The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing

By Mark Kurlansky

National Outdoor Book Award Winner for Outdoor Literature

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Cod-the irresistible story of the science, history, art, and culture of the least efficient way to catch a fish.

Fly fishing, historian Mark Kurlansky has found, is a battle of wits, fly fisher vs. fish-and the fly fisher does not always (or often) win. The targets-salmon, trout, and char; and for some, bass, tarpon, tuna, bonefish, and even marlin-are highly intelligent, athletic animals. The allure, Kurlansky learns, is that fly fishing makes catching a fish as difficult as possible. The flies can be beautiful and intricate, some made with over two dozen pieces of feather and fur; the cast is a matter of grace and rhythm, with different casts and rods yielding varying results.

Kurlansky is known for his deep dives into specific subjects, from cod to oysters to salt. But he spent his boyhood days on the shore of a shallow pond. Here, where tiny fish weaved under a rocky waterfall, he first tied string to a branch, dangled a worm into the water, and unleashed his passion for fishing. Since then, his love of the sport has led him around the world's countries, coasts, and rivers-from the wilds of Alaska to Basque country, from Ireland and Norway to Russia and Japan. And, in true Kurlansky fashion, he absorbed every fact, detail, and anecdote along the way.

The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing marries Kurlansky's signature wide-ranging reach with a subject that has captivated him for a lifetime-combining history, craft, and personal memoir to show readers, devotees of the sport or not, the necessity of experiencing nature's balm first-hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781635573084

Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of Milk!, Havana, Paper, The Big Oyster, 1968, Salt, The Basque History of the World, Cod, and Salmon, among other titles. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bon Appétit's Food Writer of the Year Award, the James Beard Award, and the Glenfiddich Award. He lives in New York City. www.markkurlansky.com

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PROLOGUE

Winter Without Tolstoy on the Big Wood River

He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.

—LEO TOLSTOY, ANNA KARENINA

Stepping into the Big Wood River on a winter day, I feel the current wrap around my legs like the embrace of an old friend. That an icy river can have a warm embrace is one of nature’s ironies.

Ernest Hemingway fished the Big Wood River and even chose its bank as the place to die. He understood. Tolstoy, who understood so much about human nature, just didn’t understand, or at least he created a character who didn’t.

In Anna Karenina, he wrote of two brothers who were wealthy landowners. To the first brother, there was nothing better than working in the fields. He could not understand why the other wanted to go off and fish for perch. At the end of the day, he would meet up with the second brother and be mystified at how happy that brother was after fishing all day even though he hadn’t caught a single fish.

It is not an uncommon divide: the one who fishes versus the one who doesn’t. The one who does can never explain the urge to the one who doesn’t.

Every winter in central Idaho while the smart set is gliding down the mountains of Sun Valley experiencing their own version of exhilaration, I make my way down snowy banks into the freezing Big Wood River in the hopes that a large and handsome rainbow trout will pull on my fly. There are days when I catch a dozen fish and days when I catch none, but I always return to town filled with the sense of peace that comes after having had a great day. If I catch no fish, if my fingers are so cold that they have turned bright red and no longer work—no matter. Any day spent fishing on a wintry river is a great day. How is it possible that someone who could write Anna Karenina couldn’t see that?

It was my interest in the Basques that first brought me to central Idaho, to the town of Ketchum. Earlier in my career, I had written a book about the Basques and spent much time in their homeland, which in their language is called Euskal Herria, in northern Spain and southwestern France. The Basques herd sheep on their farms, which is what had brought them to central Idaho a century before I arrived.

The practice of bringing outsiders into the rugged, remote mountains near Ketchum to herd sheep had begun in the nineteenth century, when local sheep producers brought in Scots, because, due to the expansion of the cattle industry, there were not enough shepherds to tend to the area’s huge flocks. The sheep industry was replacing mining in central Idaho. Scots knew something about tending sheep, but soon they assimilated and educated their children, who became economically successful in other fields or moved back to a newly industrialized Scotland. At this same time, in the beginning of the twentieth century, Basque farms in Europe, especially on the French side, were in crisis, and so the Idaho community was able to lure Basque farmers, who also knew something about sheep—housing the farmers in a building in Greenwich Village in New York until a suitable flock for them to tend could be found and they were placed on westbound trains. The Basques then went the way of the Scots, building a large, successful community in central Idaho, and in the late twentieth century the Peruvians were brought in.

Because of my Basque connection, I was asked to speak at the sheep festival held every fall in Ketchum. My wife and daughter came with me, and all three of us were immediately taken by the area’s semi-wilderness. We decided to return in the winter for some world-class skiing, oddly forgetting that we were not world-class skiers. I liked cross-country, and had skied a few mountains in far tamer Vermont, but was not fond of riding a chair or gondola to a mountaintop, rushing down, and riding back up again. It seemed to me that the greatest moment in skiing was when you finally got to take off your boots.

