In Espagna, Mille e Tre

  A list of Spanish things

   This man had somehow lost his wife in the intricacies of the Alcazar of Segovia. I got caught by his worry and so joined the search for her. Up and down the spiral stone staircase of the fortress tower I went, looking for the lost woman.  Atop the tower, glancing out between the castellations to the west, out on to a vast, rolling, and golden plain, in that emptiness, I saw Quixote astride poor, broken down Rocinante. The great crazy Don in ancient, rusty plate, his beaver up, his lance held forward at that perfect 15 degrees off vertical. Bringing up the rear was Sancho on his beloved Dapple, faithful to the end, wondering what madness lay next ahead.

    I forgot the lost wife and thought of that most enchanting, exquisite, immaterial Dulcinea, she who does or does not exist, Quixote’s lady. I poked my camera at that vista between the crenellations, out onto that gorgeous plain with Don Quixote, in his every splendor, riding by. That photograph hangs where I can see him now, The Knight of the Woeful Countenance, who so powerfully recommends to me his books, his madness, his enchantment, and his broken heart.

 Dulcinea, Oh, Dulcinea!  Might she be held somewhere in this tower?

                                                                 ~~~

    A couple centuries later, another Spanish Don rode by ravishing women, any woman he could get his hands on, of  whatever  description, anywhere he could. Riding along was his man-servant, Leporello, who might as well have been Sancho Panza’s citified cousin. Leporello kept careful book on his  master’s seductions, his “catalog”, he called it: women classified by the hundreds as to the countries where they fell prey to this ravishing Don Juan.  Ah, but in Spain, “In Ispagna,” Mozart has him sing, “in ispagna, mille e tre.”  In Spain he seduced one thousand and three.

    Well, I want to turn Giovanni’s erotic violence around and say that Spain has ravished me by the count of at least 1003. And, like Leporello, on location with his master, in Seville, his catalog under his arm, I want to sing my own incoherent catalog of the dark joys of Spain-- of all that which ravished me.

                                                              ~~~~

    I would like to imagine myself, a proper pilgrim, with an eye on the heavens, to follow the Milky Way, The Way of Saint James, to Campostela, there to worship what I do not believe. But I shall have made that long walk out of the everyday conventions of secular Europe-major into the black Catholic mystery of Spain. I’m silly enough to imagine that a saint as powerful as James may look after me and help me to get even older and sillier, doing this sort of thing.

   I feel under assault from every quarter of Spain’s (I dislike the word) magic,  dark, violent, morbidly and sexually estranged-- all that a cold-blooded Swede like me cannot fathom.

   There’s the great  Quixote, the madman,  riding past Segovia  to God knows where in his search for the sublimities of adventure to lay at the feet of his beloved Dulcinea-- to  honor and love her perfectly-- if only he can find her-- perhaps in that tower, anywhere.

    I finished reading  Cervantes for the first time within the shadows of the  Alhambra, the exact locus-- that 1492-- of those immense shifts between Muslim, Christian Goth, and Jew. You hear that gypsy music full of Islamic yearning and you want to sit and cry. I think of the most admirable Washington Irving on embassy to Spain and living in the Alhambra, studying and loving it, He must have got that Moorish music of love pure and raw.

   Good God, just outside that small presence chamber where Columbus made his proposition of immense treasure to Isabella, amid  all that  exquisite stone, I thought  I was a goner. Stone and plaster and water, so beautiful as to steal all breath away toward a metabolism of fluid joy. There I came to understand the meaning of streams of cool, pure water purling down out of the mountains to these exquisite palace  fountains.  I think, as for the first time, what these waters meant to a desert people, these lovely waters. No wonder their paradise promised to be full of them. I love the resident golden fish, and catch myself imagining a  trout living there, suspended in such a watery heaven of the spirit.

