For Mother’s Day 2010 I shared a story with my son that he hadn’t heard before. I told him how the present that he and his dad gave me for my very first Mother’s Day in 1995 has shaped my life in an interesting way, culminating in the presence of Red Humpy.

Although my first husband and I moved to Pagosa Springs in 1993 and have been here ever since, we lived for a very short time in Sun Valley, Idaho when my ex took a job there. We lived in a rental cabin just a hundred yards from the Wood River in Ketchum during the months of April through October. My son would turn one in June of that year so May of 1995 was my first official Mother’s Day and my husband had a present for me. The gift was a flyfishing setup – rod and reel, along with a thick book, ‘the Orvis Flyfishing Guide.’

It was something I didn’t even know I wanted and hadn’t even considered, but was fitting for me at the time. In Pagosa Springs, the rivers and creeks are full of trout and even now, but especially then, there weren’t a lot of people around that were fishing. I would dig up or buy some nightcrawlers (worms), drive 15 minutes to a great fishing spot, and pull out many trout in a short amount of time. The problem was, when you use bait like that the trout usually hit the hook and swallow it deep down in their throat. The hook is difficult to remove and sometimes is so far down that even with a special took the trout bleeds and you have to keep it. If you release a bleeding fish, most likely it will soon die.

So we would fish for a little while, catch plenty, and when we reached two or three injured fish that we had to keep, we stopped fishing. I had heard of catch and release fishing but it never appealed to me and I never thought I would want to try swinging a line back and forth like the guys that I saw flyfishing.

When I received that rod and reel my first Mother’s Day, I was excited to try something new. My son was nearly one and could sit on a blanket in a patch of grass while I practiced casting using the techniques I learned in the Orvis book. I hooked the grass behind me a lot, and kept my son at a safe distance from the flying hook. I never caught any fish that summer, but I didn’t care. I was learning a new skill.

The summer of ’96 I was back in Pagosa Springs and learning how to cast wet flies into my inlaws’ pond that was well-stocked with fat trout.  It was a few years later that I finally met someone who flyfished and could help me with some practicalities that weren’t in the book, but the first two summers of learning from reading helped me get a good grasp on the mechanics of casting, how to utilize the rod design, how to tie the most important knots, and how to build my own leader from various sizes of tippet.

After 15 years of flyfishing, I have probably thrown line with less than a dozen different people. Most of the fishing I do is by myself, and I have developed my own likes and style for catching fish. For a few winters, I learned to tie flies and liked the challenge of learning how to bind the different materials to a hook and make it look like a fly. The first time I caught a fish in the lake with a hare’s ear nymph that I tied, I was giddy. I learned to tie the red humpy fly because I was still getting caught on a lot of trees and losing a lot of my favorite fly, and at $2.50 each for a decent fly, that can add up.

Over the years, I have gotten over my feeling that I was being cruel to fish by catching a one only to release it again. I have enjoyed the calm of being on a small creek and seeking out the spots that I think will hold a fish, attempting the perfect cast and the perfect drift, and feeling successful even when I didn’t catch a single fish, or even make a single cast. Being up in the mountains with plenty of space and time to ponder nothing and everything is a very liberating experience, and I wouldn’t have known that feeling if it weren’t for that very thoughtful Mother’s Day present 15 years ago.

My son will turn 16 next month and is a flyfisherman himself now. He knows what a red humpy is, and now he knows that he had a big part in getting it all started.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there!