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I am standing in ice water up to my crotch. The current tugs at me, as I struggle to hold my balance. The slippery bottom doesn't help.
I am cradling a wispy twig made from bamboo that is nine feet long in my arms as I try to tie a tiny fluff of feathers and a sharp hook on the end of a length of modern science called monofilament. This is a little hard, because my hands are the same temperature as the water I'm standing in, and they - like other parts of me - are shrinking from everything.

Nevertheless, I manage to make the knot, and bite the end of the nub sticking out off with my teeth (an activity strongly frowned upon by dentists everywhere.) and then untangle the loops and loops of floating plastic called a "fly line," which droops from the top end of the wispy bamboo twig that is called a "fly rod," and then allow the little fluff called in this case a "trico," to slip from my hand, because the monofilament is attached to the fly line, and it is called a "leader."
I grasp the large end of the fly rod and lift the whole thing up and whip it back behind my shoulder, and watch the fly line attached to it sail behind me and wrap itself around a branch of a willow bush a few feet away.
I hold the fly rod above my head, as I slowly turn myself around and trudge through the current to retrieve the eighty-five cent fly from the willow. It takes me nearly ten minutes but finally, I am free again, and move once again against the freezing current back into my previous position.
From there, I carefully wave the stick - fly rod - above the water, pulling the fly line, and thence the leader and the little fishing fly called a trico into the air. The whole thing sails in looping arcs against the sky several times, as I try to dry the little fly and get the thing to move the right way so I can finally swoop the rod forward and make the whole thing drop in the water at the right place.
Finally, I think that it is ready, and my rod comes forward and stops just above the water. The fly line and the leader drop on the water in wavy little loops just ten feet from the end of the rod.
Not the right place.
I pull the fly line out of the water with the rod and again go through the waving-of-the-stick. This time I mutter a few incantations, none of which is useful in a family discussion, while watching the line loop above me.
This time, the line lays out almost straight on the water, and the current immediately pulls everything downstream

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