Thursday, November 14, 2013

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The Second Season – On The Fly

Episode 2 – Go Hook Yourself
"I think I fish, in part, because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution."   -  John Gierach
By Robert Yarnall

Editor’s Note: Progressive Charlestown’s 2012 ten-part miniseries, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (derived from the military phonetic alphabet for WTF and artfully interpreted as “What The F**k”) was created by the author in 2012 as a serialized account of the efforts of a core group of neighborhood activists who banded together to contest developer Lawrence LeBlanc’s (DBA Whalerock LLC) proposal to impale a pair of 460’ industrial wind generators atop a terminal glacial moraine abutting several distinctly residential neighborhoods.

Set against the motif of freshwater bass fishing, the series focused on the ringmaster antics of a coffee-hour cabal of neighbors living within a muffin toss of each other on Partridge Run in the Charlestown neighborhood known as Sachem Passage. 

The quasi-retired senior citizen foursome of Ronald & Maureen Areglado, Michael & Donna Chambers, and forty-something sometimes-banker Kristan O’Connor, bonded together as an excitable quintet of prickly anti-wind protagonists and hopped onto the no-turbine bandwagon, pimping it out with its very own political boom box, pumping out the now-familiar, holier-than-thou Partridgesque bird call, “…what’s good for Charlestown...”



The Partridge Family had made its mark, like a wayward seagull in a bait shop parking lot.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’s second season continues, once again set against a fishing motif. This year we venture into the penultimate angling realm of fly-fishing.

It is indeed fitting that the art of fly-fishing, based on the science of entomology, serves as the backdrop for the series, as The Partridge Family managed to open a real Pandora’s box when they flitted into town hall for October’s monthly meeting to alert the citizenry to the pending cataclysmic environmental disaster being plotted by Charlestown’s Parks and Recreation staff in concert with the Economic Improvement Commission - Ninigret Park would be overrun by hordes of creatures exhibiting undesirable socio-economic demographics and associated habits!

WPWA campus
It’s one thing for a blogging bait-caster to open a can of worms, but when the bugs are swarming on their own, courtesy of the environment, it’s fly-fishing nirvana.

One of the first things you’ll learn about fly-fishing when you sign up for the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association’s winter fly-tying workshop is that modern fly-fishing is much more of a recreational experience compared to the original version, which was necessarily a food-gathering system practiced in agrarian societies predating the industrial revolution.
Fly-tying class

For those of us who read the archaeological studies that accompanied Whalerock LLC’s turbine proposal, fishing was one of the dominant sustenance activities of Charlestown’s truly native inhabitants, the ancestors of our current Narragansett Indian Nation neighbors.

Early tribal anglers had to fish to live. (I, on the other hand, pretty much live to fish, at least when I can get away with it.) It’s fascinating to visualize the earliest Narragansetts wading through local streams or across area ponds as they utilized their intuitive knowledge of nature to survive one day to the next.

At the same time, it’s a bit disconcerting to consider what current tribal members must be thinking when they hear well-heeled transplanted suburbanites dedicating themselves to “preserving Charlestown’s rural character and environment” while they spruce up their 7500 square foot manicured lawns and power up a couple dozen candelabras in those vinyl-clad double-hung windows so the politico dinosaurs can navigate from dinner party to dinner party. (Hey, it’s an asphalt jungle out there! Keep the skies dark and maybe no one will notice.)

While the earliest Narragansetts may have used real bugs to attract fish, we post-industrial revolutionaries use artificial bugs, generically called “flies,” to entice our aquatic cousins. Learning to tie a fly requires repetition of a set of basic skills that are best taught by a hands-on approach, beginning with the easiest worm-like flies and progressing to stunningly realistic imitations of some of the most intricate insects on the planet.

You can catch fish with even the most rudimentary fly, so the challenge eventually becomes not so much catching the fish, but tying the fly that will catch the fish, the art part. Hence the term, fly-fishing. 

The science part of fly-fishing is, as you might expect, entomology, the branch of zoology that studies insects, aka bugs. You learn to identify bugs and create lifelike imitations by sitting at a table and grinding your teeth every time you hook yourself while wrapping thread to attach component parts of the fly pattern to a thin steel shank with a freakin’ point on it. (That sentence contains quite a mouthful of syllables not quite as pleasant as a beginning fly-tiers verbal response to stabbing oneself at three second intervals for two hours straight, whiskey tango foxtrot…)

Traditional fly-tying materials include an assortment of vises, pliers, forceps, needles, threads, yarns, bird feathers, animal furs, and an endless array of hooks, wires, beads, tinsels, foams, and recycled flavor straws from the 1960’s if you’re really cheap and resourceful.

Over the past few years, synthetic substitutes for bird feathers and animal furs have been successfully developed and marketed in response to economic and political pressures.

The reality is that even within recreational fishing and the organizations deriving from the sport, lurking purveyors of political ideologies seek you out to snag your line. If you run into one of them as you’re trying to enjoy a bit of free time on the planet, do what I would do - tell them to go hook themselves. That’ll be sure to open a can of worms, just like the one I opened six paragraphs ago.


Next time on WTF’s Second Season – Fly-Tying For Retired Old Tie-Dyers