For $70, you can buy a lot of things in this world. A month’s worth of cell phone service, a nice oxford dress shirt, or two tanks of gas for your sedan. Take the whole gang out for burgers and ice cream. If you’re shopping shrewdly, you can get a week’s worth of groceries for a small family.

Or, if you are a fly fisher, you can get a piece of dead chicken.

Or a fancy pair of nail clippers.

Or a shirt that looks like that $70 oxford, only with vent holes all over it and extra pockets. (Lots of extra pockets.)

For $70, there are plenty of things that you can buy in a fly shop.

You can buy thirty yards of fine, coiled PVC.

You can buy nearly two dozen fake bugs.

You can buy three trendy, stainless steel cups.

$70 is not that much money, especially when there are so many things that you need.

Every fly fisher needs seven or eight fake rats made from the hair off a deer.

Every fly fisher needs a thread holder/dispenser, precision engineered and finely tensioned.

Every fly fisher needs a hat and a shirt sporting the name of the aforementioned local fly shop.

Sure, $70 could get you a moderately clean hotel room during your fishing trip. But you could also just sleep in the back of your car and…

Splurge at the local BBQ joint for a couple meals.

Get another fishing license, with corresponding trout stamp, in an adjacent state.

Replace your old pliers with new, extra plier-y pliers.

In our day and age of materialistic consumerism, it is clear that $70 is a pretty insignificant sum of money for most people in this culture. For fly fishers it means a lot. A whole lot. Some, perhaps all, of the purchases listed could be looked at as frivolous or superfluous by the uninitiated, outside observer. But you know better. Those three score and ten dollars are the key to the next level of angling achievement, piscatorial pleasure, and fly fishing fulfillment.

So go forth, $70 in hand, and by all means: buy.