Often during the past seven years, I have taken a walk from the offices of The New Yorker along Forty-third Street—across Fifth Avenue, across Madison Avenue, across Vanderbilt Avenue—then through Grand Central Terminal, across Lexington Avenue, up to Forty-fourth Street, into the elevator at 141 East Forty-fourth Street, up to the third floor, and through the belled door of a small fishing-tackle shop called the Angler’s Roost, whose sole proprietor is a man named Jim Deren. Since I’ve been taking this walk, the Biltmore Men’s Bar, which I used to pass at the corner of Madison and Forty-third, changed to the Biltmore Bar, which then became a different bar, named the Café Fanny, which was replaced by a computer store called Digital’s, which moved (along with a lot of other stores on the block) after the Biltmore Hotel closed and disappeared under renovators’ scaffolding. Once, on this walk, I had to detour around some barricades inside Grand Central, because a film crew was working on the movie Superman. Valerie Perrine and Gene Hackman were supposedly there, but I did not see
them. Since then, I have seen the movie in a theater and have noted the part that the crew must have been working on when I passed by. During these seven years, the huge Kodak display in the station near the Lexington Avenue wall, which people say ruins the station’s interior light and makes it difficult to distinguish the beautiful Venetian-summer-night starscape on the ceiling, has featured photographs of water-skiers behind motorboats, a Bicentennial celebration with men dressed as Continental soldiers, the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán (by night, lighted), the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, the Great Wall of China, and, one spring, a close-up shot of a robin, which looked frightening at that size. One time, I came in through the door at Forty-third Street and there before me, across the echoing well of the concourse, was a view of a rock-cluttered desert, barn red under a pink sky, with a little piece of the foot of a space probe visible in the foreground—Mars, photographed by Viking 2.
A fisherman can look at some sections of any trout stream clean enough for fish to live in and say with confidence, A large fish lives there. The water should be deep, and it should be well aerated; that is, it should be free-flowing, rich in oxygen, and not stagnant. There should be a source of food: a grassy bank with beetles, grasshoppers, field mice, and frogs; or a little tributary creek with minnows, chubs, dace, and sculpins; or an upstream section with a silt bottom for large, burrowing mayfly nymphs. There should be cover—downed logs, overhanging tree branches, undercut banks. Where these conditions are found, the chances are very good that at least one large fish will be found as well. Such sections of a river are called good lies. A good lie will usually have a good fish lying in wait, gently finning, looking upstream for whatever the current may bring him.
I have always thought that, as lies go, it would be hard to find a better one than Grand Central Terminal. It is deep—water that deep would be a dark blue. Aerated streams of humanity cascade down the escalators from the Pan Am Building, and flow from the rest of midtown, the rest of the city, the rest of the world, through trains and subways and airport buses and taxis, into its deep pool and out again, and the volume of this flow makes it rich in the important nutrient called capital. Well, in this good lie, the big fish of the fishing-tackle business is Jim Deren, of the Angler’s Roost. For over forty years he has had a shop in the area—a shop that has outlasted changes in fishing fashions, changes in the economy, competitors who gave their shops names intentionally similar to his, and finally even Abercrombie & Fitch, his biggest local competitor, which closed its midtown store in 1977. All this time, Deren has remained in his good lie, gently finning behind the counter in his shop, consulting with fishermen from just about every place where there’s water, selling every kind of angling supply imaginable, taking in cash and checks as gracefully as a big brown trout sips mayflies from the surface of a Catskill stream.
The first time I met Jim Deren, I was looking for a particular dry fly (a pattern called the Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear, with a body that goes all the way back over the bend of the hook), which had worked well for me in Wyoming and which I could not find anywhere. I came across the entry for the Angler’s Roost in the Yellow Pages:
ANGLER’S ROOST FISHING TECHNICIANS
Tackle, Salt & Fresh, Lures, Flies
Fly Materials, Waders & Clothing
Repairs, Books & Advertising Props
JIM DEREN ADVISOR
That impressed me. I called the shop one Saturday afternoon around six o’clock and was surprised to find Deren there. In later years, I have learned that he is in his shop at all hours: I have found him in at seven-fifteen on a beautiful Sunday evening in June; I have found him in on all sorts of holidays, when midtown is nothing but blowing papers. On that first Saturday Deren told me that he was about to go home but that if I came in soon he would wait for me. I arrived at the shop half an hour later. He did not happen to have the exact fly I wanted, but he told me where to get it. We talked for a while, and I left without buying anything—the only time that has ever happened.
