The author reflects on her first bamboo rod project
I have never felt so much love for a man-made object as I feel for the bamboo fly rod that I made this spring – my first. It happened slowly, like a gestation and birth of sorts and imbued with the same sort of magic. Doubled over my workbench, I spent hours planing strips of cane down by thousandths of an inch, curled shavings piling at my feet. My back was sore. My hands ached. I do not have children of my own, and as I sanded off the bits of glue that bound my new rod together to reveal her shining fibers, I found myself wondering if I have become so fond of building things because I have never undergone the catharsis of bearing and birthing a child.
I got to know my little darling first as a culm of bamboo. Several feet taller than I and smooth on the outside, I would not say she was imposing, but she was solid, whole — perfect in the way that only nature can be. She had already traveled far, from the rugged hills of Southern China where she was born. The thought of her growing green and reed-like on those ancient hillsides stirred in me an aching wanderlust, a kind of nostalgia — a yearning for that stranger-in-a-strange-land vulnerability that makes me feel alive. Now here she was, out in the back of a suburban fly shop of all places, leaning casually against a very American brick wall. Stranger in a strange land indeed.
Despite her exotic origins, I knew that we would speak the same language. In time I would feel every bend and whisper of her slender length, as if we shared the same nervous system. She reminded me of Shel Silverstein’s storybook The Giving Tree, where the faithful tree fulfills every desire of the young boy who admires her. I hoped that I would be kinder to my lovely culm than the selfish boy from the story. I hoped that her life would not be wasted and that her spirit would endure the transference from reed to rod. To be sure, the work of shaping her involved cutting off the soft inner fibers and pith that made up most of her physical being, but I knew that what was left was her essence – her power fibers – the long, even strands that helped her to bear the wind and weather of her native Guangdong Province. These same power fibers would help her to flex, load, and accelerate the fly line that she was destined to cast.
The morning she was reborn I was filled with anticipation. 12 sections of finely-planed bamboo strips had been glued together to form two hexagonal cylinders of butt and tip section and had been wrapped together with twine, rolled in talc, straightened, and hung to dry overnight. I took her down and brought her outside into the sunlight. Slowly, deliberately, I unwrapped her binding and sanded off the hard enamel of her outside — and there she was. Not the finest rod you ever saw. Suffering at the hands of a novice, she had the telltale gouges and irregularities where my grip did not fully understand how to guide the plane along her delicate length, but I knew at once that she was true, and she was mine.
— EH, July 2016