Your enemies say you’re too cultured. They say your idea of a day in the country is straight out of a nineteenth-century English painting.   For the good of your image, your very social class, you must prove them correct.

Aware of this, the equally cultured and refined editor of Oregon's Clackamas Review (one of Bob "Pulp Fiction" Pamplin's weekly newspapers) presented your humble author with a problem. To wit: “Our readers are busy. We hear fly-fishing takes a lifetime to learn, like, oh, attaining Nirvana. Do you see what we mean?” 

“You want a method for obtaining nirvana in half an hour,” I said. 

“Yes,” said editor Michael Russel.  “That would be fine, thank you.” 

A fine American attitude. Find a way to condense a lifetime of disciplined dedication into a thirty minute achievement.   And, so, off we go.

••I:. The tackle.••

First, a lightning lesson in Fishbonics. “Tackle” is the angler’s term for his fishing tools. One may also say “gear” and be understood, as well. There is no such thing as a fishing “pole.” Remember that. It is a “rod.” (You will be snickered at if you say that other word.)  Now go to a discount store and buy the gear listed in the sidebar to this article. You should get away from the store with change left over from a seventy-dollar bill. I’ve done it for less than fifty (not including the fishing license).

••II:. Assembly.••

Now go home. Attach the cheap reel to the lower half of your two-part flyrod. Thread the braided backing line through the little eye up there and bring it down to the reel. Tie it to the center of the reel and wind twenty or thirty feet on. Next, tie the braided, thread-like "backing"  line to one end of the double-taper fly line and wind that onto the reel. (If the flyreel clicker-knob is “on,” the reel will click as you do all this, which saves trouble.)

Now, go out in your yard, or driveway, or street. Put the top half of the flyrod on, then pull the flyline up through the eyes, or line guides. Leave about fifteen feet of line past the last, or top, eye. You can now discover to your amazement that you can teach yourself how to make three of the four basic flycasts in fifteen minutes.

••III:. Technique.••

Look at the flyrod. It’s shaped like a starched bullwhip—big at the end you hold and smaller as you work toward the tip. A little movement down here makes the far end move a lot. 

Whip the rod back and forth.

Yup! What you have now is a bullwhip. If you whip it back and forth fast enough, it even makes a cracking sound. What you are going to need to do is figure out how to whip that line back and forth without, repeat, without…making…that…crack.

The secret? (1) Use no upper and little lower arm power. Work the thing almost entirely with your wrist. (2) Watch the rod tip, and don’t let it drift way back and down toward the ground and swing way forward and down to the ground. In other words, you’ve got to keep the tip close to the middle of the arc most of the time.

Here’s how you do it: With the rod off to one side of perfectly vertical, apply brief, strong wrist energy going back...wait for the line to stretch itself out back there...then apply brief, strong wrist energy going forward...and wait for the line to stretch itself out going forward.  If the line doesn't make the "crack" sound, and doesn't touch the ground at either end, you now have mastered the standard overhead.  Do the same thing with the rod tip a bit above shoulder level and you have what I call the “hang-cast,” which is handy when the sky is full of tree branches.

Now, on the forward “haul,” which is what anglers call it when the flyline is stretching out in front of you, let the line drop to the ground. Raise your rod tip slowly until it is sticking straight up. Now, bring the rod tip quickly down to a few feet above the ground, and watch a loop in the flyline form, then roll forward.

If you didn’t slam the rod tip against the driveway and break it, you now know the “roll cast.”

I’m not sure I can as simply explain the “steeple cast” here, but I’ll give it a try. Set up for a practice roll cast (line on the ground in front of you), but instead of having the tip high and bringing it sharply down, begin with the tip low and raise it straight up. Not back, but up.

It takes some body gymnastics to do it. You involve your whole arm in the movement. If you can’t get it right away, then get along without it for now. If you can, however, you’ll have a cast that lifts the line off the water, sends it straight up above you without drifting into the tree at your back, then translates your next downward rod movement into an “L-shaped” pattern that shoots right back at the fish about three feet above the surface.

Just like piranha-repellent, you don’t often need the steeple-cast, but it’s quite handy to have when you do.

••IV:. Final at-home preparation.••

Go back inside. Now take a small pair of pliers and crush the barbs on all your hooks. A trout’s mouth is like your fingernail, and does not suffer when impaled by a hook point. But if the backward-leaning barb is not flattened, the hook cannot come loose, and so the trout must be damaged during any release attempt.

And now you understand why I did not suggest the purchase of a creel.. They’re handy for carrying things, but only necessary if you’re going to kill fish. To start, we are going to let them all go.

