Authors: Ian Frazier
The Fish's Eye (4 page)
flies that he invented himselfâDeren's Stonefly, Deren's Fox, Deren's Harlequin, The Fifty Degrees, The Torpedo, The Black Beauty, Deren's Speckled Caddis, Deren's Cream Caddis, Deren's Cinnamon Caddis, Deren's Grey Caddis;
feathers for tying fliesârooster (domestic and foreign, winter plumage and summer plumage, dozens of shades), ostrich, goose, kingfisher, mallard, peacock, turkey, imitation jungle cock, imitation marabou, imitation wood duck;
furâAlaskan seal, arctic fox, mink, beaver, weasel, imitation chinchilla, raccoon, ermine, rabbit, fitch, marten, gray fox, skunk, squirrel, civet catâalso for tying flies;
hairâdeer, bear, antelope, moose, goat, elk, badger, calfâalso for tying flies;
scissors, forceps, pliers, razors, vises, lamps, tweezers, bobbins, bodkins, floss, thread, chenille, tinsel, Mylar, lead wire, wax, yarnâalso for tying flies;
chest waders, wader suspenders, wader belts, wader cleats, wader racks, wader patch kits, wading shoes, wading staffs, hip
boots, boot dryers, inner boot soles, Hijack brand V-notch boot removers, insulated socks, fishing vests, bug-repellent fishing vests, rain pants, ponchos, head nets, long-billed caps, hunting jackets, thermal underwear, high-visibility gloves, fishing shirts;
boots, boot dryers, inner boot soles, Hijack brand V-notch boot removers, insulated socks, fishing vests, bug-repellent fishing vests, rain pants, ponchos, head nets, long-billed caps, hunting jackets, thermal underwear, high-visibility gloves, fishing shirts;
ice augers, dried grasshoppers, minnow scoops, fish stringers, hook disgorgers, rubber casting weights, gigs, spears, car-top rod carriers, rubber insect legs, fish-tank aerators, English game bags, wicker creels, folding nets, hand gaffs, worm rigs, gasoline-motor starter cords, watercolor paintings of the Miramichi River, sponge-rubber bug bodies, line straighteners, knot-tiers, snakebite kits, hatbands, leather laces, salmon eggs, plastic-squid molds, stuff you spray on your glasses so they won't fog up, duck and crow calls, waterproof match cases, lead split-shot, collapsible oars, bells that you hook up to your line so they ring when a fish takes your bait, Justrite electric head lanterns, dried mayfly nymphs, rescue whistles, canteens, butterfly nets, peccary bristles, porcupine quills, frog harnesses â¦
The truth is, I have no idea of all the things Deren has in his shop. Just about every item he sells is appropriate to a particular angling situation. In addition to the part of the shop that the customer sees, the Angler's Roost fills a couple of large back rooms, a lot of space in an office on another floor of the same building, and space that Deren rents in a warehouse in New Jersey. I have not yet encountered, nor would I encounter in several lifetimes of angling, all the different situations for which the different items in his shop are intended.
Deren likes to recite certain fishing maxims over and over, and although he says his intent is purely educational (“We don't
sell anybody. We advise, and then they do their own buying”) I have seen his maxims work on customers' wallets the way oyster knives work on oysters. One of these maxims is “Ninety percent of a trout's diet consists of food he finds underwater.” A customer who hears this often decides he has to have a couple dozen stone-fly nymphsâweighted flies that imitate the nymphal stage of the stone fly, an insect common in rocky streambeds. The stone fly that Deren sells is two dollars, which makes it one of the more expensive trout flies he sells. Another maxim is “Trout don't always see a floating mayfly from underneath; when a trout is taking a fly he will break the surface”âhere Deren does an imitation of a trout regarding with bulging eye a fly at eye levelâ“and when he does he sees that the back of the insect is darkly vermiculated.” A customer who hears this may conclude that he cannot be without several fliesâin the pattern called Deren's Fox, as it happensâthat have across the back a number of stripes made with a bodkin dipped in lacquer, to suggest the dark vermiculations. (Deren's imitation of a trout breaking the surface and seeing a fly is itself worth the price of a lot of Deren's Foxes.) Another maxim is “People always say that a fly reel is nothing more than a storage case for line, but this is not true. A fly reel has many functions it must perform. It has to be the right weight, it has to be the right size to hold the proper amount of line, and it has to have a smooth drag”âthe mechanism that controls the amount of resistance offered to a fish pulling line off the reelâ“which can be adjusted to the various situations you may encounter.” Another maxim, one of Deren's most serviceable, which often comes up when a customer is contemplating an unusually expensive purchase, is “The money may not seem worth it, but when you run across a fish you've waited your whole life to catch and then lose him because
your equipment was substandardâwell, then the money becomes immaterial.”
