No Man's Land

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….:)