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Trying to Contain One’s Self
by Peter A. Graff |
The other day, as I floated amid a sea of fishing stuff, I spied my empty fishing vest which had settled in the corner like the dried-out reptilian skin, and I got thinking: where would we be without our vests? The answer was we’d be out in the woods, in the middle of a river, without exactly the right things we needed because we had nothing to put them in, and so left them back in the trunk of the car. The fish would be rising to flies we didn’t have; or we’d be trying to tie on a #22 midge without our 6.5 magnification reading glasses; or we’d be hungry for that salami sandwich also in the car; or we’d have broken our tippet and been forced to tie onto the 12 lb. stub of the leader. We’d be up a creek without our boodle.
But that never happens because we have vests. And vests have pockets. More accurately, vest ARE pockets separated by strands of connecting cloth and with the addition of a few “D” rings--you cannot have one without the other any more than you could have an outside of a coffee cup without the inside. And pockets are among the greatest containers of them all. (Anyone who would like to learn about larger containers like pokes, reel bags, stuff sacks, etc. would be well-served to call my friend Mike. Mike was born under the sign of the Onion--his fate is to find little things only after peeling away countless layers of bags and sacks, many of which he made himself mostly out of camo cloth obtained on the cheap from surplus outfits and local garage sales. Mike knows bags).
But pockets? Who knows pockets? Likewise, without knowing pockets, who knows fishing vests or for that matter, fishing?
For example, When were pockets invented and by whom? I did an exhaustive Internet search for ten minutes until I got distracted by some unrelated photos, and I found that the history of pockets is shrouded in little pockets mystery and misinformation that must be pieced together before they assemble themselves into a vest of knowledge (not only do I love pockets, I love cheap metaphors).
According to Aba bin Yabba Dabb Du, Turkish historian, the closest thing to an ancient pocket was
probably fashioned by Turkish soldiers out of a piece of folded unleavened bread fastened to the belt. But the contraption did not work well. Things kept spilling out the sides or the bread got damp and fell off the belt. Or they were stolen by Greek soldiers who, seeing economic possibilities, went back to Sparta to open gyro shops when they were to old to fight (“gyro” being the Greek word for “stuff spills over the sides”).
History marches on but things didn’t change much, pocketwise. Illuminations from the medieval times show folks garbed in all sorts of interesting clothing, all without pockets. Indeed, we see pictures of people with various pouches and utensiles tied to their belts--ink pots by scribes, keys by chatelaines, purses by men and women with means. It is clear, then, that toolbelts antedated pockets by many hundreds of years which might explain why my wife thinks I should spend more time fixing the garbage disposal than going fishing. I’ll have to remember to bring her back a trinket from some fallen fisherman the next time I go.
Probably, it was not until the late 15th or early 16th centuries that the prices of rag paper and cloth dropped sufficiently so that people could afford to experiment with attaching pouches and pokes permanently to jackets and leggings. The first pockets, called codpieces, were elaborately decorated pouches laced over the front opening of men’s pants. Originally intended to catch and release the...er...cod, the container really served to hold money, handerchief and, sometimes, bon bons (which I think is French for something). Fly angling began to become popular about the same time (eg Cotton and Walton), and so it is reasonable to assume that the first multiple pockets, sewn by small children in Dickensian-like sweat-shops, were invented by the anglers themselves, sewn together into apparel called “fishinge vestes,” “vestes” being the Victorian English word for “stuff spills over the sides.”
So.
Pockets now-a-days are not much different than pockets then-a-days. Buttons have been used to fasten pockets closed but were abandoned early in this century when the buttons kept falling off and women, newly enfranchised, began to realize that they didn’t have to sew buttons on any more; zippers were incorporated in the design until they proved to jam-up too often or separate irrevocably; velcro closures are the latest attempts at fastening pockets and we all know how they lose their magnetism over time and are rendered useless. But nothing much has changed save the number of pockets sewn into the vest.
Something else has not changed much: proper pocket methodology. Tips that were first offered hundreds of years ago still ring true. Here are a few:
1. The number of pockets on a vest is critical. there have to be enough a lot of stuff but not for a whole lot of stuff. Anyone who has tripped on a submerged log and has tried to swim ashore with an overloaded vest will attest to this; it’s a lot like doing the backstroke with a piano on your chest.
2. Pockets make poor live-wells. Always empty vests of foodstuff, hatch samples, and live bait before packing the vest away in the hot trunk of a car.
3. Always close a pocket once opened. Leaving pockets open leads to leaving a trail of paraphernalia through the woods, or to a major spillage, bigger than the Exxon Valdez, when one bends over to unhook a trout.
5. Consider drawing up a master index that reminds you what thing you put in which pocket. Do
not put this in a pocket; tape it to the inside of your hat or have it tattoed to the back of your hand (not recommeded for those who reorganize their vests more than once every ten or twelve years), or entered into a Palm Pilot glued to a wader suspender.
6. Folders within folders within folders are cute on a pc desktop, but putting containers into containers into pockets runs contrary to the evolution of humans which gives us lots of pockets, but only two hands.
7. Always put stuff taken from a pocket back in the same pocket. If you take something out of a pocket, and in your excitement put it back in the wrong pocket, you might as well heave it in the stream because you’re never going to find it again.
So what can we glean from all of this musing on pockets and vests? Only that it has been a long winter with too much time to think about things. It’s time to load up our pockets with the little things and go fishing.
Peter Graff writes Midwest Fly Fishing's The Last Cast. This story appeared in a past issue of MFF.
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Somewhat surprisingly, no one has the foggiest notion of when pockets came into being, only when pockets did not come into being. We know the concept of “pocket” existed long before actual pockets appeared because people have been looking for thousands of years for something handy to put items in. Take Greek soldiers, for example. After a battle it was customary to stroll among the carnage looking for souvenirs on the persons of slain enemies (and occasionally, when you could get away with it, on the persons of slain Greek comrades). It was rare to find anything because slain enemies didn’t have any pockets, but necessary to hunt nonetheless because their Greek wives told them in no uncertain terms that they better not come home empty-handed if they ever wanted to go off on another adventure. The Greek warrior, finding a trinket, would pick it up and slip it into his toga so as to keep his hands free to give battle with some evil-smelling enemy was playing possum. Sadly, the first time the soldier broke into a dead run to escape the suddenly-revived, enemy’s evil-looking spear, the acquired souvenir would drop out the bottom of his toga only to be found several thousand years later by an evil-smelling archeologist.
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copyright Midwest Fly Fishing Magazine 1999
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