A Season in the East

By Bud Bynack

    “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe said, and I didn’t. After twenty-five years in California, though, I returned to the East Coast. I was born and raised in Cooperstown, NY, but I returned to a base downstate this time, in Westchester County. Having done so, it’s hard not to reflect on the differences between the East and the West, differences that I encountered in transit to new destinations in both directions.

    On first arriving in the Northern California, history seemed to melt away—to disappear into nature. There was so much of the natural world to explore, so much that was on a grand scale. In the Adirondacks, peaks over 4,000 feet are so few that hikers keep lists of the ones they’ve climbed. It’s a big deal, there.

    By contrast, once, in California, we climbed Sonora Peak. At the summit, at 11,462 feet, we encountered two guys with a ham radio and antenna, a car battery, and the remains of a cold pizza, competing in some kind of transmission derby. I guess it wasn’t so much the Range of Light as the Range of Lite Beer, at least as they saw it. Still, it was a big deal for us.

    It wasn’t really history itself that seemed absent from California, though, but what is called “historicity,” the sense of life being imbued with history, the sense that living in the here and now is inextricably and for better or for worse connected to the lives and practices of those who went before, even if that was a long time ago.

    That’s what I returned to in the East, especially when it comes to angling—a cultural and even moral sense of being connected to a living past. I used to live two hours’ drive from a rivulet called Putah Creek, pretty much the closest possible destination for San Francisco Bay Area anglers who are desperate to spend some time on a trout stream, even if it has to be on that condom-strewn and mud-snail-infested tailwater. I now live two hours’ drive from the Beaverkill and the Willowemoc. Enough said.

    When I arrived in the East, I joined the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild. At my first meeting, I was overwhelmed by the depth of experience and the breadth of knowledge about fly-fishing history that the members brought to the table. At gatherings of fly tyers in California, I was more accustomed to seeing someone like my friend, the talented fly-tying innovator Andy Burk, tie a new creation based on, say, a fluorescent-pink synthetic material that didn’t exist six months ago, or perhaps an exquisitely imitative, yet sturdy Callibaetis nymph of his own recent devising, based on his own entomological investigations.

    I don’t think that any Eastern tyer would say that he or she is bound by the past, either, but it’s hard to deny that intellectual and emotional investment in the past is greater here than it is among their counterparts in the West. At its worst, this can lead to a sterile antiquarianism—which I hasten to add that I haven’t witnessed. At its best, however, as guild member Gary Sweet points out, the Eastern sense of historicity has an ethical component: “I’m not an elitist,” Gary says, “but when comments were published some time ago about the effectiveness or importance of our ‘traditional’ patterns and styles of patterns” in one of the national magazines, “I couldn’t help but think that the people who have this kind of respect for our own legacies and heritage have more respect for our resources.” It’s hard to argue with that, especially in the midst of the East Coast megalopolis.