The idea for this
collection of obscure thoughts and trivial observations from the mud began
in early 2010. I was in one of those transitional places that life puts us in
and desperate to find something my mind could focus on that didn’t involve
lawyers or money. So I bought a ninety-nine cent notebook at Target and started
putting words in it. It took three years
of thinking about it, reading every fly fishing blog I could find, blind
writing exercises and lots of pages from that notebook being ripped out and thrown
away before finding the courage to hit the publish button the first time.
I found a few surviving
pages from that first notebook this morning filed away in an old folder in the back
of my desk at the office. I had been looking for them since teaching a fly
tying class over the winter and talking about a very simple fly that had been
shown to me by an older gentleman nine years ago. My encounter with him was
brief and random but became part of the underpinning of whatever this thing has
become.
It was a Friday
night and I had been on a job site in Boston all day. Knowing beforehand that I’d
be coming out of the city late in the day and not wanting to sit in Cape
traffic on Route 3 I had thrown my gear in the truck with the plan of stopping
off in Weymouth and fishing one of my old haunts. It wasn’t until I got there
and reached in the back for my waders that I realized they were still sitting
in the driveway at home. I knew the water was a little too cool to comfortably wet
wade but the sun was still up and the air was warm. So I changed into a pair of
shorts I had remembered, laced the Timberland’s back up, walked into the water
and started casting.
I was a few fish
into the evening when the sun fell from the sky and the air cooled as it met
the water. I started to shiver a little and stood there for a few moments
watching the skyline of downtown Boston start to light up. That’s when I saw
him, off to my right fitted out in hip waders, a flannel shirt and one of those
old caps that train engineers used to wear. I walked out of the water, sat on a
rock where I had left my gear bag and a jacket and tried to warm up as the old
timer hooked up on nearly every cast. He was smoking a cigar as he fished and its
sweet smell washed over me bringing back memories of watching Pudge and Yaz
from the bleacher seats at Fenway.
I was thinking about
heading for home when he looked back, walked out of the water, stopped in front
of me and introduced himself as, “Name’s O’Reilly.”
“You lasted longer
than I thought you would.”
I laughed and said, “Yeah,
I forgot my waders in the driveway this morning. I’m an idiot.”
He took a puff off
what was left of the cigar, looked back at the city skyline and said, “Doesn’t
make you an idiot. I forget things every day.”
He leaned his rod up
against a boulder and sat down on a rock next to me. There was enough light
left that I could see it was an old Fenwick rigged with a Pflueger. I liked him
immediately. We talked for about twenty minutes…about striped bass in the
seventies, the crash of the population and how it had come back, his twenty
year hitch in the Navy and how much the world had changed in his seventy-four
years. He pointed to the lights of
Boston with the cigar in his hand.
“Life used to be
simple but the world got real complicated, real fast. It all goes too fast, no
one slows down anymore.”
I nodded in
agreement and we sat in silence.
Taking the last puff
on his cigar he looked at me and said, “Life is like this cigar, at first you
think it’ll last for a long time, you can see it, feel it, taste it, smell it,
watch it burn to the very end and then linger in the smoke until it disappears.
And then it’s all gone.”
He turned away,
looked toward Boston again and quietly said, “I’m in the smoke now.”
He sighed, turned
back toward me and reached into his shirt pocket and brought out something
rolled up in aluminum foil. I thought it would be another cigar as he unrolled
the foil but it turned out to be four flies about five inches long. He held one
up, just a simple reverse tied bucktail with some flash in the core, and then
handed them all to me.
He pointed at my rod
and said, “I don’t know what you’re using, but this is the only fly I ever use.
It’s what has worked for me all these years. You take ‘em, kid, I don’t think I’ll
be needing them anymore.”
He stood up and
pointed to a man not much older than me standing under the trees behind us and
said, “Guess it’s time to go. That’s my boy, keeping an eye on me like his
mother used to. Used to be I took him to the playground on Friday night, now he
brings me out to play.”
I walked back to the
parking lot with them and shook hands with my new friend as his son helped him into
the car. He broke down the rod and as he put it in the trunk he explained his
father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and that while the days were
the hardest, his dad seemed to have more clarity in the evening hours so on
good days they would come out to make a few casts. I shook his hand and he
thanked me for spending a few minutes with his dad on what was probably his
last time out fishing.
I’ve forgotten the
fish that I caught that night but I’ll never forget Mr. O’Reilly. I fished
those flies he gave me all that season. They caught just as well as other flies
I used but a fish on those flies had more meaning. I still build a few of them every
season and think of him every time I tie one on to the leader.
The smoke may be
gone but the story lives.
From the early pages
15 May 2019
