Matt Labash

10-13 minutes

Many years ago when I took up fly fishing, an old friend became
my guru. He sent missives on everything from rod and line
selection to the simple glories of Pflueger Medalist reels, from
stream tactics to fishing philosophy. All of this is useful to consider
when plunging into a pastime that, if you’re doing it right, will come
to resemble an obsessive-compulsive disorder, causing one to
give short shrift to family, work, personal hygiene, and other
onerous preoccupations of the adult world.

My sensei’s pronouncements were by turns practical, wise, and

irreverent. In college, he’d had a literary bent and briefly
considered becoming the next Walker Percy. But he opted to feed
his family, going corporate instead of hanging out with surly MFA
students whose worldviews were as bleak as their financial
prospects. Still, I asked him, did he ever think of turning his
thoughts into a fishing book? "Blechhhh!" he said with typical
circumspection. A Civil War buff, he suggested heading to the
bookstore at Gettysburg to see what punishing doorstoppers those
obsessives had committed to print. "Hour Three at Devil’s Den and
What The Generals Ate For Breakfast On Day Two," he scoffed. "I
would contribute something similar to fishing. My theories are near
and dear to about 300,000 other fishermen, all of whom have
already written books."

It’s hard to fault our Mr. Miyagi for thinking it’s all been done
before. For while fly fishers only represent a small percentage of
all fisherpersons, they are way-overrepresented when casting their
fishing feelings into words between hardcovers. Possibly this is
because they’re a verbose lot, not unlike drunks at an Irish wake,
always looking for an excuse to hold forth. Or possibly, as some
would sniffily suggest, fly fishing books outpace other fishing books
because most bait fishermen can’t read.

But though I already spend an inordinate amount of time and

candlepower trying to outsmart creatures whose brain is the size
of a cannellini bean and who often mistake something as
preposterous as a bead-head green weenie for food, I read plenty
of these books. For man cannot live on fishing alone. There are
chores to tend to. So sometimes you need to sit by a winter fire,
knock a few back, and read about fishing, too.

I retained some healthy skepticism, however, when an editor

dropped David Coggins’s The Optimist: A Case For the Fly Fishing
Life in my lap recently. From a distance, it smelled like hipster
poseurhood. While Coggins does write about fly fishing for Robb
Report, his day job also includes writing about tailoring, travel, and
drinking for places like Condé Nast Traveler and writing books on
men’s style. His Instagram, while handsome, looks like the kind of
feed that isn’t fed, but curated, appearing as though it came out of
a 1940s Filson catalog.

When his book’s publicity materials mentioned that fly fishing "is
no longer your grandfather’s pastime—millennials are flocking to
fly fishing for its authentic gateway to nature and Instagrammable
moments," that sounded sufficiently barf-y enough to make me
want to take up cribbage or needlepoint instead. The last thing I
need is some beardo with an overpriced vintage Hardy reel
standing in my layup spots, TikTokking out the coordinates.

But I worried needlessly. Coggins isn’t some fishing arriviste. He’s

been at it for a good couple decades, learning at the knees of two
codgers—friends of his grandfather’s—who showed him the fine
points of casting poppers to within an inch of the banks on
Wisconsin rivers and lakes to entice smallmouth bass (a vastly
underrated fish, basically largemouth with a few Red Bulls in
them). His mentors were such devout practitioners of their craft
that they kept their secret spot secret even from each other. (One
secret Coggins discovered when fishing with them separately:
Theirs was the same secret spot.)

The Optimist is loosely set up, structurally, as a

travelogue/instruction manual, with each place and fish Coggins
pursues—cutthroat in Montana, bonefish in the Bahamas, brook
trout in Maine, and the like—purportedly serving as thematic
illustrations of an essential attribute: assurance, vision,
persistence, etc. But what might sound like self-help dopiness or
feel like an editorial conceit is carried off with a mercifully light
touch and near abandonment of the concept. The Optimist isn’t
some dreary how-to, or about character development, or even
travel porn for its own sake (though it sure as hell made me want
to join Coggins for overgrown rainbow trout in Patagonia or for
Atlantic salmon in New Brunswick). It is, rather, a pure and
extended love letter to fishing. Trout, they say (as well as many
other fish that Coggins pursues), tend to live in the most beautiful
places. But this isn’t fish braggadocio, the piscatory equivalent of
flashing dick pics. Rather, Coggins writes, "I like feeling small,
even insignificant, in a beautiful place. It’s humbling, and somehow
correct."