sell anybody. We advise, and then they do their own buying”) I have seen his maxims work on customers' wallets the way oyster knives work on oysters. One of these maxims is “Ninety percent of a trout's diet consists of food he finds underwater.” A customer who hears this often decides he has to have a couple dozen stone-fly nymphsâweighted flies that imitate the nymphal stage of the stone fly, an insect common in rocky streambeds. The stone fly that Deren sells is two dollars, which makes it one of the more expensive trout flies he sells. Another maxim is “Trout don't always see a floating mayfly from underneath; when a trout is taking a fly he will break the surface”âhere Deren does an imitation of a trout regarding with bulging eye a fly at eye levelâ“and when he does he sees that the back of the insect is darkly vermiculated.” A customer who hears this may conclude that he cannot be without several fliesâin the pattern called Deren's Fox, as it happensâthat have across the back a number of stripes made with a bodkin dipped in lacquer, to suggest the dark vermiculations. (Deren's imitation of a trout breaking the surface and seeing a fly is itself worth the price of a lot of Deren's Foxes.) Another maxim is “People always say that a fly reel is nothing more than a storage case for line, but this is not true. A fly reel has many functions it must perform. It has to be the right weight, it has to be the right size to hold the proper amount of line, and it has to have a smooth drag”âthe mechanism that controls the amount of resistance offered to a fish pulling line off the reelâ“which can be adjusted to the various situations you may encounter.” Another maxim, one of Deren's most serviceable, which often comes up when a customer is contemplating an unusually expensive purchase, is “The money may not seem worth it, but when you run across a fish you've waited your whole life to catch and then lose him because
your equipment was substandardâwell, then the money becomes immaterial.”
One spring, just before I was going to Key West to visit my grandmother, Deren got me in the pincers of the last two maxims as I was deciding on a new fly reel: people say a fly reel is just a storage case for line but you need a good reel with a good drag, etc.; and if you buy a substandard (i.e., cheaper) reel and because of it lose the fish of your life, etc. I was planning to wade the tidal flats around the islands fly-fishing for bonefish and permit (a kind of pompano), of which the first is supposed to be very difficult to catch and the second is supposed to be about impossible to catch. Like a lot of people before me and after me, I cracked. I spent $110 on an English-made reel with level adjustable drag, which came in a fleece-lined suede case. The first day, I fished with it at a fishing spot that had been recommended by a guy behind the counter at a bait-and-tackle shop called Boog Powell's Anglers Marine (it is owned by the former baseball star, but I have never seen him in there), on Stock Island, the key just up from Key West. This fishing spot was a long sandbar behind the Boca Chica Naval Air Station, the military installation that sometimes used to appear on TV as a piece of runway and an airplane wing and some heat shimmers in the background of news stories about Cuban refugees. My cousin dropped me off there. She had to take the car back to get the seats reupholstered. (My grandmother spends a lot of time driving people in wet bathing suits around, so her seat covers always fall apart.) I hid my lunch, which my grandmother had packed for me, in the mangroves. Black mangroves, since they grow in or near water, have hundreds of little breathing tubes that aerate their roots and look like Bic pen tops sticking up from the mud. As I waded out, I scared up a couple of shore birds, which made
regularly spaced splashes with their feet on the surface of the water as they took off. The sandbar, a line of white between turquoise water and dark-blue water, was maybe a quarter mile out. I had to wade in up to my armpits at one point. I was nervous. I had never heard of a wading angler being eaten by a shark, but I didn't know why. It seemed as if anything that wanted to come in and get me could. At one point I almost stepped on a ray, which stirred up big clouds of mud as it winged away. I was doubly scared when I realized that my fear was probably releasing chemicals into the water which would call predators in from all over the ocean. On the sandbar, the water was ankle-deep. I worked my way along, casting to the deep water on the ocean side of the bar. It was very windy, and I kept hitting myself between the shoulder blades with the weighted fly when I cast. I saw one fish over the half mile of sandbar that I covered. I'm not sure what kind of fish it wasâI don't think it was a permit or a bonefish. It was about two feet