Everyone needs a friend like Tom.
I accused Tom of cleaning out his closet when a package showed up the other day crammed with all manner of fur and feathers and materials for tying flies. Specifically, saltwater flies; Tom lives on the East Coast and pesters the striped bass with footlong flies called flatwings. Classic flies. I’d been talking to him about trying to develop my version of a shorter, freshwater pattern for our smallmouths.
Thus the appearance of the package.
Leftovers? No. According to Tom, he credited the late outdoor writer Gene Hill, who recommended, and I’m paraphrasing, that if you found something you liked for hunting and fishing — boots, pants, gear — to buy 10 of them, because they’ll discontinue it as soon as you find it. Which is what he’d been doing with his fly-tying materials.
Tom epitomizes the sharing spirit percolating throughout the hunting and fishing culture. I’m not talking about the oversharing that occurs in social media, where we feel the need to bring all of our influenced followers with us wherever we go so they can see what we did, with whom, and how big the pile was at the end of the day.
Nor am I talking about advice sharing. Not teaching, mind you — how to set the decoys, how to call in a turkey, how to cast a fly rod — but rather the advice that usually begins with the dreaded lines “What you should’ve done is …” or “Why’d you do it that way?” or “You’re doing it all wrong.” That runs the risk of being irritating, advice not asked for, and “being told what to do.” An expert scoffing at the ignorant rookie.
Rather, it’s the simple sharing of an item, in person — or through the mail — that helps perpetuate a spirit of camaraderie in the outdoors.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sharing of trout flies on the river, something I hadn’t experienced until I began tying flies and fly fishing in my late teens when we moved to northern Michigan.
Actually, that all started with a gift itself, an Orvis Beginner’s Fly-Tying Kit. Opening the box of foreign materials and exploring the instruction book was discovering a new world — or, more accurately, it was the opening to a very deep, very complex, very magical rabbit hole.
But while on the river and coming across another fisherman, it’s customary and tradition to swap a couple of favorite flies. Even, upon hearing about the angler’s woes, handing over your hot fly that’s fooled a few fish already.
I love to tie flies, invent flies, and then, because I don’t fish as much as I’d like (does anyone?), I like others to fish them. I get a kick out of someone catching a fish — maybe even a prized fish — on a fly I tied.
A friend’s first trout came during the Hex hatch recently on a strange soft hackle version I made up, and so did my son Mark’s, a behemoth 22” brown trout on a Hex fly I tied that very morning. A Crazy Charlie bonefish pattern I’d tied because I thought they looked neat and might work on the local bass – and because I like to daydream of someday chasing bonefish in the Caribbean — fooled one in Hawaii for a friend, who reported back it was the only fish caught on the trip.
And there have been countless others. I sent a handful of my dry flies to Tom before his trip to England, but the mail service dropped the ball and they didn’t make it in time.
Then there’s brother Chris, who has gone from humbly accepting them to handing me a shopping list.
It seems such a small thing to hand over a hand-tied fly to a stranger, but there is a lot wrapped up in that tiny twirl of fur and feathers and flash. There’s research and time and expense, obviously; but there’s also hope and imagination and perhaps, if we’re lucky, a bit of magic.
Yet, what outweighs the investment is the hope that the gesture helps enrich someone else’s experience or even spurs them on to a lifelong passion.
The outdoor world is the ultimate pay-it-forward culture. Perhaps the reason why is as simple as the unspoken bond shared among sportsmen and women, a “we’re all in this together” sort of thing, a way to nurture our shared outdoor passions.
I’ve witnessed this spirit of sharing run the gamut from the tiny to the staggering — a size 18 soft hackle I gave to Chris, to a handmade bamboo fly rod he gave to me last summer, made by a close friend downstate. (Okay, I guess I do owe him a lifetime of flies.) Sometimes it’s even the shirt off your back or the socks off your feet, as Chris did one time with Dad when he tumbled backward out of the canoe during a late October duck hunt and filled up his waders.
Maybe it’s an extra Rapala in your tackle box when the guy at the other end of the boat is having trouble, and every one of us would share a couple of shells with the person who’s run out after shooting holes in the sky.
A book of stories and reflections can teach as much as those times when you’re actually out there. And we’ve all tossed a part of our sandwich to the other guy’s bird dog, or passed around a Thermos of coffee while getting things ready at the truck.
A week after the fly-tying materials showed up, Tom sent a follow-up package of books about how to build bamboo fly rods, another topic we’d been discussing. Books are always nice gifts and such a refreshing departure from those devilish devices that seem to be surgically attached to us. If I jump into that world, my goal is to learn via books or in person and ignore as much on YouTube as possible, except in extreme emergencies.
(I do think, however, that Tom might have ulterior motives with this particular gift.)
Every single hunter and angler can point to a random gift they were given, large or small, that sparked a desire to learn more and do more. It’s the essence of the words “tradition” and “heritage” that feel rather lost these days.
The only thing we won’t share unless under threat of IRS audit or from Seal Team Six: our spots. And even then, we’ll see how far we can push the fibs.
I won’t even tell Tom.