Episode
2 – Go Hook Yourself
"I think I fish, in part,
because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly,
puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in
an institution." - John Gierach
By Robert Yarnall
Editor’s
Note: Progressive Charlestown’s 2012 ten-part miniseries, “Whiskey Tango
Foxtrot” (derived from the military phonetic alphabet for WTF and artfully
interpreted as “What The F**k”) was created by the author in 2012 as a serialized
account of the efforts of a core group of neighborhood activists who banded
together to contest developer Lawrence LeBlanc’s (DBA Whalerock LLC) proposal to
impale a pair of 460’ industrial wind generators atop a terminal glacial moraine
abutting several distinctly residential neighborhoods.
Set
against the motif of freshwater bass fishing, the series focused on the
ringmaster antics of a coffee-hour cabal of neighbors living within a muffin
toss of each other on Partridge Run in the Charlestown neighborhood known as
Sachem Passage.
The quasi-retired senior citizen foursome of Ronald &
Maureen Areglado, Michael & Donna Chambers, and forty-something sometimes-banker
Kristan O’Connor, bonded together as an excitable quintet of prickly anti-wind
protagonists and hopped onto the no-turbine bandwagon, pimping it out with its
very own political boom box, pumping out the now-familiar, holier-than-thou
Partridgesque bird call, “…what’s good for Charlestown...”
Whiskey
Tango Foxtrot’s second season continues, once again set against a fishing
motif. This year we venture into the penultimate angling realm of fly-fishing.
It
is indeed fitting that the art of fly-fishing, based on the science of
entomology, serves as the backdrop for the series, as The Partridge Family managed
to open a real Pandora’s box when they flitted into town hall for October’s
monthly meeting to alert the citizenry to the pending cataclysmic environmental
disaster being plotted by Charlestown’s Parks and Recreation staff in concert with
the Economic Improvement Commission - Ninigret Park would be overrun by hordes
of creatures exhibiting undesirable socio-economic demographics and associated
habits!
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| WPWA campus |
It’s
one thing for a blogging bait-caster to open a can of worms, but when the bugs
are swarming on their own, courtesy of the environment, it’s fly-fishing nirvana.
One of the first things you’ll learn
about fly-fishing when you sign up for the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association’s
winter fly-tying workshop is that modern fly-fishing is much more of a
recreational experience compared to the original version, which was necessarily
a food-gathering system practiced in agrarian societies predating the
industrial revolution.
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| Fly-tying class |
For those of us who read the archaeological
studies that accompanied Whalerock LLC’s turbine proposal, fishing was one of
the dominant sustenance activities of Charlestown’s truly native inhabitants,
the ancestors of our current Narragansett Indian Nation neighbors.
Early tribal anglers had to fish
to live. (I, on the other hand, pretty much live to fish, at least when I can
get away with it.) It’s fascinating to visualize the earliest Narragansetts
wading through local streams or across area ponds as they utilized their
intuitive knowledge of nature to survive one day to the next.
At the same time, it’s a bit disconcerting
to consider what current tribal members must be thinking when they hear well-heeled
transplanted suburbanites dedicating themselves to “preserving Charlestown’s
rural character and environment” while they spruce up their 7500 square foot
manicured lawns and power up a couple dozen candelabras in those vinyl-clad
double-hung windows so the politico dinosaurs can navigate from dinner party to
dinner party. (Hey, it’s an asphalt jungle out there! Keep the skies dark and
maybe no one will notice.)
While the earliest Narragansetts may
have used real bugs to attract fish, we post-industrial revolutionaries use
artificial bugs, generically called “flies,” to entice our aquatic cousins. Learning
to tie a fly requires repetition of a set of basic skills that are best taught
by a hands-on approach, beginning with the easiest worm-like flies and
progressing to stunningly realistic imitations of some of the most intricate
insects on the planet.
You can catch fish with even the
most rudimentary fly, so the challenge eventually becomes not so much catching
the fish, but tying the fly that will catch the fish, the art part. Hence the
term, fly-fishing.
The science part of fly-fishing
is, as you might expect, entomology, the branch of zoology that studies
insects, aka bugs. You learn to identify bugs and create lifelike imitations by
sitting at a table and grinding your teeth every time you hook yourself while wrapping
thread to attach component parts of the fly pattern to a thin steel shank with
a freakin’ point on it. (That sentence contains quite a mouthful of syllables
not quite as pleasant as a beginning fly-tiers verbal response to stabbing
oneself at three second intervals for two hours straight, whiskey tango foxtrot…)
Traditional fly-tying materials
include an assortment of vises, pliers, forceps, needles, threads, yarns, bird
feathers, animal furs, and an endless array of hooks, wires, beads, tinsels, foams,
and recycled flavor straws from the 1960’s if you’re really cheap and
resourceful.
Over the past few years,
synthetic substitutes for bird feathers and animal furs have been successfully developed
and marketed in response to economic and political pressures.
The reality is that even within
recreational fishing and the organizations deriving from the sport, lurking purveyors
of political ideologies seek you out to snag your line. If you run into one of
them as you’re trying to enjoy a bit of free time on the planet, do what I
would do - tell them to go hook themselves. That’ll be sure to open a can of
worms, just like the one I opened six paragraphs ago.
Next time on WTF’s Second Season
– Fly-Tying For Retired Old Tie-Dyers