I've always loved bass poppers -- their gaudy colors, the floppy feathers and wiggly legs -- and the big, bulging eyes.
I also love how they seduce summer bass into giant, swirling boils on still evenings.
But a well-tied bass popper is high art -- at least in my eyes -- and the best ones also carry the dizzy aura of the mad scientist. And I have never felt that so strongly as right now, even as wind-blown rain is rattling on the French doors.
Summertime bass fishing seems far away -- it looks like winter is arriving early in the Northwest -- but warmer, better times seemed nearer when I stumbled across a lost package this afternoon.
I'd gotten the parcel a few weeks ago, but it somehow got pushed under the seat of the station wagon. I found it today -- just after I left work unexpectedly early.
I left early because, like so many other daily newspaper journalists these days -- I was told that my job would end in about a month. I've worked for my paper for almost 14 years, and writing about the outdoors was my dream job.
But newspapers are struggling, and that means they're cutting deep -- right into the bone. This is a self-defeating death spiral. While I'm sad to lose my job, I'm not sad to step off a floundering, drifting ship.
So, I plan to become a full-time freelance outdoor writer -- and this blog is a big part of that.
Anyway, my mind was a jumble of relief, anger, sadness and happiness when I dropped my keys on the floorboard of the Subaru -- and rattled under the seat. I groped under the seat and found:
A bar of surfboard wax still in the wrapper.
Two drink straws.
My keys.
And, best of all, a package from Paul Hansen, who lives in Oregon and is a regular reader of this blog.
Paul had wrapped the small package in white paper, and I was thrilled to find it. I tore open the wrapping and found a small box cunningly made out of a Cheerios cereal carton. Inside that box was four beautiful bass poppers crafted out of spun deer hair, feathers and Krystal Flash.
My troubles -- which seem small when cast against the gaudy craziness of our world -- melted away as I pored over each fly. Paul packed the dyed deer hair densely on the hook -- and then used a razor to form the body of each fly.
My favorite of the four -- as seen in the photo above -- has a striped green-and-yellow body, red doll eyes, long, yellowish grizzly tails and shimmering Krystal Flash. To me it looks like a frog -- or a space alien. To a summer largemouth bass, it will look delicious.
I'm kind of torn about fishing these flies. I know they will gurgle and chug along the glassy surface of my favorite bass haunt in a seductive way -- and I would love to seem them vanish in a splashy boil. But I also love the nutso beauty of these flies. A well-crafted popper has the same glittery, wacky beauty as a gleaming, rumbling hot rod.
And, like a cherished hot rod, they're made by lovingly made by hand -- and not very quickly.
Maybe I'll stick one or two of Paul's bugs in a weathered piece of driftwood that hangs over my fly-tying vise. I'll put the others into my bass popper box.
And, come summer, I'll open that box and think of an unexpected gift that arrived at the perfect time.
