To fly fishermen, everything can be compared to fly fishing.

In fact, it usually is. I do it all the time it myself (I once wrote “sporting clays is just like fly fishing, only louder”).

It’s telling, but really only reveals the user’s frame of reference; the yardstick used to measure an increasingly incomprehensible universe.

Former world champion chess player Boris Spassky (of Bobby Fischer v Spassky fame) emigrated to France and took up tennis, and I read an interview where he said “Tennis is the sport most like chess.”

As a soccer fan, it’s clear to me that Spassky is nuts; soccer’s the sport most like chess. And so it goes.

Which is why I found myself marveling at the similarities between fly fishing and shooting, and not feeling all that weird about it.

Last Sunday, with only a few hours available  (and the local streams closed, and the Upper Sac running too high to fish well), I opted out of fishing and dragged an odd old shotgun to the shooting range.

A recent gift from an in-law, it’s an old-school Remington 870 pump gun (the shotgun found locked away in most police cars), but this one was outfitted with trap-shooting hardware: 30 inch barrel, Monte Carlo buttstock, double-bead sites, etc.

The result is an odd bird; something like a double-handed spey rod designed to fish a three weight line.

It works for its intended task, but it’s not exactly what you’d call elegant (at least not when compared to the elegant-as-can-be over/unders or specialty trap guns).

Of course, pushing it over the hump from “odd” to “interesting” was its history; it showed all the signs of heavy use, but not abuse. Clearly, its former owner (my stepfather’s dad) shot a lot of trap with this gun.

In our hyper-connected era – when attention spans are measured in picoseconds and pants are manufactured so they look used even when new – a decades-old artifact carrying the unmistakable signs of good, honest use fires up an almost chemical feeling of warmth in the back of my head.

Two small stress fractures in the wood grow out of the receiver on either side of the buttstock (evidence of of a lot of rounds through the gun), and every moving part offers a smoothed, machined appearance; the supple evidence of wear instead of the dings and divots of abuse.

I have bamboo fly rods in the same condition; a pair of impregnated Phillipsons and a just-barely-postwar Orvis rod that were all regularly fished, but because they weren’t beaten or yanked on or experimented with by some idiot when graphite “obsoleted” them, they’re eminently fishable.

And highly intriguing.

I know one of the Phillipsons was hauled out during the Henry’s Fork Green Drake hatch back when the Fork’s Green Drakes were arguably the center of the fly fishing universe.

The other has kicked around much of the Rocky Mountain west with its former owner, who fished it a lot.

I know little about the Orvis rod, so in one sense, it’s more mysterious. Imagination is a powerful thing, and I could guess at its use on some of the east’s best-known rivers at a time when the country was recovering from a terrible war, and frankly needed the recreation.

In fact, I liked it enough that when the only tip began cracking, I couldn’t stand the thought of retiring the thing – ending its history in the present – and had Orvis build two more tips.

The Remington trap gun clearly received similar use for (reportedly) a couple decades, and because it was owned by a person who circulated in a higher tax bracket than myself, was probably witness to a lot of fascinating conversations.

I love that kind of stuff for the same reason I’m fascinated by the roads and building foundations which emerge when lakes dry up and recede; they’re not just stones, they’re monuments to a recent past I can’t help but wonder at.

Which, admittedly, is the long way around (I started this essay to discuss the idea that shooting is a lot like fly fishing, and we’re not really there yet).

Done properly, shooting and fly fishing feel largely effortless, and if you’re aware of your own existence, it’s in a detached, slightly bemused way – as if you were a bystander watching things unfold instead of wondering if the onlookers are impressed or a client check will soon arrive.

In the grip of that kind of tunnel vision, you cast the fly rod and the fly drops perfectly in the seam and you know the trout’s going to rise; or you mount the gun and the bead at the end of barrel picks up the clay and tracks smoothly through it, and your finger tightens…

It’s not in the style of outdoor writers to admit that overthinking stuff largely screws it up, but it my case, it’s true.

Every fly fisherman who has false cast a long line beautifully – and then overpowered the cast on the presentation, throwing a tailing loop and almost beheading themselves – knows exactly what I mean.

Likewise, hitting every clay in the air on Friday, then missing almost half of them on Saturday, when it counts, suggests a similar effect.

Last Sunday I knocked down clay birds like bowling pins and was regularly hitting shotgun shells at 75 yards offhand with my target .22 rifle.

Either I’ve become a much better shot over the last month (without practicing at all), or I’m simply a much better shot when I’m having fun.

Which is pretty much how it plays out on the creeks and rivers; if a rising fish represents a fun challenge and potentially pleasurable outcome, I’m death from above.

If the trout represents a complex problem looking for a solution – one that brings to mind a heroic cast and the first draft of a self-aggrandizing blog post – my failure rate triples.

It seems my brain is so powerful, the mere act of thinking draws all the blood away from my extremities.

A second (more likely) option is this: It turns out the point of “Getting into the Outdoors” may simply be to “Get the Heck Out Of Our Own Way.”

See you not thinking, Tom Chandler.

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