Home Waters: A tribute to fly fishers
We can all learn from our elders, especially guys like John T. Nickel and his great friend, the late Dave Whitlock
Every so often, a mess of words pops into my head and actually makes sense. They are brief respites of elevated calm that silence the typical noise I cancel out to sleep at night.
Every so often, the timing is right, and I can put the words on paper.
Every so often, people think the words are worth reading or hearing.
More often? Duds that I wisely sent to the round file.
A little over a year ago, a world of anglers who knew Dave Whitlock recovered from the shock of his passing in early 2023 and gathered to celebrate his life. The local TU 420 Chapter of Trout Unlimited moved to rename itself in his honor. I happily volunteered to create a video for the chapter that would live on its website and Facebook pages to introduce neophytes to the club’s namesake.
The board decided to meet at the Circle Cinema in downtown Tulsa for a premiere screening of the video and our official vote to rename the chapter. I have to be honest: That made me a little nervous, mostly because of technical worries.
If you haven’t seen that video yet, here it is. It’s 23 minutes, so just be aware.
Naturally, I was asked to introduce the video at the event.
As the screening date approached, I couldn’t think of anything else to say other than that the video would speak for itself if I’d done my job correctly.
Two visits with Dave and his good friend John T. Nickel popped into my head the day before the premiere.
For whatever reason, these fellas opened up to me with many stories not intended for print. We got down to some real meaning-of-life stuff. Though we experienced the world several decades and significant historical events apart, how much we shared in life events and philosophy, fishing, and the outdoors struck a more personal chord.
That familiar voice in my head spoke up sometime around 2 a.m. I thought about it while I lay there, not ready to rise. I mulled it as rolled my face back toward my pillow. A little more delay, and soon I let my leg drop over the side of the bed, the first step on the way to my desk.
I wrote enough to quiet the voices. But they continued while I showered, dressed, walked with Whiskey, and picked up some coffee. I sat in my car, pulled up my laptop to rest between my belly and the steering wheel, and the rest of what might pass for a final version flowed from the ol’ noggin to the fingertips, Google Docs, and my teleprompter app.
An hour later, I thought maybe I had something worthy.
I read it over at lunchtime and tidied things up a bit. Added a line or two.
I practiced with the teleprompter in front of my wife before I left for the event.
Her eyes got watery.
Yeah, it was OK.
After the event, people said they liked it and asked if I could record it as a podcast or publish it in a blog for the TU Chapter. A visiting writer said it was “beautiful.”
Scott Hood said he didn’t think to take out his phone and record it until it was over.
People really seemed to like it. I was surprised at how much.
So, I recorded it, but it just felt flat, somehow.
So, why not do another video?
If I had fully considered the question, I would have told myself that what you might write in just a few hours will likely take many more hours to turn into something passable in video format.
Truthfully, I did consider that, just maybe not carefully, at the time. But still, why not?
So, a little over a year later, here it is on YouTube. Folks seem to be liking it, still.
(the written teleprompter version is below)
It should speak for itself.
Home Waters
a tribute to fly fishers
(Inspired by time spent with Dave Whitlock and John T. Nickel)
We looked at each other and smiled, laughed a little at the collective groans and exhales that settled us into our lawn chairs for a break.
A sandwich lunch and conversation.
Hearty bread, deli meats, and fresh garden vegetables
served streamside, of course.
There are no silent gaps in conversation here.
The atmosphere is soaked in the rumbles, hisses, rolls, and slaps of the current.
Life’s constant rhythm.
Unseasonably warm and calm under a blue sky, a breeze is perceived only in the flickering of the highest leaves in the tallest trees, touched with autumn’s first blush.
Dave would turn 86 in a few days.
His lifelong friend, John, was here too, younger by exactly 9 months, they point out.
The old stinkers still joke about what a busy night that must have been,
that November night in 1934.
While one wrestled his way into the world
the other’s folks, well, they were involved in a kind of wrestling of their own.
Couple a jokers, these Depression and World War II era, Okies from Muskogee.
Troublemakers who stole feathers from the neighborhood chicken pens.
