Jack's Stonefly

Once a year, in late winter, we get together and tie flies. We pull out our favorite patterns and show each other how to tie them, all the while seducing each other with stories of how well these little beauties work. Some are famous for wild, huge flies with tawdry, multicolored tails of krystal flash and great, rolling eyes that glow in the dark, the Las Vegas showgirls of flies. Others tie the tinies, flies that appear to be tied on size 82 hooks, which call for an electron microscope to attach to an impossibly thin leader. It can’t actually be determined if the eye of the hook is in fact big enough to exist in this dimension.

Tiny flies do not require a fly box: a vacation-sized supply of them can be carried under the thumbnail. These babies must imitate bacteria, but the tyers swear that they work. The question is: does the pattern work, or is its ineffectiveness simply too invisible to perceive? Does the fish hit it, or simply suck it in during the act of breathing?

By the end of the evening, we end up with garish things that look like shrimp that have been birthed in a toxic waste dump ("urban naturals," they could be called), and examples that could only be named "Charlie’s Crippled Stillborn Plankton Parachutes."

We had our tying meeting last Monday, and it was during this evening that I was introduced to Jack’s Stonefly, and, in the midst of learning the fly, learned a bit of Jack as well.

Jack sits at the table in a pool of light from his tying lamp, the lenses of his magnifying bifocals catching the gleam and obscuring his eyes from the view of observers. Occasionally he looks over the top rim of the glasses at the person he is addressing, and it is then that you see the years of sunlit water that live in his eyes. His face is burnished with the wind and the reflected light, and the lines there are the recollections of smiles and squints brought on by fish and the life that fishing brings to a man. Jack is very tall and slender, but heavy of bone, his wrists and hands big and knotted, clearly strong. His fingers look enormous as they handle the delicate tying tools, but their surprising dexterity and lightness disclose as he works, trimming a feather to exact proportion with a tiny scissor or laying a strip of loose rabbit hair in the fine link of a dubbing loop.

I like to sit next to him as he works, watching the big hand dip in and out of his wooden tying box. He holds treasure in that box, and the faint whiff of mothballs that emits from it does nothing to take away from the appeal of what he has in there. It is too magnificent a thing to dream of touching, but you can peep if you’re brave, and there are wonders there that can be seen even without digging. There are beautiful feathers and hanks of deer hair and hare’s masks of all colors tucked up among the spools of monocord and the brass tying tools and the jars.

A new fellow asks him, "What do you do when your lacquer dries up?" Jack says, "Throw it away and get some more." The fellow says, "Well, is there a good way to KEEP it from drying up?" "Nope," says Jack. "How do you know when you should get more?" says the fellow. Jack grins and says, "When it’s gone."

He knows it’s a smartassed answer, but he just can’t help himself. He twinkles at the man, letting him know he’s being teased.

I think he’s a bit embarrassed, and that has helped to provoke the orneriness in him. The man has attempted to extract an expert’s secret from him, and his response lets the man know that he has no special power or arcane knowledge influential enough to overcome the natural response of lacquer to air. Jack knows he has a reputation, that there are people who have heard of him and revere him. He’s not comfortable with that, and he teases to get people to know that he doesn’t want the awe, that he will not allow it, whether he needs to stop the fawning by being brusque or aloof or funny—I’ve seen him be all three. But his reputation is well earned, and we are sometimes loathe to let it go, whether he accepts the admiration or not.

Jack works the stonefly, weaving on the creamy, butter-colored yarn that will become the stonefly’s breast, and then takes a wing feather from a jar of cordovan-colored liquid and dries it. Like the master magician he is, he makes a small split in the tip end of the feather’s shaft with a knife, and then peels it down swiftly but carefully. This gets wrapped around the fly, palmered like a hackle, and miraculously the distinct segments of the bug’s body appear, perfect in color and that crunchy texture consistent with the exoskeleton of the real insect. What was once a fuzzy piece of fluff is now a leggy, armored beast, no doubt delectable to a fish. But he’s not done yet. He builds the wing from a patterned feather shaped with those baby scissors, and the eyes from a bit of floss hardened with cement, and the wing case from a folded plume.

It is perfect. It is so indistinguishable from the real thing that I would swat it were it to get into my house.

This is when I like Jack best, and when he surprises me the most. For all his gruffness, apparent in abundance at times, he is utterly gentle and helpful when he is in the presence of people who are just new, just learning. Last year, at a tying class, my son was having a problem with his fly that he just couldn’t seem to manage. From out of nowhere, Jack appeared behind him, and those enormous hands came around from in back of the boy and took hold of the troublesome thing. Jack showed him, with quiet words and slow movements, how to fix it. All hardness left him, all teasing and leg-pulling disappeared. He was patient and kind, as warm as I’ve ever seen a man with a boy.

He has done the same for me as well.

When you show him the desire to learn, when you give him your attention and your honest interest, there is no secret he won’t show you, no lesson he isn’t willing to share. The only barter you need make is your time for his skill.

Jack sits back in his chair and stretches his long muscles, and the man asks him if he has a business card. When he opens his battered wallet to see if he has any business cards on him (usually not), there is a black and white picture of a pretty, dark haired woman in there, a picture that was clearly taken decades ago, but a picture displayed so prominently that you know that this is the way he still sees this woman, no matter what time has actually done to her. I think that what Jack knows about time is that you can hold it off, that you can carry things and people you love with you and hold the years at bay, because in your heart and in your mind you are still the true and steady person you always were, and you still cherish the things that used to be more than you fear the things that are. Time is not something that takes away so much as it is something to be given to, to be used to its fullest advantage and filled with all the goodness and devotion that you can give it. With Jack, you cannot say that you don’t have the time—time is there for the taking. All you have to do is put your hand to it.

Time is something that you make, for the things that you love and that are important to you, and for him if you want to learn the magic.

He takes the new fly out of the vice and tosses it with a bounce out of his hand and onto the table, as if it were just a scrap, a throw-away. It is a fishing fly, no more, no less, and one that you could learn to tie if you just gave yourself the practice, just the way that you could learn to pull silk scarves out of thin air, if you only had the time.

--Beth Wilson--
Winter 2001 Issue