Lines from the Long Rod - A Fishing Journey

3
From the Ground Up

And, first, for worms: of these there be very many sorts: some breed only in the earth, as the earth-worm; others of or amongst plants, as the dug-worm; and others breed either out of excrements, or in the bodies of living creatures, as in the horns of sheep or deer; or some of dead flesh, as the maggot or gentle, and others.

—Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)1

Old Izaak was more than a casual student of worms; the above section of The Compleat Angler goes on for pages as Walton describes a myriad of worms and wormy creatures, offering almost endless information on raising them, keeping them vigorous in the bait box—worms to fish when, where, and for what, and on and on. It is somewhat amazing to me that he ever even began fly-fishing at all. But I really do kind of know how it must have happened.

And it wasn’t very long until I was pretty heavily involved in the eleven-year-old’s equivalent of worm science myself. You know, you don’t just hop out of bed one morning and start fly-fishing. It is a progression: you have to work your way up, and worms were part of an erratic learning curve for me. Of course, I realize that over the past decade or two, lots of people have hopped out of bed one morning and started fly-fishing. I hate them. They haven’t paid their dues. And I doubt they have the proper respect and appreciation that comes from the more deliberate, trial-and-error learning of an art or craft or skill—or, heaven forbid, a hobby.

Art is a comparison that I can understand. Any halfway decent painter can probably copy a piece by one of the masters and create a copy that is indistinguishable to most of us. I think I could copy some of the sillier Picassos. The copy is of little value except to interior decorators and bar owners, while the master’s original maintains its value because, in addition to its historical importance, the painting incorporates the imagination, inspiration, and love that the master put into it. Lord, the higher aesthetic of fly-fishing is built on a more solid foundation than a few days with a guide, a generous credit card, and a few days on the South Platte or the San Juan. I suspect that this is somewhat along the lines of what Norman Maclean was thinking when he wrote A River Runs Through It, but I don’t think he expected the resultant horde of hop-out-of-bed-one-morning fly-fishers that the book created. I readily, even happily admit to now being something of an elitist, but I certainly spent plenty of time with the worms.

It wasn’t long after we moved to Spring Mount that I met a kid named Rodney. He was a year older than me and lived across the street, and he liked to fish at least as much as I did. Best of all, he knew a hell of a lot more about stream fishing than I did, and he rather unknowingly took me under his wing that first summer. He remained my main fishing buddy through high school, and after we went our separate ways, I always hoped that we would still fish together as adults, once in a while. But when I ran into him at our thirtieth high school reunion, in 19TK, and suggested that he come west so that we could fish together in Yellowstone National Park or on the San Juan or any number of other western streams that I knew he had read about, he declined, saying that he didn’t fly. And I haven’t spoken to him since, but I often think of him.

It was immediately obvious that I needed better equipment. Rodney had a gray tubular metal fly rod, which he mainly fished bait with, and although I don’t remember how it came to pass, I became the owner of a telescoping steel rod with, I think, four eyes. Because the joints of the thing slid into one another, the number of eyes was limited by the number of joints—one eye at the top of each joint. Even then, I knew it wasn’t a very good rod, but it was a quantum leap from the rod my father had built. However, when you cast a fly line through it, the line didn’t whistle, like it did through Rodney’s hollow metal rod. And when I finally got a cheap bamboo fly rod, to my great disappointment, it didn’t whistle, either. I still fondly remember the sound of Rodney’s line whistling through his rod when he cast. Even my current battery of expensive graphite rods don’t whistle.

