What does your fly tying area look like? Is everything all neatly set up with labeled material drawers, all your tools and bobbins and what not resting in their form fitting slots on a foam or wooden caddy and all your spools of wire, thread and floss impaled on neat little posts on yet another caddy? Do you have one of those little Waste-trol bags underneath your vise to catch hair and feather clipping lest they should fall on your perfectly clean floor?
If so, I envy your self discipline and I probably already don’t like you….
My tying area is a no man’s land that occupies a corner of our basement. I have an old oak desk that I brought home when one of my previous employers was giving their old office furniture away so they could install newer, more trim and modern metal desks. My oak desk is roughly 60 inches wide by 36 inches deep and about 30 inches high. It has six huge drawers and weighs just slightly less than last year’s Honduran banana crop. Like Greenland, there are places on its surface that may have been mapped at one time, but probably have never been visited. During the majority of the year, the top of the desk is cluttered (more like piled, actually..) with materials in (but more often, out) of their original plastic bags. Plastic envelopes and boxes of hooks peek out from beneath ostrich plumes, clumps of hand-blended sulfur dubbing and from behind empty Diet Mountain Dew bottles. An ancient #2 Metz dun neck lies back towards the rear center of the table. It is half out of its plastic bag, which is clearly labeled “red/brown India necks” in black laundry marker. That must mean that when I need a size #12 brown dry fly hackle, I need to find the bag that is labeled “#2 Metz dun”. But I’m pretty sure I just saw it the other day and it has some stripped peacock sticks in it. Oh well, it’ll turn up eventually..
In addition to the oak desk, I also have two towers of those plastic stack drawers that normal people use to store extra pairs of shoes, their now unused cassette tapes of disco music or old framed photographs of family members or former significant others who have fallen out of favor and lost their place of honor on the shelves in the family room.
One tower sits to either side of my tying chair (it’s oak too and came with the table). Each tower is just slightly shorter than I am and has five big drawers, each of which would easily hold two shoeboxes and the entire recorded output of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer on cassette. They’re big drawers. I know this because when they are stacked one of top of each other, they make big towers. In these drawers are most of my furs, loose feathers and older, lower quality hackle necks. Some labeled and in bags. Some loose. And some in bags that are labeled incorrectly. My good hackle necks and saddles are in the top drawer of the tower to my right. They are the only part of my inventory of materials that has a label on the outside of the drawer. The label reads: “Good Necks”- Add Mothballs Every November”. But at present, I don’t know where the mothballs are. They might be under that piece of muskrat fur sitting behind the unopened 8 oz. commemorative Coca-Cola bottle that my wife picked up at the 1996 Republican Convention when she was there as a reporter. I swiped it from her extensive trove of curios and took it down to my tying area because I read somewhere that you can sharpen scissors by opening and closing the blades on the neck of a glass bottle. I tried it with the Coke bottle, but I couldn’t discern any difference in the sharpness of my scissors.
Maybe it would have worked if she’d have got a Democrat Coke bottle instead. I don’t know. At least, just for that brief snapshot in time, I knew where my scissors were.
Last year when I made an attempt to go through my loose feather drawer and re-bag and label everything, I found an old, rumpled bag of loose ginger hackle feathers I bought from Herter’s of Waseca, Minnesota in 1966 or so, just a year or two after I started tying. That was pretty exciting. I mean, do the math. The chicken(s) the feathers came from were present for the births of actor John Cusack and current British PM David Cameron as well as the passing from the scene of Admiral Nimitz and Walt Disney. They were alive for the release of the Bee Gee’s first album (not available on cassette) and for the dedication of the St. Louis Gateway Arch by Vice President Hubert Humphrey. There’s a lot of history in that bag of feathers. The feathers themselves, unfortunately, were useless for tying. That’s OK though. They were useless for tying when I bought them. This was characteristic of the general run of Herter’s product quality that last decade or so they were in business prior to going under in the early 70’s. So, I threw them out. I kept the plastic bag they came in though. Right now, it has a chuck of mole fur in it. Someday, when I find my laundry marker, I’ll put a proper label on the bag.
It goes on and on. I have spools of tinsel (real metal tinsel, not that Mylar stuff..) dating back to the 60’s. I’d use it, but you know how springy tinsel gets on the spool. I lost the rubber band retainers for the spools and the tinsel came all uncoiled and became tangled up with my collection of spools of Kevlar thread, copper wire and various tying flosses. I have it all together in a bag in one of the drawers in the left tower. I have the bag correctly labeled as well. In big black laundry marker. “Miscellaneous Spooled Materials” is what it says on the outside of the bag. Not too long ago though, I did find a set of old midge-size hackle pliers in that bag tangled up with some medium gold oval tinsel. I’d been looking for them for quite a while and was really surprised to find them there. I thought for sure they were in the 3rd drawer of the right tower next to the ringneck tails and the bag that is labeled “Rubber Hackle” but actually contains a fist full of dove feathers I plucked from a bird back in the mid-70’s with the intent of using them to make collars on soft hackle flies. I never got around to trying this, but I hope to some day. They’re supposed to make pretty good soft hackles.
