You have to go a goodly distance these days to find a good fly tying table – a place where lies take on legendary proportion and are told with a Mark Twain kind of panache.
The atmosphere is important. Trendy, upper end fly shops usually don’t have a good tying table. Oh, the flies might be OK, even superior. But it’s hard to get in the mood for a whopper when you feel like you’re sitting in an Abercrombie & Finch.
Racks filled with high end clothing, peppered with posters of hyper-thin almost dressed female models facing belly on to a set of male six-pack abs tends to cause the mind to wander into zones not usually associated with good fish stories.
It doesn’t matter how many racks of fly rods are coupled with it.
Greenville used to have two good tying tables. One was at Spider Littleton’s shop on Augusta Road; the other was across town at Foothills Fly Fishing.
Both are gone now. Greenville’s only fly shop these days fills a corner at Luthi’s Pawn Shop on Washington Street where you can find good fishing gear and hock your stereo at facing counters.
Spider showed up one morning at the Chattooga River Fly Shop in Mountain Rest – arguably proud owners of the one remaining perfect tying table in South Carolina.
It was the stuff of which legends are made.
A coffee pot hissed in the corner where the cash register is illuminated by a much-used old table lamp. The tying table located between the corkboard feather racks and a specially imported hickory trunk that’s decorated with nets and has a rubber copperhead poking its head out of a hole at the base.
If the snake doesn’t give you a clue that odd things happen frequently here – nothing will.
Jason Galloway, part owner of the shop, just finished his story about a guy who won a one-fly fishing contest with a piece of red yarn tied to a hook – to the uninitiated, that fly’s known as a San Juan worm – when Spider launched into an epic.
“I was sitting around the shop and I got a call from one of my customers,” Spider said. There were sirens howling in the background and you could hear a motor roaring.
“Spider, they tell me I’m not gonna make it,” a muffled voce said – barely discernable over the racket.
“What happened, Jack?” Spider asked.
“Line got wrapped in a laurel,” Jack said and groaned. “When I tried to pull it loose I scraped up against a hornet nest and they swarmed me.”
“Dang,” Spider said. “Why you callin’ me?”
“So you can call my wife,” Jack said. “She won’t take it well that I lost my new fly rod.”
“Can I sell you another one?” Spider, ever sympathetic, asked.
“Dang you Spider!” Jack shouted into the phone.
In the background Spider heard a medic ask if Jack needed another shot for pain.
“Anyway, I was so swole up they had to cut me out of my waders before they put me in the ambulance… must have got stung 50 times,” Jack said.
“You want me to order you another pair?” Spider asked.
“Dang you Spider!” Jack shouted into the phone.
Spider heard the medic holler to the driver to step on it and the line went dead.
Two weeks later Jack walked into Spider’s shop dressed in beekeeper’s togs – complete with a net helmet.
“What you up to, Jack?” Spider said.
“Gonna go back at get that hornet’s nest stuff it in a garbage sack and bring it back. I want to hang it in my office,” Jack said, holding up two cans or hornet spray. “Wanta go?”
Spider poured himself another cup of coffee and looked at Jack. “Naw, I’ll pass on that one.”
“Suit yourself,” Jack said and headed for the door.
“Hey,” Spider shouted as the door was closing behind Jack. “Be sure to dose that nest again with bug killer before you open the bag. Hornets have a way of coming back on you.”
“He must not have paid me much attention, cause he got swarmed again at his office,” Spider said to Jason – who was wiping tears of laugher from his eyes.
“Never did sell that boy another rod.”
Tags: Charles Sowell, fly fishing, fly tying, Spider Littleton