A few months later, during a really warm April, I decided I had to go fishing, even though I had never been fishing in the East and knew nothing about it. I bought a fishing license at the Department of Environmental Conservation office on the sixty-first floor of the World Trade Center, and then I went to see Deren. He told me the book to buy—New Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations, by Art Flick. He said that, because it had been so warm, certain mayflies that would usually be on the stream later in the season might have already appeared. He sold me flies imitating those insects. He told me where to fish—in the Beaverkill, the Little Beaverkill, and Willowemoc Creek, near Roscoe, New York. He told me what bus to take. I left his shop, went back to my apartment,
got my fly rod and sleeping bag, went to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, boarded a Short Line bus, and rode for two and a half hours with Hasidic Jews going to Catskill resorts and women going to upstate ashrams. On the bus I read the Streamside Guide, which says that mayflies live for several years underwater as swimming nymphs, hatch into winged insects, mate while hovering over the water, lay their eggs in the water, and die; that recently hatched mayflies, called duns, float along the surface and are easy for trout to catch, and so are the stage of the mayfly’s life cycle most sensible for the angler to imitate with artificials; that different species of mayflies hatch at different times of the year, according to water temperature; and that the different species emerge every year in an order so invariable as to be the only completely predictable aspect of trout fishing. I got off the bus in Roscoe about four in the afternoon, walked to the Beaverkill, hid my sleeping bag in some willows, set up my fly rod, and walked up the river until I reached a spot with no fishermen. I noticed mayflies in the air, noticed dragonflies zipping back and forth eating the mayflies. I saw a dragonfly pick a mayfly out of the air so neatly that he took only the body, leaving the two wings to flutter down to the surface of the stream and float away. I caught a mayfly myself after a lot of effort, compared it with the pictures in my Streamside Guide, decided that it was the male of the Ephemerella subvaria (Deren had been right; according to the book, that insect wasn’t due for about two weeks more), tied on its imitation (a pattern called the Red Quill, in size 14), made a short cast, caught a little trout, made a few more short casts, caught another little trout, and waited while a fat guy with a spinning rod who said he wasn’t having much luck walked by me up the river. Then I made a good, long cast under a spruce bough to a patch of deep water
ringed with lanes of current, like a piece of land in the middle of a circular freeway-access ramp. This patch of water had a smooth, tense surface marked with little tucks where eddying water was boiling up from underneath. My fly sat motionless on this water for a time that when I replay it in my mind seems really long. Then a fish struck so hard it was like a person punching up through the water with his fist. Water splashed several feet in the air, and there was a flash of fish belly of that particular shade of white—like the white of a horse’s eye when it’s scared, or the white of the underside of poplar leaves blown by wind right before a storm—that often seems to accompany violence in nature. The fish ran downstream like crazy (I don’t remember setting the hook), then he ran upstream, then he ran downstream again. He jumped several times—not arched and poised, as in the sporting pictures, but flapping back and forth so fast he was a blur. Line was rattling in my line guides; I was pulling it in and he was taking it out, until finally there was a big pile of line at my feet, and the fish, also, in the shallow water at my feet. He was a thirteen-inch brook trout, with a wild eye that was a circle of black set in a circle of gold. The speckles on his back reproduced the wormlike marks on the rocks on the stream bottom, and his sides were filled with colors—orange, red, silver, purple, midnight blue—and yet were the opposite of gaudy. I hardly touched him; he was lightly hooked. I released him, and after a short while he swam away. I stood for maybe ten minutes, with my fly rod lying on the gray, softball-sized rocks, and I stared at the trees on the other side of the river. The feeling was like having hundreds of gag hand-buzzers applied to my entire body.
Since that day I have always loved the Red Quill dry fly, and particularly the Red Quill that Deren sells, which is the
most elegant I have ever seen. For me, the Red Quill is a shamanistic medicine bundle that called forth the strike, the flash of belly, the living palette of colors from that spring day, and years later, even in situations where it is not remotely the right fly, I find myself tying it on just to see what will happen.
Also since that day I have believed that Jim Deren is a great man. He is the greatest man I know of who will talk to just anybody off the street.
In appearance, Deren is piscine. He is stocky—probably about five feet ten inches tall. His hair is in a mouse-brown brush cut, about half an inch long. His forehead is corrugated with several distinct wrinkles, which run up and down, like marks of soil erosion on a hill. His eyes are weak and watery and blue, behind thick glasses with thick black frames. There is a large amount of what looks like electrical tape around the glasses at the bridge. His eyebrows are cinnamon-colored. His nose is thick, and his lips are thick. He has a white mustache. His direct, point-blank regard can be unsettling. People who have fished their whole lives sometimes find themselves saying when they encounter this gaze that they don’t know a thing about fishing, really. Deren has a style of garment which he loves and which he wears almost every single day in his shop. This garment is the jumpsuit. For a long time, he wore either a charcoal-gray jumpsuit or an olive-green jumpsuit. One or both of the jumpsuits had a big ring on the zipper at the throat. Recently, Deren has introduced another jumpsuit into the repertoire. This is a sky-blue jumpsuit with a green-on-white emblem of a leaping bass on the left breast pocket. Deren’s voice is deep and gravelly. I can do a good imitation
of him. The only sentence I can think of that might make his accent audible on paper (in the last word, anyway) is one I have heard him speak several times while he was talking on one of his unfavorite topics, the “flower children”: “In late October, early November, when we’re driving back from fishing out West, with the wind howling and huge dark snow clouds behind us, sometimes we pass these frail girls, these flower children, standing by the side of the road in shawwwwwwwwls.”
I say Deren is probably about five feet ten inches tall because even though he often says, “I’ve been running around all day. I’m exhausted,” I have actually seen him standing up only a few times. Like a psychiatrist, Deren is usually seated. I have seen him outside his shop only once—when, as I was leaving, he came down in the elevator to pick up a delivery on the first floor. (Ambulant, he seemed to me surprisingly nimble.) It is appropriate for Deren to be seated all the time, because he has tremendous repose. There is a lot of bad repose going around these days: the repose of someone watching a special Thursday-night edition of Monday Night Football; the repose of someone smoking a cigarette on a ten-minute break at work; the repose of driving; the repose of waiting in line at the bank. Deren is in his sixties. The fish he has caught, the troubles he has been through, the fishing tackle he has sold, the adventures he has had lend texture to his repose. On good days, his repose hums like a gyroscope.
Deren talking about the Angler’s Roost while sitting in his shop on a slow afternoon in March: “It seems only natural that I would have gravitated to this business. I’ve been tying
flies ever since I was in short pants. When I was in grade school in New Jersey, I used to go without lunch because I wanted to save my money and buy fishing tackle. I remember fashioning a fly from a jacket of mine when I was a kid just barely big enough to be let out of sight. I tied it out of a lumber jacket that my mother had made for me—”
The phone rings.