long. It wasn't expecting to find anybody standing in the water out there. About ten feet from me, it saw me, and it did the closest thing to a double take I've ever seen a fish do. Then it disappeared like the Road Runner in the cartoon, with a ricochet noise. I waded back to shore, stepping on crunching white coral and then slogging through a long patch of grayish-white oozeâthe kind of muck that dinosaurs left footprints in. I was quite a distance from where I'd left my lunch. I began to walk back along the road. As I came around a bend in the road, I saw a camper parked. It had Alabama license plates. About the same time I saw the camper, I heard the jingle of a dog collar. With one bark, a Great Dane plunged out of the bushes toward me. A second later, a dachshund and a border collie, both barking a lot, came out of the bushes. The Great Dane came up to my shoulder,
and had a mouthâfilled with yellow, pointed teethâthat could have eaten a clock radio. A man and a woman were sunbathing on deck chairs near the camper. The man did not get up. The woman told me to hold still and the dog wouldn't bite me. I held still, and the dog bit me in the right shoulder. I told the woman that the dog was biting me. The border collie was nipping around my knees, the dachshund around my ankles. The Great Dane bit me in the right buttock. The woman was putting on her sandals. The Great Dane bit me hard next to my left shoulder blade. The woman came up and pulled him off. I walked a distance away, and then I raised my shirt and turned my back to the woman and asked her if I was bleeding. She said I wasn't. I walked on up the road. The dachshund continued to nip around my ankles for a way up the road. The woman was calling him. His name was Fritz. I got to the place in the mangroves where I'd left my lunch, and I found my lunch and sat down on a mangrove root. My shirt was not torn where the dog had bitten me in the right shoulder, and my pants weren't torn where the dog had bitten me in the right buttock. But the lower back of my shirt was torn, with several long tooth holes. I felt my back. I had two puncture wounds, and they were bleeding. I walked back to where the camper had been parked, shouting for the people to hold the dog. The camper was not there anymore. (I later found out that the state of Florida requires that anytime a dog bites a person it must be locked up for ten days to see if it has rabies. The Alabamians, possibly having had this kind of experience before, and not wanting to change their vacation plans, may have left the minute I was out of sight.) I ate my lunch and thought about what I should do. I decided that the dog probably did not have rabies but was just crazy and overbred, like many Great Danes. I decided that it would not be worth
it to try to get back to Key Westâthat it made more sense to wait for my cousin to come and pick me up. I wasn't going to bleed to death. I went back out and fished some more, seeing this time not a single fish. However, I did spot a yellow object floating by me and snagged it with my rod, and the object turned out to be a plastic toy manâpart of the Fisher-Price toy dump truck recommended for ages two to six. I put it in my pocket, because at that time my cousin's daughter really liked Fisher-Price toys. I kept hearing voices shouting back and forth along the shore. When my cousin finally blew the horn for me and I went in, I learned that the voices had belonged, probably, to whoever had been engaged in stringing coils of barbed wire along the shoreline. (Probably it was the Seabees putting out the wire for airfield security.) This barbed wire had barbs on it shaped like little meat cleavers. I made it through the first two coils, but I got tangled up in the third coil, cutting my legs in several places. When I got to the car and dismantled my fly rod, I broke off a line guide. My cousin's daughter was with her, and she was very happy with the Fisher-Price man I'd found. My cousin took me to the de Poo Hospital, in Key West, where a twenty-nine-year-old doctor with long hair, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who had decided to practice in Key West because he hated the winters in Ohio, told me that there hadn't been a case of rabies in Florida in a really long time and that house dogs like Great Danes almost never got rabies anyway, but that I should have a tetanus shot, so I did, and it cost thirty dollars. I didn't go out fishing, or even think about fishing, for a few days after this, with the result that I forgot to rinse the salt water out of the works of my expensive new reel, with the result that the works corroded to the point where the reel would turn approximately as much as the Chrysler Building turns on its
foundation. Now the reel sits on my desk, proving Deren's maxim; more than a storage case for line, it is also a paperweight.