Just because I’ve described this immense, confused tangle of stuff in my tying area, don’t get the idea that I am sloppy, messy or have no self-discipline. I know exactly where everything is. It’s all in the southwest corner of my basement, west of the treadmill and south of the staircase. So, there….:)
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
American Originals
Like short hop passenger rail service, free television and the daily newspaper, the independently owned and operated fly shop is slowly disappearing as an American institution. Oh, there are still quite a few of them around, but make no mistake, they are fading away and each year there are fewer and fewer whose doors are open for business. While many of the reasons for this slow passing from the scene are matters of simple business sense, the disappearance of the independent fly shops also mirror changes in our culture and our values. There was a time when most fly anglers would have agreed that the slightly higher prices at an independent shop were a fair exchange for the individual attention to customer service, sense of camaraderie and the good feeling of being greeted by name when you came through the door offered by the independent shops. Nowadays, these virtues seem to be poor competition for the ease, variety and lower prices that can be ours online with the click of a mouse. It isn’t just fly fishing. In general, there seems to have been a culture-wide devaluation of the interpersonal aspects of retail commerce.
Ask the small independent grocer or hardware owner who is watching the hinges on his front door rust from lack of traffic because he can’t match Wal-Mart’s price on a box of Cheerios or the variety of Home Depot’s mind-boggling selection of nuts and bolts. So, we’ve changed. I think for the worse, but then again, what do I know? I’m moving into the lead edge of the age group that tends to see most of these sorts of changes are erosion of the ways of the world as we always knew it. At our age, none of us want to go to all the work of adapting to a brand new world. So, we tend to resent the change.
While there can be honest debate as to whether these changes reflect badly on who we are becoming as a people, I know one thing for certain: When the last independent fly shop closes, it will also signal the passing from the scene of a great, long term source of entertainment for me as a fly angler, spending time in the presence of the eccentrics, huge-hearted folks and hopelessly fish-addicted people who owned and operated these shops. My experiences with them have been one of the high points of my angling life.
I used to visit a shop in the heart of northcentral Pennsylvania’s mountains. I’d stop to buy a spool or two of tippet or a new zinger. I was always losing zingers along the creek. My total obsession with fishing; the water and the promise of the next pool, combined with my hearing loss would often result in me snagging my pliers or nippers on a tree branch or clump of brush and not hearing the snap when the cord, stretched to its limits, would break. So, I was almost always in the market for another zinger.
I’d enter the shop through the front door and approach the counter. I could plainly see the owner in the back building a rod or just sipping a cup of coffee and staring off into space. Sometimes, he’d come right out and wait on me. Other times, he’d acknowledge my presence with a wave and yell that he’d be right out. Sometimes, he would. Other times, he’d be back there fadiddling around for five minutes before he finally came out front to see what I needed. Still other times, he wouldn’t acknowledge me at all and I’d stand there for 10 or even 15 minutes and finally turn and go out the door. Or sometimes, I’d wait him out. One thing I never was though, was miffed or upset at his erratic behavior. Actually, I got a chuckle out it. He had come from a large urban area and set up his business along one of Pennsylvania’s best trout streams so he could always be next to the water and far from the beeping, grinding chattering sounds of the city. The making a living part of the equation was secondary. He had what he wanted. The only way it could be better would be if these damned customers stopped coming around to interrupt his day and his reverie. I understood. I’d probably be the same way.
I used to frequent a small shop in my home town in Northwest Pennsylvania. The guy who owned and ran it may have been cut out to be an engineer or a tax accountant or any of a hundred other occupations. The one thing he wasn’t cut out to do was to retail sales. He had the disposition of a tomcat with a singed tail and the patience of a child seeing the stack of wrapped presents at his birthday party for the first time. I’d come through the door and before it even closed behind me, he’d look at me like I was a newly discovered flat tire and say: “What do YOU want?”. I’d tell him I was just looking. He’d mumble under his breath and go back to cleaning the top of the glass case with the reels in it. No more than a minute later, he’d try again. “You figure it out yet?”, he’d demand Sometimes, I’d say “not quite yet” and he’d go back to his sulk. Other times, I’d bring a few odds and end to the counter and check out. He’d ring the stuff up and say, “That’ll be all of $12.46” in a disgusted voice like I’d wasted nine minutes of his time for next to nothing. Far from becoming offended or upset with him, I actually got a kick out of the whole thing. Here he was being totally himself and absolutely defying the cookie-cutter, fawning and solicitous persona common to retail sales people everywhere. I admired this. I enjoyed him so much I eventually bought a three hundred dollar Orvis fly rod from the rack in his shop. This was shortly before he went out of business under the weight of his less than fully welcoming personality. I don’t know what the matter with some people is and why they didn’t like him. I considered him a regional treasure.