“Hello. Angler’s Roost.”
“ … . … . .”
“Christ, I don’t know a thing about Chinese trout fishing, Doc.”
“ … . … . .”
“Well, they gotta have trout fishing. The Japanese have trout fishing. Just the other day, I sold some stuff to Yasuo Yoshida, the Japanese zipper magnate. He’s probably got more tackle than I got. He’s kichi about trout fishing. Kichi—that’s Japanese for nuts.”
“ … . … .”
“Well, I think the Russians should open one or two of their rivers for salmon fishing, certainly. They just have to have terrific salmon fishing.”
“ … . … . .”
“Look at it this way—next time you’ll know.”
“ … . … . .”
“Whatever you find out, Doc, let me know when you get back. Have a good time.
“Anyway, I had this blue-gray lumber jacket, and there was this little blue fly on the water. The goddamn fish weren’t considering anything but this fly. Well, between the lining and the thread of my jacket, I made a fly that looked something like the insect, and so, glory be, after some effort I caught a fish. The fish made a mistake, and that did it. This was on a little
stream in Pennsylvania, a little tributary of the Lehigh. It was a day as miserable as this, but later in the year.”
Deren picks up a package of Keebler Iced Oatmeal and Raisin Cookies, breaks it open in the middle, and dumps all the contents into a white plastic quart bucket—the kind of bucket that ice cream comes in. He starts to eat the cookies.
“After that, I was really hooked. I collected all kinds of items for fly-tying. Cigarette and cigar wrappers, hairs from dogs. Christ, I cut hair off every goddamn thing that was around. Picked up feathers in pet shops. I was always raiding chickens or ducks. I remember I tried to get some feathers from some geese and they ran me the hell out the county. Horsetails. Anything. It wasn’t long before I was selling some of the flies I tried. As far as I know, I was the first commercial nymph-tier in the country. I was selling flies in New York, New Jersey, and fairly deep into Pennsylvania. Fishing was a great thing for me, now that I look back on it, because in a lot of the contact sports I was always busting my glasses. But row a boat—I had a pair of chest muscles, looked like a goddamn weight lifter. I was very well coordinated. I had coordination and timing. That has something to do with fishing. I was a good wing shot.”
Deren reaches under the counter and produces a banana. With a table knife he cuts the banana in half. He eats one half and leaves the other half, in the skin, on top of a pile of papers. Later, a customer will find in the pile of papers a copy of a fishing magazine that he has been looking for. He will take it out from under the half banana and buy it.
“I spent all my time in high school fishing, and one day I noticed this guy was watching me. He’d been watching me a few times before. He’d ask me questions. Well, it turned out this guy had a radio show about fishing and hunting. I think
he called himself Bill the Fisherman. He started telling people about me—called me the Child Fisherman Prodigy. He told the proprietor of a fishing-tackle shop in the heart of Newark, right by Penn Station, and the man hired me, and eventually I became the youngest fishing-tackle buyer in the country. Not long after that, I was imported by an outfit in New York called Alex Taylor & Company, on Forty-second Street. I put them in the fishing-tackle business—”
The phone rings again.
“Angler’s Roost.”
“ … . … . . .”
“We’ve got all kinds of hook hones.”
“ … . … .”
“Fresh and salt, both.”
“Yes, some of them are grooved.”
“Two different grooves.”
“ … . … . . .”
“Each one comes in a plastic case.”
“ … . … . …”
“Different lengths. I think two-inch and three-inch.”
“ … . … . . .”
“What the hell do you mean, who makes it? It’s a goddamn hook hone! What the hell difference does it make who makes it?
“Guy wants to know who makes the hook hone. Wants to know what brand it is. Christ. Anyway, after that I became a buyer and salesman for another house, called Kirtland Brothers, downtown. They’re now extinct. I advised their clients on the technical aspects of fly-fishing. Mainly, I handled their fly-tying material. About this time, I began my mail-order
business, selling fly-tying material through ads in different magazines. I was working all day for Kirtland Brothers, then staying up all night to handle my mail orders. Finally, it got unmanageable as a side business. I wasn’t doing justice to either job. I finished my obligations to that firm, and then I opened up the first Angler’s Roost, at 207 East Forty-third, above where the Assembly Restaurant used to be. I dreamed up the name myself. You had the roost connotation because it was up off the street and you had guys that hung around all day with the eternal bull sessions. (I was thinking of selling coffee and cake there for a while.) Then you think of birds roosting, and of course, a lot of what we sold was feathers. And a lot of the feathers were rooster feathers—capes and necks.”
Deren takes from the pocket of his jumpsuit a new pack of True Blue cigarettes. With a fly-tying bodkin, he makes a number of holes all the way through the pack. Then he takes out a cigarette and lights it.
“Since its inception, the Roost has been tops in its field. We’ve had every kind of customer, from the bloated bondholder to the lowliest form of human life. Frank Jay Gould, the son of the railroad magnate, once bought a boat over my telephone. Ted Williams used to stop by whenever the Red Sox were in town. He was a saltwater fisherman, but we infected him with the salmon bug. We’ve had boxers, bandleaders, diplomats, ambassadors. Benny Goodman used to come in all the time. I sold Artie Shaw his salmon outfit. So many notable people, I don’t even remember. Engelhard, of Engelhard precious metals. Marilyn Monroe’s photographer, Milton Greene. Señor Wences—the ventriloquist who did the thing with the box. Bing Crosby. Tex Ritter. He was an uncle of mine by my first marriage; I got a lot of other customers in
Nashville through him. We’ve had more than one President. Eisenhower came in once. He was a nice guy—didn’t have his nose too far up in the air. We’ve had three generations of people come in here, maybe four. We’ve had some of the very elite. A lot of them don’t want their names mentioned.”
