OPINION — Although I love fly fishing, I am far from an expert. I cannot execute double haul casts with the precision a ballerina executes multi-rotation pirouettes; I do a face plant while wading at least once per season; and I cannot identify most species of mayfly without a streamside guide.
I grew up near the coastal plain in New Jersey where tulip trees, shagbark hickory and red oak towered above the delicate white trout lilies and pink lady’s slipper that bloomed on the forest floor. My suburban town was about an hour outside New York and Philly, near where the congested New Jersey Turnpike bisects the state and where the ubiquitous joke always directed at New Jersey residents is, “What exit are you from?”
The topography was both flat and hilly, and about as far from the setting of Norman Maclean’s 1976 book, “A River Runs Through It” as one can get geographically, historically, emotionally, temporally and culturally.
