If Fish Could Scream: An Angler's Search for the Future of Fly Fishing

By Paul Schullery

In essays sometimes controversial, sometimes reflective, all fascinating, Paul Schullery ruminates on the evolution of fly fishing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Release date: Jul 28, 2008
• ISBN: 9780811751650

Paul Schullery

Paul Schullery is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than forty books on nature, national parks, history, and outdoor sport. He is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner Award and the Roderick Haig-Brown Award, and he wrote and narrated the award-winning PBS film "Yellowstone: America's Sacred Wilderness." He is currently a scholar-in-residence at Montana State University Library, Bozeman.

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Copyright © 2008 by Paul Schullery

Published by

STACKPOLE BOOKS

5067 Ritter Road

Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

Printed in the United States

First edition

Photographs by the author

Angler protraits by Marsha Karle

With additional illustrations from angling literature

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schullery, Paul.

If fish could scream : American fly fishing and how it got that way /

Paul Schullery.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0435-9 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 0-8117-0435-1 (hardcover)

1. Fly fishing—United States. I. Title.

SH463.S33 2007

799.12'40973—dc22

2007042083

eBook ISBN 978-0-8117-5165-0

for Ken Cameron

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Stand Facing the River

1. Uncles and Other Heroes: Fly Fishing and the Culture of Celebrity

2. All the Long Desired Things: Trains, Tracks, and Trout

3. Spinners and Sinners

4. A Great Want of True Angling Sentiment: Is Competitive Fly Fishing Fatal?

5. If the Fishes Will Be Patient: Fly Fishing, Wild Rivers, and the Legions of the Dammed

6. Outworn Privileges: Trout Wonderland and the Institutionalizing of Angling’s Identity Crisis

7. If Fish Could Scream: How Cruelty Helped Shape the Modern Fly Fisher

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

For many anglers, fly fishing empowers an intensely personal experience of rivers: Pick up your fly rod, stand facing the river, and the world opens out from there. Angler Bob DeMott faces the river in the Gallatin Valley, Montana. AUTHOR PHOTO.

INTRODUCTION

Stand Facing the River

WHENEVER I VISIT A TROUT STREAM, FLY FISHING EMPOWERS THE process. The sport’s high technicians lean hard toward its empirical rewards, but I doubt that any of those admirable overachievers would be there in the first place if it wasn’t all so beautiful. Fly fishing positions us so superbly to feel and wonder—abstractly, reverently, analytically, poetically, whimsically, or in any other way within our capabilities—that it would be a tragic loss of intellectual and emotional opportunity if the sport had never arisen as a human pursuit.¹

When Roderick Haig-Brown made his famous remark that perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers, he was right. But he knew, and meant, that the nearness of the river was only the start.² Pick up your fly rod, stand facing the river, and the world opens out from there.

In fact many worlds open from there. Some days, it’s sufficient to think about where the fish might be, or why the flies aren’t hatching, or why even the best fly tiers on earth can’t seem to narrow down the appropriate pattern of the little western mayfly known as the Pale Morning Dun. Perhaps nothing else has so fully occupied fly fishers over the centuries than our quixotic and joyously addictive attempts to get a fly pattern right.

There are days when my inquiry may be, in the spirit of Haig-Brown, more about the river itself—changes in a once-familiar gravel bar since the last high water, a long bark-peeled snag that has been slowly creeping downstream through a favorite bend and now seems to have jammed itself permanently into a jutting angle of cutbank, or just an odd tint to the water that makes me wonder what has been going on upstream.

Other days, especially those when I go foraging in the folklore and literature of angling and the greater literatures of natural and human history, I am again struck by the open-ended character of the whole enterprise of outdoor sport, most especially the blessed uncertainty of it all. The combination of human nature and wild nature is always bound to be exciting, challenging, and a little bewildering.

For all these reasons, on all these levels, fly fishing is, as the phrase goes, good to think with.³ Fly fishing invites us into so many kinds of wonder and wondering that even in our most idle moods it can surprise us with new insights and questions. And if we really pay attention, we’ll hardly keep up with all that’s going on.

Fly fishing has changed more in the past century than in the previous two millennia, and it seems to be changing faster all the time. I suspect that most anglers and all of fly fishing’s commercial enterprises would call this accelerating rate of change progress, but it’s probably also worth wondering if change necessarily makes a sport better. Technology, commerce, and human values play major roles here, and they are all up for grabs. If Fish Could Scream is a series of meditations on this process of change, but it’s far less about how things are today than it is about how we got here.

