No Fly-by-night Cabbie Is Jack

Gartside got out of the Air Force in 1966, went home and found that his father was dying. "All he did was raise a family, work hard, have all these dreams about traveling and never went anywhere," Gartside says. "And then one day when he was 53 he found himself flat on his back with cancer. He spent almost a year in dying, and a few weeks before he died he told me never to end up like that, full of regret for all the things he never did. I do what I do, I am what I am, I take from my father's death."

Gartside worked his way through the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he majored in English and minored in German. He graduated in 1969, went to work as a teacher and spent the summers fishing. In 1975, he quit teaching to drive a cab.

To support himself on his jaunts abroad, Gartside has served as an extra in a Norwegian movie about Vikings (he played a peasant), has worked as a waiter in Sweden and Japan, has unloaded Argentine beef on the docks of Lübeck in West Germany and has swept African tobacco off the floors of an Amsterdam cigarette factory. Everything he swept, including dust and dead snakes found in the bales, accompanied the tobacco on the conveyor belt, and he soon was promoted to blender. In that capacity he added chocolate, mint and other flavoring to cigarettes for the European market that were supposed to have an American taste. "I worked in a stainless steel vat filled with mint from China," he says. "Ever been in a mint vat? A great smell."

In this country, Gartside takes odd jobs whenever his car breaks down as he drives back and forth between Boston and the trout streams of Montana. Once after he ran into a moose with a Ford van, he spent a week in Minneapolis putting screws in caskets and another week degreasing skimobile runners in order to pay for the repairs. When really pressed for money, he'll skip eating. "I can imagine eating a meal, and then I won't eat because my imagination has fed me," he explains. "That's why I'm so skinny—6'2" and 153 pounds."

Gartside owns only two rods. One is nine feet long and made of graphite, the other, a seven-footer, of fiber glass. "I'm not a good fisherman because I don't know equipment," he says. "I just know how to catch fish. After a while you get to know where the fish are." Indeed, one fish he's very proud of is a four-pound brown trout he caught in England. That's a nice fish, but it hardly seems worth a brag, except for the fact that Gartside caught it in London in the moat of the Old Palace near Parliament. "There are some nice trout there," he says. "People feed them bread and popcorn, but if you get down there early enough you can get in a cast." His best fish was a 13½-pound brown trout that he took in the Gallatin River in Montana in 1979 on his first cast of the year out West. "Kind of spoiled the whole season for me," he says. "It was on August 1, a hot day when even mad dogs and Englishmen were hiding under bushes. A friend took pictures of it, and then I released it. I took that fish on a fly that's listed in Bud Lilly's catalog as the Filo Fly. It's also sold as the Gartside Pheasant Nymph, but it's most commonly called the Sparrow, at least in the East, after being so named by Pete Laszlo in The Roundtable. The Sparrow is by far my most successful subsurface, all-purpose fly. I use it in different sizes, colors and hackle lengths for most of my nymph fishing. I also fish it as a streamer."

Filo feathers, or aftershafts, are the small, fluffy feathers found down toward the rump of a pheasant. Gartside started using them one day because he had little else to tie from a bird he had otherwise plucked bare. Along with the Sparrow, Gartside ties a number of ultrasoft flies, such as the Wet Mouse, which looks like a pussy willow bud. "I first tied up this pattern on a large, pointless hook as a plaything for Tobermory," he says. "It amused him for about two minutes." Trout apparently take it for a dragonfly nymph.

Another well known Gartside is the dry Pheasant Hopper that Bud Lilly spotted on Gartside's vest that day in 1976. He forms the wing by coating a pheasant feather with polyurethane spar varnish and stroking it into a V-shape that forms naturally. He then cups the wing over a body made of poly-yarn and an under-wing made of deer hair. He has found that the most effective body colors are tan, gray, green and yellow, while an orangish body makes an excellent adult stonefly imitation. "The Pheasant Hopper is very durable and quite popular in the West," he says, "and it's been written up in a few books and magazines. Unfortunately, everyone who has written about it has, for some reason, gotten the pattern wrong. I don't use the 'church window' feathers on a pheasant for the wings but the feathers just below them on the back."

There is one inelegant, if spectacularly effective, fly that Gartside ties. It imitates a cigarette filter tip. He tied it one day after discovering that a number of trout in the Firehole River in Yellowtone had filter tips in their stomachs. Gartside has since learned that the trout probably strike at a filter-tip fly because it looks like a freshly molted nymph of an aquatic insect, especially one of the per-lid stoneflies.

Besides selling to Lilly or to anglers who happen to jump into his cab, Gartside sells flies by mail. His flies cost from $1.35 to $2 each, and he maintains a year-round post office box in West Yellowstone (Box 853, zip code 59758) to receive orders; the postal service obligingly forwards the mail to Boston when he's in residence there.

"I think my flies are pretty good," Gartside says. "I have my strengths and my weaknesses. I work with what I have, and I've been very limited in money for materials. To me, fly tying really has very little to do with fishing. If all the rivers in the world dried up tomorrow, I'd still tie flies. I like looking at photographs of flies. I take pictures of them, and I have prints made from the slides. Maybe it's growing up with TV, but things look more real to me in a photograph."