Where Zen Meets the Art of Fly-Fishing

To Charlie Reading, fly-fishing isn’t really about catching fish. It’s about the art of being a fisherman, and maybe even about unraveling some of the mysteries of life.

After all, anybody who drops a line in a stream on a lucky day can come home with a bunch of fish, Reading says. But, he asks, can that person ever do it again?

Well, maybe. If he ever gets lucky again. But can he ever begin to understand why he did it in the first place?

No, and for Reading, there’s the rub.

“I considered years ago that it wasn’t so important that I caught the fish but why I caught them,” Reading says, sitting atop a stool in a modest log cabin. Outside is a large sign identifying the place as “Reading’s Fly Shop.”

It is, to the casual passerby, just another bait and tackle shop, conveniently just a few minutes outside the front gate to Bennett Spring State Park, one of Missouri’s premier trout-fishing locations.

But to those who know, it’s much more than that. It’s a cluttered Zen temple of sorts, where the paths of fly-fishing and life merge as one.

“This guy is great,” says one of Reading’s many disciples, Ron Schmidt of Illinois.

“He’s selling me a $2 thing and giving me $200 worth of advice,” he said happily after Reading sold him a small piece of equipment, then pored over the pros and cons of catching fish at Bennett Spring this year.

“You come here and he tells you stuff. . . . And then you catch fish,” Schmidt says.

The son of an “avid fisherman,” the 45-year-old Reading has spent much of his life figuring out how to catch fish with a fly rod. He’s traveled the world in search of every kind you could catch. To Africa, Alaska, Australia, New Zealand. Hooked a good number of them too. And then threw most of them back.

Oh, he does have a picture of himself with a really big one on the wall of his shop, perhaps to prove that this one didn’t get away, at least not until he let it go. But he says he quit keeping them years ago.

“I’m not so sanctimonious that I’m not going to kill a fish,” he adds matter-of-factly. “It’s just that they don’t mean that much to me dead.

“There’s a lot more to fly-fishing than to think you always have to leave with your limit,” he continues. “If you keep two or three fish a year, or don’t keep any one day, you are giving something back to other fishermen.”

And that’s key to his love of the sport.

“You know something?” says the bearded, slightly balding Reading. “In fly-fishing, I’m not saying there’s not a focus on the strike, but there’s a focus on all the peripheral things going on as well. Watching the fish, looking at the stream, concentrating on what’s going to happen. It’s like a diamond cutter, focusing on the diamond, finding the weak spot in the diamond. Before he strikes it and cleaves it off.”

To do that, he adds, one must study the fish. Learn how one small fish lives long enough to become a big fish when another one doesn’t. Learn what the fish eats. As well as what it doesn’t eat but will strike at, even when it’s not hungry.

To do all of this, he says, one must learn how the fish thinks, if one can describe what the fish does as thinking, which Reading does.

But figuring all of that out is only the half of it. There’s still the half of actually hooking the fish, and for that Reading sees the fisherman becoming one with the rod, the rod becoming an extension of the angler’s self.

Thus it’s no coincidence that Reading’s rods have brought him international attention in the world of fly-fishing.

Like the poet looking for the perfect muse, he seeks the perfect cast.

“You can feel, and you should feel, the dynamics of the way the rod and the line are working,” he says.

In this era of graphite rods and other technical advancements, that’s easier to achieve than it once was. But still, he says, to be one with the rod, one must identify with it.

A Reading customized rod, weeks in the making and offered for an unnamed price, is layered with such things as mother of pearl, ivory and scores of feathers dropped naturally by molting exotic birds.

He won’t make them for just anyone, noting that a rich novice who got into the sport last week isn’t ready for one and is best served by a good off-the-rack model.

But someone who has been around a couple of years and who, like Reading, has been all but taken over by the quest for the perfect cast, is a good candidate. Still, he doesn’t just sit down and crank one out for him, either.

“When I put together a customized rod for a person, I like to know a lot about that person,” he says. “Where he fishes, what he fishes for, how often he goes out.”

He’ll examine the person’s shoes and car closely, even his watch, to glean some clue to personality. He’ll spend a couple of hours if he can, watching the person cast.

People who use his rods are scattered throughout the world now.

They include former President Bush, who was presented one as part of a promotion by the organization Trout Unlimited, which asked Reading to build it.

But Reading, who refuses to advertise his rods, says he wouldn’t have done it if the former president wasn’t actually a serious fly-fisherman.

Bush is good, Reading says, though not as good as former President Carter.

Carter is so good that he’d like to make a rod for him too, but he has a rule against approaching celebrities. The ex-president from Georgia, or someone close to him, would have to learn about the little shop in Lebanon, about 30 miles from Springfield in the south-central part of the state.

“If my customers, the people I spend some time with, don’t think my work is worth telling others about,” says Reading, “then I guess it isn’t.”