MRS. HALLIDAY

If there are unsung heroes among Wetherell on Writing subscribers, it’s those of you who love fly-fishing, and have been very patient and loyal in following my columns focused on books, writing, and literature. This month, I thought I’d write a piece with you in mind by way of thanks. Non-fishers are invited along…

For many winters I would start my day with a walk up to Mrs. Halliday’s.

It wasn’t far—a short half-mile—but it involved climbing a fairly steep hill, so it was an excellent way to get the juices pumping, my head cleared, before returning home to breakfast and a long morning’s writing.

Mrs. Halliday’s house was on top of the hill, and I would pause here to admire the view eastward. The terrain, having crested in her meadow, fell away and opened, with no intervening trees, so I could see across the distance to our town’s chief landmark: blocky Smarts Mountain, only 3,200 feet high, but in January, if the snow draped its summit, looking as high and unscalable as K2.

These walks were often before the sun fully rose. School buses weren’t out this early, the delivery man hadn’t come by with the newspapers, no one was driving yet to work. It was a good opportunity to spot wildlife. In the course of my walks I saw deer, coyotes, bears, moose, bobcats, fishers—and yet the rarest sighting, the one I only. managed three or four times in the course of twelve years, was Mrs. Halliday herself.

She was a widow and had been for some time—that was literally the only thing I knew about her. She either was a late riser, never outside when I took my walks, or was the kind or person who kept to herself. Almost certainly she was that—neighbors who lived on our road spotted her even fewer times than I did. A semi-recluse? Fine. This is rural New Hampshire—Isolatos are greatly respected—and on dark winter mornings I’m not exactly Miss Congeniality myself.

I didn’t get the sense that her solitude came from any particular sadness or distress. Her house was comfortably large, the yard and meadow was well kept, and she owned a car that was newer and shinier than mine. When I managed to spot her she looked spry and hail for someone her age, though stooped over from osteoporosis. Her face was worn and leathery, either from spending a lot of time outdoors when younger or from the cigarettes she apparently chain-smoked all day long.

The only thing remarkable about her was the hat she wore, a cross between a Tyrolean felt and a canvas pork pie, a little smashed on top, so it gave her the look of an old Maine guide. I never could see it in great detail—these sightings were always of her limping inside from her patio—but there seemed to be a band around the base of the hat, dotted with something that from the distance looked like fish hooks or flies.

And that’s about all I have to say, when it comes to spotting Mrs. Halliday. She died in 1999, and we heard that the new owners of the house were going to have to tear it down, it reeked so much of tobacco. I probably never thought about her once in the next twenty years. Like so many in our lives, she was a figure glimpsed in passing, briefly wondered about, soon forgotten.

Jump ahead to the summer of 2020. My pal Ray Chapin…feared and respected by fish all across this continent…had taken me bass bugging on the Connecticut River down by the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge. We had done well, catching some of those 24-inch monsters that convince you that smallmouth are the strongest, bravest creatures on God’s planet, and were debriefing at the canoe launch before heading home.

“Hey, something’s come up I think you’ll be interested in,” Ray said casually, though I could tell he was excited.

A childhood friend of his named Jason, someone he had just recently reconnected with, had learned he enjoyed fly-fishing.

“My uncle-in-law loved fishing,” Jason told Ray over lunch. “In fact, I inherited his equipment when he died, and it’s been cluttering up our basement for the last thirty years. I’m not interested in it, and my wife and I are downsizing. Would you like to take it? It might be all junk, but he had some money, so…No, I don’t want anything for it Like I said, we’re downsizing, and you’d be doing me a favor.”

Every fly-fisher dreams of such an offer. Ray tried choking back on his glee.

“Well, sure. Glad to help out, Jason. I’ll come over this afternoon and pick it all up.”

Interesting enough as a story, it got even more intriguing when Ray added on a little postscript.

“Funny thing, but apparently Jason’s uncle used to live up on your road. His name was Halliday, Charles Halliday. Did you know him?”

