The Secret of Life and How I Figured It Out

“Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing, just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.” Curly, the fictional cowboy who uttered this cryptic statement in the 1991 film City Slickers also implied that the “one thing” is specifically tied to the individual and the act of finding it is an act of self-discovery. Many can’t be bothered with it, some misinterpret it, others are afraid of it, a few are lucky enough to find it before it’s too late, and then there’s me: I found it at the age of thirteen and it took nearly twenty years and plenty of emotional mileage to realize it.  

Growing up at the Jersey Shore, I was exposed to both freshwater and saltwater fishing at a young age and by eleven, if I wasn’t fishing I was watching fishing shows. Occasionally, one of them would deviate from bass angling to focus on fly fishing, a concept so alien to me that I couldn’t make sense of it no matter how many clips I watched. Not only did the technique go against everything I thought I knew about fishing, but the scenery around it was infinitely distant from that of my small beach community and felt inaccessible to one such as myself from a lower class upbringing. Even though I couldn’t comprehend fly fishing, I wanted to try it.

Bob Popovics and I, circa 2017

Through a family connection, local saltwater fly fishing legend Bob Popovics learned of my interest and generously introduced me to his saltwater fly fishing club, taught me the basics of casting and presenting saltwater streamers, and gave me a large plastic tub filled with tying supplies, including a new Renzetti vise, the only vise I’ve ever owned. With Christmas and birthday money I scored a functional 3-weight Cabela’s combo and a 9-weight Fenwick HMG. Other odds and ends were acquired, some bass fishing tools were repurposed, and I was ready to dive in. Initially it was a solo effort casting dries for panfish and streamers for largemouth in local ponds, but I soon found friends who practiced inshore saltwater fly fishing and for years we rode our bikes all over town in search of striped bass and bluefish.

By twenty, the demands of adult life took hold and I was overcome with a fear of failure, of ending up like much of my family: unfulfilled and miserable. This drove me to devote myself entirely to education and career pursuits. I was working full-time through college and after graduating balanced no less than two jobs to survive while establishing my career. From the ages of twenty-one to twenty-nine, fly fishing was out of my life in exchange for an inordinate workload of which I could never seem to stay ahead. After years of letting my profession take me over completely, my worst fears were realized: the life I was leading was unfulfilling and I was miserable. While the positive impact I made professionally was unprecedented, I had sacrificed myself entirely to that success and my reward was being let go by superiors who didn’t value my devotion and sacrifices above the bottom line. To compound my situation, the experience left me severely depressed. I no longer had a sense of self or any identity that wasn’t tied to my career and I didn’t even value my own existence.  

I soon found comparable employment but I was barely holding it together. Upon realizing I couldn’t go on like this anymore, I thought of what once made me happy and immediately realized how much I missed fly fishing. Around this time, my girlfriend proposed that we purchase a tandem kayak to spend more time in Nature and that summer I paddled and casted for largemouth as often as possible. I was enjoying my reunion with the sport I loved so much, but still something was missing. The following Spring, I overheard two colleagues in the breakroom discussing fly fishing for trout in a Northern New Jersey stream. Growing up at the shore, my only experience with trout involved casting mealworms for hatchery fish in tiny, muddy creeks smothered in dense foliage, the antithesis of the sprawling Western rivers in those old fly fishing clips. I was doubtful that it was even possible to fly fish for trout in New Jersey, but I wanted to try and decided to head North that Saturday morning, May 9th, 2015. 

At dawn I rigged up my nearly twenty-year-old 3-weight setup with an olive Woolly Bugger and hit the road. When I arrived, the stream was packed with anglers and vehicles. What I didn’t know was that this particular stream was the most popular, heavily pressured trout stream in the state and I chose to fish it on a weekend at peak season. Today you couldn’t pay me to fish elbow-to-elbow for stocked trout, but that day I was in heaven. Driving along the stream, I was stunned at the water clarity and pristine surroundings, so unlike the muddy, narrow creeks I had fished near home. It looked like one of the fly fishing segments I had watched long ago, but still maintained a distinctly Jersey feel. Finding water like this in my home state was beyond anything I could have hoped for and a sense of the day’s importance was palpable. I miraculously found parking and put on my ancient, ill-fitting rubber waders, strapped on an old wooden trout net, grabbed my 3-weight, and hit the trail. Personally, I despise elitism, especially in fly fishing, and believe one doesn’t need the best gear to be successful, but I can also be self-deprecating and acknowledge that I looked just as clueless as I was.

Years of fly fishing had taught me to keep my distance from other anglers and it took a while to find an unoccupied section; after walking nearly a mile I discovered a spot where the presence of two massive, car-sized boulders forced the water into three separate runs: one running in-between the boulders and two to the outside. The run I chose along the near bank was slow and short, dumping into a deep, wide pool. Of course, I did everything wrong on my approach. Instead of coming from downstream and working the tail first, I came from upstream scrambling down an incline overlooking the pool, knocking pebbles in the water, and positioning myself alongside the middle of the pool. I casted diagonally into the head, letting the Bugger sink for a few seconds before stripping it in. As the fly came back into sight, an eighteen-inch hen stocked rainbow came out of nowhere and crushed it. Immediately the rod went into full-bend and I was acutely aware that I was living what I’d once deemed an impossibility. Remembering that child watching TV on his mother’s couch and receiving brief glimpses of a world out of his sphere, hooking this trout changed everything; I had found my “one thing.” 

The stocked rainbow
that started it all...

After a prolonged fight, during which the stocked rainbow used its limited battle experience to repeatedly make for the deep water of the pool, I was able to turn it into the net and a passerby snapped a quick photo before release. For the rest of the day I worked that Woolly Bugger in every unoccupied pocket, run, and pool. While I only landed two more rainbows, I had aggressive action in almost every section and I was beaming. I met friendly, helpful anglers on the trail, shared my story, and listened eagerly to any tips they sent my way. That afternoon I went home feeling reinvigorated with a new-found appetite for learning I hadn’t experienced in years. Without realizing it, fly fishing for trout had become my religion.

  Once so weighed down by life I could hardly get off the couch, I wouldn’t have recognized myself in who I’ve become and owe everything to one stocked rainbow. Over the past six years I’ve travelled extensively for trout, viewing life as one fly fishing adventure after another, whether it be catching brookies on foam hoppers in New Hampshire or Euro nymphing streams for wild browns in Pennsylvania. I’ve climbed mountain trails in Alberta to chuck big caddis on glacial lakes for cutties, drifted dry-droppers for wild browns and rainbows on spring-fed New Jersey creeks, short-line nymphed native brookies out of mountain streams in Tennessee and Virginia, indicator nymphed and streamer-fished the Bow River through Calgary on a drift boat for browns, and those are only a few adventures out of hundreds in other states and provinces, with each experience being special for its challenges, rewards, lessons, and most importantly the friendships made on the water with like-minded anglers all over North America.   

Since May 9th, 2015, I’ve been happy. Yes, life is far from perfect but I’m much better equipped to navigate the rougher waters after having found my one thing. I now recognize that what I do for a living doesn’t carry with it any existential truth, but simply provides a means for me to pursue those truths in Nature. Genuine fulfillment for me was never found sitting at a desk, typing on a computer, or nodding off in a meeting; it’s in clear streams deep in the forests up in the mountains where I’m more likely to come across a bear than someone sipping coffee and making small-talk about the weather. I still work just as hard as ever and take pride in my career accomplishments, but now the little things that once gnawed away at me and had seemingly world-ending potential just “don’t mean shit” when compared to the beauty of a wild brown nymphed out of a spring-fed mountain stream.