The Mud Hook

“Stick out your mud hook!”. This was my Dad’s standard invitation to shake hands. It was just one of the hundreds of unique and colorful sayings I heard him use time and again. He had a way of speaking that was both humorous and disarming, a style that spoke equally of his easy way with people and the keen wit and intelligence that lay behind his hazel eyes.

People who spend much time with me soon learn how deeply my own personality, style, values and sense of humor were shaped by this gentle and steadfast man who overcame a childhood filled with deprivation and heartbreak to live a life where he brought humor and a soft, warm light to virtually every place he went and everyone he met. I’ve never met anyone quite like him. I don’t think I ever will. His model and example has been the sustaining gift that has seen me through the roughest patches of my own life. I idolized him and know in the same way that I know that the sky is above me and ground below, that he was best Father a guy could ever have. He is never far from my mind and I talk about him a lot. The hilarious stories he told. The simple, durable truths he taught me about decency, kindness and honesty.

So, when my fishing buddy Dan and I lit out a couple of weeks back for our annual seven day blitz of the spring creeks of Southwest Wisconsin, as we traveled from stream to stream, I was, as usual, talking about my Dad. Retelling his stories from the factory job he spent his life at and all the colorful characters he met there and the things they would say. Stories of boyhood times with his own volatile and unpredictable Dad spent chasing coon hounds barking tree along the high blue banks of Erie County’s Elk Creek. About “sticking out your mud hook” to shake hands. And on and on. My Dad had a thousand stories and several hundred sayings. Dan has excellent taste and discernment in humor. This means he enjoys the stories. Which is good, because for a lot of them, I’m pretty sure I’m on the fourth or fifth repetition with him.

Dan is an innovative and gifted fly tier. He may modestly demur when you tell him so, but it’s true nonetheless. Like my Dad, he has a level and balanced view of his personal talents and gifts that makes them all the more impressive to see in action. This too is good. I’d have a hard time fishing all week with a horn blowing rooster with an ego the size of Spain. That isn’t me and it certainly isn’t Dan.

Dan designed a new fly and brought a few with him for the trip. Part dragonfly nymph, part Girdle Bug, part whimsy and part bedrock-solid empirical observation of what appeals to a trout. With his new fly, he proceeded to hammer the wild browns virtually one after the other on several of the streams we fished. This piqued my curiosity and after Dan had made a few design and color changes in the new fly, he tied a few by the light of our motel room lamp and dropped them into my hand to try. So it was that I too began to hammer the Wisconsin wild browns on his new creation. We fished it every way we could think of. We cast it to risers, crawled it along the rocky edges of the deep slow pools and spot fished it in the fast water in the heads of the runs. It worked everywhere.
Boom! Boom! Boom! We had a real winner on our hands.

But the fly needed a name. I mean, some flies don’t really deserve to have a name, but they do anyway. Take the Montreal wet fly or Muddler Minnow for example. They’re both fundamentally useless flies (I understand there may be some dissension regarding the Muddler, but surely we can agree on the worthlessness of the Montreal), but somebody took the time to give them a name. Surely a fly of the amazing fish catching potency of Dan’s new creation deserved a name of its own. And so he gave it a name. He called it the Mud Hook after my Dad’s handshake saying. I was delighted. My Dad was not a fly fisher with all the Holy Writ and ostentation that tends to surround the sport. He was a regular old crappie-jigging, bucket-filling, fillet-‘em-and-put-them-in-Ziplocs kind of guy. Even so, now we can add “Linguistic Inspiration of the Deadly, Trout-Magnet Mud Hook” to his list of titles. I think it would have tickled him to learn that an item from a sport that he never took part in is named after one of his witticisms. And I'll wager that right now that he is smiling as he drops yet another crappie into the bucket.

Stick out your mud hook Dad. I miss you..