So, during the summers between fifth and sixth grades and sixth and seventh grades, we bait-fished with our long rods. (I am reluctant to call mine a fly rod.) Therefore, gathering bait became the highest of priorities. I know that we spent at least as much time pursuing bait as fish. We did not reach the level of worm appreciation that Isaak Walton did, but for certain situations, worms were the bait of choice. April 15, the first day of trout season in Pennsylvania, absolutely required worms—and not just any worm. The right worm was two to three inches long, a little fatter than a wooden matchstick, and a nice grayish brown color. Nightcrawlers, which could be gathered by the bucket from the lawns of Spring Mount on rainy nights and probably averaged six inches long, were far too big for the eight- or nine-inch fish that the state of Pennsylvania stocked in the Little Lehigh River, our closest trout stream. The right worm came from clean, crumbly dirt, away from any manure piles or garbage. Those environments hosted smelly, active little worms, familiarly known as “shit worms.” These things were one or two inches long, pretty skinny, with narrow yellow bands, the same color as the stuff that came out of them when you stuck a hook in them. Nothing came out of the right worm when he was impaled.

To further the chosen worm’s fishing performance, we would gather layers of thick green moss and layer it with sheets of newspaper in big cork bait boxes. Our theory was that when you threw the worms in on top of the moss, they would have to crawl down through the tough moss and it would make their skins tougher, which would make them stay on a hook better. They were fed coffee grounds on top, which necessitated another trip up and down through the skin-conditioning moss.

For the limited number of bass that lived in the Perkiomen, other bait was required: minnows, hellgrammites, and a thoroughly nasty little catfish called a stone catty. Minnows and hellgrammites were pretty easily caught with a three-by-three-foot seine. But the stone catties were considered the necessary bait for July 1, when Pennsylvania’s bass season opened. These little catfish were such formidable things that if you felt a bass pick up your stone catty bait, you would let him grapple with his would-be dinner for maybe five minutes before setting the hook. And then, about half the time, the bass would just give up and you’d retrieve your virtually unscarred stone catty, which would immediately try to dig one of its toxic spines into you.

As miserable as fishing with these things was, catching them was worse. This involved a night operation with the minnow seine. In theory, the little bastards were active only at night, so the net man walked up through the riffles below a low dam with his net in the water while his buddy with the flashlight thrashed around upstream and tried to herd the night-active stone catties down into the net. The thing was, most everything else was active on a warm summer night. One night we even caught a low-flying bat. But the worst were the snakes. The Perkiomen was full of big black water snakes—fat three- or four-footers. One night I was manning the net, and I thought I had picked up a rock, but it wasn’t a rock—it was a big water snake. I dropped the front of the net so he’d go out away from me, but he didn’t. He came right up and over the top of the net, carrying about an eight-inch sucker in his mouth, and bounced off my chest, before falling back into the water. They weren’t poisonous, but I think this one would have bit me if he hadn’t had the sucker in his mouth. Thank God more aesthetic pursuits were on the horizon.

In addition to the endless pursuit of bait, we fished a lot, day and night. The Perkiomen ran pretty high and dirty in the spring and after every heavy rain. And when it was high, all manner of fish seemed to want to run upstream. Fish that you’d never expect to have any anadromous urges would gather below the dam at Clemmers Mill and try to jump it. Carp, especially, would try it, and after the water levels dropped back down, big carp often remained in the rocky pools below the dam. For some reason, these were a lot more willing to take bait—mainly worms and inside-out hellgrammites—than their downstream brethren.

One of these big boys on the telescoping “fly” rod was a pretty exciting proposition. More than likely you would hook them while you were up on the dam, because they were easier to see from there. It was only about six feet high, but it was a slimy thing built of big, rounded rocks and a bare minimum of cement. Clambering down off the dam in order to follow your fish was a hairy experience. Usually they were hooked pretty good and you could let them run around on a slack line. Sometimes they’d end up a hundred yards or more downstream in one of the big pools below the Spring Mount Bridge, where we could actually land them.

We didn’t eat the carp, but I’d take them home, and we kept them in a big old double washtub until somebody from a Jewish summer camp a couple of miles away came to get them. I couldn’t believe how much brown, foamy stuff would gather on the surface of the washtubs. I don’t know if it...