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

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