   Just to be there at midnight! Listening to Taregga’s guitar in the near distance. So close to where Lorca-- here in his Granada-- was born and murdered-- he who taught me, my first lessons of Spain in his plays and poems, and his tragic death  “at five in the afternoon.“ He sang that refrain for the death of the toreador Mejias. Beautiful, tragic Lorca, singing, acting, loving, dying. At five, maybe, in the afternoon. Daring and fearing the regime.  Who could measure how Franco’s gang hated him!  “Degenerate”, they cried, when what they most feared was that this poet carried the Spanish people in his poems. He was too dangerous to live. Think of that: the honor of having his poems making him too dangerous to live.

   Much about Spain is too dangerous to live,

   Maybe it’s this afternoon as I try to find a voice for, a rhythm, and an authority in all this-- like Bernard Shaw’s John Tanner,  motoring  along the Way of Saint James, through the Pyrenees to Spain, beset  by bandits,  near where Roland blew his horn to tell his Uncle Charlemagne that he had been faithful to the end and died.

    In that numinous mountain place, Shaw’s John, “Jack” Tanner dreams away the night. He becomes the original, Spanish Don Juan Tenorio gone to hell to debate the Devil. This Shavian Juan must foreclose on Mozart’s Giovanni and his idea of a good “sex story”-- in Italian!  Juan-Tanner sets out to demystify the mystic nonsense of the Devil, all that romantic tosh about sinful man in the everlasting fires of his sensual fun-- or perhaps all-consuming Spanish love and hate. Shaw’s Juan has no interest in sex qua sex, but rather he imagines the Superman who with pure intellect hitched to a newReality can fathom and regulate himself, and the world. It is a passion far greater and more sustainable than the Devil’s ordinary, prurient sex. Shaw’s-Juan’s passion is for the free, working, visionary, super-conscious intellect. It may be another as yet untried way of being Spanish… all that passion, I don’t know.

  All these Dons, these wild caballeros. Only Quixote can hold my heart forever. There’s little sign of him in Seville where all the operas are set. Why is that so, in this beautiful city on the  Guadalquivir?  Was life imagined to be more dramatic in Seville during the great age of both classical and romantic opera. Is it because Giovanni  could  prey upon all the cigarette girls who with Carmen  made “smokes” in their famous factory? So  many operas are set in Seville, where “at five in the afternoon” we watch the bulls being killed so precisely and beautifully. Those bulls, in the sun-drenched arena, too dangerous to live. I thank my lucky stars that it was given to me to see this great ceremony of death.

    I kissed the hem of the Virgin of Guadalupe at her church in her remote monastery, but nothing  happened-- other than that I am still safely here. She was strange: I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Me and the Virgin-- kissing the one, true, and real Her!

   The olives at the bar in the monastery garden and the dryness of the sherry were exquisite, perhaps a blessing from the world-renowned Virgin…. I wanted that afternoon to last forever.

   Here you can rent an medieval monastery room for the night. I should liked to have rented a dozen and then hiked out to hug a cork oak tree, get its feeling into me, in honor of the fine cork grips on my fishing rods. Cork, like bamboo, is heaven-sent stuff.

    And silk! Cork, bamboo-- and gut from the silk worm, Bombyx mori, worked  by the ladies of Murcia, cutting out, pulling to length that gland of fluid silk, cut from the giant larva’s belly so that fishermen can fish and bulls die.  

    Beloved Cork! I wanted to run loose and crazy and see it all, and hear that Moorish music and feel the pounding drums of Islam. All this Andalusian other-worldliness. It permeates everything, everywhere.

    Up in Madrid, things are harder, crisper, clearer, more sullen, and impersonal.  But I had my revenge. I picked up three or four dozen molted flight quills  from the wings of the famous white doves, La Paloma, of the  gardens of the Prado where the Goyas hang !  The presence, the presence, of those dangerous pictures!

