40 Rivers To Freedom

It’s Labor Day weekend.  For many, it’s their last multi-day trip of the season.  For me, it’s a good weekend to celebrate a birthday, and on this particular one, it’s a good time to move. This will be the 3rd time my birthday falls on Labor Day, not including the one when I was born.

I remember my first birthday/labor day when I turned 7.  Not because it was Labor Day, but because I got a cool Transformer guy that doubled as a squirt gun.

I don’t really remember my 14th birthday, but I do remember that 15 seemed so much older.

Then there was 21.  I’d already done the whole drunken stupor thing in my late teens, and had a friend of a friend who could get me alcohol when I wanted it- so I wasn’t too excited about 21.  It was like 6 months before I even went to a bar for the first time- and the dude didn’t even card me .

I got my first “good” job a couple weeks after, and suddenly, I was a full fledged union member making my way up the seniority list.   Unfortunately, the company I worked for had the bad habit of taking every opportunity it could to screw it’s workers over, so I became pretty well acquainted with our Collective Bargaining Agreement.  A few years in I became a shift steward, and managed to earn the respect of enough people that I was elected to Chief Steward(I should have ran for president).  If you read this blog in it’s early days, you know that the plant I worked at was shut down about 6 months later due to outsourcing, which spurred a move to eastern New York in August 2006.  The company I work for now isn’t union, and it doesn’t need to be.  It’s one of the few companies that actually treats it’s workers pretty good.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not benefiting from what labor unions have done in the past…

While we’re talking about serious stuff- I can honestly say I’ve always thought I’d see a non-white male presidential nominee in my lifetime, but never thought it’d be this soon.  Although it could be argued that it has taken too long, I’m just gonna be PC and say it’s pretty cool what Obama has accomplished.

Here I am approaching 28.  That number doesn’t sound old, but it does sound a little foreign.  And on this weekend of rest, I get to move boxes and large furniture items for the 3rd August in a row.  Which is also funny, cause when I bought my first house in 2003, I never thought I’d move again.  I can’t complain though.  Other than the move in ‘06 from our house to an apartment, each move has been an upgrade for the most part.  I’ve learned from the past to never say never, so I won’t say we won’t be moving again.  But I do think we’ll be at this address at least until I finish my associates degree. Then a decision will need to be made- do I go to school for two more, or call it good?

On a lighter note, I have a more urgent decision to ponder.  Do I go after Bass, Carp or Trout on my birthday?  Oooooohhh, how about all three?

No fishing last night despite the call to pursue a white fly hatch.  It only took one day of being in college to get that call.  You know the one.

“White flies are happening, are you in?”

“No, I’ve got a bunch of reading to do”

No writing for me today either, still more studying to stay on top of.  I have to admit though, I’m enjoying the subject matter.

Where to click from here? Check out these other fine fly fishing blogs-

• Singlebarbed
• Foul Hooked
• The Anglers Net Blog
• Flying Ties
• The Stringer
• Fishing Jones
• Buster Wants To Fish
• Daily Fly Paper
• Tennessee Valley Angler
• Trout Zone
• Neil Creek Chronicles
• Fly Fish Chick
• Opax Fly Fishing
• Practical Fly
• The Urban Fly Fisher
• Carp on the Fly
• Trout Underground
• Fly Fish Blogzine

And if you stop at the third one from the top, give him props for rubbing it in…

This morning we talked a little more about classification stuff, and characteristics of life- which lead to some key points of Darwinian Evolution. And wouldn’t you know it, that got me to thinking about fly tying.

There are 5 key points to Darwinian Evolution

1. Life tends to produce more offspring than can reasonably survive
2. Some variation exists among the organisms that actually are produced
3. Natural Selection, nature selects who survives
4. Inheritance of some, but not all, traits
5. Time

I’m only working on my 4th year as a fly tier, but my fly boxes have evolved(or de evolved, depending how you look at it) all over the place. So if Darwin was a fly tier, his list of fly box evolution would probably read something like this

1. Fly tiers tend to produce more flies than can reasonably be used
2. Much variation exists among the fly patterns that are tied
3. Natural Selection, the fish select which patterns will be tied again next season
4. Next years flies will inherit some, but not all, traits from last years successful/nearly successful patterns.
5. Time

Like different species, fly patterns evolve in three ways

1. Divergently- multiple patterns share a common ancestor, which illustrates homology(sorry, I needed to use that word before I forget what it means ). A good example of this would be the spun deer hair head on a Zoo Cougar and a Dahlburg Diver evolving from a Muddler Minnow(I can’t freakin’ believe I haven’t added a Muddler to the database yet).
2. Convergently- two fly patterns evolve into a single fly pattern. An example here would be a Parachute Adams and a Harrop style downwing mayfly evolving into a parachute downwing.
3. Parallel- John in New York, and Bob in California might come up with an identical fly pattern without ever have meet or talked with one another. We’ll name their hypothetical fly pattern a, “Comb Over”. Bob’s Comb Over, and John’s Comb Over both came to be by the same influences.

There I was this morning, sitting in a desk again, taking notes, listening to my Biology teacher talk about stuff like the Scientific Method and Carl Linnaeus’s system for Binomial Nomenclature.  And of course, that got me to thinking about fly tying experiments gone wrong, and insect taxonomy.  I’ve had so many experiments on stream, and at the tying bench, go wrong.   They’re all worth it though, when version 23 finally does what version 1 was supposed to.

It reminds me of Thomas Edison, who failed 2000 times before finally coming up with a working incandescent light bulb.  When asked about his failures, he simply replied, “I did not fail, I found 2000 ways not to make a light bulb.”

Keep tinkering, fly tiers…