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Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] Nick Lyons: Ed is like a beacon of the best kind of fly fisherman, one of the most knowledgeable. It's one of the great experiences I've had as a publisher and also as a lifelong fisherman to have known Ed—fished with him not enough times, but enough to remember—and to have known his wonderful wife, Obie.
[00:00:31] Judy Van Put: Ed taught me how to fly-fish, and I found it to be such a beautiful, peaceful, and relaxing sport, and you just sort of seek that solitude. That was one thing that he loved about fishing was the solitude.
[00:00:46] Brett Barry: This is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast." I'm Brett Barry. That first voice you heard is Nick Lyons, who's become a very welcome repeat guest on this show. In fact, we recently released an entire episode about him. It's called "Casting Stories: Nick Lyons on Fishing and Writing," and if you haven't heard it yet, you really need to add it to your queue. We covered a lot of ground in that show, from a life on the water to a career in publishing, recollections of the Hindenburg, falling in love with literature, falling in love with Mari, and earning four cents a frog at the famous Laurel House. About a week after that interview, I got a note from Nick lamenting that he hadn't said a word about a book he'd come out of retirement to edit at the age of 93, an autobiography by the renowned flyfisher Ed Van Put. With no intention of disappointing Nick Lyons, whose conversations I always look forward to, I assured him we'd meet again soon and that I'd be glad to capture that story, and this time, Nick and I would be joined by Ed Van Put's wife, Judy, who also goes by Obie, for a special conversation about Ed Van Put's storied life and career in Catskill waters.
[00:02:09] Nick Lyons: I'm Nick Lyons. I have spent a lot of time in the Catskills and love it here.
[00:02:16] Judy Van Put: I'm Judy Van Put. I live in Livingston Manor, New York.
[00:02:21] Brett Barry: Judy, could you start by introducing us to your husband?
[00:02:24] Judy Van Put: My husband, Ed Van Put. It was considered by many a Catskill legend. He was known for his fishing and his kind and gentle demeanor: very humble, very accomplished, and a wonderful friend—in fact, my best friend and the love of my life for 47 years.
[00:02:51] Brett Barry: And, Nick, he wrote a book that brought you out of retirement.
[00:02:54] Nick Lyons: He did indeed. For some years, I deserved no credit for this, but a lot of people would tell me, as a longtime publisher, that Ed had to write a book, so I became the person who nudged him to write it, and then one day I got a call saying he was starting it, but he was afraid of using the word "I." He didn't want to make it too personal. He didn't want to sound like he was pontificating, and eventually through a series of odd circumstances he didn't get a report from several people who were considering the book. I don't know whether they would have taken it or not, but I thought it was such a strong book that I simply said, wildly, at the age of 93, "Well, I'll do it, Ed." Since I had not edited or acted in publishing for a full 20 years, it was a rather alarming thing for me to have come out of my mouth, but it was a joyous experience, and the more I heard about what he was writing, how, and looked at it, the more I thought it was going to be a perfect gem of a very important book.
[00:04:17] Brett Barry: The book is called "A Flyfisher's Revelations: Practical Tips, Strategies, and Wisdom from Fifty Years Experience." It was published in 2025. Did Ed get to see the book?
[00:04:30] Judy Van Put: Unfortunately, he passed in December of 2024. However, Ed's fingerprints are all over this book. He wrote it, and he went through any corrections, and he gave the final say to Nick, the final edits, and the final okay. We reviewed every page and every photo, and he was quite delighted when he closed the book and sent it off to Nick, and then we just waited, and it came out. Interestingly enough, the first copy arrived at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center on May 28, 2025, which would have been Ed's birthday.
[00:05:12] Brett Barry: Wow, that's nice. This book is part memoir, part technique. It's not a how-to guide, but there's a lot to glean from these pages if you're a flyfisher in the Catskills.
[00:05:23] Nick Lyons: That's definitely so. I should add to what Obie said. I think Ed got to see the digital version of the book.
[00:05:33] Judy Van Put: Yes.
[00:05:34] Nick Lyons: So he did see the full book designed and ready to be printed, but it was not printed yet.
[00:05:42] Judy Van Put: Yes, and the jacket and everything.
[00:05:44] Nick Lyons: Yes.
[00:05:44] Judy Van Put: You're right. He saw the complete digital version of it and gave it his okay, and then off it went.
[00:05:50] Nick Lyons: And I hope I liked it very much.
[00:05:52] Judy Van Put: He did.
[00:05:53] Nick Lyons: Yeah.
[00:05:55] Brett Barry: He was a passionate fisherman, and his work required that he fish, right?
