THE PINK SARAH
By
William G. Tapply

I was sitting at my fly-tying bench tying flies for my summer trip, with frequent daydreamy pauses to gaze out the window at the snowy New England landscape. Montana seemed eons and continents away, but creating a dry fly and visualizing some fat spring-creek rainbow trout sucking it in made it feel closer.

I don't know how long Sarah had been there before I became aware of her. She'd dragged a chair up behind me and was sitting cross-legged on it, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, watching me with those huge brown six-year-old eyes.

I took the fly out of the vise, bounced it on my palm, and showed it to her. "What do you think?" I said.

She poked it with her finger. "It's very small," she said. "What do you call it?"

"It's a Pale Morning Dun."

"That's a pretty name," she said. "Do you think a fish will eat it?"

"I hope so. It's supposed to imitate an insect that they like to eat."

She squinted at the little fly. "It doesn't look like an insect to me."

"That's because you're smarter than a fish." I patted my lap. "Want to make one?"

She shook her head. "I don't know how."

"I'll show you. We'll make a big one for catching a really big fish."

She shrugged. "Okay."

She scrambled up onto my lap, and with my arms around her and my cheek touching her cheek and my fingers guiding her fingers, we wound some thread onto a big streamer hook. We tied on a marabou tail, we wound on some chenille and wound a big hackle feather over it, and we tied off the head with a few half hitches.

I unclamped the vise and dropped our Woolly Bugger into Sarah's hand. "Your first fly," I said.

She shook her head. "This isn't mine. You mostly made it, not me. Besides, it's black. I don't like black. Black is boring. Can I make my own?"

"Sure. The first thing to do is select the ingredients. Decide what you want your fly to look like."

"I want it to be pretty." She rummaged through the piles of stuff on my desk and came up with a pink marabou plume, some orange chenille, and a chartreuse hen-hackle feather.

I talked her through it, reminding her to keep tension on the thread, now and then showing her how to execute a step and then unwinding it so she could do it herself, and she managed to get everything lashed onto the hook more-or-less all by herself.

When she was done, she unclamped the vise and held her creation in her hand. She grinned at me. "Do you like it, Daddy?"

It was, of course, misshapen and lumpy and asymmetrical, not even to mention garish.

"Your very first fly," I said. "I love it. It's quite beautiful. You should give it a name."

She squinted at it. "It's really kind of ugly," she said, "except for the colors. I think I'll call it the Pink Sarah."

"That's a pretty name."

"Do you think a fish would ever eat it?" she said.

"This Pink Sarah," I said, "will definitely catch a fish."

* * *

The smells -- mothballs-and-feathers, tacky head cement, blue-dun dye bubbling on the stove -- are evocative for me still. So are the names -- junglecock and golden pheasant and peacock, tinsel and floss and chenille, bucktail and hare's mask and maribou, badger and ginger and grizzly. After half a century, I still can't sit down to tie a fly without remembering. . .

In my family, the fly-tying season opened the day after the duck season closed, and it ended when the ice went out on Sebago Lake to signal the beginning of landlocked salmon fishing. Every year on New Year's Day, my father set up his fly-tying bench in the living room. Dad tied flies just about every winter evening. When I was a boy, I liked to pull up a chair by his elbow to watch him tie while our old Philco radio played big-band music in another corner of the room.

After dinner he unpacked the materials for the evening from the big green breadbox he stored them in, and I soon learned that the brown bucktail and the skein of yellow chenille meant an evening of Dark Tigers, while the grizzly and ginger necks and the woodduck flank feathers meant that a couple dozen Nearenufs, Dad's version of the Adams, would magically emerge from his vise. When he took out the big hooks and the deer hides, I knew it would be an evening of "hedge-trimming" -- spinning and clipping deerhair bass bugs.

He never used a bobbin. He stripped off a few feet of tying silk, ran it through his ball of beeswax, and used a half-hitch to secure the thread after every operation. He spread a dish towel on his lap to collect the trimmings, and after a session at the bench, he folded up the towel, went out to the back porch, and flapped the clippings onto the snow. "The birds will find it when the snow melts," he said. "They'll use it for their nests."

He was right. Come spring, I liked to wander around the yard looking for the bird nests. Usually they had strands of yellow chenille and silver tinsel and scraps of bucktail and feathers woven into them.

My father supplied his non-tying friends with flies, and since he had many friends, every winter he tied tens of dozens of flies -- flies for every angling occasion, flies that his friends requested, flies for his friends' friends. Nobody paid him, nor did he want them to. They gave him back in companionship what he gave them in flies.

For a while in the early 1940's he tied commercially. "Three for a dollar was the going rate," he once told me. "It was a hard way to make money, and I didn't do it for very long. My problem was, I'm a perfectionist. I refused to sell a fly with any flaw, even if no one would notice it except me. But I learned a lot about fly tying that way, and I ended up with an awful lot of flawed flies. They all caught fish."

Dad considered fly tying to be a manufacturing process. But to me, what he did was an art, and the pieces he created were beautiful -- perfectly symmetrical and proportioned, smoothly tapered, subtly colored. When I watched him, he made it look easy.

As the winter nights passed, his boxes filled with flies. When I was a kid, there were very few evenings when Dad didn't put in an hour or two at the vise.

And if I sat there quietly and waited long enough, he'd eventually pat his knee and invite me to climb up and tie a fly of my own. I'm positive I was the only kid in my first-grade class who could roll a woodduck wing and wind a hackle feather and make a whip-finish.

My flies never looked like Dad's, as hard as I tried. The wings always flared out at odd angles, and the heads came out big and lumpy. But when I finished my evening's fly and took it from the vise and handed it to my father, he always held it up, squinted at it, poked it with his finger, and then handed it back to me. "Yup," he always said. "This one'll catch fish, all right."

Through the months of the fly-tying season, my own little box of flies slowly filled, and when the fishing season arrived, I tried them and discovered that Dad was right: As flawed and amateurish and outlandishly designed as my creations were, they did catch fish.

I gradually figured out that anything would catch fish if you tied it on and kept it in the water long enough, a principle that continues to guide my fly-fishing strategies to this day.

* * *

My father tied flies for his friends and for his own entertainment well into his eighties, even after he'd grown too lame and wobbly to wade a stream or paddle a canoe.

Then came the day when he bequeathed what was left of his fly-tying materials to me. "Take it all," he said, waving the back of his hand at the old green breadbox. "I can't use it anymore."

"You sure?" I said.

He held up his gnarled, arthritic fingers and shrugged.

I knelt down and opened the breadbox. I rummaged through the bags and boxes and envelopes and found junglecock and golden pheasant and peacock, tinsel and chenille and floss, blue-dun and ginger and grizzly necks. I sniffed the mothball-scented deerhair and hare's mask and bucktail. It was hard to imagine my father not tying flies.

* * *

The summer she turned seven, I paddled along the shoreline of a Maine pond while Sarah, in the bow seat, trolled, gripping her fiberglass fly rod in both hands.

When the fish struck and her rod bent, she squealed.

I landed the foot-long smallmouth bass with the gaudy fly in its mouth and held it up for her to see. "She ate your Pink Sarah," I said. "I told you it would catch a fish."

Sarah smiled. "I really didn't believe you."

"You should always believe your daddy," I said.

-- The End --

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