On learning outdoor pursuits from the great indoors
by Teresa Mull
It’s a Thursday morning on the first day of February, and Penn State’s University Park Campus is abuzz with bundled-up students bustling between classes. George Daniel meets me outside Recreation Hall—a prominent brick building that’s been a hub of Nittany Lion athletics since 1929. I walk quickly to keep up with my guide, a tall, lithe man who appears to do everything efficiently.
As we sweep through the ground floor of Rec Hall, I manage a glance at the expansive gym floor, set up this time of year for volleyball, gleaming with extra-shiny splendor with no fans or players to obstruct the blindingly bright fluorescent lights and polished floors.
Tucked off a hallway in a smallish side room is a very different sort of scene. College kids are crowding in quietly and settling down at stations, while many have arrived early and already begun setting up. From a distance they could be scientists fine-tuning microscopes for some a.m. examinations, but closer inspection reveals that, while what they’re doing is biological and nearly microscopic, they’re here, ultimately, for sport. (It is Rec Hall, remember.)
This is the Introduction to Fly Fishing course offered by the Kinesiology Department as part of the Joe Humphreys Fly Fishing Program. (Joe Humphreys, by the way, is still fishing at 95 years wise. I’ve interviewed him, so stay tuned!) Instructor Daniel jumps right into it with a short, energetic lecture about leaders and tippets. Indicators are just the fly-fishing world’s “holier version” of a bobber, he explains, then launches into a colorful description of the feeding habits of fish. Their diet, he says, is 90 percent below the surface, so they behave like lazy Americans who prefer the path of least resistance (fast food) when it comes to eating.
“These fish are not difficult to catch, but you need to put the fly where they’re feeding,” Daniel says. That is—at their comfort level, where food is most available, in the column of water “right close to stream bottom.”
Now it’s time to tie the fly of the day: a pheasant tail nymph. Daniel tells the students that when they’re out on the water, they’ll see “a bunch of creepy crawlers on the rocks. All I want you to do is look at size, shape, and color. If you can find something in your fly box that closely imitates—not exactly—but gets it close enough to size, shape, and color, you’re going to be in the ballgame. It’s pretty simple. You don’t need to know Latin; you don’t need to know all these insects’ names. But size, shape, and color—those are the three most important characteristics when you’re trying to choose a fly.”
Though Daniel also reassures the kids, if they aren’t catching any fish, “It’s usually not the fly, it’s just that you suck that day.”
The pheasant tail nymph has been around for “well over 100 years,” says Daniel, and is one of the most useful patterns. Tying it, though, he warns the class, will “test your dexterity” and require “a little bit of patience.
“It’s not hard,” he says, “but it is a little more involved.” The fly-tying life “isn’t all Rainbows and Green Weenies and Walt’s Worms,” he says. On a 0–10 easy scale, the Green Weenie is a 2; the pheasant tail nymph, meanwhile, scores about a 5.
The college kids are undeterred and eagerly set forth following Daniel’s demonstration—he winds his thread around his hook at mesmerizing speed—at a raised desk in front of a magnifying screen that’s broadcast onto a television. The students will be graded today on producing four good flies.
Somehow, Daniel is able to keep the instruction of the meticulous craft of fly-tying fast-paced and entertaining, infusing constant humor—“I know most of you have photographic memories, but remember the smaller diameter end of the bead goes through the hook point first;” “Let’s show your parents what their money is paying for at Penn State”—and upbeat reassurance—“If you don’t get it first off, don’t worry about it;” “Piece of cake!” “Huge improvement!” “You could sell that fly at a shop for full retail!”
From time to time, students gather around Daniel’s desk for up-close clarification, but no one ever seems to get lost or grow frustrated. They work in almost total silence (when Daniel remarks on their noiselessness, someone says, “I can’t imagine trying to talk while doing this”) absorbed in the spellbinding task of keeping the bobbin as close to the hook as they can, isolating five or six pheasant-tail fibers and securing them with wire to create segmentation and “a really nice, tapered body,” as Daniel tells them these insects are “almost all on Keto diets. They have very thin bodies.” What’s more, he adds, a dense fly will drop quickly to the water column, “And that’s why we’re here: to catch fish.”
In fact, even as a mere observer, the class is a delight. The students are engaged, polite, and happy to help one another. I talk to a few as they’re tying off their flies with a half-hitch and placing their treasures carefully in their fly boxes, like gems in a jewel box. While I’d assumed the creative, whimsical, liberal-arts types would be attracted to such a class, I encounter a chemical engineering major, a soon-to-be criminologist, an aspiring computer scientist, and one international student who asked to have “t-r-o-u-t” spelled out. (“They’re fish found in moving water,” Daniel puts it simply.)
The students tell me how much they look forward to disconnecting in this class, where cellphones are put away, how therapeutic it is to work with their hands to produce something tangible, and mostly, how much they’re looking forward to the many field trips scheduled for when the weather finally breaks. (“Happy Valley” is world renowned for its trout streams.)
Several students make a lot more than the required four flies, and most seem reluctant to drag themselves “back to the real world,” as instructor Daniel puts it, even when they finish their assignments early.
It’s easy to see why. To be unplugged for 90 minutes from the chaos of modern life, contentedly immersed in the creation of something as pretty as it will be useful, all the while dreaming of a sunny, springtime expedition on a clear stream as the paradoxically hyper-focused yet easy-going George Daniel mixes earnest instruction with playful banter—it’s no wonder this class is wait-listed every year.
Teresa Mull wonders how many fly-fishing classes she can get away with sitting in on “for journalistic purposes” before somebody catches on.
