Fishing knowledge is frequently gained by omission rather than success on familiar water. Mastery comes with application of that knowledge to waters unfamiliar—those that spark our imagination.

Like art, fishing is an endeavor within which perfection is unattainable, where a certain level of expertise may be reached only to reveal another, higher, more proficient level. Angling is learning, and the better one gets at it, the more one knows about it, the more that truth reveals itself. Which is what makes it so great.

The difficult pleasures are the best kind. To toil endlessly, to practice and study and plan, to risk the ridiculous and have no greater guarantee of success than maybe—a long maybe at that—requires faith. To have it all pay off, even once, with the disappearance of your fly from the surface and a surge of power at the end of your line is something no angler is assured, so it must be faith in something other than the result. The reward must be in the journey, not the destination.
We begin, whether early in life or late, as utter strangers to the sport. We’re first shown the road by grandfathers and grandmothers and dads and moms, brothers and sisters, neighbors and friends. As the route winds from spring creek to mammoth river, we gradually evolve as anglers, detailing what we understand about the sport one day and eclipsing that mark on the next. We realize the measure of an angler isn’t how much he loves it after a forty-fish day; it’s the passion he feels for the water after being thoroughly whipped. So much of fishing knowledge, if one can call it that, is knowledge gained by realizing what doesn’t work. Shutout, humiliated, intimidated by a river and the secrets she holds so close, an angler will savor the lessons of the day and yearn for the opportunity to try a different approach.

Soon, our passion becomes somehow less about catching fish. Strange bywords creep into our angling lexicon; we champion the quality of an experience, the difficulty of a challenge overcome, and the immense pleasures taken from each. The fish are there, and catching them remains the objective, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what we’re really after. Eventually, once we’ve learned enough to really begin an education, we can sit at the head of the class, and only then can we begin to learn from the waters themselves.

An angler’s enthusiasm invariably owes its origins to a single location, a piece of water eulogized in memories that only seem to grow more vivid as time marches on. As we age and our passions take us to new waters, we realize that greatness is almost always a local phenomenon. So rare is the truly accomplished angler that the renown of those who’ve reached such a level rises to near mythical proportion. Once off our home waters, we find ourselves working the sweetest pools and the most likely looking seams and finding no success. We find ourselves fooled, baffled, tricked into believing the method and the means we first employed will prove universal. Soon, we realize it all must be learned again; we must learn like we’ve never been taught a thing. For in angling, like life, wisdom only comes by way of experience.

In his titanic 1946 memoir, A River Never Sleeps, Roderick Haig-Brown wrote that “knowing a river intimately is a very large part of the joy of fly fishing.” As with much he wrote about angling—and life—there was genius layered within his magnificent prose. Haig-Brown, who knew his beloved Campbell “almost as a man should know a river,” recognized for all of us that there is a bond between an angler and his water that often goes far beyond the one he shares with the fish that fill his dreams. In the end, we finally realize there is only so much one can learn before nature itself begins giving the lessons.

Thus, new rivers are exactly what we seek. While never quite encroaching upon the silhouette that is mastery, we nevertheless yearn to take whatever lessons have been learned in those waters most familiar to us and ply them on streams still remote to our minds, streams that as of yet have coursed only through our imaginations. As we learn, we suddenly need to learn, and within that transformation, an angler’s spirit will forever remain restless. The river becomes Socrates to the angler’s Plato, and we’re more than happy to simply document what truths we find for those who’ve yet to come.

And so the twilight of a quickly fading year finds many of us with our rods securely tucked away and hackle strewn about the bench, but our dreams persisting, our minds wandering to visions of the sweet of the year, conjuring up images of the rivers we’ve yet to fish and of all the things only those waters will be able to teach us—both about angling and about ourselves. For to us anglers, looking at a stretch of new water is like looking at all the life we’ve yet to live. No matter what we’ll find, we’re sure it’ll be exactly what we’ve been looking for.

—Troy Letherman
Editor

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