“He died before we moved in. Halliday? I knew his widow. Well, glimpsed her anyway. So now you’ve inherited his fly rods?”

“Crazy, huh? Let me bring them over to your place tomorrow and you can help me sort them out.”

“Okay. But when it comes to fly rods, I’m downsizing myself.”

Ray knows me too well. “Like hell you are.”

He got to my house around noon; it took us a gratifyingly long time to ferry everything from his car to our picnic table, with the excess spilling across the lawn. Rod tubes, cardboard boxes, wooden crates, duffle bags, vests, a small suitcase—and everything bulged.To say we were experiencing a dopamine rush hardly begins to describe our excitement; donut-loving boys, set afloat on a lake of crullers, wouldn’t have been so giddy.

We started by spraying everything with disinfectant—Covid was still around, and any surface was suspect, even ones that hadn’t been touched in twenty years. We went through the rods next, taking them out from their tubes, matching them with the fly reels at the bottom of the boxes, trying out some casts. After that we tore through the flies, spreading them out across the picnic table. Accessories were next—fly-fishing gadgets filled one of the larger bags—then we went through the books.

But I’m teasing you here. Tackle freaks are going to want to know exactly what we found.

A Baby Catskill bamboo fly rod from Payne. A “Mills Standard” bamboo, also on the light side. A 7-foot Hardy Palakona bamboo. Two Orvis Battenkill bamboos, one five feet long, the other six feet. A light Heddon fiberglass rod, with the trademark red wrappings and white blank. Three Thomas & Thomas graphites from the late 1970’s. A Leonard “Graftek” graphite from the same era. Various tip sections, middle sections, butts—wounded in battle, but too valuable to throw out.

Five Orvis CFO reels in their original cartons. A Hardy St. George reel, plus various Lightweights. Three Young reels marked “Redditch, England” in the smaller diameters. A Pfleuger Gem.

Muddler Minnows, with both natural and yellow wings. Dozens of Parmachene Belle wet flies, some snelled, some not. Hornbergs in all sizes. Reverse bucktail shiner imitations. Irresistibles galore—brown, cream, grizzly. Gray Fox Variants, Bivisibles, Devil Bugs, that old-time favorite with stubby bat wings, some still pinned to the cards they were originally displayed on. Light Spruce and Dark Spruce streamers. Tandem trolling streamers, the kind with slicked-back hackle and an extra trailing hook.

Books. Ernest Schwiebert. Roderick L. Haig-Brown. Dana Lamb. Howard T. Walden. Eugene Connet. Arnold Gingrich.

Accessories. Wheatley fly boxes engraved with initials, exuding class. A rusty De-Liar. Gadgets to thread flies through hook eyes. Silk fly lines in their original boxes. A micrometer. Strands of old gut leaders. Fly line floatant that must have been new in 1959. Amadou drying pads. Fishing licenses in transparent sleeves, the oldest from 1938, the most recent from 1999. Wooden nets, wicker creels.

Everything…rod cases, reel pouches, streamer wallets…gave off a nostalgically sweet-smoky aroma, as if they’d been doused in citronella, pipe tobacco, and bourbon.

Going through all this, we began to get a sense of Mr. Halliday’s fishing personality. Clearly, he embodied fly-fishing’s genteel tradition…no one ever bought a fly rod from the William Mills emporium in Manhattan except gentlemen…and yet he lived on into the age of graphite. He paid attention to details; micrometers to measure tippet size are used by only the fussiest.

He respected his tackle, and he obviously couldn’t bear to part with it before his death. Most importantly, he loved his sport deeply; the authors he collected were the ones who wrote celebrations of the sport, not how-to-catch-’em manuals.

We also had some hints about where Mr. Halliday fished. Parmachene Belles? Big old Devil Bugs? Humpties? These suggested Maine or the Adirondacks, brook trout fishing in bouncy pocket water. He also enjoyed trolling for landlock salmon, so perhaps he belonged to a lakeside fishing club or had his own camp in the Rangeleys. There were plastic boxes marked Dan Bailey, Livingston, Montana so he fished out West, too.

