You can make yourself crazy over casting. You can worry about it so much it ruins your fun. Fly fishing becomes some kind of angst ridden battle with your demons. If you’re not careful you can go from trying to get more accuracy and distance to your cast to wondering why your high school gym teacher seemed to have it out for you. And the more you try, the worse you get. There’s an old baseball cliché that seems to apply to casting: don’t try harder, try easier.
In baseball, the epitome of trying easier has got to be the Nationals’ 3rd baseman Anthony Rendon. He just goes out there and hits and fields and runs the bases. He looks like he’s having fun and he seems like he knows he’s got it good. Playing baseball is a pretty good way to make a living, even if the season is 162 games long. Everything about Rendon’s approach to the game seems to say that he knows there are people out there who have jobs that require them to work long hours and do sometimes dangerous work, or to sit in a beige box all day to feed their family and that he gets to play baseball.
Same with casting, you’re on a river, casting a fly. It’s pretty. Even if your boss is a jerk, the odds are that he’s not going to be able to find you here in the middle of the stream and give you a hard time. You are as far away from your problems as you can get. Unless your problem is that you can’t seem to catch a fish. Then, being in the middle of a stream with a fly rod and failing can begin to look like a big fat metaphor for every other problem in your life.
If you wanted fish so badly you could cast a spinner, or a worm, or you could just go buy a fish at the store. You want to catch a fish on a fly because it is so &*^% elegant! Why isn’t the fly going where I want it to go? Don’t’ break your wrist, keep the rod tip on a plane, keep all these actions together and cast. No! Not into that tree! What is wrong with you?! This is supposed to be fun, why isn’t this fun?
On July 29, 2014 during a game with the Marlins, Anthony Rendon yawned during an at bat. Seriously, between pitches he let out this big, lazy day yawn. That is not a guy who is struggling to get out of his head. That’s a guy at one with the universe; that is Buddha in a Nats uniform. To be that good and to appear not to care? That’s a perfect loop heading out over the cosmic stream of consciousness to land along the log of enlightenment to drift drag free over the platonic ideal of a trout that may not really be there. (Author’s Note: this metaphor has gotten away from me and is currently scuttling around the office baseboards; an exterminator has been called).
I struggle for that inner peace; I want it desperately and if I don’t get it, I demand to speak with the manager! You see my problem, I’m an American through and through and as such, I see journeys of self-discovery as transactional: “One inner peace, please.”
When you start out, there are so many variables. There are so many it’s impossible to figure out which ones matter and which ones don’t. There are variables that you don’t even know about. There are variables you accidentally change while trying to change other variables. That’s true when you first start out life and when you first start out fly fishing. When you first start angling, catching a fish seems like an accident. It’s like that moment in Bull Durham when Nuke Laloosh throws a perfect pitch and then asks himself, “God, that was beautiful. What’d I do?”
Try easier, that’s the key. Just put it out there and the cast is what it is. Accept that you are trying to do an impossible thing: you want your fly to drift as if it is not attached to your fly line, but it is attached. Every time you go out, you get a little better, but you are getting better at what is an unattainable ideal. Put aside the ego, put aside the drunken monkey chattering in your head; be like the trout in the current, waiting for what the river brings him. Take what the water gives you and be happy with it.
Who cares if I catch the trout? Not the trout and certainly not Antony Rendon. I hope someday that I won’t care either.
First Fish 