Clyde Gets Done Up Real Nice

Southern Yarns and Fly Hooks

This story is about a culminating event for the growth of fly fishing in Alabama in 2022. Next to a subject’s introduction to this scene I have placed the story they first appeared in under a parenthetical framing.

Clyde rides again. Well, sort of he did. I’m not sure why I wanted to bring him to the Fly Fishing Film Tour event in Birmingham. It has been a disconcerting week in my stewardship of the Brougham Marquis by Mercury. Paul and I took him on a turkey hunt which was interesting primarily because I was so stoned off his fumes after the two mile ride to turkey land at the base of Sand Mountain that I felt as if I had been inhaling nitrous balloons in some post-Phish concert parking lot party. For the record, I hadn’t.

Paul had finessed a combo trip. I asked him to bring me a loaner trailer since my trailer was really too small for Clyde. He consented to helping me thankfully, and assisted me in loading up ole Clyde after we were busted by the longbeard that never gobbled. I almost shot at him, but thought better of a sixty yard shot at a fleeing bird. Paul was pissed the bird never gobbled, but I was glad to know we still had a few gobblers roaming about when I saw him boogie down the trail.

I was ecstatic that Clyde was running again. I wanted to do so much with this ol’e guy. His new gas tank was like a new lease on both our lives for however little time I had with him. The Drake will eventually ask me to pass his keys to the next unsuspecting victim.

After trailering him to Ohatchee I picked up Justin and Colin there at Justin’s house (“God Rails”). Justin was shaking the cobwebs out after a long few weeks doing bird surveys in Iowa. I was an hour early. Colin was giving up a day in the turkey woods foraging for sparse morels, and birds that were still thundering gobbles into the canopied Talladega wilderness. I was early picking them up because I knew Talladega was going to be a cluster of Nascar fans. We sped through Lincoln on our way to the interstate, stopping for coffee, and they discussed everything from trillium flowers to the crappie bite on Logan Martin Lake in Pell City. The diesel truck, Clyde’s trusty wheel chair, roared down the highway. Every driver in our wake was incensed that my rpms were not any higher, but I didn’t want to blow up my Dad’s truck. We coasted down the interstate at a harrowing fifty five to sixty miles per hour, and I white knuckled the wheel furtively while Justin and Colin discussed the hardness of a pike’s skull, and the importance of sharp hooks. I was in good company.

This event we were attending was vital to a healthy culture of fly fishing in Alabama. The culture seemed to have grown since Covid began two years ago. Grown is perhaps an understatement. The culture of angling had ballooned to quadruple the size of past fly fishing film tour events. The profundity of the turnout revealed the existence of a community that normally interacts virtually in the digital landscape of fishing forums, and facebook pages. Putting the event on was Coosa Riverkeeper, and Native Fish Coalition, and a host of rod makers, fly tiers, and fishing artists. Some were friends, and some would likely become friends after meeting, but Clyde was the great lubricant to all this fly socialization (Clyde and the booze). I mean the film tour was surely cool too, but I will have to watch those films with better acoustics, or at home on my personal device. There was just too much stimuli, at this cause to celebrate for anglers.

All day friends rolled into the party. I first saw Rick Shelton, a casting instructor from Deep South Outfitters, and he was performing a casting demonstration in an alley (“In Litchfield’s Fields”). The alley was not befitting his good humor, and storytelling prowess, but it was befitting the gentrification of the neighborhood to have a typically imagined elitist sport being spread to include all listeners with every beautiful and artful Belgian cast and aerial mend he made. Then Rick’s cast, or more likely the wind grabbed his hookless fly and wrapped it around my friend Gene’s daughter’s neck at seventy feet. I unhooked her because I am a gentleman, and because Gene is still a good friend, in spite of what happened at the Rainbow Fly Club.

Then I walked her and Gene over to Clyde for a photo opportunity, and because I once saw a documentary called Hands on a Hard Body, I had them pose with Clyde in this fashion, because Gene is one of the coolest guys (“Airborne”) from the ol’e club, and he is one of the few in that club that knows who Clyde is.

My new friend Tim, came down to Birmingham too with some of his friends. He knew Clyde, and had come to visit him once at my father’s barn where Clyde lived for the last six months.

Matt Lewis was there representing Native Fish Coalition (“Two Popes: A Schism in Bama Fly Fishing”). The event had every vendor busy all day, and it seemed to raise a great deal of raffle money for conservation. They had great prizes, and he and Justinn Overton, from Coosa Riverkeeper, did a fabulous job making everyone feel welcome. When the seats disappeared I sat my fat ass down to rest my tired feet, and Justinn snuck up behind me, and said, “We are glad you are here.” I looked at her as if she had nefarious intent, and said, “You are not going to make me get up from the kid’s table are you? I am pretty sure I belong here.” She said, “No, you are too important.” It made me feel good that she wasn’t too officious with me. In past years, without Clyde, I might have been asked to move. Clyde gave me Rosa Parks status as both legend, and seated legend.

Later Tony Cox arrived with a crew of interesting folks. One was an environmental lawyer that was doing something Coosa River related in his professional life. He was attending the event because he wanted to see what the Coosa Riverkeeper was all about. He is a published author, and so I was able to pick his brain momentarily as the event wound down. Tony guides for smallmouth out of Muscle Shoals. I look forward to fishing with him someday, and I was happy to give another stamp to Clyde after our conversation.

As I began to depart, I noticed my legs were pretty chaffed from all the walking down the street for people to stand by Clyde for photo opportunities. My mother, who lives in Birmingham, even dropped by to see Clyde. She is hands down my best reader, so I was glad for her to get a few selfies in with the Brougham beast from Detroit. She noticed a few folks stamp him surreptitiously before I could approve them, so I was not terribly surprised when I saw my buddy Hank and his girlfriend come walking down the street gaslighting me about unauthorized stickers. I rationalized this as simpatico, since Clyde’s patina of Western and Florida stickers were beginning to peel. I needed to rationalize this a bit since my stewardship is surely temporary, but I think I was falling for ole Clyde. He meant belonging in this community. The one that was typically so disjointed by politics and ego. As the sun began to go down my friend Sam from the 2017 Knoxville carp cup (and other carp outings), found a symbolically meaningful wrestler mask under Clyde’s seat. It looked as if it could have been both Ray Mysterio’s from the nineties, and also a barn mouse home from this winter.

All of these friends were stamping Clyde with their passion projects which maybe amounted to ten stamps. It was the nature of a community event such as this. But it made me wonder about fly fishing in Alabama. Could we support the growth of this sport? E.O. Wilson called us “the aquatic state.” Clyde and other entrepreneurs will be able to test that thesis. Let’s not work against the experiment by not supporting our local river keepers. Donate today. Donate tomorrow. The anglers are here, and they are queer for Clyde, but more importantly for conservation. I never even needed to get Clyde off the trailer, but I did crank him up a few times before he idled his way into the heart of Ray Mysterio. Today, I am proud of my state.