In his fascinating book Hunting and the American Imagination, historian Daniel Herman describes how American sportsmen reinvented themselves in the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁴ Before 1850 the game-hog/fish-hog culture prevailed and sportsmen were perceived as lazy ne’er-do-wells, shot at anything that moved, and wiped out fish and wildlife populations with no apparent awareness or remorse. But by 1900, under the leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, and their like, and backed by hundreds of newly created sportsmen’s groups, American hunters and fishermen adopted a rational, forward-looking code of behavior, began to police themselves and train their children, and became widely respected not only as conservationists but as good citizens. Sportsmen, Herman persuasively argues, literally made themselves over, and by doing so not only changed the public’s feelings about sport, but brought the wildlife back.

The novelty of this momentous transformation wasn’t that sportsmen could change. As I will suggest many times in this book, everything about sport has typically changed in pace with its social, technological, and even biological contexts.⁵ What is much more interesting about this particular change is how directed it seemed to be. Under the inspired leadership of the Roosevelts and the Grinnells, we picked ourselves up out of the social gutter and made ourselves into something we hadn’t been before. We did this on purpose, both to ensure the future of our quarry and to improve our standing in the community.

We have changed more since then, including a continued refinement of the principles and values that drove Roosevelt and Grinnell. But most of the time we’re not as intentional as Roosevelt and his pals were about where we’re headed. We usually change in a haphazard way, and most of us don’t give it much thought. Maybe we’re just too distracted trying to come up with a decent PMD imitation. Whatever the reasons, I hope that this book reveals the extent to which fly fishing is poised for continued and probably accelerated change. I like to think that knowing change is coming, and being alert to its opportunities as well as to its risks, can be to our advantage.

The subjects of some chapters are intensely controversial among anglers today. A Great Want of True Angling Sentiment considers the competitive impulse among anglers, a hot topic because of the flourishing of amateur and professional fly-fishing contests, including a widely publicized fly-fishing world championship. Some participants in this debate invoke history and historic authorities to prove their cases for or against such contests, but our predecessors were no simpler or less quarrelsome than we are when it came to answering these questions.Spinners and Sinners traces the long rivalry between fly fishers and users of other kinds of tackle, a constant source of contention over fly fishing’s perceived elitism. The title essay, If Fish Could Scream, is about the supposed cruelty of anglers—a persistent criticism we have faced (or dodged) for several centuries. In an irony-rich examination of our reaction to this criticism, we find that our infamous self-perception as socially or even morally superior to other kinds of anglers originated in part because we once believed we were the least cruel of anglers. Now, because of our catch-and-release practices, we are seen by critics of sport fishing as the most cruel of all.

Other chapters consider matters that probably could use a little more controversy—or at least conversation—than they have generated so far. Uncles and Other Heroes explores the longstanding celebrity culture of fly fishing. The fly-fishing celebrity is not new, but the nature of the celebrated heroism has come a long way. All the Long Desired Things, by focusing on the railroad boom of the nineteenth century, shows how transportation technology revolutionized fly fishing’s engagement with the natural world. The typical fly fisher before 1800 rarely fished more than 25 miles from home, while today’s angler has the whole world within reach. This change means that a lifelong, deep acquaintance with local water is often replaced by a cosmopolitan if shallow acquaintance with many waters. How unlike our ancestors does this make us? If the Fishes Will Be Patient is about the historic damming of every major American watershed and the effects of those dams on fly-fishing practice and values. The extraordinary popularity of dozens of newly created tailwater fisheries downstream from huge hydro dams has demonstrated the adaptability of the modern fly fisher, but these new rivers test the sport’s environmental values in ways never before encountered. And Outworn Privileges visits one of the world’s great and historic trout-fishing shrines and reminds us of how perilous our privileges as anglers can be in a rapidly changing world.

I realize that most casual anglers don’t care much about these questions, but I know from my own travels in the world of fly fishing that many of us do take the sport’s bigger issues seriously. Perhaps this book is for those who are already interested in such matters, but I can dream that others will also pick it up and begin to think harder about what we do out there on the water.

