School of Fish

Tim Linehan’s talisman is a plastic pig that sits by the boat’s centre thwart. It’s broken and smudged, and white stuffing pokes out where the nose and legs used to be. It looks like it was in a house fire and then beaten with a cricket bat. Linehan snatched it out of the river as it bubbled up on a slow guiding day; minutes later, and after casting for six hours without a strike, they started catching fish. "I grew up in New Hampshire, and I’m a Red Sox fan," he says. "With that comes a ridiculous sense of superstition." He holds up the noseless pig-head. "My wife says it frightens people, but how could that frighten anybody?"
Superstition is a lesser form of religion, but it acknowledges the role of transcendent forces. This is true of fly-fishing in general. Books like The River Why, The Earth Is Enough and Norman Maclean’s

A River Runs Through It have all recast the pursuit of trout as a brush with the eternal. Chancel replaced by remote stream, knelt prayers with roll casts-God made immediate, present in the quiet, in the leaves and waters. Maclean’s novella was semi-autobiographical and tells the story of two brothers raised by a trout-obsessed Presbyterian minister. "In our family," wrote Maclean, "there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing." Thanks in good part to Maclean, Montana is sacred ground for those who carry aluminum fly-boxes in their vest pockets like breviaries.

Today I’m getting fly-fishing lessons on the Kootenai River in northwest Montana, a four-hour drive from Missoula. This is true drift-boat fishing: oars only, no motor. After some instruction in casting we’ll float downriver, with Linehan steering us toward promising pools. As he rows us to the gravel bar for the lesson, I’m aware that I don’t deserve to be here. Fishing the Kootenai with a guide like Linehan, on a July day like this, is a reward reserved for more advanced souls-those who hand-tie their own damselfly patterns, those who can arrange an arabesque of line over their heads for a breathless second before drifting a Hairwing Dun under a fallen branch 20 metres away.

I’m relieved to have Linehan’s collection of talismans on my side, but it takes some basic skill to dupe a 16-inch rainbow with a modified piece of elk hair. Effort precedes grace. "Fly-fishing is unlike any other kind of fishing," one of Linehan’s guides told me back at the outfitting cabin. He didn’t smile. "There’s no luck involved in this. The one with the rod has got to make it happen."

Linehan beaches us and I stumble in my waders onto the softball-size stones of the bar. The air smells of river, sun-warm mud, oxygen, wet bark; the sunlight on the riffles is blinding. Linehan hands me the rod-an Orvis four-weight nine-and-a-half-footer that weighs only slightly more than a hummingbird. I’m nervous, sure I’m going to whip the hook into my earlobe, eyelid or some part of Linehan. Except for one fly-fishing trip with a friend of my father’s at age 15, I’m a saltwater spinning-reel fisherman. A bait-caster, a troller, a Buzz-Bomb hurler. Spin-casting is about as technical as throwing a baseball. Fly-casting, which uses the gathered weight of the line rather than a heavy lure, is, in comparison, like quantum theory. There is art in it. Rather than just hauling a fish in, the quest is two-fold: the perfect cast, the perfect fish, in that order. "If our father had had his say," wrote Maclean, "nobody who did not know how to catch a fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him."

Linehan is a good teacher. This is not a guaranteed quality in a fishing guide. He explains the basics (don’t choke the rod; hold it like you’re shaking hands) and the nuances. "Come back with just enough force to break the friction of the line on the water. You’ll actually sense when it’s time to come forward, you’ll feel a bit of a tug when that rod is loaded." After 30 minutes of basic catechism, standing ankle-deep in flashing river, I start to feel that moment-as pleasant as when you first learn how to shift gears in a manual transmission-when the back-cast is snug and supple, ready to fire. I’m even able, a few times, to get over my pleasure in noticing and cast the line. I can get the fly out on the water, and the line fairly straight. Just not where I want it.

