Casting Practice

We stood on the ten-yard line of the middle school football field as the sun was receding to the tree tops, and evening shadows began to lie across the green turf. A few high schoolers threw a frisbee to one another and watched curiously as Dad assembled his five-weight Redington fly rod, likely wondering what a middle aged man and his daughter hoped to catch on dry land with no water in sight.

Unconcerned and unhurried, Dad threaded the line through the rod, finally tying a small piece of pink yarn on the end of the tippet in place of a hook. With smooth, expert movements he tugged down on the line while flicking the rod backward, and then tugged once more with a forward flick of the rod sending the line whizzing through the rod and out toward the fifty-yard line. A double-haul cast, he explained, and watched the progress of the yarn across the field, hopeful as a quarterback throwing a football for a winning touchdown.

I ran to see where the "hook" had landed, and found it lying a yard shy of the thirty-five yard mark.

"Seventy-two feet!" I shouted back to the expectant figure, who grimaced his disapproval and reeled the line in. The goal had been seventy-five. He then held the rod out to me.

"Want to try?"

I hadn't held fly rod since I was twelve year-old on the North Fork of the American River in the Sierra Nevadas, standing at dusk as my father hooked a tiny Rainbow Trout and handed it to me to throw back into the eddying pool. I held the wee fish in my hand, looked into its clear black eye and, spooked into action, hurriedly threw it back toward the water. It flopped instead on the granite, thrashed its body back and forth and--I swear it-- had a look of terror on its fish-face. I screamed loud enough to scare every trout within three miles away: "Daddy Daddy! He is going to die!" And that was the last fish my father caught that evening. It was also the end of my fishing career to that point. From then on I would happily slither and hop miles up and downriver with Dad, but only as a spectator.

No fish were involved in casting with pink yarn, though. I held the Redington in my hands. I flicked the rod forward, and the line tentatively whooshed through the reel. I noted the barely suppressed glee on Dad's face, his prodigal daughter returned to the religion of her forefathers.

And now the instruction:

"Ten and two, Sarah B, just imagine a clock: pull the line and go backward to 2, then forward to 10. Let the rod work, and keep your elbow still."

Tug. Backward. Forward. The rod tip bent and the line sailed in a satisfying whir. I laughed, feeling a rush of affection for the Redington. What was it Gus calls his rod in The River Why? Rodney. Yes. I could now imagine naming one's fly rod, watching as the one I held so gracefully responded to the motion of my hand.

The tippet floated down at the twenty-yard line, landing thirty feet from here I stood.

"Thirty feet, budgie!" Dad crowed while crouching over the bit of yarn, "When we try this on the water I guess fish within thirty feet of you ought to be worried!"

He looked proud and paternal standing there with a little bow of pink yarn pinched between his fingers that I grinned and tried again.

This wasn't bad at all.