There is something strange about teaching a subject you know you haven’t mastered.
I’ve been fishing for most of my life, and I’ve been around fly fishing long enough to know my way around a fly rod. I’ve caught fish, spent time on Pennsylvania streams, taken fly rods with me on trips, and accumulated enough flies and equipment to fill more boxes than I probably need. But the more seriously I’ve begun taking fly fishing, the more I’ve realized just how much I still have to learn.
And somehow, in the middle of that, I became the teacher.
This year, I started a fly fishing elective at the Christian school where I teach. There are six students in the class. The idea is fairly simple: spend the colder months learning the foundations, equipment, knots, flies, casting, reading water, trout behavior and conservation—and then get outside and actually fish when we can.
But I’ve started to realize that the class is about considerably more than teaching six kids how to throw a fly line.
Fly fishing has an unusual way of slowing you down.
You can buy the right rod, reel, line and flies, but none of them guarantee that you’ll catch a trout. You have to pay attention. Where is the current strongest? Where would a trout be able to hold without wasting energy? What’s happening underneath the surface? What insects are present? Is my fly moving naturally, or am I dragging it through the water?
And sometimes you can do everything you think you’re supposed to do and still walk back to the truck without catching anything.
That’s not necessarily a bad lesson for a young person to learn.
We’re living in a world where almost everything is immediate. Entertainment is immediate. Information is immediate. If something doesn’t hold our attention, we can replace it within seconds.
A simple minded trout doesn’t care.
The stream demands patience.
That’s part of what I want my students to experience.
I want them to learn how to cast and mend line. I want them to understand the difference between a mayfly and a caddis. I want them to be able to look at a section of water and begin recognizing where a trout might be holding. Of course I want to see the excitement when one of them finally feels a trout pull against the other end of the line.
But twenty years from now, I don’t particularly care whether they remember every knot I taught them.
I’d rather they remember what it felt like to stand in a Pennsylvania trout stream with friends and discover that there was an entire world moving around them that they had never bothered to notice before.
There’s another part of this story that I’m beginning to understand myself.
Teaching fly fishing has made me a student again.
Every question from one of my students has the potential to expose something I don’t know. Every time I pick up a rod, I notice another weakness in my own casting. Every conversation with someone who has spent decades studying trout reminds me how deep this sport really goes.
At first, that can be intimidating.
I’m the teacher. Aren’t I supposed to have the answers?
But maybe one of the most valuable things I can show my students is what it looks like to keep learning.
I don’t need to pretend I’ve mastered fly fishing. I need to care enough about it to keep getting better and then turn around and give away what I’ve learned.
That’s how traditions survive.
Somebody teaches somebody else.
An older fisherman shows a younger fisherman how to read a piece of water. A father hands a rod to his son or daughter. A friend teaches another friend a knot. A teacher puts six fly rods into the hands of six students and hopes that perhaps one of them discovers something that stays with him for the rest of his life.
Maybe years from now one of those students will stand beside another stream with somebody who has never held a fly rod.
He’ll straighten out a leader, tie on a fly and hand the rod over.
“Here. Let me show you.”
If that happens, I think this little elective will have accomplished something worthwhile.
And somewhere along the way, I’m beginning to suspect that while I’m teaching six students how to fly fish, fly fishing is still teaching me.
That’s where The Narrow Current begins.
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