Whenever I need to check out of the world, I head to a place called Satan’s Creek. I go there to catch-and-release—or maybe catch-and-ogle—God’s most perfect creatures: wild brook trout. They come small in these mountain runs. An 11-incher would be considered trophy-size. Still, bringing one to hand, with its speckled reds and yellows and blues, is like holding an opal with gills.
Satan’s Creek is not its real name, but I’ve so coined this riverine hideout because while fishing it, I often have to dodge the refuse left behind by Frederick County, Maryland, natives (“Frednecks” they’re sometimes called—though never to their faces). They don’t have the same reverence for the land as I do for their fish. I’ve circumnavigated cinch-sacked trash bags, animal ribcages (at least I think they were animals), a discarded toilet, and once even an abandoned suitcase with nothing in it but children’s panties, perhaps left over from the human sacrifices. And yet while I can catch brookies in more unspoiled climes, I still feel as though I’m fishing hallowed water. For Frederick was the birthplace and longtime stomping grounds of Bernard “Lefty” Kreh. And if it was good enough for Lefty . . .
Lefty left us on March 14 at the age of 93. And for non-fisherpersons who never realized he’d been here in the first place, well, you missed out. For it can fairly be said that he was the sport’s all-time premier ambassador, the Michael Jordan of fly fishing. Or, putting matters in proper historical context, Michael Jordan was the Lefty Kreh of the NBA.
He changed the game, as they say. Lefty caused us to think differently about how we fly fishers cast, abandoning the rigid 10-and-2 clockface instruction that tweedy trout priests drilled into novices since Izaak Walton was in short pants. Lefty favored instead an extended stroke with the body pivoting that allowed him to throw effortlessly tight loops previously unheard-of distances. He also expanded where we fish. Lefty was catching big bad saltwater fish with a fly rod when the rest of the fly-fishing universe still had on its trout training wheels. His Lefty’s Deceiver fly, invented to entice Chesapeake Bay stripers, became such a staple that the Postal Service put it on a stamp.
Lefty caught 126 species on the fly on every continent but Antarctica. He’d have scored there, too, if it weren’t for the fact, as he told Angler’s Journal, that there “ain’t nothing to catch on Antarctica but penguins.” He set scores of world records, from tarpon to blackfin tuna. And yet, being a good Maryland boy, his favorite fish was the comparatively modest smallmouth bass—basically a largemouth with a couple of Red Bulls in him. Fish the world when you can was Lefty’s credo, though the world right in front of you has plenty of fine fish, too. Be no discriminator. The greatest fish are the ones you can catch.
What Lefty did best of all, with his reverence for things that matter (fish, rivers, people) and irreverence for that which doesn’t (“there is more BS in fly fishing than there is in a Kansas feedlot”), was make you want to fish just like he did: full-on, without pretense, doing what works, discarding what doesn’t, grabbing all there is to be gotten, then returning it right back to where you found it. “You don’t burn your golf balls at the end of the day, do you?” he once asked an interviewer. Lefty knew and lived what so many of us suspect: Our days, even when we get 93 years’ worth of them, are finite, and a lousy day of fishing beats a good day of whatever else you had in mind.
I only met him once. When Lefty was a spry 86, a friend hauled me along to the annual Tie Fest on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I don’t care much for tying flies myself. If I have time to tie, I have time to fish, which I’d rather be doing. But I wanted to pay my respects to the master before it was too late. Thronged by idolaters, there he was, an unlikely athletic specimen—a gap-toothed 5’7″ octogenarian in a frumpy upper-downer hat, who on his knees and using half a rod could still throw a fly line 30 feet further than any of us.
Back in his stunt-casting days, he’d knock a cigarette out of a girl’s mouth at 60 feet, a practice he abandoned, preferring to share knowledge rather than show off. He instructed everyone from Jimmy Carter to Ted Williams, but he was a man at ease in his own skin, in no need of lording his prowess over fishing partners.
