When I first took up fly fishing it was an enthusiastic love affair. I purchased hundreds of flies and multiple rods before actually catching much. And since my wife shared a half dozen other sports with me, I gifted her one of every type fly I owned. First times out our flies were catching quite a few treetops, so we carried four of each of a lot of patterns and sizes.
This occurred maybe our third outing: We were moving up a Beaverkill bankside, probably jingling from all our festooned gear. There was an old man, thin and wearing street clothes, he had a fish on. We waited as he gracefully released it with skill I had yet to learn. Being gauche I asked what the fish took.
And being courteous but moving away he replied, “Parachute Adams 14. It’s the only fly I carry.”
My wife, the old soul, watched him rounding a bend. She said, “He looked like us once. He’s orbited around to so simple.”
and photo of a catch in Russian Arctic Circle
That incident has stayed with me. When I brought Ruin alive I wanted to portray both sides of wonderful in fly fishing. The mysterious capacity for replete expertise. And too, at the other side of the moon of understanding, the mysterious capacity for reductive simplicity.
So it is in Ruin that there are the well read technically expert fishers of the Anamorphosis Flyfishing Club. Yet too, on that other side of the sport, there is Ruin’s Frank Campbell, the noble savage fishing instinctively in simplicity.