I got a book in the mail yesterday: "Amazing but True Fishing Stories." Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo (two fishers of stories, I assume) put the thing together.

And there are some whales of tales in there: The guy who lost his wristwatch and it turned up in a 42-pound salmon years later. The fishing competition where no one caught a single fish. The guy who once tugged a thousand-pound motorcycle to shore. (I know, that last one sounds a bit "fishy" to me, too).I assume the publisher printed the book to take advantage of the fly-fishing mania brought on by the movie "A River Runs Through It."

And that mania is out there. People who hadn't used terms like "dry fly" or "roll cast" in decades are suddenly talking about 21/2-pound natives again.

And that creates a problem for me. My father, uncles, cousins - even my brother - were avid fly-fishermen, but I never went along. I'm like a guy who's read entire books about swimming but has never been in the water. Oh I did some bait fishing, but fly fishing is different. It's an elite club, a secret society, a brotherhood. And sometimes I find I can talk, act and think just like those guys - but I've never been.

And that gets me in a few pickles. Once I get "hooked" into a conversation with fly fishermen and start talking about the north fork of this or Shakespeare reels or what kind of leader works where - I can't just blurt out, "You silly pants, I've never been fly-fishing! Don't you see? Don't you feel like a fool?"

No, I have to play the whole thing out.

And it's easy to talk like fly-fishermen. They talk like golfers. They can give you hundreds of details with the clarity of a video camera. They can spend 10 minutes describing the way they arranged the dry grass in the bottom of their creels. (If you don't believe me, read Ernest Hemingway's story "Big, Two-Hearted River").

And fishermen tend to withhold more information than bankers. They can talk for weeks about their fishing trip and never get around to telling you exactly where they went, what fly they used, what time of day they fished or if they'll go back before they die.

I can "do" a pretty good fly fisherman if I'm forced to. And if one day I'm exposed as a phony jerk, I actually have one story to fall back on.

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Back when I was 8 years old, my neighbor Vert Anderson got me interested in tying flies. I liked the "craft" of it, the "art," if you will. So I tied flies by the dozens and gave them all to my father to use. I could tie a fly in, oh, about 22 seconds. The problem was they were so ratty looking, so clunky and large (they looked like moths), no sane fish would ever even smell it.

But every time Dad came home I'd ask him how my flies worked.

Finally, he came home, put a hand on my shoulder and said, "I hooked a cut-throat native just above Tony's Grove with one of your flies today."

I was so pleased and grateful. And I still am, though today - at age 44 - I see he was just a big, two-hearted fisherman telling his boy another amazing fish story.

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