Deren looks left, cocks his wrist as if he were throwing a dart, and flips the cigarette out of sight behind the counter.
“We had our own television show, which ran for twenty-six weeks on the old DuMont Television Network. It was called The Sportsman’s Guide. It was sponsored by Uhu Glue—a miracle glue, kind of like Krazy Glue. The announcer was a guy named Connie Evans. I did the lecturing—like on a spinning reel—and then when we did a fishing trip I did the fishing. That television show wasn’t on very long before people started calling me Uncle Jimmy. I don’t know how it got started, but it stuck. I was also a technical panelist on a radio show called The Rod and Gun Club of the Air. The other panelists and I shot the breeze amongst us every week.”
A blond woman in a beige knit ski cap comes in. She asks Deren if he has an eight-foot bamboo fly rod. He says he doesn’t but he can order one for her. The woman says, “Oh, that’s great. I think he might marry me if I find him that rod.” She leaves.
“Did I tell you about our television show? The Sportsman’s Guide? Did I tell you about our heavy involvement in the advertising field? Over the years we’ve acted as consultant on hundreds and hundreds of ads. Sooner or later, everybody uses a fishing ad. Also, the slogan ‘How’s your love life?’ started in the Roost. I used to ask my customers that when they came in, and then it became the slogan for a brand of toothpaste.
“We developed the first satisfactory big-game reel—the
Penn 12/0 Senator. I guess there’s six or seven miles of those things now. We also helped develop the concept of R and R—Rest and Recuperation—for the military. The idea was to take these guys who’d been through the horrors of war, get them fishing, get them fly-tying, get their minds off their former troubles. Some of the stuff I wrote on fly-tying for the Navy was posted in battleships that are now in mothballs. We also supplied the cord that made Dracula’s wings move, for the Broadway show. We’ve always been an international business. Anglers come from India, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, South America—so many South Americans you’d think it was just next door, and they’re all loaded. Bolivia, Tierra del Fuego. Any guy who’s a nut about a fly comes to the Roost eventually. Anyplace a trout swims, they know the Roost. Not only trout. Also bonefish, tarpon, sailfish, striped bass, salmon—”
The phone rings again.
“Angler’s Roost.”
“ … . … .”
“Hello, my little pigeon.”
“ … . … .”
“Just a few minutes. I’m leaving right now.”
In Deren’s shop, three customers can stand comfortably. You can stand and put your hands in your pockets, but there really isn’t room to move around much. Four is tight. Five is crowded. Six is very crowded. When there are six customers in the shop, one of them has to hold on to somebody to keep from falling over backward into the knee-high wader bin. Except
for the small space around the customers’ feet, Deren’s shop is 360 degrees of fishing equipment, camping equipment, books, and uncategorizable stuff. The shop is like a forest in that if you remain silent in either of them for any length of time you will hear something drop.
“What the hell was that?”
“I think it was a book.”
“Don’t worry about it. Leave it there.”
“Better Badminton? Jim, how come you have a book called Better Badminton?”
“A lot of these things get shipped by mistake, and then it’s too goddamn much trouble to send them back.”
In Deren’s shop, he has tackle for the three different kinds of sportfishing—bait casting, spin fishing, and fly-fishing. Bait-casting outfits are the standard rod and reel that cartoonists usually give to fishermen. The reel has a movable spool, and both rod and reel are designed for bait or for lures heavy enough to be cast with their own weight. Spin-fishing rods and reels are also designed for lures heavy enough to be cast with their own weight, but because of refinements in the reel—a nonmovable spool that allows the line to spiral off—spin-fishing rods cast farther with less weight. In fly-fishing, the lure is usually nothing but feathers on a hook, so it does not have enough weight to be cast. Fly-fishing equipment consists of longer, lighter rods and a thick, tapered line, which work together with a whipping action to cast the fly. All three of these kinds of fishing can be done in either fresh or salt water. The sea is bigger than the land; saltwater tackle is usually bigger and heavier than freshwater tackle. Deren sells saltwater rods as thick as mop handles, and freshwater fly rods like Seiji Ozawa’s baton. They are made of bamboo, fiberglass, metal, or (recent developments) graphite or boron. He sells
reels like boat winches, and palm-sized reels that sound like Swiss watches when you crank them. He has thousands of miles of line—nylon monofilament or braided nylon or plastic or braided Dacron or silk or wire. He has hooks from size 28, which are small enough to fit about five on a fingertip, to size 16/0, which have a four-inch gap between the point of the hook and the shank.