You release them without lifting them from the water, if possible. You always wet your hands first. The barbless hooks come loose when you rotate them. If the hook is deep in the mouth, you cut the leader and leave the hook there. You never touch the gills or eyes. You shade the trout’s eyes from direct sunlight. You protect the fish from dropping on a stone or to the bank. You tell the trout to be more cautious in the future, while at the same time gloating at him. “Neener, neener, neener, I fooled you” is appropriate.

••V: Stream selection.••

You need a trout stream, not a river. The Clackamas is a river. Deep Creek, a tributary of the Clackamas, is a stream. The Tualatin is a river. Gales Creek is a stream.

Your stream should have trees along the banks, because they keep the water cool and so the trout healthy. The water should be clear enough to allow you to see the rocks on the bottom. It’s particularly good if there are bushes and grass along the bank, because they keep the water clean and foster insect life. Ninety-nine percent of a trout’s diet is insect life. (Fly-fishing suddenly makes practical sense, doesn’t it?  It's like casting artificial ice cream cones at children.)

Okay, you’ve found the stream. You’re there. It’s a beautiful morning. What do you do now?

••VI: Final streamside preparations.••

Your rod is assembled, the reel is attached, and the line is up through the guides and hanging back down by the reel. Now, remove one of your tapered leaders from its package. If it’s a long one, trim it back from the thick end. The length you want is one foot shorter than your flyrod. If there’s an illustrated knot on the back of the package, use that to attach the leader to the end of the flyline. If not, tie the two together as simply and cleanly as you can.

To the small end of the leader, attach your choice of a fly. I’d use the Royal Coachman bucktail because it’s easier for a beginner to see, but suit yourself.

The knot you use should be the “clinch,” which goes as follows: leader tip through hook eye and back up along itself. Leader tip wrapped around main leader strand a half a dozen times. Leader tip passed through leader loop above the hook eye. If pulled tight, this is a “clinch.”

But if you insert the leader tip not only through the leader loop above the metal hook eye, but also back through the big loop you made on the way down there, you have an improved clinch.

If this drove you crazy, use a granny knot.

Finally, apply “fly dope” to your fly.

You are now standing on the border of nirvana.

••VII: The quarry.••

No, I didn’t buy any waders, either. We are the fishing elite. We laugh at frozen feet. Our sneakers were beyond reclamation, anyway.  Now look at the water. What’s that shape in the stream? A submarine?

Well, yes.

It has a front and a back like one, anyway. But while submarines can back up, trout can’t. Trout always, therefore, face into the current. Except when chasing or fleeing something, trout always face into the current. If you want to sneak up on a trout, don’t walk downstream. They’ll see you coming.

Next, you don’t see any ears. Do they hear? That line along their side is sensitive to water-borne sound waves, just like your ears read airborne ones. So don’t make noise. Wade quietly, slowly. Or, better yet, don’t wade at all. Fish from the bank, from behind a bush, while crouching and keeping your eyes narrowed so the whites don’t show. 

Trout can see up and to the side better than you can, because that’s where most of their enemies, and most of their victims, hang out. Trout are camouflaged on the top and white on the bottom for the same reason. They look like the sky from below and like the bottom from above.

••VIII: The threshold moment.••

This instant of time is green and cool and shady and quiet. Byron or Keats or Shelley is around here somewhere. This place is rife with Greek deities and Roman demiurges. Why is that bird doing a rhumba on that rock?

You release the hook from its handy eye, near the rod handle. Working the rod back and forth quietly, and pulling a bit of line from the reel each time with the other hand, in no time at all, the fly is out there.

Let’s see: We want a drag-free drift, because insects don’t usually water-ski across streams. Drop the line in the slow water to this side, and let the leader settle down over the current, right where it drops into the pool.

("Mending" is a flyfishing term for "fixing" your line while it is laying on the water.  You flip your rod tip in a vertical half-circle so that the part of the line that is going too fast or too slow (causing the fly to "drag") is moved to allow the fly to float free for a few more inches.)

The Coachman descends to the surface, floating jauntily. As it passes though a tiny shaft of light filtering through the alder leaves, there’s a flash.

A FISH!!! IT’S A FISH!!! LEONARD WASN’T KIDDING!!! THIS WORKS!!! WHAT DO I DO??? SET THE HOOK!!! RAISE THE ROD TIP!!! LOOK AT HIM GO!!! HE’S A FOOT LONG!!! HE’S HEADING FOR THAT TREE ROOT!!! THE LEADER WILL BREAK!! I CAN’T TURN HIM IN TIME!!!

He’s gone.

And, so, strangely, is the morning and most of the afternoon. And with them went the world. This is the first time all day you’ve even thought about the world. How strange.  Does this strange condition have a name?

Oh, yeah.

Instant nirvana.

Royal Coachman Bucktail, commonly known as a Trude.