When a fly fisherman says he got bamboo for his birthday, the mind races. Payne? Phillipson?

Or perhaps a modern craftsman? Reams? Thramer? Beasley? Shays? Raine?

Not exactly:



Yes, my furred friends, the Underground now possesses what few others do: a bamboo keyboard (and a powerful attitude about it).

Clearly - and as fly fishermen everywhere know - bamboo transforms you into a better fly fisherman typist unbearable snob writer.

Do McGuane, Leeson or Gierach have one of these? Are their words flowing organically from its smooth, limber, almost sensuous keys? Or are they stuck writing on stiff, unyielding, too-fast, unnatural synthetic keyboards, their sentences short, quick, efficient - but lacking connection to the primal life force that beats within all of us?

Are they - to put it bluntly - simply muddling by on sheer talent?

Sure, plastic keyboards are great at pumping out words all fast and easy. And yeah, they're light, so you can type on them all day. But for the sheer joy of writing, nothing compares to bamboo, and if you doubt that for even a second, I can scare up a couple hundred people who will state - in definitive terms (some using physics diagrams as a visual aid) - that bamboo users simply write better.

Emboldened by the varnished, straight-grained goodness beneath my fingers, I'm going a step further, suggesting I might even be better human being than the huddled plastic masses, most of whom probably deserve the carpal tunnel they're developing from their synthetic keyboards.

Clearly, the scales have simultaneously fallen from my eyes and tipped in my favor. (See what I did there? The bamboo's already working its magic.)

One day, the world will look back at this moment with reverence, correctly seeing it as a turning point in the literature of fly fishing the world, when the most organic, smooth, flowing writer the world universe had ever seen typed the immortal words:

"It was a dark and stormy morning on the river."