      I smuggled the feathers home, past the Goyas, past customs and immigration in my inner coat pocket, to use them here at home on Rio Grande  Kings and Royal Coachmen. And I got a lot of  fourOclock seed by scrambling on my knees in the gardens of the Alhambra--to the dismay of honest tourists. Rare and moon-driven white fourOclocks.

     Finally! A statue of Cervantes at a busy Madrid intersection. How had he managed to escape from slavery to the Moors to write this best of all stories while Shakespeare was making our theatre  in London and Montaigne, inventing essays and dying of “the stone”  in Bordeaux ? What kept the earth from spinning out of control given that triangulation of genius?

   Cordoba boiled me in oil, whatever that means. But I saw where Maimonidies lived and thought-- and I wondered what, but for him, I might I be thinking today? It is said of Maimonidies that he may have had the most powerful intelligence in all the history of the species.

    Toledo, Holy Jesus Christ! He was everywhere-- shot through the agonizing glories of El Greco. The view of the city from across the great river ravine, from where, as though to “memorize another Golgotha,” he painted it into our unconscious. To think that I could be allowed to see this as item in my mille e tre!

   But I forget. Back in Granada, in the Chapel Royal, in huge majesty, there lay their majesties Ferdinand and Isabella themselves. It seemed too much to hold on to. And for that matter in the cathedral at Seville, in the south transept, is the quite overwhelming tomb of Columbus. I never would have believed that I could have cared that much about him-- or his bones. But I did, and his spectacular tomb haunts me still.

     It is the fashion of the day to think of Columbus as a most dangerous man, which he was, no doubt. But for dangerous men of Spain, I am most deeply shaken, first, by the dictator, Generalissimo Franco and his fascist suppression of Spain in our last terrible century. On the road out of Madrid to the Escorial, suddenly looms Franco’s monstrous  basilica at The Valley of the Fallen, carved from the living rock of the  mountain, too huge, like St, Peter’s in Rome, too huge to take in. I glance around, worried, almost in fear of its brutal, sterile grandeur. There, beneath me, Franco lies. He built this place in his own honor and memory-- and to draw people, even like me, too him even yet. I want to get the hell out of there-- clear this place out of my head, and on to that next super-monument, the Escorial Monastery.

     Philip II built it, this gigantic square structure, where he lived, worked, and died. Where everything else is huge, this tiny room was his office-study-retreat, like a hidey-hole, just off the chancel of the inner great church. From here the gout-stricken king could slip quite privately into the sanctuary for consolation and the sacraments. This little office-study, for a king of that magnitude, from which he managed all of Catholic Spain and its dominions!  He made all of Spain into an auto de fe.

   Then down the difficult stairs into the “Pantheon” room below the chancel where the Hapsburg  kings and who knows who else, lie  racked and stacked up on the side walls. Among all that royalty, who got dead for their pains, is Philip II, King of Spain, and much of Europe, by right of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Down in  this chamber of the dead, Philip is nothing special. He must have been a tiny little man to require so small a coffin. I imagine that I hear Verdi’s Don Carlo, that music of death shrouded in Spanish black and gold.

    Again, I thank my lucky anglophiliac stars that our Elizabeth would have nothing to do with this most dangerous Spaniard-- beyond sinking his invincible Armada, in that great storm of 1588. He was given the terrible news while at prayer in his church right here. I was shown the exact spot and trembled with the terrors of history. To think that someday, some nobody like me would trample the spot that his suffering had sanctified!

   What’s at the root of it all? How should I know! It’s too much for me, and I’ve lost count of my 1003. It may have to do with Quixote’s invention of Dulcinea and our search for her, our Virgin. It may have to do with cork, and olives, and sherry, songs, and that unhappy dancing. Maybe it’s silkworms and Seville oranges. Or perhaps it’s the searing pain at Philip’s heart, the heart of Spain, all morbid black and gold and Catholic, that can approach the mystery? In any case, it’s ravishing, in one thousand and three ways.

Here is the place-- atop  the tower of the Alcazaar of Segovia,
where I can see Don Quixote and Sancho riding by.

