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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Happily there do exist some fish in our inland Texas waters that allow the owner and cherisher of light — and bantamweight trout tackle to do a little more with it than admire it by the fireside in winter and utilize it three or four times a year in the Mountain States if he’s lucky. These are the bream, or perch, or whatever you may want to call them — the bluegills and goggle-eyes and redears and pumpkin-seeds and other flat-bodied sunfish that abound in all our lakes and streams and in farm and ranch stock tanks. They run small — anything over about half a pound is very good bream indeed in Texas, and in some ponds where the population has gotten out of whack with the food supply, most of them you catch are closer to the size of a silver dollar, if anyone now remembers that departed honest coin. But in compensation for want of hugeness, bream are voracious consumers of insects and small aquatic life and are thus quite pleasantly suited to the light fly rod and to those who like to wield it.
Trout they are not, and a part of the ritual usually goes by the board when you sally forth after them, unless you simply want to observe it. Besides being mainly much larger, trout are finicky creatures, and that is the chief reason for much of the ancient ritual itself: the study of currents to avoid drag on the line and fly after a cast, the alertness for hatches of mayflies or caddis flies or other favored bugs, the solemn consultations with other anglers as to the flies and manner of presentation that seem to be working best on a given day astream. Bream, on the other hand, don’t truly give a damn and most of the time are pretty unselective. If they’re feeding at all, practically any pattern of fly will do as long as its not too big for their mouths and you put it where they can see it, without having frightened them beforehand by clomping along the bank or hugely disturbing the water.
Nevertheless some skill is required, and certain wily fly-fishers do take more and better bream than others. In most water this is less a matter of entomological and hydrological know-how of the troutish sort than it is of reading the water for likely spots, casting accurately and softly so as not to startle the prey, locating heftier specimens by the manner of their rising, getting a fly down deep when they’re not hitting near the top, finding the most attractive manner and speed of retrieve, detecting and responding to underwater strikes, and so on. There is thus enough to think about to keep the illusion of ritual intact, along with the near-certainty of catching fish.
Quite edible fish they are also, even the silver dollars, which with the most perfunctory of scalings and guttings can be dunked in cornmeal and fried crisply whole and devoured whole too, bones and fins and head and all. The delicate flesh of the bigger ones is hard to distinguish from that of the closely related crappie, for me the most savory freshwater fish in our region. Nor do you have to worry about the morality of taking as many as you think you need. Since bream breed as recklessly as do people, ponds especially are often so overstocked that it is absolutely virtuous to take away all of them you can catch, in contrast with current practice on many popular trout waters, where authorities quite wisely are encouraging or requiring a catch-and-release approach among anglers to stave off catastrophe.
I sometimes carry home minnow-bucketfuls of undersized sunfish, caught in some teeming tank, and dump them into our own piece of creek, which goes utterly Texas-dry every four or five summers and often needs restocking, and there they grow to good size rapidly. But nature itself does an adequate job of moving them into new water when they’re needed. In that same creek, when rains break a drouth, I’ve watched perch leaping and wriggling up a nearly vertical five-foot jet of water tumbling over the ledged cascade at the bottom end of our place, to head for newly replenished deeper pools above. And at a brand-new, raw-clay, fishless pasture tank, filled overnight by a deluge, I’ve seen tiny goggle-eyes the size of my thumbnail swimming on their sides by thousands up thin rivulets flowing across the spillway, from some older pond far down the same draw.
Maybe best of all, if you have a hidden competitive streak in your psyche, as even most ritualists do, the fly rod as often as not, in reasonably practiced hands, is a better tool for taking them than any other. Thus you can have the illusion not only of ritual but of efficiency too, in a way that you can’t with bass except under the most prime of fly conditions.
I remember from thirty years since — rather guiltily, as one remembers unfair triumphs — a spring afternoon on the Cibolo not far from Boerne, at a pretty place where white spate-water roared across a concrete low-water bridge into a deep blue pool. Big handsome bream, in bright breeding hues of yellow and red and green and blue and silver, were gathered in swarms in that pool, and seven or eight locals had gathered also, hauling out fish with poles and worms but not exceedingly fast. I knew none of them, and as soon as I showed up they switched from speaking English to German, a form of cultural barrier you’d run across from time to time in that region. It relieved me of the need to do anything but fish, and during the 45 minutes or so of my presence in their midst, using a number ten Yellow Sally and a beat-up little fiberglass trout rod, I took roughly four or five fish for every one the whole crowd of them caught. By the time I said my early auf Wiedersehen and left, dragging a tow sack heavy with bream, the atmosphere was quite thick with hostility, but I expect I left some converts to fly-fishing among them, if they recognized what my tackle was.
Except at such demonic moments, though, I’m not actually very competitive about fishing or anything else, and the times I remember with most pleasure on spring-fed Hill Country creeks like the Cibolo, the loveliest waters in the state in my opinion, are whole days spent alone or in quite good company, wading them in tennis shoes and fishing them like the trout streams they would be if they were only a few degrees colder. In that clean live water, bream and slender bass tend to behave much like trout as well, and are harder to tempt, and the ritual becomes nearly entire. Some streams in the hills have good numbers of queer, humpheaded, black and gold sunfish known as Rio Grande perch, which against a two-ounce rod can pull like veritable hogs. One that I caught in the Blanco at Wimberley weighed not much short of a pound and even managed to strip off quite a bit of line from my reel in fast water before I brought him in to turn him loose again for somebody else to catch.
Other respectable sunfish I remember clearly and affectionately too, among them a population of lively steel-blue and silver beauties that together with a lot of bottles and a few old tires inhabited some riffles beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin in the late forties, before that part of the river was damned. They had deep streamlined bodies and very slim hinder sections and long slanting blue tabs on their gills, and I’ve never seen their like elsewhere. I used to go there and fish for them in the evenings after having overdosed on freshman-theme grading, and it was a fine strange solitary place to be at twilight, with the cliff swallows that nested under the bridge wheeling and twittering and swooping at bugs, the night-hawks and bats coming out, the cars rumbling faintly far overhead, the Colorado’s clear water singing its song in the riffles, and the cool green river smell of it. They were picky, those steel-blue bream, and I had to use good trout flies on them. If I recall aright, they usually liked best a Brown Bivisible dry tied on a size twelve hook, drifted down the current without drag.
In fact, whenever I look back — and fishing like some other things often has retrospection in it for me these days as I see, in an eddy or a stone or a purl of current against some cypress knee, other streams in other times where other fish were the goal — looking back I note with more than a shade of chagrined surprise that many of my most agreeable recollections of fishing involve the lowly bream, every child’s first catch. I don’t suppose the surprise is justified, for only rarely have I lived where I could go out after trout when I wanted, and I am, God help me, a fly-fisherman by preference, and given those circumstances it’s probably true that I’ve fished with greater frequency for bream than I have for nobler species. Nevertheless this realization is rather humbling, making me seem to myself very un-Hemingwayesue and not much like Lord Grey of Fallodon either, and causing me to wonder dauntedly sometimes if, in angling as well as in some of those other things I view in retrospect, I may have fallen a bit short of growth and full achievement.
It isn’t a wonder that lasts very long, however, at least in regard to angling. Because down inside I know quite well that the fish are not the point. The manner of fishing is.
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