Deren also has:
thousands of lures designed to imitate live game-fish prey, with names like Bass-Oreno, Original Spin-Oreno, Buzz’n Cobra, Chugger, Lucky 13, Crazy Crawler, Hopkins No-Eql, Goo-Goo Eyes, Hula Popper, Jitterbug, Devil’s Horse, Creek Chub Wiggle Fish, Flatfish, Lazy Ike, Red Eye, Dardevle, Fluke Slayer, Ava Diamond Jig, Rapala, Dancing Doll Jig, Rebel, Darter, Mirrolure, Shyster, Abu-Reflex, Swedish Wobbler, Hawaiian Wiggler, Golden-Eye Troublemaker, Hustler, Al’s Goldfish, Pikie Minnow, Salty Shrimper, Williams Wobbler, Tiny Tad, Tiny Torpedo, Zara (named after Zarragossa Street, the former red-light district in Pensacola, Florida, because of its attractive wiggle);
countless trout flies that imitate mayflies at every stage of their life, with names like Quill Gordon, Hendrickson, March Brown, Red Quill, Grey Fox, Lady Beaverkill, Light Cahill, Grey Fox Variant, Dun Variant, Cream Variant, Blue-Winged Olive, Sulphur Dun, Brown Drake, Green Drake, Pale Evening Dun, Little White-Winged Black; trout flies that imitate other insects—the Letort Hopper, Jassid, Black Ant, Red Ant, Cinnamon Ant, Black Gnat, Spider, Leaf Roller, Stonefly, Caddis, Case Caddis, Caddis Worm, Caddis Pupa, Dragonfly, Hellgrammite, Damselfly;
flies that imitate mice, frogs, and bats;
streamer flies—the Muddler Minnow, Spruce Fly, Spuddler,
Professor, Supervisor, Black Ghost, Grey Ghost, Mickey Finn—which are probably meant to imitate minnows;
other flies—the Parmachenee Belle, Lord Baltimore, Yellow Sally, Adams, Rat-Faced McDougal, Woolly Worm, Hare’s Ear, Humpy, Royal Coachman, Hair-Wing Royal Coachman, Lead-Wing Coachman, Queen of the Waters, Black Prince, Red Ibis—of which it is hard to say just what they are supposed to imitate, and which are sometimes called attractor flies;
big, colorful salmon flies, with names like Nepisiquit, Abbey, Thunder and Lightning, Amherst, Black Fairy, Orange Blossom, Silver Doctor, Dusty Miller, Hairy Mary, Lancelot, Jock Scott, Fair Duke, Durham Ranger, Marlodge, Fiery Brown, Night Hawk, Black Dose, Warden’s Worry;
flies that he invented himself—Deren’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 flies—rooster (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;
fur—Alaskan seal, arctic fox, mink, beaver, weasel, imitation chinchilla, raccoon, ermine, rabbit, fitch, marten, gray fox, skunk, squirrel, civet cat—also for tying flies;
hair—deer, bear, antelope, moose, goat, elk, badger, calf—also for tying flies;
scissors, forceps, pliers, razors, vises, lamps, tweezers, bobbins, bodkins, floss, thread, chenille, tinsel, Mylar, lead wire, wax, yarn—also 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;
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 …
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 nymphs—weighted 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”—here Deren does an imitation of a trout regarding with bulging eye a fly at eye level—“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 flies—in the pattern called Deren’s Fox, as it happens—that 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”—the mechanism that controls the amount of resistance offered to a fish pulling line off the reel—“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 substandard—well, 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 was—I 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 ooze—the 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 mouth—filled with yellow, pointed teeth—that 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 West—that 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 man—part 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 Englishman 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.
Guy: “Jimmy, let me ask you something and you tell me what you think of this. Last August I was sitting on the bank of a river in Michigan waiting for it to cool off and for the fish to start feeding, and I saw this white thing bouncing along the river bottom, and when it got close enough I saw that it was a peeled potato, and when it came closer I saw that a twelve- or thirteen-inch trout was bouncing the potato along the river bottom with his nose—”
Deren: “You sure it was a potato?”
Guy: “It was either a peeled potato or maybe a peeled apple. This trout was bouncing it; I swear, he was dribbling it with his nose along the bottom like a ball. Friend of mine and I followed him downstream a long way. He just kept dribbling that potato. Now, what in the hell could that have been?”
Deren: “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a trout do anything like that. But that reminds me—did I ever tell you about the time I saved a trout from drowning? The reason it reminds me is that I saw the trout bouncing and flopping along the bottom with the current. Good-sized brook trout. I caught up with him and netted him, and I discovered that he had a caddis case—you know, the protective covering that the caddis worm spins around himself, it looks kind of like a twig—well, he had one of these caddis cases, about an inch long, stuck between his upper and lower jaws. It was stuck in his small teeth, so he couldn’t close his mouth, and if a trout can’t close
his mouth he can’t filter oxygen through his gills, and he drowns. I took the caddis case out, and I put the trout in some shallow water, and pretty soon, proud as beans, he swam away.”
Guy: “I was reading in some sporting magazine about a man who was fishing in a boat and he had his retriever dog with him, and as he made a cast he accidentally let go of the rod and it flew out into the lake, and the dog immediately jumped in after it, and he started swimming to shore and the lure was trailing in the water, and a fish hit the lure, and the dog kept on swimming, and he ran up on the shore and kept on running until he’d pulled the fish all the way out of the water.”
Deren: “Could happen. Could happen. I remember once I was out in a boat casting a deer-hair bug for bass, and my leader was frayed, and when a big bass hit I broke the bug off in his mouth, so I put on a new leader and continued to fish, and then a couple of hours later I decided to quit fishing, and I was coming back to the dock, and suddenly there was an enormous splash next to the boat and this big bass came out of the water into the air and landed in the bottom of my boat. It was the same fish I’d hooked earlier—he still had my lure in his jaw. Of course, there’s a simple explanation. The fish was jumping trying to throw the lure. He would probably have kept at it until he succeeded, but instead he landed in my boat.”
Guy: “That doesn’t surprise me. Did I ever tell you about the time …”
Other customers are men of considerable personal force, but when they come into Deren’s shop Deren is sitting, they are standing; Deren knows where everything is, they don’t; they are asking, he is telling. After an exchange like “Hi, I’m
looking for some leader sink,” “Look on that shelf right next to you—no, not there, the other direction. Second shelf. Second shelf, that’s the third shelf. Move that fly box. Look to the left of that. No, the left. That’s the right. Move your hand back where it was going originally. Right there! Right there! It’s right in front of you! Look right where your hand is! You’re looking right at it,” this particular type of customer’s ears, having heard more sentences in the imperative mood in the last few seconds than they probably hear in a week, turn pink with embarrassment.
