In my memory it was early fall, the leaves in Sioux City just beginning to turn. I must have been twelve or thirteen. Dad and I were tossing the football in the yard and talking about my grandfather, Les Davis. He’d died in 1966, when I was nine. Thankfully I’d had the chance to fish with him the summer before his death on a trip to Lake of the Woods in Ontario—my first-ever Canadian fishing trip—and to this day I’ve never seen his equal with a bait-casting outfit.

Fly anglers tend to anthropomorphize the objects of our obsession to such a degree that I often wonder if it’s us or five-year-olds who possess the most active imaginations. Nevertheless, the assertion that fly rods are more than just tools shouldn’t be too hard a claim to swallow. For a group of folks that regularly affirm that trout are capable of elaborate, deductive reasoning, I reckon there’s room for the idea that fly rods are more than the sum of their parts.