'The Fly-Fisher's Guide to Romance'

It was while trying to drop a big bushy fly in The Impossible Hole (Phoenicia, N.Y.) that I came up with the title of my book: “The Fly-Fisher’s Guide to Romance.�

The publishers, Both Hands and A Flashlight Press, have been bugging me for weeks for a title. “Bite Me� was already taken. I was at a loss.

I was also at a loss as to how to insinuate something into The Impossible Hole, a deep run carved out of the clay during the last big flood in the Catskills, and guarded by a tangletatious portal of dead trees.

The Hole is in a part of my home stream, the Woodland Valley Creek, that used to mean an easy jaunt through the woods and now requires an arduous trek through the World’s Thickest Pricker Bushes, a scramble down an eroded streambed, and much tending to wounds.

The flood — 2004, I believe — altered whole stretches of the stream, including the place where I caught my first trout on a fly, with nobody around.

This event established a pattern of behavior that inspired the book title. Inevitably, criticisms of my habits from the various ladies I have known center on the fact that I would rather stand in the rain, alone, bleeding from thorn scratches and nursing a slightly sprained ankle, trying to drop a weighted nymph into a trout pool singularly unsuited for fishing, than do almost anything else.

“Obsessive,� they say. “Unhealthy. Isolating. Weird.�

I can’t resist the smarty-pants retort. I am the man who, asked if I liked arugula, replied, “Is that near Antigua?�

Which is why I am going to call my book “The Fly-Fisher’s Guide to Romance.� It’s ironic. Or post-modern, I can never remember the difference.

The brook, when running high, actually fishes rather well. Treacherous wading, of course, but once I get on the left bank (for a right-handed angler) it’s a fairly clear shot.

Woodland Valley Creek is a fair-to-middling sized freestone affair, and usually an 8-foot rod is more than long enough.

But when it’s running high I use a 9-foot six-weight so I can chuck big flies and reach the opposite side without too much drag.

This past Sunday, with the stream running around 200 cubic feet per second (as opposed to the average 82 cfs), the water was clear enough to see where I was stepping into trouble — and clear enough to watch the brown trout, peckish after all the commotion in the neighborhood, chase my big stonefly and caddis imitations.

I had numerous visits from fingerling browns, with heads smaller than the flies I was throwing.

But I also located the adults, often holed up anywhere outside the rushing current, just waiting for Providence to drop lunch on their noggins.

But I just couldn’t get anything to drop into The Impossible Hole. The current swept everything into the tree branches so fast even a weighted nymph with two pieces of split shot didn’t go to the bottom.

On the way out, through a now-dark thicket of prickers and with a rising respect for the bears that barge through them with such impunity, I met two young men, fly rods in hand. Early teens, about the same age I was when I began fishing solo.

We shot the breeze for a bit and moved along, and I realized that the title for the next non-existent book will have to be “Consarnit! Why Today’s Fly-Fishing Isn’t As Good As It Was, By Cracky!