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My brother and I found it mortifying as kids, melting into our seats with embarrassment. I have long since found it charming. A year ago, after almost three decades in Michigan and Chicago, I went east for a late-bloomer jaunt in grad school and to finally see how things felt on the mythical edges of the country. I spent the last week in Chicago, reliving my mids, drinking beers at bars with Old Style beer signs out front and swimming in the cold, urban lake, the skyscrapers bobbing above me. The day before I left, my friend Ryan had blown my hair straight and dyed it blond in his hip West Loop salon.
Today, in this tackle shop in Northern Michigan, my hair still straight but pulled back, I feel too precious, too clean. I wish my hair were three-days dirty and matted to my head. I was home visiting my parents when I decided to ask my dad if we could go fishing. I was bored in the suburbs, and the long summer evenings and loud cicadas reminded me of when my dad would take my brother on fishing weekends. I have no memory of our parents gendering my brother and I, giving him trucks and Hardy Boys books, me dolls and Little Women.
In reality, it is just another way to fish! Admittedly, as you become more involved in fly fishing, you will experience a transformation in the way you view yourself. Beginner's Guide to Fly Fishing. Fly fishing is different from standard fishing because the bait used for fly fishing must be light enough to float on the surface of .
But divisions came anyway, and my brother learned to cast a fly rod while I never did. My father talks loudly, pointing out everything in the shop. This is a special bag for hauling your pole. Twenty different colors of fishing line! We are both in our early 30s, but the mismatch between us is striking. He saunters like a grown man, I cower like a child. From here, Lansing feels cosmopolitan, a place where frivolous people live. New York and Chicago seem in another universe.
I wanted to come here to be in a place my father and brother love, to try out a sport I have long thought poetic, to see what it was my brother learned on weekends up north with my father. I wanted to trespass into the world of men and see how I faired there. I wanted to feel the gray area of the middle of the gender spectrum, to see if there might be a way for the femme and the butch to coexist. I am too small, too feminine, too urban.
I feel childish as I follow my dad around the shop, like a teenager rolling her eyes at his enthusiasms. As I touch the flies and the nets, I also feel too old to be so new at something. It feels a bit too late to learn. Growing up, I believed in the poetry of fly-fishing, but I participated in the activity of it very little. My mother often told the story of how, when he was writing his dissertation in graduate school, he rewarded himself for each page of intellectual work completed with five minutes of winding thread around metal.
He is a man who happily spreads butter on cake and has always worked hour days. As a kid, I would sometimes go down to the basement and pet the pelts of quail and beaver he kept there. They were hypnotic — delicate and tactile and practical. Once, when I was about 8, I went bluegill fishing with a friend in a suburban pond. Within an hour, I had been bitten by a duck and had snagged a hook on my cheek.
I was sure the duck was rabid and the hook was rusty. My mother made me get a tetanus shot, and the whole incident was all but the end of my fishing career. My dad thought it was hilarious. But I only felt confidence later, when I was around friends who had never tried to thread tent poles through nylon — people who grew up in big coastal cities who took my status as a Michigan native as proof of some quality of ruggedness.
It was only in relief, juxtaposed against someone who had never seen a camp stove lit or a fish flopping and bleeding on the floor of a boat, that I seemed expert. They cast their lines into a stretch of river frequented by Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway, a place where maples hang over the copper water and mourning doves hoot for most of the day.
On those weekends, it seemed, the boys trained to be men and the girls trained to be women. My mom and I stayed home to paint our nails and watch romantic comedies. My brother and father came back with tales of salad dressing made out of pickle juice, pranks played, and enormous fish caught and released. My mother was satisfactorily grossed out by the stories and their carload of grimy, fishy equipment.
She refused to let them in the house until they had hosed themselves off. It was that we both wanted our childhoods to be capacious enough for both. Gender is so often an accidental inheritance — one that comes despite best efforts to disrupt the binary, to teach girls about astronauts and boys about baking. But normative ideas of gender are everywhere, and they infect us with notions of masculinity and femininity that take grasp of our unconscious. I still love painted nails and romantic comedies, but I never really got the hang of all the rituals of femininity.
I have a cousin who travels with a caboodle full of makeup and potions. She dabs serum on her eyelids to make her lashes grow at night, and has special balm that comes in a metallic silver orb that will plump her lips as she sleeps. She wakes up two hours before she is supposed to be at the hospital where she works as an anesthesiology resident to paint her face with shadows and light, using the tricks of portraiture to make her cheekbones more prominent, her eyes more awake.
I only wash my hair a few times a week and feel like a clown when I wear lipstick. But I love the transformative potential and the regulating ritual of beauty potions.
Although I forget often enough, I occasionally dab my lips with the grenade of lip-plumping Vaseline, and have, after 15 years of trying, gotten decent at drawing on eyeliner. At 27, I learned to walk in high heels, and I still do it regularly. That trick requires delicacy and forcefulness.
You must imagine yourself as a ballerina and a boss. Without thinking about it, I offered to help him. My parents would never have let me graduate high school without knowing how to plunge a toilet, install a shelf, mow a lawn — skills that I suppose someone might consider male if it were , but are really only markers of competence. It seemed neighborly to offer. I had let my guard down in that Brooklyn bistro, where we sat eating overpriced burgers by the light of Edison bulbs.
But I had performed my role too.
I waited a week to break up with him. The gendered rituals seemed exotic and cloistered. My father believes that it is necessary to spend a long time at the fishing shop before fishing can begin. I thought it was all supposed to start early — the fish bit only in the mornings or some such thing. He reassures me that the fish will be there regardless. He tells me about every fly and talks me through the basics of lures and lead lines. The Hex Hatch, I come to learn, is the most coveted time of year to fish.
