What I had mastered was fly-fishing Rule # 1: Remove all hooks from soft tissue under water, where near-freezing temperatures anesthetize exposed nerve endings and you can't hear your fellow anglers' hysterical laughter.

What I had mastered was fly-fishing Rule # 1: Remove all hooks from soft tissue under water, where near-freezing temperatures anesthetize exposed nerve endings and you can't hear your fellow anglers' hysterical laughter.

These are the technicalities. The jetes and pirouettes.. but the music of the dance lies in the subtle signals between the steps: the fish's delivery of them, the fisherman's read of and response to them, which, if she's good, must be near telepathic. That's what takes a death-grip on your concentration. That's why your mind empties of all trivia, which, when playing a fish, includes just about everything else you could possible think of. That is what anglers live for.

And connected I had been. When the fish changed directions, I felt it. when it slowed or sped up, I felt that too. It's such a raw thing, this shared existence with a piece of bucking biomass.

Despite all the variables and advise, like love and marriage it seemed to me that learning to cast ought to be a lot easier than it was.

But when I saw the cursive grace of Guido Rahr's fly line writing prayers I couldn't read to the river gods of Outer Mongolia, I knew my name was written there too. Fly fishing was going to be my version of my father's sport, my nod to my Scottish ancestors and to my self, and to the fish crazed part of America I had claimed as my own.