Linehan chooses my initiatory fly, a Goddard caddis. What this means I’m not sure, but it floats on the water and looks like a bug, which is good enough for me. We get back in the boat and start to drift downstream. The river is wide, about 150 metres, the banks on either side crowded with cottonwood and tamarack. Linehan knows the runs and riffles of this section of the Kootenai as well as if he’d landscaped them himself. As I cast from the bow, he oars, calling out instructions. "Cast out at about 45 degrees, drop it just near that gravel edge. Okay, good, a little closer. That’s okay, just try again. You can false-cast to build some speed. There you go. Nice cast, pal." Linehan starts out with gentle encouragement; it won’t be until after lunch, when he’s seen that I can do better, that he will be openly critical of sloppy technique. Poor fly-fishing after lunch, technique sapped by digestive torpor, is legendary. Linehan’s guides call the phenomenon "turkey sandwich casts."
For now, Linehan is more kindly pastor than sarcastic uncle. Just before I catch my first trout he imparts some higher-order insight into river ecology. "Trout like seams. Seams are where the fast water meets the slow water," he says, pointing to the thin line of current parallel to the bank. "They sit on the soft side, and bugs drift right by them on the fast current." This means, I see, a target range of about six inches. I miss the zone the first 10 times.

Despite my desire to be a good student, I’m not stressed. There is something about fly-casting and the endless lull of the river that acts as a spiritual tonic. One of the earliest extant essays on fly-fishing, A Treatyse of Fysshynge Wyth an Angle, printed in 1496, makes the same point. "Which are the means and the causes that lead a man into a happy spirit? Truly, in my best judgment, it seems that they are good sports and honest games which a man enjoys without any repentance afterward… The best, in my simple opinion, is fishing, called angling, with a rod and a line and a hook."

The belief that extreme experiences contain profound meaning tends to fade, as it should, after age 30. Unlike peak experiences on mountain crags, fly-fishing is a religion of the valley. Few spectacular vistas, few death-defying adrenaline surges. There is less revelation in it, and more of the still, small voice. "Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart," wrote Maclean. "I don’t know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep."

As Linehan rudders us to every good hole he knows of, setting me up for success as best he can, I experience a moment of grace. I back-cast and feel that tug of taut line loaded behind me, and can sense the arcs forming a simple arabesque over my shoulder-and I don’t exult, don’t hesitate, I flip (though that word, like "flick" or "snap," is too abrupt to describe the perfect feel of it) the line forward, and-yes, yes-it goes exactly where I want it, at the near edge of a current seam. It lands like a real bug, looks like a real bug. If I were a trout I’d devour it. In this two-part gesture I attain the first station of the path, a taste of its earthly promise.

"Nice cast. Put a mend on the line, then just let that hunt through there. Let it hunt." Hunting means not picking the fly off the water too soon, and letting it float with the current over likely trout holes. It’s Linehan’s way of calming jumpy clients. Consumed by the perfect cast, I’d forgotten fish were involved: when the first trout strikes a few minutes later I’m too surprised to set the hook. The second fish slips off the unbarbed hook as I’m stripping in the line. But I hook and land the third, a fine large fish: a 13-inch Westslope cutthroat, the Montana state fish, native to this side of the Rockies. The fish is beautiful, a piece of the river. Olive-green on the back, pink blush along the belly, speckled with fat black dots that gather at the tail. Linehan removes the hook from its lip-a barbarous sport, yes, as well as a sublime one-and inserts the fish back in the river.

But at this stage in my fly-fishing career, the fish is still an afterthought. I just want to deliver a perfect cast. This is the alchemy of fly-fishing: it takes perfectionist human ambition and gives it something harmless and absurd to pursue. It is more difficult to run for president or prime minister than it is to learn to lilt a PMD fly under the branches of a fallen tamarack to a platter-sized trout pool, yes-but it takes about the same amount of time.

Fly-fishing may be the completion of a 5,000-year cycle of worship in Western culture: from nature to church and back to nature. But not necessarily. Its centre is not superstition, religion, but joy. Fly-fishermen, like devotional mystics, are simply addicted to something beautiful. I can already see the allure of further stations. There will always be a new stream, another trout, a promisingly shaded pool to drop a fly-in short, enough to occupy you with perfect moments for the rest of your life. This, not the hook in the earlobe, is the real peril.