By Ethan Hollifield
“…It’s not fly fishing, if you’re not looking for answers to questions.”
– Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Many dedicated anglers have fish embedded into their minds that continually haunt them. These are fish that maybe come once or twice in an angler’s life, if they’re lucky enough. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the memories of myself connecting and even landing some large fish that others would only dream about possessing. It’s the ones that always tended to slip from my grasp, despite me being so close to outwitting them, that I tend to remember more so than the ones I placed my own hands on. As I matured, I began to understand more that these seemingly uncatchable fish were metaphoric in nature: in that they represented more of my own experiences in life outside of fishing than I realized.
When I was younger, all I wanted to really pursue when it came to fly fishing was catching at least one “big” fish on every outing. At one point, I had seemingly struck it rich with a yearlong streak of hooking into some monster rainbow and brown trout. What I quickly began to realize, however, was that these were fish that had such qualities of intelligence and cunning that my attempts to net one, more often than not, failed horribly. These are fish that still haunt me and which I still perceive as uncatchable.
Norman Maclean in the book “A River Runs Through It” had interpreted the notion that the stories in our lives are more like rivers rather than books themselves. I’ll be so rash as to take this a step further and compare life and fly fishing as almost one in the same. As I grew older, I began to understand more the idea of what it meant to hook into and lose one of these uncatchable fish. With age, comes experience. And with experience, comes success and failure. Failure comes with the notion of something being unattainable: getting fired from a job, a failed relationship, and losing a big brown trout are things that come to mind. However, through God’s grace we have the ability to enter the microcosm world of fly fishing and experience these successes and failures without any consequence other than maybe a broken off fly.
I appreciate more, the sense of place that is so prevalent to me on a trout stream rather than just the idea of “catching” anymore. Trout streams have magic to them, where questions that aren’t even a conscious thought can make their presence known and yet, somewhat impossible to grasp. This revelation became so much more of a reality in my post college years where I have experienced more “uncatchable fish” on and off the water than I ever had prior. I believe it was then that the whole idea of what fly fishing, and life itself, really meant unfolded in my minds eye. They both are in pursuit of something uncatchable, whether it’s a trout or otherwise. I still don’t believe I’ve fully found an answer as to how to catch these creatures, or rather, to avoid failure in life altogether. If anything, I suppose this means I need to go fishing.
Ethan Hollifield is an Environmental/Physical Science Teacher and is also a guide for Southern Appalachian Anglers.