[00:05:58] Judy Van Put: Yes.
[00:05:59] Brett Barry: How lucky is that? He kept a detailed journal. Can you elaborate on that, Judy, his journal, his fishing, and how the fishing and the work ran parallel?
[00:06:11] Judy Van Put: Yes, Ed actually did not come from a family of fishers, much less flyfishers. No one in his family fished, so when he was about nine years of age, he began fishing with local kids in New Jersey, where he grew up, and by the time he was a young teenager, he was interested in seeing how the fish took flies and became interested in fly-fishing. Ultimately, he traveled up to the Catskills, where he would come every weekend and spend time at Harry and Elsie Darbee's, learn as much as he could about fly-fishing and trout fishing, and eventually bought the house, which I still live in. He soon met Catskill Bill Kelly from the New York State Conservation Department, who offered Ed a job doing a creel census in 1969, and that began a 40-year career with what became the Department of Environmental Conservation. Ed worked in fisheries and became a principal fisheries biologist, as well as working in habitat and public fishing rights. He was obliged to keep a diary during the creel census and, from that, decided to keep a separate diary of his own fishing and kept diaries of his own fishing for almost 60 years, actually 50 years of his own fishing, and, from that, decided on a 30-year period from which he gleaned information to come up with this book.
[00:07:55] Brett Barry: And a creel census would be like a fish population, a survey of the stock of trout.
[00:08:01] Judy Van Put: At the time, in 1969, Bill Kelly had just instituted a new catch and release, no-kill fishery on the Willowemoc Creek, so the creel census was twofold: it was to determine any deleterious effects of building the highway, the new Route 17, that was crossing those rivers, as well as to see how the fishing pressure and fishing itself, how the Willowemoc, stood up to the fishing pressure. He was given a schedule of work. He would work 12 to 14-hour days, a number of days a week, and he had... I believe it was a seven-mile run where he would interview every fisherman he saw along the stream. He would ask to see any fish that they had caught and measure them and take scale samples for determining the ages and conditions of the fish, and because it was a no-kill section, all the fish needed to be returned to the water, so he learned a lot of information from that creel census and, as you can imagine, met a lot of interesting fishermen.
[00:09:10] Nick Lyons: He tells a wonderful story about coming upon a fisherman several hundred yards upstream who was putting a fish into a creel, and he comes up behind him and says, "How's the fishing?" The man said, "Well, he hadn't done too well," and Ed said, "But you just caught one and put it in your creel," and the man just opened his creel and took out a white hat that he had put in, and he tells some wonderful stories like that in his book. He had an extraordinary experience meeting with all these fishermen: all the different ways of fishing and finally learning so much about the fish, about the insects that they take, about the flies used, and so forth, that curiosity to find out about these things lasted his whole life.
[00:10:05] Brett Barry: And he worked to expand public fishing rights.
[00:10:08] Judy Van Put: Yes, he did. I believe it was in 1973. There was a bond act, an environmental bond act, which released significant funds for the purchase of public fishing. Public fishing rights had not been purchased very often or for very long since way back in the '30s, so this was a big boon to the state and the people of the state of New York, and Ed really launched himself into this. By the time he retired, he had acquired 26 fishermen's parking areas and a number of boat access sites, as well as an unprecedented 54 miles of public fishing forever for the people.
[00:10:56] Brett Barry: It's a nice legacy.
[00:10:57] Judy Van Put: Yeah, one thing that Ed was very happy that occurred. Back in 1972, he was fishing the Delaware and contacted Tony Bonavist, who worked for the DEC at the same time, and was alarmed that the water temperature had reached 80 degrees, and Ed was standing in a pool with 200 large trout that were just pooling up because of the lack of oxygen and the temperature, and this sparked a letter, which traveled to the powers that be, and as a result, Frank Bailey had formed a group called Catskill Waters that met in Roscoe in the Antrim Lodge for a number of years, elected John Hoeko as president, and fought for cold water releases from the reservoirs, and as a result, jumping forward, I believe it was 1976, the law was passed, and Ed was fond of saying, "We fought the largest city hall in the country, the city hall of New York, and won." The law was passed by one vote to establish a cold water release, a regulated cold water release program, and recently, in an article that Tony Bonavist wrote over the past year, he mentioned that Ed should be thanked for his efforts because if it weren't for that memo he sent and his diligent research and temperatures and conditions of the trout, it may not have happened. If you were to ask Ed, "What is your favorite fishing book of all times?" He would always say, "The Notes and Letters of Theodore Gordon." John McDonald had compiled many years ago. It's a wonderful repository of the writings of this man, who sadly never wrote a book but was considered the father of American dry-fly fishing. His writing was filled with gentility. He just had a wonderful way of speaking and writing and wrote from his heart, and Ed loved it, and through the years in his research, he came across two unpublished letters that Gordon had written, and Nick and John were collaborating on a new edition of "The Notes and Letters."