Hexagenia limbata are a specific breed of mayfly that emerge all at once in early July. When the flies are nymphs, they live in the river.
In early summer, as the water warms up, the nymphs rise to the surface of the water and their shells split open. The adult emerges, largely defenseless. These flies are easy prey for fish, who rise to the surface of the river and open their gulping fish mouths to suck in the bugs.
And if you plan on fishing in locks or weirs on the River Thames, you will need an additional licence. The tree dips into the water and the current tugs at its leaves. It is quiet and wild, transcendent and feral. There are three main things to keep in mind; the weight, length and action of a rod. My brother and I found it mortifying as kids, melting into our seats with embarrassment. You need waders to fly-fish.
This, in turn, makes the fish easy prey for the fisherman, who can float his fly on the river, tied to look just like the Hexagenia limbata , and snag trout after trout. There is another stop before we end up at the river, though. We go to Gates Lodge for breakfast, which is quickly becoming lunch. It strikes me as poetic, like something out of a Carson McCullers novella, and my father explains it is a pun about the Hex Hatch — the flies are larva in June and they hatch at night. When my dad and brother came back from their fishing trips, they talked about Gates Lodge like it was the Shangri-la.
They spent much of their time in cabins by the river. I imagined them in bunk beds, cooking hot dogs over a camp stove, setting their farts on fire. At the end of every trip, they cleaned themselves up and went to Gates for a proper meal. In my mind, Gates was a place of white tablecloths and delicate, flaky whitefish dinners. It seemed to exist in another time, with wicker fish baskets and leather-buckled tackle boxes, Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway sitting next to each other in the corner, discussing poetry and fish.
Instead, we have a seat at a lacquered wooden table with paper placemats. We are in a room full of men. No Teddy or Ernest, but plenty of late-middle-aged, potbellied fishermen there for a hearty breakfast. The only other woman is our waitress, who appears to be in her 50s and seems to know everyone so looks at us skeptically.
Part of the work of living in the Midwest is to always be guessing at what everyone is actually thinking as they ask you how your job is going or offer you second helpings of potatoes. And … bacon chocolate chip pancakes? He has been diabetic since he was a teenager, but has never taken the sugar restrictions very seriously. I first learned about ice floes and fishing shanties and the ways of men secondhand.
My father read my brother and me the literature of outdoor adventuring at night before we went to bed as we sat at the kitchen table each with a bowl of Cheerios. If we were out of milk, he would grab the orange juice. Swiss Family Robinson , White Fang , and Huckleberry Finn were in heavy rotation, as was a series of satirical books that told tall tales of men eating gross things while hunting. My father seemed to like the self-reliance, the fraternity, and domestic activity of outdoor life.
The stories were of domestication and danger; it seemed that to live outdoors was to take up and control all the space there was, to turn trees and rivers into houses and wild animals into pets. It was my brother who found A River Runs Through It , that most American and romantic story of fly-fishing and brotherly love. We read it to each other on Sunday nights in a ritual that was as close as we ever came to church. My brother once wrote me a card with the last paragraph of the book scrawled out in the penmanship of a seventh-grade boy: On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.
Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters. There seemed to be something mysterious in the river, something transformative in the act of fishing itself that would change a man or show him a kind of grace. I wanted access to that mystery. But there were also long sections of the story that described fishing: Those parts were boring to me — I never knew what they were talking about.
But my brother loved them. By then, he was going on fishing trips with my dad, and knew the specifics of fishing.
He knew that it was not only a romantic undertaking, but a practical one. I think he saw that the mystery came from it being both. As a kid, I had imagined my father learning to fish in the classical way in his backyard, the oldest boy in a family of 10 children. I saw this in movies and saw my brother learn that way in our own backyard. It seemed fitting that my dad would have learned that way, too. My dad and his brothers were outdoorsmen who thought of hunting and fishing as casual weekend sports.
They often went deer hunting and came back with a couple of squirrels. As we drove north for our trip, I asked to hear the story of how my father learned to fish — one I thought I had heard many times before. It turns out, he had only learned bait fishing as a kid. His father and his uncles fished off a boat, using live bait kept in a coffee can. Stoned on the quad in front of their dorm room at Michigan State University, they flicked the rod from 10 to 2. And if you plan on fishing in locks or weirs on the River Thames, you will need an additional licence. Find out which equipment you need and some handy tips below.
Beginners will need the following essential fly fishing equipment to get started: There are three main things to keep in mind; the weight, length and action of a rod. Length Most multi-purpose rods are around nine feet in length. Longer rods tend to work better if you can cast long distances without too many obstacles in the way, and shorter rods are better in areas with lots of obstructions trees and bushes for example. Weight When it comes to weight, a mid-weight rod is typically used for beginners.
Rods start at weight 2 and go all the way up to 7 7 being for larger fish like salmon, and 2 for smaller fish. Your best bet is to meet somewhere in the middle and go for a 5, but do chat to the shop assistant and explain your needs. Lots of beginners go for a fast action rod as they are easier to cast long distances. A fly reel is essential in terms of basic fly fishing gear.
Used as a holder for your next purchase — the fly line should match your rod in weight. Check your fishing rod — it should show the recommended line size by the handle, or check with the manufacturer. For beginners, purchase a floating line, as you can use it for surface and sinking flies. Casting can take a long time to perfect so be patient and take the time to practice in your garden before taking to the water, and braving more difficult conditions. And tread carefully to avoid any slips.