I also realize that I’m dabbling in a host of disciplines where my formal training is scanty. All of us with a scholarly specialty tend to get turfy when someone ambles in from a neighboring academic discipline and sets up shop in our backyard. I know I do; in my writings on environmental history I have often indignantly dumped on some ecologist (or, even worse, economist) who had the brass to act like a card-carrying historian. But interdisciplinary studies are the future for every form of scholarship related to natural resources, and we need to develop not only a greater tolerance for each other, but also a greater enthusiasm for working together. All of which is to say that I apologize in advance for any occasions upon which I may have carelessly (or incompetently) trod on the turf or toes of anthropologists, ethicists, folklorists, sociologists, ecologists, and any other specialists for whom fly fishing’s complicated cultural saga is such a rich and inviting field of study. All I can say to you is: consider my shortcomings an invitation to take on these subjects yourself.

Fly fishing’s debates and controversies are pretty much endless, and should be. We’re better off for admitting that we will never completely sort these things out, and I’m not trying to win arguments here anyway. I certainly don’t hide my own opinions, and now and then I do criticize some notion or belief that I find particularly feeble. But I hope that I have managed to offer this book in an open-ended spirit, one that might advance the conversations we require if we are to do justice to this wonder-filled sport, the natural world it relies upon, and the reinventions to come.

CHAPTER ONE

UNCLES AND OTHER HEROES

Fly Fishing and the Culture of Celebrity

MY FIRST FISHING HERO WAS MY UNCLE, RICHARD MURPHY. HE was a lifelong cane-pole baitfisherman and a fixture on his home lake in Ohio who enjoyed nearly seventy years of fishing experience. Funny thing is, aside from certain inadvertent lessons he gave me in the effective use of profanity, I would have a hard time describing even one specific thing he taught me about fishing.

It wasn’t that Uncle Dick didn’t teach me things. They just didn’t matter as much as being out there with someone who had lived with the lake his whole life. Just hanging around with someone like that is exciting. There is great inspiration in the presence of genuine authority.

Many of us have been lucky enough to stumble into a situation where we could learn from some especially gifted angler. Every town has at least a few, and whether they’re the upright souls who patiently conduct fly-tying classes at the local school or the poachers whose license numbers are taped to the dashboard of every law enforcement officer in the county, they occupy a special place in our sport’s culture. They represent some rare, admirable pinnacle of skill and experience. They know things the rest of us don’t; they have seen things the rest of us can hardly imagine. They embody wisdom—or at least a backwoods craftiness that many of us would secretly prefer anyway.

The author’s uncle, Richard Murphy (1916–1989), a longtime Ohio baitangler, exemplified the venerable tradition of the local angling legend. AUTHOR PHOTO.

THE NEED

We enjoy being in awe of someone like that. Whether we consider them role models or not, it feels good to know a genius. The experience of being star-struck is happily self-serving. There’s a satisfying if they could see me now feeling in actually spending time with such a person. Many years ago, during my first conversation with Lee Wulff, one of the twentieth century’s most influential anglers, I found it hard to listen to him because my brain kept shouting at me, You’re actually standing here in Lee Wulff ’s house having a conversation with Lee Wulff!

There’s more to it than that. Our fly-fishing heroes take care of things for us. They put in the hard years doing the homework on techniques, entomology, fly patterns, and all the other great technical questions. They pave the way into all sorts of arcane corners of the sport. They inspire us with their example and comfort us with their long, deep view of what the fly-fishing life means.

This is all especially important to the underachievers among us who have no intention of working as hard as the real experts have worked.We don’t see them as role models as much as superathletes.¹ They reduce the pressure on us.We’re happy just knowing that fishing can be practiced on such an exemplary plane. We don’t need to mimic their exploits and triumphs. They’ve got the heroic end of the sport covered, and we can just bumble along feeling good about it. Having a hero, like being a hero, is not a simple thing.

Joseph Campbell, in his popular classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), described the ambivalence of the hero’s image this way:

The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency. In fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain golden ring, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling, into ruin.²

None of this should sound unfamiliar to fishermen, from the exceptional gifts to the lack of recognition (or outright disdain). After all, only a few undistinguished people in my Uncle Dick’s community realized or cared that they had a great master of an ancient craft among them. And as far as symbolical deficiencies, just replace the mythic Golden Fleece or the Ring of Power with an equally mythic trout or a long-sought magical fly pattern, and we’re talking about the same passionate intensity of purpose.³ The difference is that in the case of fishing, only the fishermen care how it comes out, and the world isn’t going to end if, as usual, we fail.

The cultural anthropologists might tell