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By Jonathan Jacobs The paragraph below, with light editing, accompanied the photos in a post I made on social media. Judging by the reactions it generated there, folks found it interesting. The editor of RipRap thought its readers might enjoy it and asked me to send it along for publication. Writing it brought back fond memories for me but when I re-read it, I thought people might find it either interesting or incongruent that an Iowa farm kid somehow connected with fly tying and fly fishing or might wonder how Minnesota fit into the picture. The Iowa/Minnesota component is easy to explain: When I was young my family lived on a farm deep in the Corn Belt, miles from any kind of fishable water, but we rented a cabin for a week on a little lake in central Minnesota in late summer for several years before my parents sold the farm and bought a classic lakeside tavern/boat rental/cabin rental operation there. That’s where I did my fishing, but the roots of my interest in fly fishing are more complicated and are something I’ve had to think about. For one thing, in my time on the farm I had unfettered access to the outdoors before large scale, full-on industrial agriculture took over. There was a little creek on the property that ran through a sliver of abandoned pasture, low ground that hadn’t been fitted with drainage tile. There were only minnows in the creek, but interesting flora and fauna abounded and being “out there” inculcated in me an intense interest in the natural world. I think that being outdoors was the thing that my father liked best about farming, too. My father had a brother, my Uncle Leonard, who with his wife, my treasured Aunt Luella, farmed just a few miles from my family and we spent a great deal of time with them. Like my father and me, Uncle Leonard loved to read. He subscribed to several magazines, including the old-fashioned “hook and bullet” magazines like Sports Afield, and some general interest magazines, too, and I had access to them.I read every word of those magazines, and I found articles about trout fishing in the outdoor magazines mesmerizing. Even the mass-market magazines occasionally had articles that would get me dreaming. One of them, either Life or Look – I don’t know which – did multi-page pieces complete with glorious color photographs on trout fishing in the Catskills and on fly fishing for Atlantic salmon. One of those articles included a photograph of a Silver Doctor, an old-fashioned showy wet fly, and I recall thinking that someday I would tie my own Silver Doctor and use it to catch a fish. That hasn’t happened yet, but I continue to hang on to the dream.  Another member of the group recently posted a picture of their first fly tying vise. Here’s mine. It was part of a portable kit my father made for me at least sixty-five years ago after I saw an article about it in Boys’ Life magazine. It required a hardwood dowel, which we didn’t have out on the farm in Iowa where we lived at the time, so Dad cut the handle off one of my mother’s wooden cooking spoons, which pleased her not at all. To assemble the kit, you placed the short dowel, which was center drilled, into the band-aid tin in the appropriate position and passed a nail (The nail is long gone, the screw is a modern replacement) through the hole. You then placed the longer section of dowel, the one with the slot cut in it, atop that. The longer dowel had a slot cut down it and a screw and wing nut through it. Tightening the wing nut closed the “jaws.” It actually held moderate-sized hooks pretty well. Hooks came from the hardware store and materials were things I mostly scavenged with some of them coming from my mother’s sewing supplies. Along with the vise components, the hooks and materials were stored in the Band Aid tin. I tied some flies that, while crude, caught sunfish in a little lake in Minnesota. That little kit set me on quite a path. |
A Band Aid Approach