Lucky they didn’t get shot, way back when, goofing around on their dusty backyard milk runs for fly-tying supplies.
Sometimes they went to Caney Creek, sometimes The Illinois River, both spring-fed with cold, crystalline, Ozark waters.
Their home waters snaked through forests, little prairie marshes, and farm fields, rocky runs to deep pools in the shade of high bluffs, overhanging oaks and tall sycamores.
That was before the dam, you know.
Much of it is under the Tenkiller Reservoir now.
So… so many sleek, hungry Neosho smallmouth bass and sunfish.
People today wouldn’t believe how a little stream could support so much life.
It’s different now, but still precious.
A stream’s beauty is indelible and complex.
Nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, they hooked their first Caney Creek smallmouths using secondhand bamboo rods to toss feathered hooks.
Okies didn’t do this, you know.
You’ve got to understand.
Not in the 1940s.
Especially not poor folk
and most certainly not folks like these two little 12-year-old troublemakers.
Couple of oddballs, they were.
John says that young Dave found a way to buy him a tier’s vise.
He taught him how to tie and how to be a fly fisherman.
Dave chimed in … “Poorly! He really didn’t have a chance”
“Well,” said John, “I never forgot it”
Dave went on to inspire little troublemakers everywhere.
All over the world.
Pick up the spindly rod, that heavy line, the feathered hooks.
Be a fly-fisher.
Be a conservationist.
Learn about and live for the waters.
Cast a graceful line into the wilds and take that connection into your soul.
This is not just a game, and it’s not just for rich folks.
And a tip to remember: Don’t ever let loose of your fly line.
Artist, author, inventor, instructor extraordinaire,
Angler and conservationist, famous by any account.
Dave could have lived anywhere in the world he wanted.
And John?
He turned to the land, and soil, and plants and nurseries.
He built an empire shipping growing things nationwide.
And he, too, could have lived anywhere in the world.
But his dreams always brought him back to a childhood landmark.
A high bluff along the Illinois River still called to him.
He found a way to buy that land.
He created a nature preserve around it.
And he bought a ranch, too, the same place where he and Dave caught those first smallmouths.
Caney Creek Ranch, it’s called.
He reconnected with his old friend again almost by chance, and the timing was right for both to return to the range of their home waters.
With their families, their homes, their careers,
they lived adult lives those two 12-year-olds could scarcely have imagined
Three-quarters of a century after they hooked those first Caney Creek smallies on the fly, they shared lunch, streamside, at Dave’s place, right here on the ranch.
A question had to be asked.
Where, now, do you think, are the great 12-year-old troublemakers for our future?
Are your legacies what will give rise to the fishing innovators and conservation leaders of tomorrow?
The eyes of the old anglers met.
John reserved his reply.
Dave looked away.
You’d think he had ignored the question.
But he saw the answer where he always had found it.
His eyes were on the water.
Each answered in his own way, reflecting decades of change they experienced—streamside.
Through life, in nature, every living thing faces sometimes violent turbulence, struggle, change that appears haphazard, meaningless at first.
But where the current rumbles, hisses, rolls, and slaps out life’s constant rhythm, there will be inspiration and new life.
The answer is to look to your home waters, wherever they may be, whatever they may be.
And don’t ever let loose of that line.
These touching and inspiring videos are two I will view again.
Charlie Transue
Tulsa
Hey Charlie,
We spoke at length about those very things. The impoundment was accepted by most who suffered through the Depression Era as necessary and a leap in progress, but they had memories of it as a crystal-clear reservoir and shook their heads at the eutrophication and impacts to the entire watershed from population growth in NWest Ark. They saw the worst of pollution (before the wastewater treatment plant improvements) so could appreciate that folks are working on it, but also are were big proponents of protecting riparian zones and establishing conservation easements to help with poultry waste and erosion issues. They loved Caney Creek most of all, of course, and have had their battles preserving it.
So, yes, water quality and erosion were big topics of conversation. We spoke in 2020, so the wounds to the creeks and rivers from the floods in the winter of 2015 and spring 2019 were fresh in their minds.