Being humble, of course, can get you banished from many internet
fishing boards and bars. I sadly and shamefully have spent many a
day on the water, thinking not just about communing with nature,
luring some of God’s most perfect wild creatures to hand only to
watch them swim away freely, but about how to make the size or
volume of the fish caught feel maximally enviable to fishing
friends/rivals when I relate the tale, later. Which disgusts me. We
fish to escape the world, and other people, then enslave ourselves
to their perceptions anyway. At least, I rationalize, I don’t take
fishing selfies, rationalization being what separates us from the
animals.

While a fine turner-of-phrases ("Patagonia is not what anybody’s

made, it’s what’s lasted despite all we’ve made"), Coggins may not
possess the undiluted laconic zen of a John Gierach or the literary
precision of a Tom McGuane. (Who does?) But what grows on you
and ultimately stays with you while reading The Optimist is his
sheer exuberance and honesty. The real brotherhood of fishing
might occasionally be about fishing triumphs, but just as often if
not more, it is about failures. And we get streamside seats to all of
Coggins’s.

One of his fishing guides, Tony, a Jimmy Page doppelgänger who

rolls and chain-smokes his own cigarettes, summed it up nicely on
a brushy chalk stream in England, as Coggins was catching more
overhanging branches on his backcasts than he was sulky brown
trout, which are often the Godots of fish in that you can spend a lot
of time waiting for them. Doubling as a salmon guide in Scotland
(Atlantic salmon can make brownies look like ravenous plate-
cleaners by comparison), Tony dryly offered, "In salmon fishing,
you have one chance a day, and if you’re good enough, you’ll
know when you’ve missed it."

And so, we suffer with Coggins all of his gratification delays and
indignities: The bad, water-damaged fishermen’s motels with the
television chained to the wall and the sign saying the desk help is
down the street at the bar. The overheard conversations of guides
discussing their sports’ blown casts and lost fish. ("A true
humiliation, like people watching a video of you dancing.") The
lonely desolation of bonefish flats when you’ve waited all day to
see a fish, then when you finally do, clumsily spooking them back
out to sea. Going to a stuffy angling club in Canada, only to catch
the smallest grilse (a young salmon) in club history, which you are
required to enter in the club’s fishing log, even though your guide,
whose very livelihood should depend on being bad at math,
refuses to let you round up its size: "In the comment section next
to the entries, which other anglers have used as a chance to
elaborate their triumphs, I’m at a loss. Beneath a ‘tremendous fish’
or ‘silver beauty’ I write ‘room for improvement’ and close the
book."

Once, after Coggins and a fishing buddy floated all day down a
river in Wisconsin to his car at a pull-out spot, when he got there,
he realized he left his keys in his friend’s car at their put-in spot
many miles upstream. "Why would I want to carry them in the boat
all day, something bad might happen?" he had reasoned, before
his boner dawned on him. Here, he perfectly illustrates why I
prefer fishing alone: "Fishing with somebody brings you close
together because that person has a front-row seat for your
failures."

And yet, despite the expensive globe-trotting shutouts, the

spectacularly miscalculated weather patterns that have him gutting
it out in torrential downpours, the nagging feeling that "I’m not
merely leaving town but leaving society, the society that’s
employed, productive, efficient, and to their mind, necessary," he
keeps going back. Hell, that’s probably why he keeps going back.

For fishing forces optimism into even the darkest heart. There’s
catching, sure. But a good deal of the time, it’s all anticipation and
expectancy. Even on days when it’s all going sideways, "you’re
one cast away from being a genius," Coggins writes. And then
comes the blessed moment of connection. The tug is the drug, as
the beer koozies say. "Action replaces theory, analysis makes way
for drama. This is not speculation or a wistful memory—it’s
completely in the present tense." You are playing something wild
and beautiful and pure just a fly-line’s length away. You will bring it
to hand, admire it, and then let it go. It will leave you as suddenly
as it appeared. And then you will wait for it to appear again.

It’s downright biblical, if one feels the need to inflict that sort of
order on things. I’ve always held that it’s no accident that a good
sliver of Christ’s disciples were fishermen, including all of his
favorites. (Judas, for whatever it’s worth, was a treasurer and
embezzler, but no fisherman.) For as the Good Book says: "Faith
is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen." Faith and fishing—it can be hard to tell the difference,
because there isn’t much.

And so, Coggins keeps on casting. Like many of us, he dreams of

fish, too. "They say you can’t see your hands in dreams," he
writes, "and I never see mine. But I cast, not knowing what will
happen. In the waking life, I cast too, and still I never know. If no
trout rises, I cast again. I feel a shiver of good fortune to be in the
world, a world without end."