Blogging His Birthday Party

    What with bad weather and all, celebration of my mere 84th. birthday came a cropper. But the weather will clear and those good birthday relatives will soon find their way here for dinner one way or another.
     In the meantime, I have begun to fantasize on the theme of an extravagantly impossible big 85th. party, here on the side of Lovers’ Hill, right smack down in this house in my grandfather’s back yard, where once he very nearly went to jail for fighting cocks. Ah! the baggage of antique memory.
Anyway, I think I should like to build a guest list of those who have welcomed the stuff I’ve written over the past twenty years-- and even read it.
    In my fantasy, these various good people would gather here late of an April afternoon to greet one another around a simple board, in the center of which is a wheel of what I believe to be the finest cheddar made, washed down with a good amontillado sherry or a dipper from a steaming bowl of bloody red sangria-- and hunks of fine warm bread. (coffee and beer in the kitchen for the needy)
    But, my chief-most offering would be the guests to each other, each to the other’s great pleasure. The trouble is that the guest list grows and grows and keeps on growing. At what point does it become impossible? When the company spills down the stairs, out into the street, all over the deck, stacking up in corners, what to I do then? This huge mass of angling humanity to whom I am so indebted?
    I dare not begin to list them here, all those whom I so admire. I'd like to bring them to Boulder where we can all meet and celebrate the astonishing, impossible fact of our being together. Will there ever have been such a gathering of angling people?
    I should want my kids from New Jersey on the one hand and California on the other to be here so that they can see for themselves what a marvelous bunch of people could be conglomerated on the occasion of their father’s birthday.
    I should think that all these guests would fall to the spirit of the day and wish each other, every one, a Happy Birthday, whenever it is.
    Then, and I shudder to see it, suddenly here come all those readers of The Bouldercreek Actor, all those dear friends and readers who in one way or another practice theatre crashing the party. Not to be kept away, they are sure to leaven the crowd and give it tone. They arrive as in a phalanx of the imagination and drama.
    Then, just when things are going strong, some one will call for “order”. When there is quiet and order established, in honor of the master Vince Marinaro, the noted baritone Patrick Mason will sing “The Song of the Letort Spring Run”, verses of mine and the great Ernest Schwiebert and composed by John Patrick Thomas. With this bit of music, in the spirit of the Milkmaid’s song in Walton’s Angler, we will bond the excellence of art to our angling. It will be everyone’s portion, right along with the cheese and sherry.
    I shall, in advance, have asked one particular guest to offer a Resolution to the company, because that is what the party will have become: the first and probably last plenary session of THE WHOLE AND ANCIENT COMPANY OF ANGLERS-- and fully competent to conduct its business.
    Therefore, following the song, Ms. Velma Biddle will, in her one hundred and second year, rise to move the motion, a Resolution for the Day. I cannot imagine what it might be, but I know that, from Velma, it will be exquisitely appropriate. Following her presentation of the Resolution, someone will move that the motion not be debated or amended. With that agreed upon, he will move a unanimous ballot, and the Resolution will be passed to general cheers and rejoicing-- clear out into the street where the sherry has reached.
    Betty, who in this virtual world did not have to labor at preparations, will be free to welcome and debrief everyone. Me, I shall sit quietly beside Velma, watching everyone enjoying everyone, and wondering at the power of language, and hooks and lines, sherries and cheeses, but most of all, wondering at this collection of people who glow so richly human-- in honor of the day they were born and were given to fish and read, and be together.
     As you read this, please know that your presence is requested next April 26, 2011, at this virtual birthday party, digital as it will be, deep in the secrets of this machine. Yes, it will be nothing less than The Whole and Ancient Company of Anglers-- (with actors and hangers-on). Do plan to come.

