The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4
DETOUR BY FLY
Words: Hiroto Hayashi 2022-06-24 09:33:30
Sterling Price’s tying desk in his home in Colorado, circa 1975. Sterling’s kids remember the room as always in disarray, and though this photo suggests as much, one can sense a method in the madness. Everything in its place, and every place with a thing.
Photo: Hiroto Hayashi Family Archives
I was born too late to meet my grandpa Sterling. He died from cancer before I came into this world. Sterling worked in a machine shop and made a few simple vises that circulated through the family in later years. He wasn’t supposed to be making vises, but that’s just how the man operated. The Sterling I’ve come to know is one built from hand-me-down stories gathered over the years by the generation before me.
Telling these stories, my mom would shake her head with a wry smile. “The carpet of his tying room was so covered in fishhooks and bits of wire,” she once said, “you couldn’t walk into it without shoes on.”
In an old color photo, his tying desk is dwarfed by weathered wooden cupboards and tarnished shelves that hold bags and boxes of multicolored and disjointed tying materials. He hunted wild game and scavenged porcupine quills and other odds and ends from roadkill he stumbled across. These things made it into plastic bags that were stuffed into car compartments or sealed and forgotten in a shirt pocket. The cloudy haze of the old film obscures the clarity with which he viewed his flies. Clamped to the edge of a scarred and worn desk surface is one of his vises—spare, blocky, straight to the point. He was one with that desk.
Before the advent of commercial fly-tying operations, Sterling toured the hills of South Dakota and mountains of Colorado selling his flies. He’d walk in with a fly box or two and the shop would buy what they needed. Conversations were short, curt, simple. My mom says he “was always on the lookout for the next get-rich-quick scheme.” That statement, while it makes sense from what I’ve heard about the man, doesn’t line up with tying flies. He must have known that tying wasn’t going to make anybody rich. So what was it? What thoughts did he pore over while seated before the vise winding and winding the gray thread and dubbing that was to become an Adams?
When my mom was young, the family once went on a road trip to Montana to visit a family friend. Her friend’s grandmother had died, and they were going to help the family clean and sell the house. My mom asked her parents if they could take a detour to see Old Faithful on the way back. They said yes, on one condition: They would make the trip to Yellowstone only if grandpa could sell enough flies to cover the additional cost.
He did. To this day, my mom wishes she had pictures of the trip. I wonder: How many flies did he have to sell? The flies he carried, the ones tied at his desk, were an investment.
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DETOUR BY FLY
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