Free All Fishermen Are Liars by John Gierach Page B

so on, not to mention the reels and lines to go with them. Later, when I started traveling a lot, I backed up my two-piece rods with three-piece models that I could carry on airplanes. Then I gradually accumulated spares in case I broke one.
    I developed the usual nit-picking preferences. I think a rod should be as long as possible for leverage and line mending and as short as it has to be for convenience. On my small home water, an 8 ½ - or 9-foot rod is best for line control, but it’s too long to cast in tight quarters or even to carry from pool to pool through thick woods. A 6 ½- or 7-foot rod is about the right length for casting but doesn’t give you enough reach and leaves too much line on the water. Obviously the ideal rod for mountain creeks is 7 feet, 9 inches. That must be why I have four rods of that odd length: three 5-weights and a 4-weight.
    My first good rods were all used split bamboo by defunct makers,but don’t ask me why all these years later. It must have had something to do with my ideas about tradition, craftsmanship, romance and the dubious value of practicality in sport, not to mention the sense that we’re too quick to leave the best we have behind us and call it progress. It was also a sign of the times when graphite was new, fiberglass was fading and bamboo was still a viable choice rather than a social statement.
    Martin Keane hadn’t yet published Classic Rods and Rodmakers , which started a price war on old bamboo that continued unevenly until the crash of 2008. It also helped that the Granger and Phillipson companies had been headquartered just down the road in Denver, and half the attics and garages in Colorado contained old bamboo rods that regularly turned up at yard sales with price tags in the $30-to-$50 range. That meant a working stiff could get his hands on them and still pay the rent, although sometimes just barely.
    During that same period I just managed to afford a few longer Paynes (the shorter, lighter rods were already out of my reach), and as prices for the big-name makers went through the roof, I rightly guessed that F. E. Thomas rods would soon be sucked into the vacuum. I picked up two of them for a song: an 8-foot 4-weight and a 7 ½ -foot 5-weight. Some of those rods would turn out to be the only good investments I ever made, and also hinted at the dark side of bamboo: Even those of us who claim not to care what they’re worth can’t help but be aware of their value and in weak moments can come off sounding like stockbrokers with hot tips.
    At one point I even published a monograph on bamboo rods without realizing that this little book would mark me for life as a true believer. Some years later on a river in northern Canada, I met a man who said he was shocked to see me fishing a graphite rod. Shocked!
    We’re all children of our times. Bamboo spoke to me then and still does now, but if I took up fly fishing today, there’s a good chance I’d put these rods in the same category with cherry 1957 Chevysdriven by older guys for reasons that aren’t immediately evident. It boils down to this: If you’re young now and your fly-fishing career lasts as long as you hope it will, eventually someone will point at your graphite rod and say, “You still fishin’ that old thing?”
    But I was never really a purist and so I cautiously tumbled for graphite when it first came out. Through a fly shop where I worked, I got a screaming deal on some J. Kennedy Fisher graphite blanks and built myself a 9-foot 5-weight and a 10-foot 6-weight. I fished the 9-footer off and on for years. I liked it, but I didn’t love it and finally gave it to an old friend who was moving to Alaska and needed a grayling rod. The 10-footer never quite worked out. Like most of the 10-foot rods I’ve cast, it had no real reason to be longer than 9 feet, and it was a two-piece blank, so the 5-foot-long case was unwieldy. I still have it. I’ve tried to trade it off a few times, but no one wants