On International Women’s Day, we celebrate a powerful creative mind, often misunderstood and underestimated, and yet undaunted, Willa Cather. // www.tateangling.com
"I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land-slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be." •
The above excerpt from Willa Cather's My Antonia has everything it needs. It is a case study in efficiency and accuracy.
•
We are inspired by the fine craftsmanship of Cather's work. it goes without saying that we think quite a bit about efficiency and accuracy in our own work. A fly rod is nothing more and nothing less than a cantilever spring, a relatively simple tool. Its artistry and beauty are found in the efficiency and accuracy with which it delivers energy from your hand to the line, to the leader, to the tippet, to the fly, to the water, and finally to the fish.
•
If you cast one of our rods and find poetry in the way it handles energy and line, we give some of the credit to the writers like Willa Cather who inspire us to think differently about the art of their own kind of energy and line. As with all art forms, making fine angling tools & equipment has a lot to do with drawing from the right influences.