Despite people tugging from every side that afternoon, Lefty sat down with me for a drink. I had a whiskey to calm my nerves, he had a Coke. He spoke with that mouthful of working-class Maryland—all elongated “O” sounds—and called the waitresses “hon.” He looked at the book of his I was holding, immediately admitting, “I didn’t write it,” giving credit to the ghostwriter who took down his tales. And then he told more hilarious stories, none of which I can remember, but one of which ended with one of his fishing buddies, Tom Brokaw, calling another, the novelist Tom McGuane, a “c—sucker.” Being politically correct was never Lefty’s strong suit. Even as he lay dying last fall, an email made the rounds in which he bucked up saddened friends, assuring them that he was staying “busier than a Syrian bricklayer.”
Being gracious was the constant refrain of his life. As fishing writer Dan Blanton put it, “He made you feel as though you were the celebrity, not him.” Bill May, another angling author, has told how Lefty took over an hour out of a fishing exhibition to console May after his wife had died, waving off all other comers. (Lefty’s wife had passed away a few years earlier, after over 60 years of marriage.) Angus Phillips, the longtime outdoors writer at the Washington Post, who, when he started in the late ’70s, “didn’t know a fish from a duck,” tells me that Lefty, who was then his theoretical rival at the Baltimore Sun, had Phillips over to a pond near his house for casting lessons. Lefty taught him tricks that would’ve taken years to learn on his own, all while making him feel better about his thinning hair: “Tell ’em it’s not a bald spot, it’s a solar panel for a love machine.” “Lefty had it all,” says Phillips. “He was talented, generous, and funny, a friend to anyone he met.”
The book in my hand that day at Tie Fest was Lefty’s autobiography, My Life Was This Big and Other True Fishing Tales. There are better written fly-fishing books, yet this is perhaps the most treasured volume in my fishing library. Not just because Lefty signed it—”Keep showing me the way,” he wrote, which I use to taunt rivals—but because it’s a beautiful portrait of a life well-lived.
In it, we learn of a man whose dad died when he was six years old and whose family slid from the middle class into poverty and into a Frederick ghetto. His embittered mother warned him she couldn’t afford the clothes and lunches it took to send him to public school, so Lefty’d have to earn his way. He did so, by hook or crook: bush-bobbing for catfish to sell and trapping muskrats for their hides, all the while learning his future trade as an outdoorsman. “Frederick was far from paradise,” he wrote, “but you couldn’t have told us that.”
Lefty served in the artillery in World War II, fighting at the Battle of the Bulge, where a friend had his head literally blown off right in front of him. Back from the war, he worked at Fort Detrick, growing anthrax cultures for the Army. He and a couple coworkers were exposed. The coworkers died. Lefty survived. His casting arm turned black, but he recovered, and the U.S. government eventually named the strain after him.
He shook the shackles of government work, and the rest is history, as he fished his way across the world, teaching untold sums of people along the way, but always staying humble enough to absorb more knowledge himself. A true fisherman understands the importance of humility. For as Tom McGuane once put it: “The uncertainties of fishing undermine all forms of smugness.”
Lefty’s voice, even stilled, keeps rattling around in your head. I hear it when I’m trying to dupe stripers into eating my Deceiver from a Chesapeake jetty. I hear it when I’m stalking wild browns in Maryland’s Gunpowder River, along what has been christened “The Lefty Kreh Fishing Trail.” I heard it a few years back, when a friend dragged me along on a guided trip. I usually fish to get away from people trying to tell me what to do.
We were casting for snakeheads, the Asian invader that looks more like a reptile than a fish. My boatmates had already gone to spinning rods, since there was little hope of fly-fishing success. Snakeheads were laying up so far in the thick spatterdock that I’d have stood a better chance with a rake than a fly rod. But I kept casting my weedless popper, hoping for lightning to strike. The guide, watching my form, offered, “You’re sidearming, you shouldn’t do that.”
I was casting a little more sidearmed than usual—so as not to hit him in the face with my backcast. Though he was now tempting me. Everyone who has watched Lefty videos or read Lefty books knows that such concerns don’t matter. Just observe the laws of natural motion: Keep your thumb behind the cork. Keep your elbow on the shelf. Accelerate then stop hard on the long stroke, like you’re flinging a potato off a fork.
When the guide started up the boat, I muttered to my friend under the motor’s hum, “If I try to drown your guide, stop me.” He smiled, knowing what I was thinking, without me having to say it. And what I was thinking was this: “What does the guide know? If it’s good enough for Lefty . . .”
Matt Labash is a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard.
