By Neil King Jr.
For two hours I drove past soybeans gone yellow in the fields and up a washboard road into the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains and then down to where I am standing now, ankle deep in the Rapidan, contemplating human fallibility.
There are fish at my feet surely, and fat sycamore leaves falling clumsily into the pools upriver, carried in the current like brittle barges of orange and brown. I can barely see any of that because I am looking through clip-on 3X glasses, trying to tie a knot. The golden trees, the river’s sparkle, the two monarchs flirting in the sunlight: The entire rest of the world is all a blur, well out of focus, on the other side of the divide from where I stand, trying to tie this knot while also thinking about knots and clumsiness and our own perfectibility.
There are a large number of knots in fly fishing and all are in their own way lessons in ingenuity and human shortcomings. Clinch, Trilene, Nail, Perfection, Blood, Albright, Davy, Double Davy, Surgeon’s. They have many names and stories and purposes. Some fly-fishers swear by one and spurn the other. I have tied some knots well and lost fish to not having tied them well enough. I have tied the ones where the faintingly thin line must first make seven loops around itself, double back through the opening near the fly, and then back again on itself, and have cursed when my fingers in the morning chill turn into thumbs and the line won’t cooperate, won’t do as I think I am telling it to do, and unravels upon completion.
I am tying this knot now because of a prior failure, because I lost a fly to a high maple limb behind me where that fly now lives, embedded in the bark, a length of broken tippet hanging from its eye. That fly may reside there now for a decade or more, looking down upon the river. And it got there because for a flash I forgot about that limb and the threat it posed. I got distracted by what was in front of me and forgot what was behind, and overhead. A lapse of mindfulness like so many that break the ethereal rhythms. Because of that lapse the line went suddenly taut and I had caught the wrong thing in the wrong direction.
So now I am starting over, affixing new flies to my line. The particular knot I am trying to tie is a clinch knot onto the hook of a nymph so to allow another nymph to sink enticingly below it. This isn’t the hardest of knots to tie, but it has its dexterity challenges, particularly when you transfer the knot from the tip of your finger to the hook itself, a feat I have yet to master. Twice I fumble it and the line comes loose and I have to start again. I grit my teeth and curse, aware both of the profound finitude of this man here trying to tie this knot and the infinitude of the river flowing by at his feet.
You learn in fly fishing that there are the knots you tie, the deliberate and intentional knots, and then there are the knots you make through sheer stupidity, the tangles of line that defy the laws of physics and explain why mathematicians devote entire careers to studying black holes and the explosiveness of particles arrayed as string and the order that resides within chaos. You make an errant cast and snag yonder willow and my what a mess you have made. You step through water and go to meet the mess, to untangle it and return it to the linearity of what came before, and you can’t believe the new universe of interwoven monofilament that one bad move hath wrought.
In those knots, too, you find an order as you disentangle them, just as you find an order in tying an intentional knot with care and deliberateness.
Fish aside, these are some of the wonders of fly fishing that explain the crazy why of it. Why you drive all that way to stand in that river trying to tie that pesky knot. There is the spider’s web over the river that stops you midstride. You cannot explain how it was built, or the ease with which you ruin it by mistake. There is the sudden emergence of the delicate mayflies, cavorting perilously at the moment over the water. I glance over my glasses to watch them, there but for a day, a few hours. Albrecht Durer in 1495 did an elaborate engraving that featured a tiny mayfly in the corner, Holy Family with Mayfly, some called it. Heaven, earth, eternity, brevity, all of it together. There is a river in the engraving, too, of course, and a bridge, and a man in a boat.
Finally, I get the knot right, and slip it smoothly onto the hook of the nymph. I pull it tight, and clip the tag. I have improved in tying that knot. I am getting better at it. Profoundly fallible, but improving. There for a moment, moving on. I put the 3X glasses away and the wider world falls back into focus: the river slipping into the gorgeous pool, bringing leaves down with it, and oxygen for the fish I will now return to trying to catch.
–Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and a writer who, when not at home in Washington DC, is very happy to be elsewhere.