I skied a little during our first winter in Idaho, but then I was told that there is winter fly fishing on the Big Wood River and that was the end of my skiing. My wife, Marian, continued to ski and my daughter, Talia, skied some days and fished others and was remarkably good at both. I have tried to get back to fish the Big Wood every winter since.

The Big Wood begins at the Galena Summit, about 8,700 feet above sea level, formed from churning streams descending the rugged and aptly named Sawtooth Mountains, whose rough-cut, sharp-pointed, snow-covered white peaks line up in a row like a lower jaw of wolf teeth. There, the angry waters join together and then split off into the Salmon River and the Big Wood River at what is surely one of the most beautiful spots on earth.

The Salmon River carves a 425-mile canyon that in places is deeper than the Grand Canyon. Its steep banks of rough rock, at times almost vertical, are covered with bright chartreuse and yellow lichen, while dark, clear water rushes and churns below. Lewis and Clark dubbed the Salmon the River of No Return, because its current was so strong that they could not paddle back up it. But the Nez Perce, in whose territory the river ran, knew well how to paddle upstream. They were skilled salmon fishermen who lived off the river’s rich salmon runs. Later, they also learned to be fine horsemen and deadly riflemen, and they were the last native tribe to be defeated by the U.S. Army. Their last chief on the Salmon River, White Bird, never surrendered nor was captured, but fled to safety in Canada.

I love to fish the Salmon, but it is not open in the winter. The Big Wood is open to fish trout, though only for catch-and-release fishing.

After separating from the Salmon, the Big Wood chortles and snarls for 137 miles, descending the Boulder Mountains in Sawtooth country down to where the riverbanks are low and the casting is easy, just past the town of Ketchum. Along the way, other tributaries join it, including the Warm Springs Creek, whose junction with the Big Wood is an excellent spot to catch trout. Past Ketchum, the Big Wood merges with the Little Wood and becomes the Malad River, which flows into the Snake River and then, like all Idaho rivers, leaves the state to flow into the Columbia River and finally the Pacific.

The Big Wood is not the easiest river to wade into, especially in the winter. The current is strong and the river bottom is covered with large slippery rocks, which makes it easy to lose your balance and fall. I have never fallen in, but if I did, my fishing day would be over. I would have to get out of my wet clothes and go somewhere warm. The river has deep quiet pools, drifting at the edge of the fast current, where the rainbow trout like to relax and grab food, including fishers’ flies.

Which leads to the only two rules of fly fishing that cannot be broken: you cannot fall in and you must keep your fly in the water as much as possible. Everything else depends on circumstance.

Rainbow trout are remarkably designed. In the river only their dark backs can be seen, so well camouflaged that you rarely notice them until you hook one. But once the fish is pulled from the water, it is stunning, an almost iridescent rainbow of hot pastel colors.

Big Wood trout are called cut bows. They have the rainbow trout’s typical brilliant colors on their sides, but sometimes also sport a bright red slash of color at their throats. The red slash is the mark of another species of trout of the same genus, the cutthroat, which is abundant in the neighboring Snake River. This means that in the Big Wood, the cutthroats have somehow mixed with the rainbows.

The Big Wood is not stocked by a hatchery—which is significant because hatchery fish are a bit dumb. They don’t have the survival skills of wild fish, which has led some to question the value of stocking rivers. Big Wood fish are wild and have the wisdom of experience, as in the summertime they face a constant swarm of catch-and-release fisherfolk who have seen the Robert Redford film A River Runs Through It. In 1925 Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald from Spain and defined his idea of heaven. One of his requirements was a trout stream that no one else is allowed to fish in. Fishing the Big Wood in winter is not quite that, but on a cold enough day it comes close. That’s why I like winter fishing. I have the river to myself—and I have to contend with savvier fish. After running the gauntlet of the summer anglers, the fish know quite a bit about artificial flies and those strange creatures standing in the river holding poles. Fish learn.

One factor that makes hatchery fish easier to catch than wild ones is that they are used to being fed regularly and so will eat at any time. A wild trout is a different matter. Scientists tell us that trout like to feed when the temperature is between 50 and 68 degrees. It gets colder than that in the Big Wood, and as the temperature drops, a fish’s metabolism slows down and it needs less food. You can still catch fish, though, because they have to eat eventually. I have fished the Big Wood when it was so cold that I struggled to keep my line from freezing and yet the trout kept biting. When the water is cold but the temperature is rising, as is often the case in the late winter, it is prime time for trout to eat. Trout will not eat or breed when the temperature gets above 68 degrees, however. In fact, they will die, partly because the warm water does not have enough oxygen. One of the biggest threats to trout is climate change.