And Trout Were Rising
    The day was gorgeous- down on Boulder Creek-- in the center of town where I was to show off Tenkara fly fishing tackle to any who cared to drop by. And about fifteen did. A remarkable event, it seemed to me. I showed them how to extend the rod to eleven feet and to attach the eleven foot line to it. I have thought that method and act of attachment to be just plain “charming” and so did they. I showed the rig’s casting versatility on the creek and gave everyone a chance to try it. As a friend has put it, Tenkara fishing is so “new, different, and old”.
    But the point I want to make is that the whole event was new, different, and old. These people were so cordial, open, friendly, and gently eager. I can’t remember quite the same sort of gathering , that sort of behavior among anglers. They were eager but patient, reticent but persistent, friendly with a slight formality, really smart but modest, everyone of them bringing some personal excellence, for which I had to pry to learn. This is not the way right down regular post-modern people on the make are expected to behave in this day and age. They stayed an hour. I was exhilarated.
    The thing is, dear reader, that this is but another bit of evidence that things have changed in fly fishing. It is indeed the Sixth and New Period in American fly fishing. Anglers are renewing themselves, refreshing themselves. And, most of all, looking for and craving simplicity. The strains of economic recession, wars and rumors of wars, even a volcanic cloud out of Iceland have tended to turn us inward, to find a new habitation for the spirit, nearer to the heart’s desire.
    Some have said that Tenkara partakes of Zen in its processes. I’m wary of such claims and doubt this one, but, that said, there is in Tenkara the possibility of discovering a new sort of complexity, but now, in simplicity. A deep complexity in that which is simple-- what the artist is working at, forward and back, in and out. I must not claim too much for something as basic and old-- and different and new-- as Tenkara. But there it is….
    It leads us, I think, to the conclusion that we have “profited” as much as we can and are now moved beyond the largely mechanical complexities of the TU Period with its competitions, anxieties, and great power. It’s over. Now the flicking, gentle cast of the Tenkara fly is a modeling of the new sensibility.
    And if that is hard to believe, you should have been on the creek that day to see that new sensibility clearly manifest in those fifteen New Period anglers throwing that hookless fly-- as good trout sipped at the surface.

Tenkara Revealed on Boulder Creek

   On  Wednesday, April 14, at the  stroke of twelve noon, on Boulder Creek, at the  Public Library south parking lot, off Arapahoe, between the two bridges, I shall show, demonstrate, and allow casting with the fabulous Japanese Tenkara rig. Do come by for a moment of your lunch hour, and have a look at something at once new and  refreshing, yet ancient and comforting-- this astonishing  method of fishing the fly on smaller waters for fish under a pound.
   Weather permitting, of course. If it's bad, I shall sulk at home.

    You might call this “Learning to Blog by Hit and Miss”. Anyhow, below is an essay that I have worked and re-worked and now really kinda like. I like writing about things that might not otherwise be noticed, or, as in this case, not noticed as I think they should be. Trouble is, there seems to be no ordinary outlet for this story. It was too long for the paper Bouldercreek
Angler, and trouble is, it may be too long for a proper blog. So, look it over, see what you think, or throw up your arms in despair and move a-field to fairer blogs by clearer streams and bluer skies in our cybernetic Arcadia. GMW-


The Rods of Lyons

    I’ve gone through Lyons time out of mind, ever since it was a single-lane dirt road up to Estes. There in its bowl of beautiful sandstone red cliffs is Lyons, Colorado, an attractive little town, a memory of the Old West, once strategic at the confluence of the two Saint Vrain Creeks, and at the exact point of rising of the Rocky Mountains. Now it's a gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park and the exact location of South Creek; Ltd., where Mike Clark builds internationally celebrated cane fly rods.
    I think of what it must be like to come to Mike’s place for the first time, of the suspense, and excitement of it all. An angler of my imagining may have made the momentous decision to move beyond his round graphite rods and get himself a lifetime treasure: a custom-built cane fly rod from the hands of the distinguished Mike Clark.
    A bundle of nerves, our angler pulls up in front of the fine old-time red sandstone business building on the south side of Lyons's one block long Main Street and wonders at the deep purple trim of Mike's store front. Purple!
    Once out of his car, he timidly peers though the old fashioned store windows, to see what he can which is not much. But what he can see is altogether different from what he's come to expect at "fly shops." There's none of that "Come On In, Anglers-- Big Sale Today”, enticement common and identical to identical fly shops everywhere. This place is different.

