“Fly fishing,” Wikipedia tells us, “is an angling method in which an artificial ‘fly’ is used to catch fish.” To catch fish so that s/he can then release them, the fly fisher(wo)man must make something artificial—feathers, fur, thread, a barbless hook—appear Real, a skill that involves getting things Right: the cast, the presentation, the fly itself.

Those casts above the water—that back and forth, back and forth to unloose more and more line—are called false casts, the set-up for the Real. They remind me of sentences, one after another, wanting to be Real, destined to be false, because of the sentence’s nature, its reliance on language, something that isn’t the Real itself, but merely its representation. Its stand-in.

In fly fishing, one is rewarded with a trout. My favorite is the marbled-green native brook trout, flecked with tiny blue-haloed red spots, its red fins edged in white. Cast after cast, false, false, false, Real, now and then a rise, the line pulling tight, a flash of something elusive, briefly caught, held, released.

In fly fishing, one casts the line, the fly’s weight too insignificant; once cast, the fly, one might argue, is everything. But the whole shebang—from that first false cast to that last flash of speckled green—feels like it exists as one thing: that attempt to grasp a submerged, secret, brilliant thing with the tiniest of forms. An ephemeral world, like the life cycle of the fly. Only the stream lasts, its deep banks a sign of its forever-ness.

The first real sign of age for me: I couldn’t put the tiny tippet through the eye of the tiny fly and thus had to buy magnifying glasses. A world of very tiny things. That invisible connection of the hair-thin tippet to a barely visible midge fly, the imperceptible drag on the line that makes the trout see that the fly is not floating naturally, the camouflaged trout, the secret currents, the mind drifting off just as the trout rises.

In my fictional childhood, I had a grandfather who fished without hooks and in a small leatherbound notebook marked with a √ each trout that rose to his fly. Imagine someone not needing the strike, that screech of the line, flesh.

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