Free All Fishermen Are Liars by John Gierach Page A

made these fish prettier than they’d have to be just to get by. It’s fishing new water that lets me see all this again as if for the first time.

7
    RODS
    I got a rambling letter from a friend the other day talking about fly rods. His fly rods, that is, past and present: what they were, where they came from, where some of them eventually went (in recent years he’s given some away to guides) and what he liked or didn’t like about them. It was the kind of letter you write to a friend who shares your interest and who you don’t have to impress—basically a two-page, stream-of-consciousness postscript.
    There were surprisingly few rods considering that this man is aretired doctor in his late eighties and a lifelong fly fisher, but then not all of us are tackle freaks. I am a tackle freak, although after years of accumulating rods I’ve come to envy those who fish comfortably with what they have instead of always looking for something better. Marksmen like to say, “Beware of the man with only one gun because he knows how to use it.”
    The search for the perfect rod begins early in a life of fly fishing and often for the wrong reason. As a beginner, you’re a poor caster and you naturally want to get better. In a commercial culture like ours, that suggests a better rod, which you are led to believe is a rod that costs more than the one you have. I mean, if one rod sells for $129.95 and another of the same material, length and line weight sets you back $700, why the difference in price if the expensive one isn’t better? This is one of the burning philosophical questions of our time.
    In fact, what you probably need are casting lessons, regular practice and, most of all, lots of fishing, since casting on water with fish in it is different from casting on a lawn, for reasons having to do with both physics and psychology. Also, there are things you’ll learn on your own through constant exposure that no one could ever teach you.
    But then in some rare cases, the rod you start with really is a clunker that holds you back. Maybe, as in my case, you bought it at a yard sale for a few dollars because that was all you could afford at the time. Before you handed over the money, you put the rod together and wiggled it as you’d seen others do, but that was just for show. You didn’t know the first thing about fly rods, but you had the itch and had to start somewhere.
    My first fly rod was a 7 ½ -foot, four-piece fiberglass fly-spin combo with a reversible reel seat. Two rods for the price of one: What a deal! I wasn’t much more than a kid at the time, but I still should have known that a tool that’s supposed to do two separate jobs wouldn’t do either of them very well. I did manage to catch some fish on this thing, but a kindly stranger who stopped one day to give me somemuch-needed casting tips ended the brief session by saying, “And when you get a few bucks running uphill, you really oughta get yourself a better rod.” He was just trying to be helpful and he was right, but the idea that a new rod could improve my casting took root and ruined me for life. The obvious danger is that a fly rod—especially an expensive one—can be seen as a talisman with some inherent power of its own, while in practice it’s more likely to be like a Stradivarius violin in the hands of someone who doesn’t play well: a flawless instrument that nonetheless squawks like a chicken.
    I did eventually get a rod that was better (almost anything would have been) and it proved to be the first of many. At that time I could have done virtually all my trout fishing with the 8-foot 5-weight Granger Victory I picked up for $50, but many of the fishing writers I was reading left the impression that doing all your fishing with one all-around rod was like performing brain surgery with a can opener. So I came to think I needed shorter 4- and 5-weights, longer 5- and 6-weights, 7-weight streamer rods, 8-weight bass rods, 9-weight salmon rods and