At the Wulff School we’d cast fly rods most of the weekend, but we hadn’t fished, and before we left New York State we needed to catch a fish. We had a mile of private access to the Beaverkill, and Monday morning we’d booked Craig Buckbee as a guide. Saturday and Sunday we’d fished once or twice before or after class, but the class day was long, and the bar at the Beaverkill was very good, and practicing Bach on the porch with the guitar and a martini in the evening or the guitar and coffee in the morning was a lot easier than climbing into waders. Plus it’s hard to drink a martini while fly fishing. That’s where bait fishing has fly fishing beat cold.
Craig was one of the Wulff School instructors. He tournament casts, guides in New York and Pennsylvania, and teaches casting in Central Park. That last didn’t seem odd to me, but then I realized that most people may not as a matter of course practice casting in urban parks. Thinking about it later there aren’t many places it would be more fun to learn to fly cast than Central Park. I bet you could aim your casts at those little sailboats.
The manager at the Inn told us we’d done the school right, staying over that morning to fish. The Catskills have had their moments: 19th century fly fishing, Borscht Belt resorts, and the Hudson River School. I told her that a young colleague had mentioned that her husband wanted to go to the Catskills, and she said that the Catskills were again a hot outdoors destination, especially for young folk out of New York City. They come to camp and fish and mountain bike and kayak and Nordic ski and feed the ticks. I guess if I were 30 years old and in the City I’d be there as well. I guess come to think of it I was there. I’m such a hipster.
The locals told us that the Beaverkill Valley Inn and the surrounding area had once been owned by Larry. The locals we talked to all mentioned Larry. Larry turned out to be Laurance Rockefeller Jr., great grandson of John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil (and business partner of Henry Flagler). He’s a noted Republican environmentalist, which is a species that as a conservationist he couldn’t save from extinction. Mr. Rockefeller Jr. has spent big bucks on land preservation, both in New York and out West, and on the Upper Beaverkill he seems to have done smart things. He took acreage and resold it in 20 acre plots protected by conservation easements. He renovated and sold the Inn as a country club to the new residents. There’s no golf at the club, but there is croquet.
He also did about a zillion dollars of stream restoration, and Craig pointed out where huge granite blocks had been carefully arranged in the river to preserve trout habitat. He did not, on the other hand, spend a zillion dollars on tick eradication, or on mosquito prevention, or, as my new discovery on this summer’s list of insect horrors, doing to death the black flies. Black flies love me. I am their new Man God, and they each want a piece of me as a remembrance.
Maybe it was so even before all the work, but Mr. Rockefeller’s Beaverkill is as picturesque and inviting as a trout river can be. There was no covered bridge where we fished, and someone should point that out to Larry, but there was a mighty picturesque one just down the road. As a general matter trout live in pretty places, and this pretty place was all a trout could desire.
Meanwhile in this pretty place Craig had spent the past two days teaching us, and I worried getting out on the river that he would constantly remind me to relax my shoulder. He didn’t. He was low key and quietly humorous. He asked about Kris’s preferences, and I told him that Kris would be happiest if he gave her plenty of time to flail away on her own, and he did. He paid attention to her, but it wasn’t intrusive, and it was always just enough. Same for me. He didn’t correct my sloppy casts, even though I figured he ached to do so. This was about fishing, and he talked about the water and helped me fish.
He must have changed out my flies a half dozen times in that four hours. I vaguely remember fishing small streamers with a wet dropper down and across and on the swing. Did I do that? I think I did that, but at this point things blend and that may have happened two days later in Vermont. I think though that that’s how I caught my first small brown. It came off the hook at the net, and I didn’t get a picture, but I figured that if I caught nothing else that was good enough for me and New York.
I also vaguely remember fishing nymphs, and Craig pointing out a yellow Sallie. Mostly I remember how pretty everything was, including the yellow Sallie.
Kris caught a small wild brown on a purple bodied dry, and then another larger stocked brown, and after a while I was fishing with a purple bodied dry. This must be our year for purple. Speaking of Mississippi Craig said he’d gone to Houston’s Glassell School of Art, and had expected to be a children’s book illustrator. He had a particular interest in nature illustrations, and he and Kris talked birds. I wanted to ask if he knew Walter Anderson’s strange work, but never got around to it. I think if I were interested in nature illustrations I’d want to know Walter Anderson, but I never even asked Craig if he painted now. Next time.
We were close to the end, and Craig had told Kris she could cast 15 more times–he’d really sussed her out. It was both a hard number and a small enough number that she couldn’t say she’d lost count. We’d moved downstream towards the Inn and Craig told me where to cast in the softer water flowing past a rock shelf set into the bank and I caught a nice stocked brown on my last cast of the day. I really did. I caught a brown trout on a dry fly. There was no hatch of course, hatches being a hoax that Yankees perpetrate on gullible Houstonians, but at least I’m reasonably certain now that it can be done. I did it. I caught a trout on a dry fly.
