SEX, DEATH, AND FLY-FISHING by CANDACE FLEMING

Author:CANDACE FLEMING
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Published: 1990-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

GUidi NG AN d B EiNG GUid Ed

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: I’m not a fishing guide. Never have been. Never will be. I don’t enjoy it very much, and I’m not especially good at it. Most of the times I’ve tried guiding were when I weakened and gave in to flattery and/or the need for some fast money—two of the forces in nature that will make a person with a normally accurate self-image try to be something he’s not, at least for a couple of days.

It hasn’t been all bad, but I think I’ve done just enough of it now to get a feel for what it’s like, and to know that I don’t want to do it anymore.

The last time was one of the worst. A friend of mine who runs a combination guide service/fly-fishing school was short a hand one week, and in a serious bind with a big-tipping regular party due to show up in a couple of days. This was a somewhat trying bunch, he said, but still valuable, repeat customers. Would I please fill in? He’d pay me well, and consider it a personal favor if I’d help him out.

Okay, okay. If the truth were known, I sort of owed this guy a favor. It had also been awhile since I’d done any guiding. I knew I’d given it up, but didn’t remember why quite vividly enough.

As I said, this was a guide service and school. I’m not much better at teaching fly-fishing than I am at guiding—I’m always saying encouraging, diplomatic things like, “No, you idiot, not like that, like this!”—but it was only for a few days. How bad could it be?

The sports in question were well-to-do professional people, most on the long end of middle age, who got together every summer for a few days of fly-fishing. I never determined exactly how many there were in the group because they were always getting split up this way and that among the staff, but I know there were no less than eight or nine of them. In other words, way too many for any kind of reasonable fishing trip.

They’d been doing this for a number of years, long enough for some personal traditions to develop, like the big fish fry on the last night.

A couple of days every season, and that’s it. In one sense, they’d all been fly-fishing for years (that’s what they’d tell you if you asked) but in another, much more meaningful sense, they had about a month’s worth of experience between them. But then, they didn’t need experience because they’d engaged a guide, you see.

The problem—both mine and theirs, but mostly mine—was that these people naturally wanted to catch some trout, but honestly didn’t have any idea of how to go about it. Ten minutes after I’d met them, I, their steely-eyed, mountain man guide, had some doubts as to whether it was in the cards for them.

This is not a professional attitude. The Professional Attitude fairly reeks of confidence, enthusiasm, and rural good cheer.

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