miles down the limestone just to hit the dock in McLean’s Town. The kids would come up and pull the hair on my arms. They’d never seen anything like it before, never seen a white guy. Now of course they’re totally self-sufficient, but back then you couldn’t really count on the locals doing anything without supervision. I mean, they couldn’t read a map, couldn’t run a boat without trashing the prop. But we got along well. We were all using those cheap polarized glasses. Just about everyone who spent time on the water had cataracts. Not one of us knew what he was doing. Famous guys like Al McClane, Joe Brooks: nowadays they would be barely adequate casters, but they looked the part.”
Valdene, too, remembered the early fly-casting acolytes, “the dudes in their khaki outfits: khaki shorts, khaki shirts, everything was khaki. And all were kind of stodgy but very nice, all very sweet people.”
Then khaki-clad, if less than stodgy, a young Miller watched dumbfounded as David, circa mid-1970s, first employed a fly cast from the bow of a skiff.
“What’s he doing?” Miller asked his father.
“He’s cheating,” his father said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when we make a bad cast, we have to reel it all the way up and cast again. If he makes a bad cast, he just picks it up and wings it out.”
Like most of the guests at the club, the Millers soon graduated to the more sporting means of fly casting for both its efficacy and its grace. They were among many who had never cast a fly rod but had, somewhere or other, seen one employed—the first loop of line sailing back and unfurling before being powered forward in a second unfurling loop—and wrongly assumed that the traveling line’s fluidity would translate into an ease of aptitude.
Although twenty years had passed since Florida Keys captain Billy Smith landed the first fly-caught bonefish, saltwater fly tackle hadn’t evolved much in the interim. Despite the elements’ demands, rods were still fashioned largely from slow-moving fiberglass—a traditional, if slothy, material that serves well for tossing dainty dry flies on chalk streams in Pennsylvania for ten-inch trout, where an angler wading, say, the famed LeTort Spring Run might see a trout rise to take a natural mayfly in the shade of a willow, and be afforded the time to stop casting, change flies, perhaps light his pipe, then make a proper premeditated presentation of his fly to the steadily feeding fish. All of which is to say: neither angler nor prey, resting comfortably in its lie, is going anywhere in a hurry.
However, on the saltwater flats where middle-of-the-food-chain, ever-hunted targets such as bonefish don’t loiter, anglers must be prepared to present flies instantly and instinctively, mirroring their quarry’s modus operandi. (“Big bonefish coming fast at eleven o’clock,” a guide might say, “ninety feet. Put it on his nose! Now!”)
As a result, fiberglass and bamboo eventually gave way to speedier graphite, though even the early-generation rods of the mid-1970s responded too slowly to be considered effective, let alone enjoyable to wield. The necessities of a saltwater fly cast coupled with the prevailing elements (fifteen miles per hour is considered a light breeze on the flats) often turned experienced freshwater fly casters—accustomed to casting a rod weighing three ounces instead of one twice that weight—into first-rate floggers. One illustrative photo from the early fly-rodding era, accompanying a 1981 Field and Stream article about Deep Water Cay Club, shows author Ed Zern on the bow of David Pinder’s skiff roughly two rod lengths from a tailing bonefish. Zern stands at attention, his casting arm tucked tight to his body, as if he were holding a Bible between his elbow and his ribs, the rod nearly as bulky as David’s shaved-pine push-pole. Zern, one assumes, is about to enact a now-ancient casting model wherein anglers “tick-tocked” the rod back and forth between ten o’clock and two o’clock, twelve noon being straight overhead, on a metronome’s rhythm—a model that the flats’ demands, and David, quickly deemed worthless.
WHILE IT’S FORGIVABLE TO DRIFT OFF INTO THE HIGH LYRIC while imagining a backlit fly caster rhythmically zinging line back and forth inches from the water’s surface, it’s better to de-romanticize the fly rod, to recognize it for what it is: a tool someone fashioned to help one creature connect to another. Dame Juliana Berners, fifteenth-century Benedictine prioress and inventor of the sport, chose an alder limb and shaved it down to the proper weight. Five centuries and countless industry advancements later, I found after snapping my expensive graphite in a tumble on the way to the stream that a carefully selected willow branch would still suffice: knotted a monofilament leader to the tip of the branch, a likely fly to the end of the leader, and soon felt life tugging at the other end.
The contemporary, of course, necessitates complexity. Today’s $900 graphite rods host custom cork grips at the base of which are seated machined reels containing Dacron backing, synthetic fly line, and monofilament leader. Knots like slip-, Albright, and nail connect these lines, which taper from a butt end like spaghetti to a working end of angel hair. To the end of the clear leader, via blood knot, a two-foot section of tippet testing ten or twelve pounds is tied, and to the end of the tippet a bonefish fly is cinched.
Like language, the artificial fly is a brutal approximation.
The impressionist flytier wraps some chicken rump feathers and chopped-up rabbit fur dyed mauve to the shank of a stainless steel hook, adding two small black plastic bulbs meant to mimic a crab’s eyes; the realist, however, scissors a hunk of brown carpet into a disk, threads it to the hook’s shank, and glues it there with two strips of white leather, razor-cut to look like claws, then epoxies a piece of real crab shell to the abdomen, to achieve the texture of the natural. No matter how impressionistic or realistic, the fly evidences the unbridgeable distance between expression and experience.
While anglers and flytiers argue the merits of their patterns like stumping politicians, most bonefish guides scoff at a well-catalogued box of fly patterns—“It’s not the arrow, it’s the archer,” they say.
In such terms, the bow is the fly rod, and the rod, if we’re fishing during the early 1960s, is bamboo, likely made in upstate New York with cane imported from the Bay of Tonkin, the cork from Asia, too. In the mid- to late seventies, the rod is fiberglass and fashioned in San Francisco. Thenceforth the angler likely wields lighter and stronger graphite pressed and fused together in the Pacific Northwest, new models of rods every year, like fashion lines. The same folks who engineer cassette tapes manufactured the floating line in Michigan. The fly’s steel hook point has been honed by a laser in parts unknown. The serpentine aluminum guides, line keepers running incrementally along the length of the rod, are aluminum from a refinery in Illinois. The hen feathers trailing off the fly come from an Ohio farm that breeds fowl to produce high-grade hackle, the fur dubbing from a rabbit trapped and killed by a young boy in Kentucky who sells his pelts per dozen to a man from Lexington who sells them by the gross to a company named Wapsi out of Arkansas. Maybe the angler hand-tied the fly, maybe he ordered it from a Montana-based company that shops out its labor to factories in Costa Rica and Thailand.
All this is to say that no matter how isolated the flats angler appears or thinks herself (and clearly she searches for some pleasant desolation as she stalks fish barefoot, adjacent to the shore of an unnamed Caribbean cay whose sole inhabitants since time immemorial have been cormorants and frigate birds), when the hooked bonefish accelerates like a gazelle fleeing a cheetah, and the integrity of five knots is tested, along with the rod’s backbone, along with the reel’s oiled clutch—when the line tightens, a dozen seemingly disparate worlds fuse with a flourish, and she feels, as Hemingway’s Nick Adams felt upon spotting a long-desired trout from a high north woods riverbank, “all the old feeling.”
This old feeling is far, far older than we can imagine. And yet we touch it through the new.
THAT DAVID HAD NEVER CAST A FLY ROD PRIOR TO HIS employer’s arrival was perhaps
