Wanted: Sturdy Guide for Old Fly Fisherman

I balanced on the edge of a stream bank, dark North Carolina forest overhead. I looked over a four-foot drop with an incline down to the trout stream. At one time I would have made it down in two bounds. That time, like my hair, was long gone. The longer I studied it, the drop became an abyss, like the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which I had once observed over my shoulder, holding on tightly to a convenient pine tree while my Life’s Editor and son gazed down at buzzards flying under them. The trout I spotted on the other side of the stream needed attention, so I sat on the edge of the bank and hung my feet over, planning a controlled slide on my bum.  With my left hand I clutched a sapling to steady me, my fly rod held in the right. I launched. The sapling slipped. I thundered downward in an avalanche of dirt, caroming off an outcropping of stone hidden under a leaf mound. Sitting in the debris, legs sprawled in the stream, I assessed the damage. Rod not broken, check. Bones apparently not broken, check. Dignity and trout, gone. But thanks to cuts and scrapes and my daily consumption of fish oil capsules, it looked like there had been a Santeria sacrifice.

I had seen worse. Decades ago, I drifted a Missouri river with my son and my brother, Colonel “Wild Bill” Gavan (four tours in Vietnam and a Silver Star). Our guides beached our jon boats on a sand bar at the end of a pool of water, letting us out while they navigated the shallow rapids to the next pool.  Wild Bill, seeing the opportunity to get to the next pool first, leaped out, rod in hand, to race across the sand bar. A treble hook on a lure dangling off the side of the boat impaled his calf.  Wild Bill grabbed a filet knife, carved out the offending hook, and charged on, waving his rod, leaving a trail of gore. My son gaped. The guides gaped. A legend was born on the banks of the Big Piney River.

The day of my slide down the bank had started well enough. It was a comfortable summer’s day and my pals Steve and Chip and I had put ourselves into the hands of Chris Franzen, trout fishing guide out of Headwaters Outfitters, Rosman, NC. He was a tall, exuberantly mustachioed fellow and in full regalia. With boots, waders, vest, net, et. al., his look screamed, “I know where they are. I speak trout.”  

I have been fortunate with guides. Our interests converge. I want to catch fish; they want me to catch fish. There have been blips: the guide who ran out of gas, the guide who broke my rod, and the guide who needed marriage counseling. Then there was the unfortunate one-armed Bahamian guide. He was game, standing on the flats-boat platform four feet up above the deck, pole tucked under one wing. But he was not in favor of the silent stalk of a bonefish, poling being a chore. He preferred to motor up to a school of bonefish, stab the push pole in the sand and critique our casts as the bonefish scrammed.

Chris drove us to the river in his truck, pulled off on a side road, then stopped at a clearing surrounded by oak, sweetgum, and maple. We were to fish a private stretch of a branch of the French Broad River, not available to common folk who might use spinning reels and lures and pack a tin of worms. Under his eye, we rigged our fly-fishing gear.

When you meet a fly-fishing guide for the first time and rig up to engage in battle, it is a fraught moment. Whether you are in the flats of Andros Island, the Bahamas, or on the bank of the French Broad in North Carolina, the guide assesses you. What, exactly, do I have on my hands today? Your mother never checked you out so closely. And the guide does not love you. He watches you rig up – securing the reel, slipping the fly line through the rod guides, and tying on leader. You want to look blasé, been there, done that. This works until you fix the reel on backwards. I once stood on a boat dock in Chokoloskee, the Everglades, at 0-dark-thirty, with my friend Colonel Jim Craven, ex-Military Policeman. Everglades mosquitoes were methodically chewing us up like a hungry boy consuming a buttered ear of corn. Face hidden behind a buff, the guide asked us to rig up. In between slaps at his tormentors, Col. Jim’s efforts produced a macrame project on his reel. There was a snort from behind the buff, then a blunt “Give me that!”  On the plus side, the day could have only gone uphill from there.

Chris tied a “dropper” fly arrangement on our leaders. This couples a winged fly that floats, with a wingless fly that is tied to it, drifting way below. Trout are in the insect eating business. Streamside insects start out as nymphs on the bottom, then metaphorize to a winged stage. With a dropper arrangement, the trout can have it both ways, like in a Subway sandwich ad.

We clumped through the brush and knee-high grass to the stream. Chris assigned us each an area to fish. This was where my cataclysmic slide of shame occurred. I was not the lithe lad of my twenties, forties, or even sixties. I was deep into Medicare-hood. For the rest of the day I needed the assistance of a non-governmental agency, namely Chris, to navigate treacherous banks. I regularly looked around for a sturdy forearm to help me down or up.  

On the way back to the truck at the day’s end, we started across a fast run, knee-level water, cobbled in boulders. I broke off a tree branch for my wading staff.  I would no sooner get one boot steadied and step out with the other than it would slew off the side of a stone. I tottered, I reeled, I swayed like a drunk leaving the Tanga Lounge at closing time. Chip and Steve, safe on the far bank, guffawed gleefully. They were not helpful.

It had been a good day. The paying customers did well, catching feisty rainbow trout, all released, no prodigious technical casts required. Back at Chateau de Chip, Mrs. Chip was Florence Nightingale, making appropriate noises about my bravery while providing first aid. Budger and Agnes, resident Labradors, stuck their noses in, offering to lick my wounds.  We gathered on their deck and viewed Lake Toxaway over a glass of wine. Someone started singing “Under the boardwalk, down by the seeea …” Three more voices joined in, and more Drifter tunes, followed by Sam Cook’s, “Don’t know much about history …”, wafted out on the evening breeze.