[00:13:27] Nick Lyons: We brought out a new edition.
[00:13:28] Judy Van Put: And John had said to Nick about mentioning this to Ed, and long story short, he was so thrilled that he was able to contribute new material to the book that had always been his favorite book.
[00:13:42] Nick Lyons: And Ed did as much to keep him alive as anyone. He always mentioned him. He always admired him, and there were some Western writers who denigrated him with very nasty comments about him being raised up to levels that he didn't deserve, Gordon—and Ed was steadfast, in all matters connected to Gordon, I think very wisely. This extraordinary knowledge that Gordon had of the rivers and about fishing and the experiences of fishing—he didn't separate that from the joy and the simplicity and the spiritual aspect of it.
[00:14:32] Brett Barry: I think fly-fishing comes off to many people as a very precise and technical sport. You have to read the stream and the weather and the types of insects on the water, and there are thousands of artificial flies to choose from and to try to match what's naturally out there, but Ed has a contrarian view in some ways. He writes in his book, "I never believed it was necessary to directly imitate the various hatches, but I liked tying many of the patterns, and assumed that by carrying multiple flies they might come in handy. From the beginning of my fly-fishing experiences, I saw no evidence that rationalized directly imitating the fly that was on the water. Once I learned of the abundance and variety of the mayfly, caddis, and midge species, I could not justify the concept that it was necessary to match the great variety of aquatic insects that inhabited a trout stream; trout fishing just couldn't be that technical or complicated," and then he goes on to say, "I learned from my diary experiences that there are times when having too many flies to choose from made fly-fishing more complicated than it is. Carrying fewer flies can make one a better flyfisher because having less to choose from concentrates your efforts more on presentation, fly-casting accuracy, and tying or buying the best flies possible." So having the tools is one thing, right? But there's a lot that goes behind that in terms of how you're casting and how you're presenting this artificial fly so the fish will take it.
[00:16:04] Nick Lyons: It's a philosophy he very much lived by. He didn't set out to prove something. He just wanted to share what he had learned, and it is one of the great lessons that I think all the manufacturers of fly-fishing equipment were very sorry to hear because they want to sell you all the new flies, all the new equipment, and all the new rods. Ed used the same rod for about 40 years, a glass rod that he had specially made to his specifications of the old glass material. He gave him great joy, and I think the fetish of wanting more and more subtle equipment that you don't need turned fly-fishing, in some respect, away from the things that Ed saw as being so important for successful fly-fishing: presentation, approach, knowledge of the water, and knowledge of where the fly should go and how to follow it downstream.
[00:17:12] Brett Barry: He says, "The goal is to make the artificial fly have the appearance of a natural fly and float as a natural fly would, on the surface film, not in the surface film; and to make the presentation with such confidence that you expect that the trout is going to take the fly and are surprised if it doesn't. That's how I fish."
[00:17:31] Judy Van Put: Yes, yes, Ed was a real student of fly-fishing, beginning from when he was very young, and observing things, he had great powers of observation. He had great eyesight, and when he was working in the creel census, you can imagine that in a 12-hour day, especially early in the season or on rainy days, there aren't very many fishermen out there to interview, so he would spend those hours studying the stream and studying the fish, taking a little pebble or a leaf or a pine needle and tossing it in front of a rising fish or tossing it out there and just watching to see if a fish came up and took it. He found that if you cast your fly in such a way, in as delicate a manner as possible, looking as natural as possible when it lands on the water, and it's on a collision course with when the trout is going to rise and take it, you almost always are successful in achieving that fish taking that fly. His ideas about fishing were relatively simple. He, again, by continuous study and observation, learned that although it's fun to have lots of equipment and it's wonderful to tie all sorts of different flies and look at them—they're beautiful, but they're really not necessary. You can actually take the fly that you have and make it work for you and learn how to cast it and present it properly so that it takes the fish. The other thing, not that he didn't believe in matching a hatch, is he would go with a general size and shape, be it an upright-wing mayfly or a backwing caddis or stonefly or a tiny midge. Color was important, whether it was light, medium, or dark, but he found that if you presented the fly accurately and delicately, that was the most important.
[00:19:46] Brett Barry: Again and again, he comes back to the Adams Dry Fly. I've recorded lots of fishing talks, and they always come back to the Adams Fly. What is the Adams Fly?
