Articles

The foam line

Foam is home
A trout sips not one but two mayflies off the foam lined surface (photo: Jason Jagger).

Anybody who powered through a high-school psychology class probably remembers Maslow’s famous triangle chart—the famous Hierarchy of Needs.

At the base of the triangle lie our foundational needs—things like food, shelter, sleep, sex. Higher up, and slightly less important, are still-important needs, like safety, financial security, emotional well-being, etc. Still higher up, and still less important than the foundational needs, are things like love and acceptance, self esteem and, finally, self-actualization.

Outsiders

Part 2: The Arrival
Illustration: Jake Keeler

Carter met Kyle, the first time, while chasing down a glitch in the drone deployment module of TaoZon's two-hour-delivery system. The code was fairly straightforward but the storage and network bandwidth that it was consuming seemed excessive. Digging around the user interface, he found a back door to an old processor, an obsolete code repository, that was supposed to be idle but that showed a slow, steady ripple of activity. Carter had discovered URTH.

URTH, Carter figured out, was a hacked xchat partition that was being unwittingly hosted in TaoZon's hardware, providing a dark web resource for fanatic environmental political discourse and doomsday angst. Open discussion of the environment had long been banned but had found quiet, illicit pockets here and there around the net. Dubbed URTH by its participants, the User's Road To Hell, it was a bootleg outpost frequented by outsiders and the most radically pessimistic. Carter's first instinct was to expose the hack but, just before making the call, two words in the storage dump caught his eye. Fly fishing. Further digging uncovered an obscure little thread where a handful of outsiders claimed to still be practicing the arcane sporting practice. Carter, remembering Grandpa, tumbled down the rabbit hole and landed on Kyle. The hack went unreported.

Outsiders

Part 1: The Christmas Bloom
Illustration: Jake Keeler

Carter tucked the denseweave up under his goggles to be sure that the bridge of his nose was covered. The sun was a mean one today. It had been since the Christmas Bloom, twelve years past.

Cornhusker

The Most Perfect Morning in the History of the World
Photo: Dan Keck

Archie felt so good he had to push down the guilt. It was his nature, as a God-fearing son of the prairies, not to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. But this time he couldn’t help himself. It was too delicious. He was gleefully, ecstatically happy.

Not that he’d had a hand in the thing, although the struggle for restaurant supremacy in South Sioux City had been waged for years, bitter as any blood feud. He hadn’t even wished for it, at least not in any but the oblique, diffuse way that one daydreams of a future in which one’s rivals fall victim to calamity.

Review: Redington GRANDE fly reel

After over a year of testing, our thoughts on Redington's newest big game stopper
Photo: Chad Shmukler

I can still remember my first "real" fly reel. As a brand new fly angler, I had dumped almost every penny I had into a rod—a handsome, noodley 5-weight Diamondback that I still break out of the basement every few years when I'm feeling a bit nostalgic and know that I'm going to spend the day mostly throwing dry flies. Because virtually every dollar I had went into that rod, the reel that I paired it with was unimpressive to say the very most.

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