Fifty miles from home by John C. Street
 
It was a business meeting I really didn’t want to attend but I had to be there and, as was my habit, I arrived a few minutes before the confab was to start.  I was introducing myself to the other people in attendance when I heard someone say my name and then, “Well, everyone, the expert is here.”
 
I’d always thought an “expert” was someone who was at least fifty miles from home (I wasn’t that day) and carried a briefcase (I never did).  On that particular day - or any other day for that matter - I certainly didn’t fit the criteria but I didn’t deflect the gentleman’s description of me either.
 
Thankfully, I kept my mouth shut throughout that meeting.  There were some legitimate experts present that day - I wasn’t one of them – but even the experts misunderstood my silence as professional thoughtfulness.  And I didn’t give them any reason to think otherwise.   
 
I got a telephone call a while ago and heard my name and the word “expert” used in close proximity again.  Despite my inclination to protest the title, I basked in the compliment because this man had called me about fishing.   
 
A couple years ago I wrote an article on the Clarion River for a national fly fishing magazine and I’ve been getting phone calls ever since, more sporadically as time passes but still a few every year.  For whatever reason, it seems a lot of people saved that issue, tucked it away for the day when they may get to actually fish my river.  
 
Because of that article, most of the kind souls who call me think I’m an “expert” and offer me some handsome mullah to take them fishing for a day.  The guy who called just recently had that very thing in mind.  “I’m tired of catching these eighteen and twenty inchers here around home,” he informed me.  “I’d love to try for some of your big fish.”
 
Wondering where a person could go to get tired of “catching eighteen and twenty inchers” I asked him where he lived and learned that “here around home” was a stream in another part of the state I was passably familiar with, had caught a trout or ten in it and maybe one of them – if you weren’t too strict with the ruler - would have covered eighteen inches.
 
I came within a hair’s breath of asking if he’d be available to guide me out there around his home but caught myself when he used that danged word “expert” again.  I didn’t know this man from Adam but I was getting used to him thinking I was some kind of expert and all.  Fortunately, as I did at that business meeting, I didn’t say enough to make him think otherwise.
 
The simple truth of the matter is that what I know about fishing could easily be written down on one typed page with plenty of white space all around.  I’m enthusiastic as all get out about it and probably do spend more than my fair share of time in pursuit of fishies in the brook but there’s a lot of ground between spending time and being an “expert.”
 
An “expert,” for instance, wouldn’t have the hot/cold relationship with the Clarion River that I have.  Oh, sure, there have been a few days when a nonbiased observer might have said I did pretty well up there but there have been a whole lot more days – had one just last week – where the only way I could have had a trout almandine diner was to have stopped at the fish market on the way home.
 
There were plenty of bugs in the air (three species of caddis and one species of mayfly right on the cusp of darkness) but on that day last week, the only thing “expertly” about me was finding my way back to the car in the dark.  Obviously, one little stocked rainbow in over four hours of fishing does not an “expert” make.
 
I’ve taken some enormously big browns up there – my personal best is just shy of … well, never mind, “experts” don’t brag – but over the course of a year’s worth of fishing, I’ll only take half a dozen that hit the two foot mark or better and never more than one a trip.  Again, the real “experts” I know typically only fish there when conditions are absolutely perfect and produce those kinds of numbers every time out.  One man, a real “expert,” even has pictures of several that were thirty inches or better.  Now that’s an “expert.”
 
And part of the reason that guy, and the few other truly good anglers I know who fish up there, consistently get into the hook-jawed browns is because they know on a first – and Latin – name basis all the little creepy crawleys (and there are a ton of them, thanks to the clean-up of the river) that live in that water and they know, to the day if not the hour, when they will hatch.
 
A well-known philosopher one said, “Given a choice between technique and enthusiasm, I should choose enthusiasm every time.”  While I don’t think he was referring to fishing when he uttered this famous line, he surely could have been talking about me and angling.  But since most of my fishing is within fifty miles of my home and I definitely don’t carry a briefcase, I’m not going to even insinuate that I’m some kind of “expert.”
 
But I know a little bit about the bugs and the browns and spend enough time – sometimes even at the right time – to comport myself pretty well.  And if you were with me on one of those days, you might even conclude I knew what I was doing.
 
So forgive me if I keep my mouth shut when someone who doesn’t know me calls on the phone and wonders if the “expert” would take them fishing.  I figure as long as I keep my mouth shut, and they never actually show up to test me, they’ll never know the difference.