It is a common youthful trope. Seeing your teacher outside of the school’s walls is a disorienting experience. Usually these awkward encounters occur at the grocery store or a restaurant. Especially as a teenager, one is well aware that human adults need to purchase and consume food. But a momentary zag in the usual zigging routing throws you for a quick loop.
The experience is exacerbated when it occurs in the middle of the woods hours from home.
At 16 I was fishing quite a bit. Local ponds and creeks made up the bulk of my angling, with day-long trips further away happening at least once a week. I lived within a short drive from three other states and a wide variety of waters. Many were remote, with slim odds of seeing another person most of the day.
So it was quite the surprise to round a bend and see another fly fisher, crouched low and stalking a fish. On this spring creek, like on many spring creeks, the fish were wary. Giving other anglers a wide berth was necessary. Moving farther away from the bank, I quietly headed upstream. My boots’ crunching on the vegetation revealed my presence. He turned, noticed me, gave a quick nod, and went back to casting.
I was still doing the mental math of how much more distance I should put between us when I was hit with the “he looks familiar” feeling. On one hand, everyone in a pair of waders, a vest, a low riding baseball cap, and a face largely obscured by polarized sunglasses looks the same. But humans, even teenagers, are sophisticated enough to perceive personal nuance through drab-colored outdoor gear.
Mulling over where I might recognize him from, I got back to fishing. As is often the case, the attention to the angling filled more and more of my consciousness and I was only peripherally aware that I had encountered another person in the last hour. In short order that information reentered the front of my mind when I heard footsteps on the trail.
“Having any luck?” The angler from earlier was up on the hillside, packing his lip with chewing tobacco. His sunglasses were now perched upon the brim of his hat, too.
“Mr. Dillinger?”
Now he look confused. Apparently the uniformity of the fly fisher’s attire was sufficiently obscuring my identity as well. I took of my sunglasses, but he was still perplexed. “It’s Matt.” It still wasn’t registering.
I can appreciate the disorientation working the other way. Decades later I was teaching middle school. Playing racquetball at the local rec center on Saturday morning, I went to retrieve a ball that had rolled against the clear, back composite wall. Standing up, I was face to face with a child that looked as if he was staring at a zoo animal. He was summoned away and ran off. I assumed it was one of my students but I couldn’t put two and two together in that moment. Monday morning the whole class was tittering over the encounter when I walked in.
“Oh… Matt! Hey!” Once he figured it out we had the most normal of streamside conversations. We talked about our respective histories with the stream we were fishing. We checked out one another’s rods and reels. We commiserated over the morning’s slow action. He showed me the incredibly ugly cress bug that he swore he “usually killed them” with. I had my patterns, which I usually killed them with. I’m sure he thought it was ugly, too.
This lead to many, many fly fishing conversations at school the rest of the year. We talked more about that stream, other local rivers, fly tying, and conservation. Mr. Dillinger ended up getting transferred to a newly built high school that summer, and we only ran into each other once more in the subsequent years.
The whole experience was impactful for a handful of reasons. The fly fishing community is relatively small. The river is an equalizer between individuals of different stations. Apparently, high school teachers use smokeless tobacco. My stream is countless other anglers’ “my stream” as well. All of these observations are quite pedestrian, in hindsight. But looking back, it is interesting to see moments when an awareness of these facets of fly fishing started to come together in my mind.
Years later, I did try fishing his ugly cress bug that had been relegated to an odd corner of my nymph box. It was quite effective, even though it looked about as unrefined as a fly can possibly look. So I suppose the trope of youthful hubris was also at play.