A fly-fisherman from a vanished generation, Mr. Halliday. A gentleman angler who bought the best. Only…and Ray and I, digging deeper through the treasure, came to this conclusion simultaneously…maybe it wasn’t him we were learning about at all.

Our doubts started with the fly rods. They were top-shelf stuff, but lightweight, even wispy, suggesting they may have been purchased by a woman. We’d torn through the boxes and bags too greedily, not bothering to focus on details, but when we did, we realized that, when it came to the initials engraved on the fly boxes and reels, the ones marked CMH for Charles something Halliday were far outnumbered by the ones marked DCH for Deborah something Halliday.

The licenses offered more proof; there were some for Mr. Halliday, but apparently there were years he stopped buying ones (too busy on Wall Street?), whereas with Mrs. Halliday there was a license for every single season since 1953, including a resident New Hampshire license for 1999, the year she died.

And those books by those classic writers? When we opened them to the flyleaf we found many were autographed. “For Deb Halliday, with all best fishing wishes,” wrote Robert Traver. “To a woman who looks like she knows her way around a river,” wrote Dana Lamb.

Mrs. Halliday was the passionate fly-fisher in the family; she was the one who had assembled all the tackle, used all these flies. (The cache had surely been there in her house when I went by on my walks; maybe it’s good I didn’t know that, otherwise Breck Hill Road would have experienced it’s first burglary ever). Ray’s friend Jason had explicitly told us it was his uncle’s tackle, he hadn’t said anything about his aunt, so it led us to the sexist assumption that it had been his hobby, not hers.

Any lingering doubts we had were erased by finding in one of the boxes a manila envelope crusty with age. When we searched inside we found a letter dated March 4, 1974 to Deborah C. Halliday from The Flyfisher’s Foundation, welcoming her to “The Women’s Flyfishers Club” as a charter member.

I tried explaining to Ray about her personality, what her life was like, but there was little I could say about either; except for the evidence we were pouring through, I still knew nothing about her. And yet she could have been sitting there in the shade with us, explaining what fly rods she used and why, holding up her favorite flies so we could marvel at how well they were tied, going on to recount stories of her best-loved waters and biggest fish, bringing to life a vanished era.

Entering the last years of a fishing life myself, there’s a question I would have liked to ask about one of her final purchases, that New Hampshire fishing license she bought the final year of her life when she hardly ever left the house. Did she dream about going fishing one last time? Or was buying a license so much a ritualistic part of her spring that not to buy one meant giving up on hope? Either way, I had no trouble understanding what was in her heart.

The solitary keep their secrets so fiercely. Surely on one of those walks, spotting her with that fly-dotted hat, I could have gone over and introduced myself as a fellow flyfisher, even—as our friendship deepened—taken her out fishing.

But it gave us much to ponder, this archeology of a fishing life. We put the rods away in their cases, packed the books back in the boxes, gathered up the loose flies that had spilled across the grass.

“A lot of stuff,” Ray said, with a long shake of the head. “Too much for just me. Pick out anything you want and it’s yours.”

“Anything?”

“Name it.”

“Including the Payne rod?”

“If you want it.”

“Even the Hardy reels?”

“Just say the word.”

I went in to fetch us some beers, playing for time; this was an offer of such generosity it deserved careful thought. I came back outside, looked to the pile of rod tubes, tackle bags, nets and creels…thought some more…finally pointed.

“I’d like one of those Wheatley fly boxes.”

Ray didn’t bother hiding his surprise. “That’s all? There’s way better stuff.”

“One with Mrs. Halliday’s initials on the lid. Give me that and I’ll be happy.”

The box sits on my desk as I finish writing this—but I lied when I said it was the only thing I wanted, since before Ray left I filled its clips with Mrs. Halliday’s Gray Fox Variants, her Irresistibles, her Parmachene Belles.

Coming next time, celebrating one of my favorite writers.