The Big Wood River, Idaho, in winter

Most of the time, but not always, the Big Wood can feel like a wild frontier. Hawks are hunting overhead. Merganser ducks with pointed narrow beaks, not the usual duckbills, fly in patrols over the river looking for small young fish. Beavers fell large cottonwood trees, patiently nibbling cone shapes at their bases until the points are thin enough for the trees to fall over. Often the beavers will chew down two or three large cottonwoods before they start eating the trees’ black bark. Whole beaver families feast on the river’s trees until there is nothing left along its shores except white poles. This changes the course of the river, creating fast, rushing, narrow streams and protected quiet pools that are good spots for fishing.

Hemingway, and many others, have claimed that central Idaho is at its best in the fall. The leaves on the aspen turn bright yellow—more than yellow. They cluster together in a golden glow, fall off, and butter the surface of the Big Wood. Between the clusters of aspen are red maple, turned a bright crimson.

These gold and red banks are beautiful, but for me the best time in central Idaho is when the jagged rocks, and the gray-blue sagebrush, and tumbleweed growing high on the slopes are covered with sparkling snow. In the rugged northern Rockies, there is a baldness to the mountains in winter. Even in the center of Ketchum there are hills too steep and rocky to build on.

One of the pleasures of winter fishing is that there is little food in the snowy high country and so its residents come down to the rivers to eat. Elk stop along the slopes to watch me fish and descend farther when I am gone. I find their cloven footprints along the riverbank. Sometimes a moose saunters down, looking for the first willow buds of spring. It is a little disconcerting to find an animal standing next to you that is a head taller than you and weighs well over a thousand pounds. But moose are not usually aggressive. I just try not to make them mad.

In the 1990s wolves, once commonplace here and then nearly extinct, were reintroduced to central Idaho. Cattle and sheep ranchers were upset, but the wolves fit in well, as they were part of the area’s natural order. Hunters today complain that because of the wolves, there are fewer elk and deer to shoot, but there is little evidence of that. The animals are just more dispersed.

Attracting hunters is profitable business in central Idaho, which is why the wolves were nearly exterminated in the first place. That move led to the growth of unnaturally large ungulate populations in the Northern Rockies, making it easy for hunters to find and shoot their prey. Now they may have to do some stalking, as in older times.

There are wolves along the Big Wood, but they are too smart and agile to let themselves be seen. Brian Richter, my fishing guide for so long that he really seems to be more of a friend, has seen them. Brian is a lean westerner, a hunter and fisher who is so knowledgeable about his native Big Wood River Valley that he seems almost as much a part of nature there as the beaver or elk. When he catches a particularly beautiful fish, or when I do, he takes a picture and later paints a portrait.

When I first started to fish the Big Wood in 2006, there were a number of forest fires, and the rocks at the bottom of the river became black. I became accustomed to fishing in a black-rock river. But today the water is clear and the rocks have lost their black shrouds. They have returned to their natural green, orange, and yellow and the rainbow trout blend in, their spectacular colors—central electric cotton-candy-pink stripes surrounded by purple and orange stripes—matching the river bottom.

I fish in the late winter, when it is usually not so cold that the line starts freezing to the guide rings. Most of the river is no longer frozen by then, and there is already enough melt from the mountains to move its waters along quickly. Occasionally there might be a light snow flurry, with flakes landing as gentle as kisses on a baby, and the drifting flakes above the river remind me of the wonder I felt at first snowfalls in New England as a child.

You can dress warmly enough for everything but your fingers. Fly fishing is just too delicate for gloves, even fingerless ones. You need to be able to feel the line.

The Big Wood flows through the town of Ketchum. When Hemingway first discovered this town, it was a frontier outpost where rough men drank in downtown bars. The town had a population of just over 3,000 then, but of late has shrunk to less than that, and with more affluent people from the West Coast and fewer rough folk from the mountains.

When Hemingway bought his house on the Big Wood, it stood alone, in such a deserted spot that he could blow off his head with a shotgun behind his house without anyone seeing him. Were he still alive today, he would move, because now there are houses all around his. Ironically these newcomers are protective of their privacy. They try to chase away those who fish in front of their houses, which they have no right to do. No one owns the river.

People with money build houses on the river because they love it. But there are few things more destructive to a river, especially a fly fishing river, than houses along its banks. Building destroys the insect habitat, and insects are essential to a fish’s survival.