Another establishment, a destination shop on a large stocked stream not far from where I grew up was owned and operated by one of the most contrary and opinionated people I think I’ve ever met. You’d come through the door and say, “nice day”. He’d tell you it looked like rain. Then you’d offer, “Well, if it rains, maybe there will be an olive hatch”. And he’d tell you that the olive hatch ended for the year last Wednesday. So much for that ray of hope…
And on and on it would go. Eventually, I got to the point where I would go in expressly for the purpose of torturing him for 20 minutes or so at a time just by being in his shop and daring to speak. Usually, I’d buy something. A box of split shot or a bottle of floatant. I figured the four or five dollars I’d put down to be a bargain for the entertainment I got in return. Unless you go to the matinee, you can’t go to the movies for five bucks and it isn’t anywhere near as much fun.
Not all the independent fly shop folks I’ve dealt with were crotchety, eccentric malcontents. Some were men with hearts the size of continents, men who without ever being “famous” fully met the only definition of greatness that really means anything. I worked for such a man in a fly shop in the mountains of Northwest Pennsylvania. At the time, the beginning of the internet retail boom and a changing demography in his customer base were making it hard to keep the business afloat. Yet, this man, who had been a helicopter gunship pilot in Vietnam made a point of employing a guy who had done five tours in Vietnam and who bore all the emotional scars of his experience. The guy was like a walking skinned knee; hypersensitive to the touch and sore and easy irritable all the time. He came and went as he pleased and for whatever reason he pleased. Sometimes, he would deal with a modestly difficult customer and then simply just take off and leave for the day, the experience having worn the insulation off his already frazzled nerves. He refused to run the cash register or help take inventory. Too much pressure. Yet the owner always paid him for the hours he was present and kept him on the payroll. He may have been the only person in the entire town who, by giving him a job, took the time to thank the guy for his service to his country and recognized the toll it had taken on him. The time I spent with this man was a gift. It made me aspire to be a better person.
There are many more examples of this unique, but sadly disappearing species, the individual fly shop owner. The guy at a Pennsylvania shop who would let you take a new rod from his rack to try it for a few days before deciding to buy. The laconic, bearded Rebel in a North Carolina shop who invited me to sit and have a couple cups of coffee with him and just talk fishing on a slow day. We ended up talking for three hours. The central Pennsylvania fly shop partner who would visit with you for hours, now and then pausing to splatter a bit of tobacco juice in the wax-coated orange juice he always had handy. Guys that you knew from the first time you encountered them, held the same love and reverence for the water and the fish that you did.
If and when the last of the independent shops closes its doors in recognition of the inexorability of change, I’ll miss the service and I’ll miss the local touch and all the rest. But most of all, I’ll miss the people themselves. Their heart, their kindness and warmth and the delight of their eccentricity. All are American Originals and when they are gone, a piece of what I’ve grown to love about the sport will go with them.
Ask the small independent grocer or hardware owner who is watching the hinges on his front door rust from lack of traffic because he can’t match Wal-Mart’s price on a box of Cheerios or the variety of Home Depot’s mind-boggling selection of nuts and bolts. So, we’ve changed. I think for the worse, but then again, what do I know? I’m moving into the lead edge of the age group that tends to see most of these sorts of changes are erosion of the ways of the world as we always knew it. At our age, none of us want to go to all the work of adapting to a brand new world. So, we tend to resent the change.
While there can be honest debate as to whether these changes reflect badly on who we are becoming as a people, I know one thing for certain: When the last independent fly shop closes, it will also signal the passing from the scene of a great, long term source of entertainment for me as a fly angler, spending time in the presence of the eccentrics, huge-hearted folks and hopelessly fish-addicted people who owned and operated these shops. My experiences with them have been one of the high points of my angling life.
I used to visit a shop in the heart of northcentral Pennsylvania’s mountains. I’d stop to buy a spool or two of tippet or a new zinger. I was always losing zingers along the creek. My total obsession with fishing; the water and the promise of the next pool, combined with my hearing loss would often result in me snagging my pliers or nippers on a tree branch or clump of brush and not hearing the snap when the cord, stretched to its limits, would break. So, I was almost always in the market for another zinger.