[00:19:57] Judy Van Put: The Adams Fly is a great all-around fly that doesn't imitate anything in nature, but it is similar to many flies. You can fish it in a Hendrickson hatch—you can fish it during Light Cahills—you can fish it any number of times; Isonychia hatches. It has a blended hackle of gray and dark brown grizzly color. It has a light bluish muskrat-dun body, and it was one of the flies that Lee Wulff also said he felt was the buggiest of them all in "Lee Wulff on Flies." He loved the fly. I think when it was originally tied, the wings were not upright [but Ed began to use the upright version wing], and he tied that fly in many different sizes, and when all else failed, he'd go to the Adams, and we found that it usually produced fish.
[00:20:59] Nick Lyons: He mentions that in his journals he used the Adams. About 75% of the trout he caught on a dry fly over a long period of time were caught on the Adams. It's that number, and it does force you to practice the other aspects of fly-fishing that he thought were so important. He thought the fly was the most important, but he did not think the particular fly was necessarily what finally was decisive. He spends a lot of time describing the exactness with which he ties the Adams. It was not just an Adams. It was his Adams that caught those fish in large numbers.
[00:21:47] Judy Van Put: And he would tell you he wasn't a great fly tyer, but he paid attention to proportion and having the best materials he could. We raised chickens for many years, many of which were descended from Harry Darbee's birds and...
[00:22:03] Brett Barry: Harry Darbee is?
[00:22:05] Judy Van Put: One of the original Catskill fly tyers of the Catskill School of Fly Tying. Harry and Elsie Darbee and Walt and Winnie Dette, who had started working together maybe in the 1920s, I want to say, or '30s, and developed this method of tying sparse flies, sparsely tied flies. Their dun hackle was outstanding. Ed found that the feathers from bantam roosters, which are smaller roosters, had the very best hackle for the Adams and loved that fly. How he got into fishing with so few flies was once he started keeping a diary, he found it annoying every time he would change the fly and he'd have to write down, "I caught two fish on this fly and one fish on that fly," so he just decided to keep the same fly on and count how many fish he caught rather than which fly each fish was caught on.
[00:23:02] Brett Barry: There's a wet fly that was his go-to: the Royal Coachman. For someone who doesn't fly-fish, can you explain a wet fly and, more specifically, the Royal Coachman? What is it?
[00:23:13] Judy Van Put: Yes, it's a beautiful fly. It's an old fly. A wet fly is fished below the surface. A dry fly is fished on top of the surface, so it uses hackle that is very stiff and sparse, and the hackle is tied so that it keeps the fly afloat. A wet fly has a hackle that is drawn back, and its wing is usually a down wing. It does not ride above the surface. The hackle is the feather or feathers that are used to imitate the legs of the insect, so on a dry fly, they actually circle around the hook, sticking up on the top as well as on the bottom, and on the bottom, they keep the fly afloat. With a wet fly or a nymph, which is the nymphal stage of the fly, which lives in the subsurface. The legs are soft and moving, so when you cast a wet fly in, it's easy to begin fly-fishing with wet flies, and you'll have great success. That's how we taught our children to fish [it was first with wet flies] because you toss it in, allow it to swing in the current, and then sort of twitch it upstream a bit, which causes the hackle to move, similar to the legs on a natural swimming stage of the fly itself. The Royal Coachman has a white wing, and its body is green and red, and it has a dark brown hackle. It's very beautiful.
[00:24:47] Brett Barry: Judy, you didn't just pick this up from watching Ed fish. You fish, too.
[00:24:50] Judy Van Put: Yes.
[00:24:51] Brett Barry: Do you still?
[00:24:52] Judy Van Put: Yes, and I just started tying flies again because I need flies to fish with.
[00:25:00] Brett Barry: Where did his skill and intuition come from? Was it just a lifelong connection to the craft of fly-fishing, or was there something else?
