I grew up in Boundary county fishing with my father whenever he could get away from his job as Port Director at the U.S. Custom Port of Entry in Eastport, which was more often than one would think but less often than one would want. I was raised with a spinning rod in my hand and a panfish jig tied on the end of some mono for dipping off the dock at Perkins. The next year, we would fish well past sundown–and well past my organized bedtime at the behest of my mother–with spinning rods trolling out the back of our canoe as we paddled all over Perkins or Solomon.

Our chest freezer held numerous freezer bags full of what I liked to call trout cubes. The nightly routine through much of the summer was to fish and bag a whole lot of trout, clean them when we got home, leave a few in the fridge for dinner the next day, and house the rest into deep freezer bags filled with enough water to cover the trout carcasses. This would help prevent freezer burn on the fish themselves in theory, but at the same time would make the freezer extra full and uneven to where you would pull one out and shut the freezer door as fast as you can since if you didn’t see the tree fall in the woods–or the trout cubes fall in the chest– it did not make a sound. Well, until the inevitable day that my mother would go into the freezer to grab a bag of last year’s raspberries for a pie, her voice echoing through the house as I ran as fast as I could out the back door so I could plead ignorance to the landslide.

In the next few years, I became the household expert of the spinning rod. I would often out-fish my father–which I hope made him more proud than upset–and I became better at cleaning the trout and packing away the trout cubes. But something about this never made sense to me. When I was learning to fish and my father was catching much more than I was, I had to clean them. When I was demolishing him in the activity of trout catching by the numbers, I also had to clean them. I feel like I got the short straw no matter what I did. He was always there anyway to take simple pot shots at my cleaning–and filleting if it was what we decided on–though he always slapped my back and told me “good job” as I walked past him with numerous, awkward gallon sized freezer bags full of water and wiggly trout bodies.

When I got down to the basement and into the room with the deep freezer, I would place the bags into it and shut the door, then turn around and take the room in. It was the “everything room” of the house. My father’s indoor tool bench he meticulously built for the room to the point where the wood on either side was only about a half inch from each wall to maximize the space he had for, well, a mess of tools and junk wood, nails, screws, levels of all sorts, and other work bench paraphernalia that had not made it back onto the pegboard. On the other walls were shelves that were sort of the kitchen junk drawer of our basement. One would find a little bit of everything on them: large power tools in old 1980’s bulky plastic cases, magazines from every era imaginable, boxes of Standal family photos and related ephemera, shotgun shells for duck hunting, boxes of .243 ammo for deer season, old holey waders, busted boots. High above all though were the fishing rods. There was a plethora of spinning rods from old Shakespeares to, well, new Shakespeares. There were large bait rigs from my father’s time at the great lakes. Tackle boxes full of old spinners, jigs, top water lures, and lots of plastics. Then there was the mysterious large forest green cardboard tube with old USPS labels falling off of it that was highest up of all. I never knew what was in there, and I never asked until I was deep into my high school years.

My father brought it down one night after I had brought it up to him, and he slowly opened it and pulled out a beautiful bamboo fly rod nine feet long with a clean cork and a gorgeous agate stripping guide. I had never really seen anything like it. All I knew were graphite spinning rods and the wee little ice fishing rods that shook in my hand as I shivered on frigid winter mornings. As I had become quite proficient with these rods, of course I could do well with a fly rod, right?

“Yeah, no James. I tried, I could never really do it. Why work harder for less?” my father told me.

I believed in this for years. Then, my neighbor’s father put a fly rod in my hand on the North Fork of the Flathead, helped me cast and land my first trout on one and the rest is history. Some might say that I am in too deep with the hobby now. I have that old bamboo rod of my father’s, the first fly rod I ever held, and it wasn’t a bamboo rod at all but a fiberglass rod built off a blank by my crazy uncle (everyone else’s word for him, not mine) with a cork that had never been carved out and was still just a full cylinder of cork, and the stripping guides and while the guides are quite pretty to look at, between them is a mish-mash of distances where they were terribly tied on. While I have never fished it, and I am not sure I would want to, it is still considered a family relic by me and will be passed on to my son and hopefully his kids in the future.

I had been bitten by the bug bad, and a whole new world of fishing opened up in front of me. Flies, odd reels with click and pawl mechanisms, heavy and thick fly line, leaders, tippets, droppers and loops, graphite or bamboo or fiberglass, sink tips, dries and nymphs and streamers and poppers. I wanted it all, and I still do. Not only this, but now I wanted to play catch and release rather than kill and grill. This drove my father crazy. He fished and hunted to put food on the table, and now his only son of four kids wants to let that beautiful 18” rainbow he caught on a stonefly imitation go back into the water rather than into his and his family's stomachs. While he trolled for rainbows in the deep parts of the lake, I was casting to the shores for the top water action of panfish and largemouth. I just enjoyed catching a fish more on a fly rod than any other option, and while I don’t think this is true, maybe subconsciously it was a bit of classic teenage rebellion towards my authority figures the way I made the switch so quickly from spinning to the fly rod.

The evolution of fishing styles from spinning/baitcasting into fly fishing is quite an odd one. As Nick Lyons laid out wonderfully in his book Spring Creek, “...it’s like going from something that works to something that, for a long time, doesn’t work. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” I guess the only answer I can come up with is sort of metaphysical. The river is not just a buffet of fish waiting for you to swing some rooster tail with a worm or a marshmallow on it in front of them. To me, it is a place of nigh meditative therapy. The cool water removes all the ills in my mind as it rushes through my legs. The songbirds in the pines, a soundtrack to my four-count rhythm in casting. The chance to fool a trout with an imitation of an insect that just hatched or hopped in the water, rather than slapping him in the face with a treble hook and a worm, and feeling the tug on my forearm after a good trout-set: my medicine.

The difference between spinning and fly fishing are somewhat comparable to different dances. Spinning is like an evening at an exotic dance club: you keep tossing $1 bills to each new trout on the pole and they come down to slurp it up off the river bottom. Then the next one comes along, all doing the same thing with a different look. Not to say it is not fun or doesn’t take talent, but it does lack a certain sophistication, eloquence, and honestly, challenge.

Fly fishing is more like you are at the county dance as a youngin about to blossom into adolescence: that trout you like, the one that you see through the crowds of dancing couples at the grange, the one that you have made eye contact to once or twice that night and that was all you need, is open for a new dancing partner. It seems that they like the taller kids, the ones with confidence. You fix your hair (mainly those rough bangs), fix your posture and stand as tall as you can. You make your way over, the strides of your feet allowing a nice and natural drift. You tap them on the shoulder, and either they turn and smile or they look at you in disgust and go for the one who looks a little more buggy that wandered in next to you.

Fly fishing looks a lot more difficult (which, to be fair, it is) and a lot more pretentious (to be fair, it is), but it is more about finding that connection with another single entity out in nature, getting them to bite, and following each other to get the foot pattern right until you finish with a bow (or a rainbow).

My father, while not in complete agreement with the route of fishing that I took up, was always supportive. He grumbled under his breath between puffs of his Marb Light while I told him about my fishing trips as the years went on. A few short years after I had picked up the fly rod and never looked back, my father started having large issues with his kidneys and his ability to make it out to the lakes took a dive quickly. He passed away in 2020. Every fish that I catch to this day, I dedicate to him, and I know he is smiling wherever he is at saying, “that one was a keeper”.

Tight lines out there, friends.