by Richard Foust
June 18, 2023
We have been fascinated with water and rivers since ancient times. D?gen Zenji, the Buddhist philosopher, made the following statement in the “Mountains and Waters Sutra” in 1240 A.D.
From ancient times wise people and sages have often lived near water. When they live near water, they catch fish, catch human beings, and catch the way. . . . Furthermore, there is catching the self, catching, catching, being caught by catching, and being caught by the way.
Most of us are familiar with the words of Norman Maclean, taken from the last paragraph of his novelette titled “A River Runs Through It.” Perhaps you have seen Robert Redford’s film of the same name.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a River runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
“A River Runs Through It” used flyfishing as a vehicle to tell a story about people. The stories focus on the events and the interactions between Norman Maclean, his brother Paul, and their father, a Presbyterian minister. Flyfishing for trout in the Big Blackfoot River was a passion with the Maclean men. The book begins with the following paragraph:
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and flyfishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry fly fisherman.
Norman Maclean’s son, John, describes the emotional roller coaster ride of fishing with his father like this:
Many go through life without glimpsing heaven and hell, but fishing with my father gave me an early appreciation for both places. Hell was when I lost a big fish in front of him. “What did I bring you here for? How could you have muffed him? You muffed him!” When I hooked a big fish, however, he became so enthusiastic that, on occasion, he joined the fight.
Why do we fish for trout, and what is unique about fly fishing for trout? At least a dozen authors, with names like Walton, Bergman, Hemingway, Leeson, and Wulff, have attempted to answer this question. Robert Traver, the author of “Anatomy of a Murder” and an Associate Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, described the pleasure of fishing like this:
So, I went fishing and my heart was carefree and gay. At dusk I snapped my leader on two trout of voting age and finally, just at dusk, latched onto grandpa and the fight was on. “Come, come, sweet lover darlin’,” I coaxed and wheeled. “Come to daddy, come to daddy.” Twenty minutes later I went into the familiar Daisy hoop and slipped the net under him. “Ah. . . . It was my biggest brook trout of the season. It looked like a dappled and dripping slice of sunset in the wavering light of my flashlight. But best of all, for twenty whole minutes I had managed to forget all about the Marion case.
What activities make us happy? George MacKerrion, an economist at the London School of Economics, developed an iPhone app to research the happiness question. His study is called the Mappiness Project. The free iPhone app is anonymous, and it beeps you twice a day and asks you to answer three simple questions and rate your happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. The questions the app asks are:
- What types of people are you with?
- Are you indoors or outdoors?
- And what are you doing (there are about forty options)?
After answering the three questions, the responder replies with their happiness level. MacKerrion collected more than 3 million data points from the replies he received, making it the most extensive happiness study ever completed.
The activities that make people happiest include exercise, gardening, and sex. People get a big happiness boost from being with a romantic partner or friends but not from others, like colleagues, children, or acquaintances. People are happier when the temperature is over 75 degrees and sunny. People are consistently happier when out in nature, particularly near a body of water with beautiful scenery. Work is the second most miserable activity; of forty activities, only being sick in bed makes people less happy than working. MacKerrion concluded, after analyzing over 3 million responses to his iPhone app, the answer to life is: Be with the one you love on a sunny, 75-degree day, having sex.
Ed Glaeser and Josh Gotlieb ranked people’s happiness in every American metropolitan area in a related study. They found that New York City was the least happy. Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco also scored low. The happiest places to live include Flagstaff, Arizona, Naples, Florida, and all of Hawaii.
I am the president of the Massanutten Chapter of Trout Unlimited, and our chapter manages a special regulation, flyfishing-only section of Beaver Creek. On April 5th, I received the following email from Ian Horwitz, a person I did not know.
Hello, I just wanted to share that I had an amazing fishing experience fishing Beaver Creek today. . . . What y’all are doing is fantastic for the sport of fly fishing. I got to share the river with other respectful anglers, and a grandfather sharing the sport with his grandkids. . . . Oh, and by the way, I hammered them on dries today!
Tight lines,
Ian Horwitz
I learned flyfishing from my father, the traditional way the love for flyfishing passes through the generations. My dad learned to fly fish from his grandfather, Albert Foust. Dad’s first fishing rod was 8 feet long, constructed of bamboo, and came with two tips, one for worm fishing and a lighter one for fly casting.
Dad was born in 1925 and lived in a small coal mining town in southern Pennsylvania. Every decision Dad made over his 94-year lifetime reflected the impoverished life he experienced in his youth. For instance, you should only buy something if you cannot make it yourself. The chest waders fishermen use require separate boots. Wading boots cost more than the waders themselves. Dad purchased a set of waders and then meticulously glued outdoor carpet to the soles of a pair of worn-out Red Wing boots to save forty dollars.