An important customer who has been coming in for many years, or an old fishing buddy, or a fellow angling expert, or any of the guys Deren has got to know over the years, he calls a son of a bitch. If the guy is present, he’s “you son of a bitch”; if he’s not, he’s “that son of a bitch.” Deren says the phrase with mastery, with delicate tonal shadings to indicate everything from a wonderful human being to a horrible human being. He says the phrase with the ease of a man turning into his driveway for the ten-thousandth time. When the subject of any one of these guys comes up, Deren will say, “That son of a bitch.
—he’ll never die, the Devil wouldn’t have him.”
—he tied saddle hackle on streamer flies with greater intensity than any man I ever knew.”
—don’t ever let him around a car, he’ll destroy it in a second.”
—he was a real screwball, a big, tall, good-looking guy. Slept with, lived with, married I don’t know how many women.”
—did you know he invented the après-ski boot?”
—I’ve seen drunks dive under the table when he appeared on the scene.”
—he’s a pinko crêpe-hanger of the first water.”
—he married a girl in Greece.”
—he’s basically a correlator. He’s not an originator. He doesn’t have spontaneity. Spontaneity is what advances the sport.”
—he fathered half the illegitimate children running around [a large American city].”
—he had a compass in his head.”
—he would have made a great President, but he wouldn’t touch it.”
—he could tie flies down to size 28 in his fingers without a vise.”
—he was incredible. He’d make bets he could sight a rifle in to zero in three shots. And do it, too.”
—he was always into me for something, as well as I knew him.”
—he asked me to be the best man at his wedding, and when I got to the wedding he told me to put on my waders, and he was married in a pool on the Ausable River.”
—he asked me to sign a bank note for him when he bought a new car, and then he skipped town and I had to pay the bank, and meanwhile, I’m getting these postcards from him, he’s out in British Columbia, and he says he’s having the best salmon fishing of his life and he wishes I was there!”
—he’s a very enthusiastic angler. It’s the Indian in him.”
—forget it. He’s a three-dollar bill. He’d write any kind of angling misinformation he could think of. He prostituted his sport for money. He’s not a sportsman.”
—he’s an enthusiast of an extreme caliber. He won’t eat, he won’t sleep, he lives by the goddamn tides. This lends him a cloak of irresponsibility, but he is responsible—to the striped bass. He was fishing on the bridge out at Jones Beach, which is
illegal, and he had just hooked a big striper when the cops came along, so he jumped over the bridge and hung from the railing with one hand and held all his tackle and played the fish with the other until the cops went away. He’s an angler at heart.”
In Deren’s world, an angler at heart is the best thing you can be. He describes many people as competent anglers or good anglers; he describes some as enthusiastic anglers; only a very few does he describe as anglers at heart. When I asked him what distinguishes the few anglers at heart from the fifty-four million other people who fish in this country, he said, “It’s the call of the wild, the instinct of the hunt. It’s a throwback to the forest primeval. It’s the feeling of being in a state of grace in a magnificent outdoor cathedral. Either you have it or you don’t—it’s inborn. The first time I went into the woods, it was as if I had been there before.” He looked at me significantly.
“You mean … like in a previous life?” I asked.
“Well, that would be stretching it. Let’s just say I didn’t have too many surprises. I could sit all day and watch a field mouse fifteen feet away, watch a bird in a tree huntin’ bugs—sometimes they’re comical as hell. People would say to me, ‘What in the world do you do in the woods that long?’ Well, Christ, you never run out of things to do in the woods. The woods are a constant unfolding story. But it wasn’t the same if there was anything man-made in view. If you thought of man at all, it was a man who had gone through there silently. Maybe in some long-forgotten time an Indian who went to join his ancestors long before the Norsemen came to the American coast set foot on that same spot when he was following the buffalo. Or maybe it was pristine, the way the Lord of the cathedral made it. The romance of fishing isn’t all just fish.”
In The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton says, “For Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice, but he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practiced it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be like virtue, a reward to itself.”
More men than women fish. Sometimes this works out fine, but other times the shadow of angry excluded wives and girlfriends falls across the sport, and things get depressing. About women in angling, Deren says, “The Angler’s Roost was the first place I know of that trained women. We pioneered in that field. A lot of women were getting fed up with this business of getting left home on the weekends, and so their husbands brought them to us and we trained them. Later on, the women we trained became the nucleus that infected a lot of other women. Of course, you had to indoctrinate them properly. Sit them on a rock and let the bugs chew them up and then ask them if they like it and you’re going to get a negative answer. But if you can inculcate the angling mystique into them, you’ve got yourself a hell of a fishing partner. Some parts of some rivers had places where a female couldn’t manage, and they needed different equipment sometimes, because their muscle structure is different from men’s. But they became good casters easier than men, and they became experts with flytying and flies, because of their inherent gentility.”
Deren’s wife, Catherine, is a nice-looking woman, who
was wearing slacks and a blouse and had her hair piled up in a bouffant hairdo the one time I saw her in the shop. She was as nice as pie to me then. Her perfume was unusual in that room filled with the smells of fly-tying cement, rubber, canvas, and True cigarette smoke. Another time, I saw her on the street, and she had just had some dental work done and she was really in pain and did not want to talk at all.