Once Inside
    Our client, with some trepidation, opens the front door and steps into the deep quiet of a twelve by twenty room, inimitable and unique, filled with angling gear and artifacts, with racks of antique and restored cane rods, cases of reels, lines, books, invaluable collections of old flies on the walls, and new flies expensively for sale-- all selectively stocked and displayed, first class stuff, in fine cabinetry and under enticing glass. Good Grief! Just look at it!
    Fine trout art graces the walls, even the carpets underfoot. High on the east wall is a painting on board by Ken Iwamasa of a brown trout seven! feet long that I have long coveted. In each front corner of this front room are great signature racks of Tonkin bamboo culms, racked from floor to ceiling, stunning in their wheaten beauty and exotic provenance. That most wondrous, heavenly, of grasses, good for almost everything, out of which nearly everything needful to human life can be made.
    Our client, now in overload, awe-struck at all the stuff so cunningly and artfully displayed, moves carefully, if not gingerly, about, wondering what to do next, trying hard to take it all in as fully as he can.
    This is no ordinary “shop”: it is in fact a studio, an atelier, where a master might hold sway and court important clients who want to commission a masterwork. There's a peculiar formality and classical character to it.

Who’s She!
    It's too much to take in all at once; the client tries to pull himself together, before "facing the music"-- for there, straight in front of him, curtains draping the entry, is the work-room proper. Clark's work-bench is dead in the center with the master himself standing at the right, at his steel planing forms. Just a bit impatient at being interrupted in his work, in a moment he comes to meet our client, with that notoriously enigmatic smile, good looking, what with that curiously gray-blonde seaman's queue dipping down his back. Our client feels on the spot, uneasy, off balance, not sure whether he's exactly welcome or not.
    He steals glances at the myriad and compelling details of this larger work room, everywhere, up and down, in every corner, on every wall, on every shelf, in every nook and cranny, rod building stuff to excite the angler's fascinated curiosity. This is the back room of a veritable museum where treasures are stored and the hard work done.
    Then, anxious for a hint, for some help with what's next, he spots Kathy at her work bench along the west wall. There she sits, Kathy Shulkin-Jensen winding the guides to a rod, maybe one Mike has just finished-- or perhaps a fine old Payne or Granger sent in for her to restore to its original glory.
    You may have seen old-time photographs of the famous old rod building shops of the past. Men building the rods, women finishing them. They were invariably a frumpy looking lot, badly dressed, and embarrassed by the camera. Cane fly rods? They could as well have been making ax handles.
    But here in Lyons, in Mike Clark's South Creek, the woman, in this extraordinary shop, is Kathy, of the nicely hyphenated name, a woman, tall, dark, slender, smart, aristocratic, slightly exotic, her powerful eyes full of intelligence, vitality, and welcoming. Kathy rises from her bench to greet the client, her hand extended. At last he begins to feel welcome while still swamped in the allure of the place.
    At this point, allow me, your author, to step in and take over from that imaginary "client." I'm here in his place now in the back room of this studio to talk to Mike and Kathy to learn all I can for this very article. Where, for instance, do Kathy and Mike come from!
    This is clearly Mike's studio, his creation; it pre-dates Kathy. But for these last eight years, she’s been here, Kathy, graceful, glamorous, finely spoken, more often than not taking over from Mike to explain the ins and outs of ordering a rod, explaining why it will take four and a half years to get high enough on the list for Mike to build it. She lionizes him.
    She explains how a client will, in time, come to choose his rod's every cosmetic detail and casting characteristic. Every rod from South Creek; Ltd. is altogether custom built for the particular customer, there being no "standard," no "name-brand" grade to be had. She’ll help him choose.
    When Kathy joined Clark those eight years ago, when she and her husband moved to Lyons from California, neither of them knew the first thing about fishing, fly or otherwise, but quickly "got into it" even taking some lessons.
