Say the name Lee Wulff to any fly fisherman and images start spilling out like attracters from an old fly box. A glimpse of the Royal Wulff, his buoyant dry fly, floating along the Madison River in Montana, daring the rainbows to strike. A memory of Wulff the bush pilot buzzing Labrador, the shadow of his wings producing silver flashes in dark river pools as spooked Atlantic salmon mistook him for a bird of prey. Wulff of the Catskills, lean as a cougar, padding up to the old Piper Cub he kept parked at the edge of a mowed field on the Beaverkill. And Wulff as the old man and the sea, craggy faced, hard as hickory, reeling in the humiliated marlin, sailfish and bluefin tuna he deceived with his flies. He was restless, wily, inventive, fearless. “If you had to invent a fly-fishing hero,” says John Gierach, author of the definitive “Sex, Death & Fly-Fishing,” “you would make up Lee Wulff.”
Wulff did for American fly-fishing what Ernest Hemingway did for American prose: he saved it from British conventions and mannerisms. He was born in 1905. In those days, on misty mornings in the Catskills, you could still find Currier-and-Ives anglers in coats and ties casting along banks shaded with hemlock and mountain laurel. At the beginning of the Depression, Wulff sewed deep pockets onto a vest, crammed them with gear and hit the rivers. He changed the way fly-fishermen fished, what they fished for, even the way they looked. Paul Schullery, the gentle ironist who wrote “American Fly Fishing: A History,” says that in the heyday of the hook and bullet magazines, “Lee defined the image of the rugged guy in plaid shirts who was always just ‘a little better man than the rest of us’.”
Onstream, Wulff had the eyes of an osprey, offstream the vision of a prophet. “He was always 20 or 30 years ahead of his time,” says Silvio Calabi, editor of Fly Rod & Reel magazine. His obsession was taking ever-bigger fish on ever-smaller rods and flies. He invented new gear, took risks. One day he stood in his waders looking down from a bridge in Vermont. Below him slid the purling waters of the Battenkill. Taking a deep breath-and a hitch in his belt he jumped. The splash sent every trout from Shushan to Manchester racing for cover. The experiment was scientific: Wulff hoped to prove that a fisherman in heavy waders could fall in and not drown. He believed the waders would fill with trapped air and hold him up. But he wasn’t sure until he made his own leap of faith.
No one who went fishing with Wulff ever forgot it. Two seasons ago, John Randolph, editor of Fly Fisherman magazine, and Nelson Bryant, outdoor writer for The New York Times, took off with him for the SteMarguerite River in Quebec. Wulff wanted to catch a salmon bigger than 10 pounds on a number 28 hook. (To understand the challenge, think about pulling a ham through a swimming pool on a bent pin about half the length of your little fingernail; and even then the ham isn’t alive and trying to get away, the water isn’t moving and you aren’t using a gossamer tippet.) The day was cold, the rocks slippery. A salmon struck, dove, sulked as Wulff held the line between his thumb and finger. “When you’ve caught enough of these fish you can feel their heart beat,” he whispered to Bryant. Suddenly the fish tore downstream. Wulff jumped into a canoe and gave chase until the tiny hook straightened and the big one got away. That night, around 1 a.m., Randolph heard some noise outside his cabin: “Lee was out there with the damn guides, laughing, tying flies, telling stories.” He was 84 years old.
Wulff was the grandfather of catch-and-release fishing. He watched netting devastate the Atlantic salmon runs, pollution and overfishing spoil once pristine rivers. He protested. For a long time no one listened. When the experts did start coming around, he didn’t always agree with them. “He was never seduced by the illusion of hatcheries,” says Ernest Schwiebert, an old partner in the conservation wars. “He knew wildness couldn’t be preserved in a poultry farm or zoo.” In the end, here and there at least, his views took hold. By the last time he and Schwiebert sat out on a porch in Yellowstone, the cutthroats were cropping back the bait fish in Yellowstone Lake, and the Yellowstone River and the Firehole were both on the mend.
If a river runs through the last chapter of Wulff’s life it is the upper Beaverkill, where he and his wife, Joan-a strong woman who can flick a fly line a country mile and teach even the dumbest man to cast-built their fishing school. Last week, at 86, Wulff cranked up the Piper Cub and went aloft to get his pilot’s license renewed. He had a heart attack. The plane hit the side of a hill. And he was gone. Searching for words to recapture Wulff’s spirit, Nick Lyons, the Addison of American fishing writers, quoted Emerson: “The great man draws a larger circle around what we think is possible.” Wulff hated funerals. So he left some money to the Anglers Club of New York for a small party to celebrate a fly fisherman’s life. The club was small, but that didn’t really matter. Every other fly-fisherman in the country had already taken in the beautiful ring of his rise.