In The Origins of Angling, the author, John McDonald, says that angling existed in the ancient world, and that our knowledge of modern angling dates from 1496, when A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, by Dame Juliana Burners, was published in England. He says that hunting and falconry were the sports of medieval chivalry, that books on those sports had existed for centuries, that the publication of the Treatyse occurred at about the same time as the decline of chivalry, and that the Treatyse is addressed to all who are, in its words, “virtuous, gentle, and freeborn,” rather than just to the nobility. He says that it cannot be definitely proved that Dame Juliana Berners wrote the book, as people say, or that she was a nun, as people also say. He says that people fished with tackle that was basically the same as that described in the Treatyse until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the invention of a better reel, of upstream fishing, and of the trout fly that floated rather than sank changed the sport tremendously. He says that over the centuries there has been much argument about trout-fly patterns, that the Treatyse presented twelve trout flies, for the different months of the year, as if they stood for immutable truths, that these twelve ruled for a hundred and seventy-five years, until Charles Cotton’s Instructions
How to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream introduced sixty-five new fly patterns, that in the eighteenth century Richard and Charles Bowlker entered the discussion with their A Catalogue of Flies Seldom Found Useful to Fish With, and that the dispute continues to the present. The idea is that some anglers like to use the flies that have always worked, while others like to experiment. McDonald says, “The trout fly is still subject to a constant pull between classicism and innovation. In recorded history, the score is now even: three dominantly classical centuries—the fifteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth; and three innovating—the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.”
So when Deren says, as he often does, “What in the hell is the point of using a famous fly that is some imported concoction from some Scottish salmon river which is probably the result of some guy having a couple of martinis a hundred and fifty years ago, which doesn’t look a thing like any insect on any stream in this country, and which never looked like any insect in the British Isles, either, when you can pick a bug off a rock and copy it and catch a fish?” he speaks in the voice of his century.
Much of angling today is disappointing. Some of the best trout streams in the country are now privately owned, and it costs a lot of money per person for a day of fishing, and you have to get your reservations a long time in advance. The health advisory included in every copy of the fishing regulations for the state of Michigan says that because of the high PCB, PBB, and mercury content of fish from Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and many of their tributary streams, no one should eat more than half a pound per week of fish caught in these waters, and pregnant women or women who one day expect to have children should not eat any at all. The acid rain
that falls in the Catskill Mountains is bad for fish, so now fisheries biologists in New York State are trying to breed a strain of acid-resistant fish. In the absence of clean streams that are nearby and uncrowded and full of wild trout, the modern angler often concentrates on a particular aspect of his sport—one that does not require such a rare set of circumstances. Some people like to cast, and they become tournament casters; some people read about fishing all the time; some people write about it.
Deren concentrates on tackle, of course; he also concentrates on information. Information is vital to angling. The fact that anglers are always hungry for information is probably one of the reasons The Compleat Angler has gone through over three hundred editions since it first appeared. Anglers are always trying to find out how to fish, where to fish, when to fish, what to fish. They always want to know about new killer lures, new techniques, new hot spots nobody else knows. Nowadays, it is often easier to buy the most esoteric piece of equipment than it is to obtain a really great piece of information. An angling writer will tell about the tremendous fishing on some tremendous stream, and then add that he’s not going to give the name or site of the stream, for fear that all his readers will go there and ruin it. Most angling information is subjective. A theory that one person puts into practice with confidence works fine for him but may be worse than useless to the person with no confidence in it—sort of like literature or medicine. Every angler knows one fishing secret that he thinks nobody else knows. One person will say he’s just discovered the greatest fly or the greatest technique of all time, then another will come along and say it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard of, and so on. It is a cliché that fishermen are big liars, but some fishermen actually are. Sometimes the land
of angling information is like that land in the riddle where half the inhabitants tell the truth all the time and the other half lie.
All day long, Deren hands out and receives angling information. People are eager to share with him the one thing they know. Sometimes he will throw cold water on them by giving them an answer that begins with his standard “That’s one of the great misconceptions of fly-fishing.” Sometimes (less often) he will tell them they are absolutely right. His agreement or disagreement is never less than vehement. A very large number of people, in his opinion, have no idea what they are talking about. He says, “You follow something long enough and you realize you know as much as—or more than—anyone else, and that opens up a door. Most of this knowledge is based on having the problem yourself and solving it. A guy can come in here and ask me a question and I’ll know I can answer his Questions 1, 2, and 3. But it might be two years before the guy comes in and asks Question No. 2.” And when Deren is right (as he was when he told me how to catch a trout on that April day) he’s really right. In the world of angling information, he gives the impression of knowing everything, and it is this impression that’s important. If the stream of people who flow through New York bring Deren sustenance, then it is the weedy tangle of angling information, of statement and contradiction and myth and old wives’ tale and supposition and theory and actual fact growing out of five hundred years of angling, that provides him with cover.
I have never fished with Deren, but once (although I did not know it at the time) I fished near Deren. One year I fished in
Montana for two months—mostly in the Yellowstone River, near the town of Livingston. Deren goes out to Montana in the early fall just about every year, so when I got back to New York I went to see him. I asked him if he’d ever been to Livingston. “You’re goddamn right I been to Livingston. I was hit by a truck in Livingston,” he said. (He and his wife were in their camper, pulling into a gas station, when a kid in a pickup truck ran into them. Deren was not hurt, but his wife had to have her arm X-rayed. Nothing broken.) I asked him if he had ever fished at a place where I fished a lot, called the Sheep Mountain Fishing Access. “I remember smells, I remember the way things look, I remember sounds, but I don’t remember names,” he said. (I know this is true. Despite the fact that I have talked to him for many hours, and despite that fact that when I first introduced myself to him he said, “That’s a good name for you,” I doubt very much if Deren has any idea what my name is. But when I call him on the phone he always recognizes my voice right away.)