    Mike had come to that point in his business where he needed help. Someone to wrap the rods would help a lot. Somehow Kathy wandered into the picture and was sent home to practice wrapping to see if the work suited her. It did. She learned quickly and mastered it. From that point on she became a lover of cane rods herself, rods old and new. And, she says, with Mike at her elbow, she planed and built a rod of her own-- so she knows, at what she calls her “modest level”, how it's done.
    She refers everything back to Mike, "Mike says this," "Mike believes that." She told me that when a customer comes in, she can help him a lot, but the customer has to be assured that he's going to get a rod that Mike built, not the work of an "apprentice". She would never presume to split or plane a strip of cane for Mike. She'd never dip a rod in the final varnish. I noticed that Mike himself was doing the final rub-down polish on a set of his glowing sticks.
    Interestingly enough, Kathy began to take on the simpler repair jobs on rods that anglers brought in. This led to her successful rod restoration service. She's inordinately proud of the pains she takes to restore an old rod to as nearly its original, authentic condition as possible. She specializes in careful research into the rod's original, right-from-the-manufacturer condition. She tells me how wonderful it is to have all those great rods of the great cane rod tradition passing through her hands. She feels it's a privilege-- and an inspiration-- all those old Paynes, Leonards, Grangers, Gillums, Thomases, Garrisons, Powells!
    Kathy not only wraps, repairs, and restores rods, and does the book work, but she's often out fishing herself, usually with Mike. Of her pleasure in fishing, she says that "you can't go anywhere but fishing when you're fishing." That’s deep and bears remembering.... She speaks of fishing's utter and healing need for concentration and regrets all the years that she didn’t do it.
    A momentary cloud passes over our conversation, when she remarks that she would not fish alone-- a woman ought not to…. I think of my daughter’s exact, same sentiment. It's sad.
    She wanted me to know that she could never before have imagined her life in a business like rod building; yet, she was not altogether unprepared. She had worked professionally in businesses in California--and had been raised around the fine hand-work of her father and mother, both artists by avocation. And now she brings to Mike’s studio the refinement of sensibility that work with cane requires and is essential in its tradition. If, dear reader, as you have trundled along to the water, you have never held the two or three sticks of a bamboo fly rod at your side, never felt their aliveness in your hand, if you've never felt how eager a cane rod is to get out there and work for you.... well, you owe it to yourself to have that experience. It can change you.
    Kathy's certain that cane, even the idea of cane, works its way on the clients who come in the front door. She's full of praise for them, for their gentility, their courtesy, their deep appreciation of what they are about to do, get on a four-year waiting list for a Mike Clark fly rod.
    I could argue that at that moment of entering this inner sanctum of rod making on Main Street in Lyons, Colorado, Kathy herself becomes a part of that rod-to-be-- a part of the never to be forgotten experience. The Master Builder in all his masculine rigor, is one thing. But the feminine complement to the place, and in the rods, is the advocacy of art.

The Tools
    Kathy notwithstanding, this is the work-room of a master craftsman. There's all the paraphernalia of rod building: the essential planing forms, the strange looking varnish dipping tube with its simple but sophisticated rigging for lowering and raising the rod joint, the lathe, the rod winding apparatus. But I'm always brought up short to realize how few tools and what minimal machinery cane rod building requires. It's, in fact, pretty "low tech." Low on tech and high on craft. And it doesn't take much space.
    Mike, as a courtesy to the author, I'm sure, pulls open several large drawers full of supplies, myriad silk threads antique and new, the finest cork rings for grips I've ever seen, and in one a huge collection of ferrules, old and new, many from rod builders of the past whose rods may come in for repair or Kathy's restoration. The entire craft of rod building is filed away in these drawers.
    This remarkable studio is an amazing blend of artifact, personality, and commercial enterprise; and only out of recognition of the current recession is there no longer the customary dozen American Beauty red roses on a counter out front.