I’d enter the shop through the front door and approach the counter. I could plainly see the owner in the back building a rod or just sipping a cup of coffee and staring off into space. Sometimes, he’d come right out and wait on me. Other times, he’d acknowledge my presence with a wave and yell that he’d be right out. Sometimes, he would. Other times, he’d be back there fadiddling around for five minutes before he finally came out front to see what I needed. Still other times, he wouldn’t acknowledge me at all and I’d stand there for 10 or even 15 minutes and finally turn and go out the door. Or sometimes, I’d wait him out. One thing I never was though, was miffed or upset at his erratic behavior. Actually, I got a chuckle out it. He had come from a large urban area and set up his business along one of Pennsylvania’s best trout streams so he could always be next to the water and far from the beeping, grinding chattering sounds of the city. The making a living part of the equation was secondary. He had what he wanted. The only way it could be better would be if these damned customers stopped coming around to interrupt his day and his reverie. I understood. I’d probably be the same way.
I used to frequent a small shop in my home town in Northwest Pennsylvania. The guy who owned and ran it may have been cut out to be an engineer or a tax accountant or any of a hundred other occupations. The one thing he wasn’t cut out to do was to retail sales. He had the disposition of a tomcat with a singed tail and the patience of a child seeing the stack of wrapped presents at his birthday party for the first time. I’d come through the door and before it even closed behind me, he’d look at me like I was a newly discovered flat tire and say: “What do YOU want?”. I’d tell him I was just looking. He’d mumble under his breath and go back to cleaning the top of the glass case with the reels in it. No more than a minute later, he’d try again. “You figure it out yet?”, he’d demand Sometimes, I’d say “not quite yet” and he’d go back to his sulk. Other times, I’d bring a few odds and end to the counter and check out. He’d ring the stuff up and say, “That’ll be all of $12.46” in a disgusted voice like I’d wasted nine minutes of his time for next to nothing. Far from becoming offended or upset with him, I actually got a kick out of the whole thing. Here he was being totally himself and absolutely defying the cookie-cutter, fawning and solicitous persona common to retail sales people everywhere. I admired this. I enjoyed him so much I eventually bought a three hundred dollar Orvis fly rod from the rack in his shop. This was shortly before he went out of business under the weight of his less than fully welcoming personality. I don’t know what the matter with some people is and why they didn’t like him. I considered him a regional treasure.
Another establishment, a destination shop on a large stocked stream not far from where I grew up was owned and operated by one of the most contrary and opinionated people I think I’ve ever met. You’d come through the door and say, “nice day”. He’d tell you it looked like rain. Then you’d offer, “Well, if it rains, maybe there will be an olive hatch”. And he’d tell you that the olive hatch ended for the year last Wednesday. So much for that ray of hope…
And on and on it would go. Eventually, I got to the point where I would go in expressly for the purpose of torturing him for 20 minutes or so at a time just by being in his shop and daring to speak. Usually, I’d buy something. A box of split shot or a bottle of floatant. I figured the four or five dollars I’d put down to be a bargain for the entertainment I got in return. Unless you go to the matinee, you can’t go to the movies for five bucks and it isn’t anywhere near as much fun.
Not all the independent fly shop folks I’ve dealt with were crotchety, eccentric malcontents. Some were men with hearts the size of continents, men who without ever being “famous” fully met the only definition of greatness that really means anything. I worked for such a man in a fly shop in the mountains of Northwest Pennsylvania. At the time, the beginning of the internet retail boom and a changing demography in his customer base were making it hard to keep the business afloat. Yet, this man, who had been a helicopter gunship pilot in Vietnam made a point of employing a guy who had done five tours in Vietnam and who bore all the emotional scars of his experience. The guy was like a walking skinned knee; hypersensitive to the touch and sore and easy irritable all the time. He came and went as he pleased and for whatever reason he pleased. Sometimes, he would deal with a modestly difficult customer and then simply just take off and leave for the day, the experience having worn the insulation off his already frazzled nerves. He refused to run the cash register or help take inventory. Too much pressure. Yet the owner always paid him for the hours he was present and kept him on the payroll. He may have been the only person in the entire town who, by giving him a job, took the time to thank the guy for his service to his country and recognized the toll it had taken on him. The time I spent with this man was a gift. It made me aspire to be a better person.
There are many more examples of this unique, but sadly disappearing species, the individual fly shop owner. The guy at a Pennsylvania shop who would let you take a new rod from his rack to try it for a few days before deciding to buy. The laconic, bearded Rebel in a North Carolina shop who invited me to sit and have a couple cups of coffee with him and just talk fishing on a slow day. We ended up talking for three hours. The central Pennsylvania fly shop partner who would visit with you for hours, now and then pausing to splatter a bit of tobacco juice in the wax-coated orange juice he always had handy. Guys that you knew from the first time you encountered them, held the same love and reverence for the water and the fish that you did.
If and when the last of the independent shops closes its doors in recognition of the inexorability of change, I’ll miss the service and I’ll miss the local touch and all the rest. But most of all, I’ll miss the people themselves. Their heart, their kindness and warmth and the delight of their eccentricity. All are American Originals and when they are gone, a piece of what I’ve grown to love about the sport will go with them.
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