things that happen in the blood sports, among them the rise of a covey of quail before a pointing dog, expected but nonetheless heart-stopping.
Bass can often be taken thus with surface flies in the warm months too, at dusk or at daybreak or at night. And in the past couple of decades or so some experimental fly-rodders have worked out ways of using sinking lines and big streamer flies to reach them in deeper water and take them at times almost as well as the plastic worm crowd can, and have learned to cover the water more thoroughly through the use of enormously long “double line haul” casts.
Until recently this new knowledge had mainly passed me by, and I doubt I’ll be changing or improving radically as a fly-fisherman at this point, even though I do intend to have a try at some of the new techniques and I don’t expect I’ll ever quit going after bass with the long rod when I can. But it lacks the delicacy of standard trout fishing, primarily because of the tackle you have to use, and this in turn has to do not with any greater size and power that bass possess but with the flies themselves. Without wanting to wax too technical here — a danger of the sport, as non-fishing readers will already have discerned — I will note that bass don’t have that great big mouth for nothing. They prefer to take their nourishment in hunks, as anyone knows who has dissected their stomachs during the cleaning process and found therein birds, baby squirrels, young catfish six or eight inches long, but very few if any of the diminutive insects that delight the trout man’s heart. Hence, to be attractive to them, flies usually need to have good bulk, with consequent increased weight and air resistance. This means inevitably that the line with which you lay those flies on the water, up to fifty or sixty feet or more away from your ritualistic self, has got to be a thick one whipped through the air with a powerful, relatively heavy rod. It’s true that similar tackle is needed for Atlantic salmon and steelheads and Alaskan rainbows and other sizable salmonids, as well as for taking saltwater species on a fly, but that’s mainly because of the quarry’s great strength, which needs what authority you can muster.
Bass water is therefore no place for lovely tiny flies and a number four line and a lithe slim wisp of a rod that feels like a long and springy extra finger of your hand, things that are part of the charm that fly-fishing can have and a very fine part too. I don’t remember ever getting a charley horse under my shoulder blade on a trout stream, not even in a long day’s fishing, but I’ve had some good ones when after bass. And, I admit, have considered them fair enough payment, when the bass were hitting.
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