The Swapmeet Box That Started It All....Thanks Dad

Can You Relate?

The smell of the garage is the same. It’s a scent I’d know anywhere: aged cedar, the sweet dust of cork, and the faint, metallic tang of old varnish. It’s the smell of my childhood, and I’m eight years old again.

It all started with a treasure hunt. Not for gold or jewels, but for the kind of magic only a father and son understand. My dad was a scavenger king, a prince of the swap meet. One Sunday, he came home not with some useless knick-knack, but with a small, weathered wooden box. Its hinges were brass, gone green with age, and its surface was etched with the scars of a long life. He pressed it into my hands. “For you,” he said. “A real fly tying box (now over fifty years old) Now we just have to use it.”

That following weekend, he took me down to Balboa Park. Under the dappled shade of a massive oak tree in a small building, a council of wizards held their court. They were all men over fifty, with leathery skin, kind eyes, and glasses—bifocals and great, magnifying lenses clamped to their heads. They peered into their vices with the intensity of surgeons, their fingers, thick and calloused from a lifetime of work, performing miracles of delicacy.

They were tying flies. And they welcomed me, this wide-eyed eight-year-old, into their circle.

They taught me the ancient dances of thread and feather: the whip finish, the half-hitch, how to palmer a hackle. They’d lean in, their magnifying glasses making their eyes look huge, struggling to thread a hook a size 22 midge. Meanwhile, my young eyes, unaided, could see it all perfectly. I was their secret weapon. And of all the patterns they taught me—the Royal Wulffs, Matukas, the Woolly Buggers, Hornbergs—my favorite, my signature, was the simplest: the Hare's Ear Nymph. It was elegant, deadly, and it was mine.

My dad saw the spark he’d lit. A few days later, he led me back into the garage. He pointed to a huge cardboard box he’d just acquired. “Pick your rods,” he said, as casually as if he were offering me a choice of cereal.

I peered inside. It was a king’s ransom: what must have been a thousand Browning Silaflex rod blanks, the sleek, pale spines of future fishing poles. Right then and there, at eight years old, I decided to build my own.

I started with a spinning rod. I fitted the reel seat, painstakingly glued and shaped the cork grip until it fit my small hand perfectly, and carefully wrapped the guides with bright thread, sealing them with glossy epoxy. I was hooked. I built a delicate 4-weight fly rod for the mountain creeks and a powerful 9-weight fly rod for the monsters I dreamed of battling.

For the next twenty-five years, those rods were my Excaliburs. That little spinning rod was a wand of pure potential. I caught skittish brook trout in the high Sierra's, hefty rainbows at Lake Crowley, and on a day I will never forget, I fooled an 18-pound largemouth bass on a tiny float-and-fly, the rod bending in a perfect, terrifying arc but never breaking.

The 9-weight fly rod… that was my ocean lance. I’d trail my bass boat up to Ventura, point it into the swell, and cast for hulking salmon, the rod I built with my own hands singing with the strain of the fight. I caught hundreds, thousands of fish on the gear I built and the flies I tied.

But the greatest testament to those early lessons in Balboa Park happened years later, on the shores of Lake Kaweah with my friend, Mike Ross. The big brook trout were feeding, but they were keyed in on something tiny: freshwater scuds. We didn’t have the right fly.

So, I sat on the bank. I took a small hook, some fine wire, and a plastic bag. Then, I did the only thing that made sense. I reached up, cut a few strands of hair from the back of my head, and with the skills those old men had gifted me, I tied a Human Hair Scud. It was ridiculous. It was brilliant.

Mike and I caught ninety brook trout on that trip, with many coming on the stupid fly. A fly born of desperation, innovation, and a little bit of myself, literally.

I’m 57 now. I started tying flies and building rods in 1978. A lifetime ago.

Just the other day, I was out in the garage, looking for something else, when I saw that old box of flies again. The ones I filled in my youth. I blew the dust off the lid, popped the latches, and there they were. The Royal Wulffs, the Hornbergs, and right in the center, a few simple, perfect Hairs Ears Nymphs. Next to the wall leaned the rods, their cork grips darkened and smooth from years of use, the thread wraps worn, but in my eyes still vibrant.

They weren’t relics. They were time machines. And in that dusty garage, I could hear the laughter of old men under an oak tree, feel my dad’s hand on my shoulder, and smell the promise of adventure. The fish are still out there. And so, it seems, am I.