The Fish's Eye by Ian Frazier Read Free Book Online

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