About Mike
    Mike has over the years had a good press. He’s been written about a lot. In fact one of those drawers he pulled open was liberally stuffed with press cuttings. So, his story's been told, about the Mike Clark who began making rods thirty years ago after leaving big-time excavation and construction work, professing to want to get out of the "rat race" and into something that could really satisfy him. And, I suggest, something that would not deny the artist in him. He says he was willing to trade the affluence of his days in construction for the "poverty" of rod making.
    As did so many of our finest craftsmen and women today, Mike Clark came from out the tumult of the Sixties where rescuing the all but lost crafts of an older and simpler time could be a thumb in the eye of the managers of a sickening war and all the social ills and resentments that for so long had been accumulating on the late-American experience. I believe that we cannot otherwise understand the amazing renaissance of fine crafts that we find everywhere today.
    Mike seems almost as much a curator of a collection of valuable angling artifacts and memorabilia as he does a builder and merchant of rods. Yes, it's like a tiny museum, a stepping out of time, out of the hurly-burly of contemporary fly fishing mania into a place where the great tradition as once we knew it is quietly nourished and protected, even insisted upon. And yet, Mike remains something of a mystery to me, something deeply private about him. I leave his studio wishing I had spoken better and asked better questions. I leave uneasy, wondering what he must be thinking of me. In his retiring way, Mike is running the show.

The End
    It's like the discovery of a lost time in American fly fishing. There's surely the gratifying sense of stepping back into the greatness of the fly fishing tradition, to its Golden Age, untouched by the tubular carbon rod with which the contemporary angler "attacks" the water. Such is the spirit of this place.
    Kathy may praise the clients who come in the front door as paragons of angling excellence, but I suggest that just walking through that front door is a transforming experience for the client. And bamboo is the key. I suggest that bamboo can open up for the angler secrets of the most opulent pleasure.

Begging Your Patience

     It’s snowing out, and this blog is now ready for your reader’s comment. I won’t presume to tell you how to use it; rather I shall beat a retreat into cover and hope that your comments will not be as harsh as doubtless I deserve, Look at it if you will.
     And bear with me as I try to get my bearings in this mode of publication. I scarcely know what to do with it. I would really like to maintain something of the four-times-a year quarterly publication of paper Bouldercreek Angler. But that may be hard to do. Still, I do not want and will not let it become a chatty, every day sort of account of what I presume to be of interest to you.
     I want to show you pieces of writing that I have worked over, revising and rewriting them, until nothing casual or too heated is left. Just like the old paper gazette.
     Being expert at being old, as I claim to be, probably ought to include knowing when it’s time to shut up….
     In any case, let me work on it a while. It must have a discipline.
     I’m told that if you subscribe to the blog, you will somehow be notified when something new is posted. ~~~
     As the snow keeps coming on, let me tell you that a few days ago an old friend sent me an old copy of an old issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal for April/May,1976-- an issue in which I had an essay on catch and release. That was thirty-one years ago. I thought that anglers were not looking hard enough at the ideology of no-kill, and so I should do it for them. As I re-read the essay now, it sounds all right, but the penultimate sentence caught me: pretty much what I believe today, and it’s in connection with my proposal of a sixth, The New Period, in American fly fishing.
     Here’s that sentence: “Now let us go a-stream more like our fathers-- individual, unself-conscious, unreconstructed, and quiet with our streamcraft and our love more important than our equipage and image.” But how, I wonder, can I both blog and, at the same time, in Walton’s use of Scripture, study to be quiet….?
      It’s snowing now, those great, beautiful, sloppy spring flakes. For us Westerners they fill the air with promise-- and are superbly quiet.