The Vice

Fly fish­ing was not a catch and release con­cept as it applied to my life.

Oh yes, when applied to angling, I believe and prac­tice this con­cept quite reli­giously as an adult. But the art – the vice – of fish­ing, never let go of me.

It hap­pened gradually. My Dad would not just let his five boys stay at home on week­ends and watch the tube. Instead, he had us out help­ing him carve fig­ure four dead­falls for rab­bits, or get­ting as close to drown­ing or smacked by light­ning as we pos­si­bly could with­out actu­ally doing so.

Some­times these fam­ily out­ings involved fishing. Usually, some type of home­made ves­sel was in the mix, and added to the antic­i­pated and unfore­see­able out­come of each trip.

The seed was planted and cared for well. Any inter­est in out­door pur­suits of any kind were well received by Pop. Mom played along even when we would bring the out­doors inside, turn­ing the house to splin­ters while whit­tling full sized canoe pad­dles from choice pieces of driftwood.

And so an obses­sion was born.

To be pre­cise, this was not a sport of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. It was angling with flies tied out of what was handy, and to an eleven year old that vowed to fish this way or never fish, there were moun­tains to climb.

The feath­ers and fur were no issue. They strut­ted  and slinked around the yard every day. The hur­dles were the tools and the hooks. Long nights in the work­shop finally gave up a very crude vise that didn’t really hold much for long, a bob­bin that cut through my thread, even though it was just Mom’s sewing thread, and a pair of brass weld­ing rod turned hackle pli­ers that mirac­u­lously has out­per­formed any I’ve used since.

When long, dark nights of win­ter cast it’s cold blan­ket over my young life, the tying brought me just close enough that I could see hear smell every­thing that angling was.

When I grew up I real­ized what an effect my angling and tying had on my life. It was way more than just fish­ing. The hunt for fresh cdc, per­fect bronze mal­lard, new ring­neck pheas­ant skins, or what­ever it was that time, imprinted on me the value of such stun­ning sun­rises most peo­ple miss. The worth of a for­est thick enough to hear every foot­fall of every wild thing. The open coun­try of west­ern plains many call ugly and worth­less, become mas­ter­pieces in the dear­est gal­leries of the mind.

And to what end? Fishing. The game of wrap­ping a hook with fluff some­times taken from a milk­weed seed, a flashy feather from that pesky cedar wax­ing last win­ter, and tying it to the line, to be whipped around and finally laid out in the swirl of rapids and rif­fle, to be drifted with del­i­cacy and con­vinc­ing decep­tion, to the hope that is the chomp of the ulti­mate prey. That end.  That one flash and splash, that brings the dance to the hand, and thrill of accom­plish­ment to the wielder of the floppy wand.  All this is the game that has my life in a vise.

Charles Card is the SCP’s North­east­ern Utah Coor­di­na­tor. Char­lie is an avid sports­man and resides in Dutch John, Utah, the gate­way to trout fish­ing on the Green River below Flam­ing Gorge Dam.