My first automobile was a 1956 Plymouth Belvedere that we purchased from a junkyard for seventy-five dollars. The body was in good shape, which was a consideration because of the salt used on winter highways in Pennsylvania, but the car had a blown motor. We towed the car home and rebuilt the engine in Foust’s garage. It was a father-and-son project from the get-go. I had considerable mechanical skills that I had learned from working with my dad in the garage, and with his guidance, I completed the motor overhaul nicely. The car’s original colors were black and white, but I prepped the car for painting with a bit of elbow grease and a lot of sandpaper. Dad painted the vehicle with the deep maroon color available on Chevy Corvettes. Sadly, I hit a deer while traveling 45 miles an hour, ruining the hood and the vehicle’s front fenders. Dad’s solution to the problem was to return to the junkyard and get a second 1956 Plymouth Belvedere. This one had the blue-and-white color scheme that was popular with that model. The body was in good shape, and by putting the motor we had recently rebuilt into the new body, I had the vehicle that I drove cross-country and kept through graduate school.
Dad was the scoutmaster for the Seanor Boy Scouts. Our troop always won the top prize for the cleanest campsite when the Camporee ended. Berwindino Elementary, the school I attended for six years, included students from Seanor and the nearby farms. My dad drove the school bus that transported students to the school, and he occasionally would exit the bus when he arrived and take a few swings in the softball game that was going on.
Dad was fascinated with everything about trains. He maintained a model train set until moving into a single room at the retirement home. In 1954, we were fishing on Wills Creek, eating our lunch while sitting on the running board of my grandfather’s 1939 Chrysler, when a Steam locomotive pulling a train of coal cars passed by on the Western Maryland Railway. When the train passed out of our view, Dad said, “Let’s run down to the next crossing so we can see it again.” We jumped into the car and beat the train to the next crossing, where we could see the steam locomotive puffing its way toward Cumberland. About a year later, Dad took the family to the Windber train station, where we boarded a special Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train that traveled around the Horseshoe Curve near Altoona.
My mother was an excellent seamstress and made her clothes and my sister’s dresses from fabric and patterns she bought at the W.T. Grant store in Windber. She made matching fishing vests for Dad and me, and several years later, she made a fishing vest for my brother Bill.
Dad was always concerned about my ability to earn a living and wanted me to take an elective welding class at Penn State because “Welders will always be able to find work.” The automobile industry switched from generators to alternators around 1960. Delco-Remy offered an evening class to independent auto repair shops to train mechanics to diagnose and repair the new devices. Dad took me with him to the workshop (I was ten years younger than anyone else in the room) because “I could always get a job if I were up to date on the latest developments in automobile repair.”
I did not fish much with my dad after I started college in 1963. After graduation, I moved to California for graduate school and then settled in Arizona, where I lived until 2008. We didn’t fish when I visited Pennsylvania, and Arizona is not a trout fishing destination. The last fishing trip I had with my father was in September 1978. Dad and Mother drove to Flagstaff to visit. Dad, my son Richard, and I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and fished Bright Angel Creek, where we all did well. We were halfway up the North Kaibab Trail when Dad encountered heart pains and required a helicopter to finish the trip to the rim.
The last time Dad cast a fly rod was in August 2017. My grandson Tanner spent a week with Glenda and me, and we drove to Dad’s retirement home in Pennsylvania to visit. We took a fly rod I built for Tanner and let Dad cast the 8’, 4-wt fly rod on the lawn in front of Dad’s apartment. He picked up the rod and made several false casts, working out the line with each stroke before making a perfect, tight-loop, 30-foot cast. Although Dad was feeble and required a walker, his muscle memory was as sharp as ever. Fly casting is like riding a bicycle—once you learn to cast correctly, your muscles always remember the rhythm.
The following two and a half years were the most difficult of Dad’s life. Mother, Dad’s lifelong companion, passed away in 2016. They were married for 72 years. He was alone and slowly drifted into the fog of amnesia and confusion caused by Alzheimer’s Disease. I made the 400-mile round trip to sit with Dad every second or third week. He always smiled at me from his wheelchair when I arrived but rarely had much to say after we went through the standard questions about traffic, the weather, and which routes I used to get there. I usually arrived at lunchtime, and we would go to the Village Dairy, where Dad would order pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream. It wasn’t long before he became too frail to ride in my truck, so we ate lunch in the Laurel View lunchroom. Dad lost the ability to remember names and didn’t recognize his brother, who drove in from Wisconsin to visit. However, he remembered fishing stories and fishing trips, which he repeated every time we were together. Our last conversations were about the fish he caught and the ones that got away.
Tight Lines, Dad.
© Richard D. Foust, Jr.
Not Just on Father’s Day, a poem written by Linda Dove and read at the end of Richard’s message.