“Sheep Mountain is downstream from the bridge on the road that leads to White Sulphur Springs,” I said. “The river breaks up into lots of channels there. There are a bunch of islands.”
“Yeah, I know the place you’re talking about. I’ve fished there. Not last time we were out. Last time we camped on the river upstream from there.”
“Just this fall?”
“Yeah. We got to the Yellowstone on October 10.”
October 10 was my last full day in Montana. I fished all day, very hard, because I had not caught the fish I had dreamed I would catch out there. The river had filled up with mud and little pieces of moss right after I arrived, in mid-August—a man in a fishing-tackle store told me that a whole
cliff had washed away in a rainstorm, up in Yellowstone Park, near the river’s source—and it stayed muddy for several weeks. Then, after it cleared, the weather became hot and the water level dropped, and my luck stayed bad. I threw nymphs, among them Deren’s big stone flies, and grasshopper imitations and bee imitations and ants and dragonflies all over the river every day. I caught whitefish and unimpressive trout. (Just before I left, I told that same man in the tackle store the size of the largest trout I’d caught during my stay, and he winced and went “Oooh!”—as if I had shown him a nasty bruise on my forehead.) On my last day, I took a lunch, drove to the fishing access, fished my way several miles upstream, crossed a bridge, and worked my way more than several miles back downstream. When I noticed that it was getting dark, I was on the opposite side of the river from my car, and miles from the bridge. I started through the brush back to the bridge. The beavers who live along the river cut saplings with their teeth at a forty-five-degree angle. These chisel-pointed saplings are unpleasant to fall on. The fishing net dangling from my belt wanted to stop and make friends with every tree branch in Montana. Occasionally I would stop and swear for three or four minutes straight. At one of these swearing stops I happened to look across the river, and I saw my car where I had parked it, lit up in the headlights of a passing car. I calculated: there was my car, just across the big, dark, cold Yellowstone it was many more miles of underbrush to the bridge, and miles from the bridge back to the car; the river was down from its usual level, and I had forded it not far from this spot a few days before; but then that was during the day, and now I couldn’t even see the other bank unless a car drove by. I waded in. I wasn’t wearing waders. It took a second for the water to come through my shoes. It was cold. My pants ballooned
around my shins. The water came past my knees, past my thighs. Then it got really cold. I was trying to keep my shoulders parallel to the flow of the river. The water came to my armpits, and my feet were tiptoeing along the pebbles on the river bottom. I still couldn’t see the bank before me, and when I glanced behind me I couldn’t see that bank, either. I was going downstream fast. Then I realized that, gathered up tight and holding my arms out of the water, I had not been breathing. I took a deep breath, then another, and another. When I did, I saw all around me, under my chin in the dark water, the reflections of many stars. The water was not getting any deeper. I was talking to myself in reassuring tones. Finally, the water began to get shallower. Then it got even shallower. Then I was strolling in ankle-deep water on a little shoal about a quarter mile downstream from my car. I walked up onto the bank and sang a couple of bars from “We Will Rock You,” by Queen. Then I raised my arms and kissed my biceps. I walked to my car and drove back to the house I was staying in and took an Olympia beer out of the refrigerator and drank it. The motto of Olympia beer is “It’s the Water.” That night, I had a physical memory of the river. It was a feeling of powerful current pushing against my left side so insistently that I had to keep overcoming the illusion that I was about to be washed out of bed.
“Did you fish that day, on the tenth? How did you do?” I asked.
“Oh, that first day we were on the Yellowstone I hardly even got out of the camper,” Deren said. “I was pooped from driving, and I honestly did not think that conditions were at all favorable. The water was down, it was too bright. I did take one walk down to the river, for the benefit of these two guys who were following me. When I’m in Montana, guys follow
me wherever I go, because they think I’ll lead them to good fishing. I showed these two guys a piece of holding water where they might find some big trout, and then I went back to the camper. Later that evening, after dark, the guys came to my camper, banged on the door, woke me and Catherine up. They had this goddamn huge brown trout they’d caught, right where I told them. They were pretty happy about that.”
“I didn’t catch any big trout, but that same night I forded the river,” I said.
Deren looked at me. “That’s a big river,” he said.
On the inside of the door to his shop Deren has posted what is probably his most famous maxim: “There don’t have to be a thousand fish in a river; let me locate a good one and I’ll get a thousand dreams out of him before I catch him—and, if I catch him, I’ll turn him loose.”
For Larry Madison, a wildlife photographer and magazine editor who often fished with Deren thirty years ago, a thousand dreams were hundreds more than his patience could stand: “Jim would get in a pool and just pound it all day. I’d say, ‘Oh, Christ, you been in there for ten hours and you haven’t had a hit. Let’s go home.’ Not him.”
Fishing is worth any amount of effort and any amount of expense to people who love it, because in the end you get such a large number of dreams per fish. You can dream about a fish for years before the one moment when your fly is in the right place, when something is about to happen, when you hold your breath and time expands like a bubble until suddenly fish and fisherman feel each other’s live weight. And for a long
time afterward the memory of that moment gives you something you can rest your mind on at night, just before sleep.
(The last word I had from Deren came via my brother-in-law, John Hayes. A few months after this article appeared, in 1982, I moved to Montana. That December, John stopped by the Roost, and Deren asked why I hadn’t been coming around. John said that I was now living in northwest Montana. Deren said, “Tell him, ‘Don’t drown.’” Jim Deren died, and the Angler’s Roost closed, the following year.)