Larry Yellen
Fly fishermen love their stuff.
Our vests are covered with shiny gadgets. Our basements and garages are filled with rods, reels, waders and nets. Our desks are covered with feathers, hairs, threads and hooks for tying flies. But where do we keep the stuff of memories?
Mine reside in a pair of used waders. I don them only a few times each year, usually when I’ll be fishing alone, and might need someone to talk to. The waders belonged to my good friend Eli Pick, who brought me to flyfishing.
The waders were very special to Eli. He loved that they came not from some big-box hunting and fishing store, but from the legendary Dan Bailey’s Flyfishing Shop in Livingston, Montana.
He was wearing them on our first trip out West in 1999, when he landed a 24-inch rainbow trout in Cheesman Canyon in Colorado. “A real hog,” he called it. I mentioned that fish in the stories I shared at Eli’s funeral.
He wore those waders as he took me by the arm and safely guided me into the Dowagiac Creek in Michigan, fishing for chinook salmon.
He was wearing them when I lost my footing in Colorado’s Gunnison River and was nearly swept downstream. Eli later explained that he saw me struggling, but he just couldn’t abandon the 26-inch brown trout that he’d been working for half an hour. Our fishing guide caught me. Eli caught the fish.
In British Columbia, Eli wore those waders just hours before the dinner where he challenged some boisterous Texan fishermen to a joke-telling contest. It turned out to be no contest at all for Eli, even though his chemo treatments had left him exhausted after the day’s fishing.
Less than a year later, Eli’s colon cancer finally got the better of him. His widow generously offered me all of his flyfishing stuff. I was reluctant at first, but finally agreed to take his Dan Bailey waders. Now, when I pull them up over my chest and tighten them around my waist, the memories flow like riffles in a trout stream. Eli’s wrapped around me, leading me across the river to the other side.
Eli Pick passed away in 2013 after a courageous battle with cancer.