regularly spaced splashes with their feet on the surface of the water as they took off. The sandbar, a line of white between turquoise water and dark-blue water, was maybe a quarter mile out. I had to wade in up to my armpits at one point. I was nervous. I had never heard of a wading angler being eaten by a shark, but I didn't know why. It seemed as if anything that wanted to come in and get me could. At one point I almost stepped on a ray, which stirred up big clouds of mud as it winged away. I was doubly scared when I realized that my fear was probably releasing chemicals into the water which would call predators in from all over the ocean. On the sandbar, the water was ankle-deep. I worked my way along, casting to the deep water on the ocean side of the bar. It was very windy, and I kept hitting myself between the shoulder blades with the weighted fly when I cast. I saw one fish over the half mile of sandbar that I covered. I'm not sure what kind of fish it wasâI don't think it was a permit or a bonefish. It was about two feet long. It wasn't expecting to find anybody standing in the water out there. About ten feet from me, it saw me, and it did the closest thing to a double take I've ever seen a fish do. Then it disappeared like the Road Runner in the cartoon, with a ricochet noise. I waded back to shore, stepping on crunching white coral and then slogging through a long patch of grayish-white oozeâthe kind of muck that dinosaurs left footprints in. I was quite a distance from where I'd left my lunch. I began to walk back along the road. As I came around a bend in the road, I saw a camper parked. It had Alabama license plates. About the same time I saw the camper, I heard the jingle of a dog collar. With one bark, a Great Dane plunged out of the bushes toward me. A second later, a dachshund and a border collie, both barking a lot, came out of the bushes. The Great Dane came up to my shoulder,
and had a mouthâfilled with yellow, pointed teethâthat could have eaten a clock radio. A man and a woman were sunbathing on deck chairs near the camper. The man did not get up. The woman told me to hold still and the dog wouldn't bite me. I held still, and the dog bit me in the right shoulder. I told the woman that the dog was biting me. The border collie was nipping around my knees, the dachshund around my ankles. The Great Dane bit me in the right buttock. The woman was putting on her sandals. The Great Dane bit me hard next to my left shoulder blade. The woman came up and pulled him off. I walked a distance away, and then I raised my shirt and turned my back to the woman and asked her if I was bleeding. She said I wasn't. I walked on up the road. The dachshund continued to nip around my ankles for a way up the road. The woman was calling him. His name was Fritz. I got to the place in the mangroves where I'd left my lunch, and I found my lunch and sat down on a mangrove root. My shirt was not torn where the dog had bitten me in the right shoulder, and my pants weren't torn where the dog had bitten me in the right buttock. But the lower back of my shirt was torn, with several long tooth holes. I felt my back. I had two puncture wounds, and they were bleeding. I walked back to where the camper had been parked, shouting for the people to hold the dog. The camper was not there anymore. (I later found out that the state of Florida requires that anytime a dog bites a person it must be locked up for ten days to see if it has rabies. The Alabamians, possibly having had this kind of experience before, and not wanting to change their vacation plans, may have left the minute I was out of sight.) I ate my lunch and thought about what I should do. I decided that the dog probably did not have rabies but was just crazy and overbred, like many Great Danes. I decided that it would not be worth
it to try to get back to Key Westâthat it made more sense to wait for my cousin to come and pick me up. I wasn't going to bleed to death. I went back out and fished some more, seeing this time not a single fish. However, I did spot a yellow object floating by me and snagged it with my rod, and the object turned out to be a plastic toy manâpart of the Fisher-Price toy dump truck recommended for ages two to six. I put it in my pocket, because at that time my cousin's daughter really liked Fisher-Price toys. I kept hearing voices shouting back and forth along the shore. When my cousin finally blew the horn for me and I went in, I learned that the voices had belonged, probably, to whoever had been engaged in stringing coils of barbed wire along the