Stone flies and small black midges are among the most common insects found along the Big Wood, and artificial flies made to resemble them are the ones I use most when fishing there. The stone fly is one of the oldest fly fish patterns we know of. It was described in the 1486 English book Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, which recommended wrapping the fly’s body in black wool with a touch of yellow wool under the wings, and using drake feathers for its tail and wings. Today’s stone flies, made of woven black and brown feathers, resemble the actual long, slender insects much more than the fifteenth-century one did.

Stone flies, known to science as plecopteran, are found almost everywhere in the world except Antarctica. A female lays up to a thousand eggs, dropping them in running water or on rocks or branches on the riverbanks.

I can sometimes catch a trout in Ketchum with an artificial stone fly, but to see the real ones, I have to be on less populated parts of the river. If stone flies were allowed to flourish in Ketchum, people would be miserable, plagued by thick clouds of insects everywhere they went, and so a compromise has been reached. The insect population is kept down to a bearable level in town but is allowed to thrive enough outside town to sustain a trout population.

Farther out of town the mountains are enormous, the wildlife thrilling. My boots crunch through snowy banks as I make my way down to the Big Wood and carefully lower myself into its clear, rushing stream, to become part of something magnificent. The trout are there, they jump up and laugh at me, showing off their rainbow colors, but in less than a second they are gone, like a dream you recall that might have been real. Sometimes one will grab one of my ridiculous-looking fake insects and, despite its small size, put up a long and powerful fight. When I finally catch one, I admire its colors, carefully remove the hook, and gently return the fish to its river. On days when I catch a few and on days when I catch nothing, I leave the river a happy man. What could possibly be a better day?

Gray professor fly

1

Why?

Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

I had taken seven fish. The takers were all solid, confident, and deep. I released all the fish, and by the time I’d hiked out of the boggy forest that night, I could feel glory all around me.

—THOMAS MCGUANE, THE LONGEST SILENCE

Two difficult questions that I am frequently asked are why do I write and why do I fish. I would like to be able to say that the two questions are related, but I don’t think that is true. All they have in common is that they are both activities that I have been impulsively drawn to for as long as I can remember. I started both when I was a boy, writing longhand with a pencil and fishing with a reasonably straight stick from a tree branch, some string, a hook, and some earthworms dug up for bait.

While some writers famously fish, many just as famously don’t. Tolstoy, Steinbeck, and many other writers have judged fishing harshly. Being a good writer will not necessarily make you a good angler and there is certainly no guarantee that being skillful at fishing will make you a good writer. The only thing the two have in common is a love of solitude and a tendency for reflection. They often, but not always, attract the same type of people.

Fishing, and especially fly fishing, is about asking questions: Should you take the fish? Should you fish on a sunny or overcast day? In the river or from the riverbank? With colorful flies or not? What do these fish like to eat? At what time of day? These types of questions are endless, but underlying them all is a more fundamental question, the question of all questions: Why do it? Was nineteenth-century president Grover Cleveland right when he stated that the urge to fish was driven by an occult and mysterious instinct?

In my case, I think he was. Whenever I see a body of water, I look for fish. When I am by the sea, I follow bird flight patterns because birds follow fish. When I am by a river, I stare into the glassy still pools by the sides of swift-moving currents, examining the ripples enlivening the surface. I always ask where the fish are, and when I think I know, I want to try to catch them. It is an almost involuntary response—like a cat sensing the presence of a mouse.

This primordial urge started when I was such a young boy that I suspect I was born with it. It was not cultural. None of my adult relatives fished or even thought about fishing. They were all urban, not outdoors, people. My grandfather used to wear a suit, tie, and hat when we took him to the beach.

The only intersection of fishing and literature in my boyhood was that a good spot for reading and a good spot for fishing were the two things I asked of a natural setting. My primary reason for fishing was always clear: it was to go someplace beautiful where I could feel immersed in nature. I grew up in

Reviews for The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing

[breic-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I have only a slight interest in fly fishing, but having loved Kurlansky's book on cod, I figured that this book might be of equally broad interest. But it is really much more technical, going deep into the nitty gritty of fly fishing history and literature. > Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. -Henry David Thoreau> what is a trout? From a scientific point of view, there is no real definition. Trout is not a scientific term. It is a name commonly used for freshwater salmonids distinguished by various spots and stripes of often very different colors and even different markings. Trout are also generally smaller than salmon, except when the taimen is called a trout> The book also advises tying flies on different-size hooks and using larger-size hooks for less-than-clear water, a choice with which many modern fishers would agree.> The state of Oregon started requiring men to purchase fishing licenses in 1899, but women were not required to have them until 1923. Some U.S. states did not require women to get fishing licenses until the 1960s.

[huberk-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Not really my kind of book. I requested it, but found that I couldn't get into the story.I do read a lot of non fiction books, but sometimes some don't appeal.