shoreline. (Probably it was the Seabees putting out the wire for airfield security.) This barbed wire had barbs on it shaped like little meat cleavers. I made it through the first two coils, but I got tangled up in the third coil, cutting my legs in several places. When I got to the car and dismantled my fly rod, I broke off a line guide. My cousin's daughter was with her, and she was very happy with the Fisher-Price man I'd found. My cousin took me to the de Poo Hospital, in Key West, where a twenty-nine-year-old doctor with long hair, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who had decided to practice in Key West because he hated the winters in Ohio, told me that there hadn't been a case of rabies in Florida in a really long time and that house dogs like Great Danes almost never got rabies anyway, but that I should have a tetanus shot, so I did, and it cost thirty dollars. I didn't go out fishing, or even think about fishing, for a few days after this, with the result that I forgot to rinse the salt water out of the works of my expensive new reel, with the result that the works corroded to the point where the reel would turn approximately as much as the Chrysler Building turns on its
foundation. Now the reel sits on my desk, proving Deren's maxim; more than a storage case for line, it is also a paperweight.
Although all kinds of people go to Deren's shop, most of his customers are adult white men. This category is large enough to include many subcategories. Some of these men are technicians; they wear raincoats, gray glen-plaid suits, black-orange-and-yellow-striped ties, and gray plaid Irish walking caps, and the gleam of their metal-rimmed glasses reinforces the expression of scientific curiosity in their eyes. They know no higher words of praise than “state of the art.” When Deren shows them the latest graphite fly rod, they ask, “So is this pretty much state of the art in graphite rods?” Others are rich, and probably social. They bring with them the warm, Episcopalian smell of Brooks Brothers or the Union Club, and they talk like George Plimpton: “An
English
man who fishes in
Brazil
had this particular kind of
lanyard
, do you know the kind I mean,
marvelous
, yes, that's exactly what I want, yes,
good
for you!” Others are writers or photographers or painters; they are quiet or loud, hungover or not hungover, and many of them carry shoulder bags and don't wear suits and look as if somebody had smudged them when they were wet. Others are short, bluff, bald men who look like walking thumbs and laugh after every sentence they speak; sometimes they open the door and yell, “Hey, mister! Got any hooks?” and then they laugh delightedly. Others are terse. That's what they do for a living. They're professionally terse: “Jim. Ask you a question. Winchester. Model 21. Twenty-gauge.” Others are executives in the oil business who are leaving tomorrow for
Bahrain. Once, I heard the executives in the elevator going up to Deren's talking about the management characteristics of different oil companies. One of them said that top management at Mobil Oil suffered from “paralysis by analysis.” Others are big, wear size 11 shoes, have red faces, and come into the shop in the afternoon with cocktails and good lunch on their breath, and shoot the bull with Deren for hours.
English
man who fishes in
Brazil
had this particular kind of
lanyard
, do you know the kind I mean,
marvelous
, yes, that's exactly what I want, yes,
good
for you!” Others are writers or photographers or painters; they are quiet or loud, hungover or not hungover, and many of them carry shoulder bags and don't wear suits and look as if somebody had smudged them when they were wet. Others are short, bluff, bald men who look like walking thumbs and laugh after every sentence they speak; sometimes they open the door and yell, “Hey, mister! Got any hooks?” and then they laugh delightedly. Others are terse. That's what they do for a living. They're professionally terse: “Jim. Ask you a question. Winchester. Model 21. Twenty-gauge.” Others are executives in the oil business who are leaving tomorrow for
Bahrain. Once, I heard the executives in the elevator going up to Deren's talking about the management characteristics of different oil companies. One of them said that top management at Mobil Oil suffered from “paralysis by analysis.” Others are big, wear size 11 shoes, have red faces, and come into the shop in the afternoon with cocktails and good lunch on their breath, and shoot the bull with Deren for hours.
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