[00:25:10] Judy Van Put: I think it was innate. Ed learned all of this on his own and found that he had this keen ability to study things closely: observation and study and research. He loved fly-fishing once he got into it. He loved the history of it, the people, the flies, the patterns, and all of that and did diligent research. Quite by happenstance, he was employed by the DEC and learned that some years back, many years back, there was a program of salmon in the Delaware, stocking salmon in the Delaware, and he wanted to see if that had really happened, and he found in The Hancock Herald that there was an office in Hancock, New York, with bound editions of the old newspaper from the early 1900s, and then was fascinated to learn that most fishing editors, not only of The Hancock Herald but most of the fishing newspapers and magazines in and around the Catskills, most editors, I'm sorry, not fishing editors, most editors fished, so there would be big news of the week if someone caught a large trout or a large number of trout, and began just for his own pleasure, reading and borrowing copies of newspapers. He happened to meet Alf Evers in Kingston Library one day, and they were discussing research, and Alf told Ed about interlibrary loan, and we became instant patrons of that service, and he started thinking he could formulate a book on the history of "Trout Fishing in the Catskills" with the idea in mind of the Catskill Fly Fishing Center, which was newly being formed some 35 years ago. From that, we traveled to libraries and newspaper offices and universities north and south all throughout the Catskills and many, many different places to continue research, and that became the basis for his books. His file on "The Beaverkill" grew so much that he did his first book, which Nick published back in 1996, and then in 2007, I believe, "Trout Fishing in the Catskills," and he's written more since then, but it was that innate love and desire to research the history that drove him.
[00:27:59] Brett Barry: So, Nick, as someone who's published other books of Ed's, what makes this one stand out?
[00:28:06] Nick Lyons: It's very personal, and it's not personal in the way that someone who's beating his own drum, and I find the fishing field just filled with books where the ego has just taken over. It's not that Ed does not have an ego or have an ego. It's that he is honest about himself and about what he caught. I think that's what struck me right away. I had met Ed almost the first summer I spent in Woodstock with my family when a man named Frank Mele had said, "You don't know anything about the Catskills. I want you to spend the day with Tony Bonavist and Ed Van Put," and in fact, they took me out and rode me around the Ashokan, and I was so dumb that I was wondering how you could fly-fish on the Ashokan in 40 feet of water, and then we drove up the Esopus. They showed me a spot where someone had just taken an 18-pound brown trout or some huge monster of a fish, and I said, "Oh, I'm going to want to fish that," and they said, "Well, the fish is gone. He's no longer there," but it was a lovely day, very memorable. Both of them were so knowledgeable, and I think that periodically over a long period of time, I kept learning to respect Ed more and more, and when he did the Beaverkill, it came to me blind. I had not known he was working on it. I could tell that the voice, the steadiness, the care, and the quality of the research, which I'd learned from the academic world, were just of the highest level, and I trusted the book immediately and knew that it was something fresh and real.
[00:30:09] Brett Barry: Nick, you're a lifelong fisherman. We've talked about that in other interviews [and a publisher of books about fishing], so reading a book like this must come with great satisfaction and the recognition of a shared experience.
[00:30:24] Nick Lyons: It was a delight. It was a surprise that—to me—Ed had written it and that he was finally going to do this thing, and Obie was an extraordinary help throughout the whole process, but it was exactly what I was—what I wanted. I wanted to know about his life, how he came to be a legend in the Catskills, and particularly in the area surrounding the Beaverkill and Delaware watersheds. It was a particular pleasure because Ed is a particularly special human being: careful, quiet, always knowledgeable, and never saying anything that I doubted, and I had fished with him, I don't know, six, seven, or eight times over the years, and he was a beautiful fly fisherman. One of the things that I particularly noticed was that most people I have been on the stream with cast too fast and put the line in the air too often, which, of course, is where so many of the predators of trout come from the air, from the birds. He had a soft cast that was low to the water that was smooth, often at considerable length with just a minimal number of false casts. Lee Wulff called him a predator, and, of course, that's part of what you must be to be a good fly fisherman, not like a weekender who comes in and slashes the water because it's just been stocked or because someone has told them that this is where the fish are rising or the like.
[00:32:20] Brett Barry: He acknowledges the good fortune of living in a fishing town, Livingston Manor, where he writes that a call-in to a local fly shop can provide an angler with all the info needed for a successful day on the Willowemoc Creek. Does that kind of interaction still exist?
[00:32:37] Judy Van Put: Oh, yes.
[00:32:37] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:32:38] Judy Van Put: Yes, I mean, you know, when Hendricksons are hatching, people may not necessarily fish, but they know the Hendricksons are hatching. You can talk to someone in Peck's Market or the barbershop or the Jeff Bank or the post office, you know, and people are talking about the fishing. You'll see people wandering around Livingston Manor, crossing the road wearing waders. There are a couple of fishing access sites there [and stores], and it's a wonderful town, and Roscoe is just six miles downstream, similar, although in Livingston Manor, the river runs right through the town. Two bridges, three bridges over the river in Livingston Manor.
[00:33:37] Brett Barry: I've always wondered if a fish is harder to fool after the first catch, and there's a whole section in this book about catching the same fish twice or more than twice. Ed was so tuned in, he could identify an individual fish that, in some cases, he'd catch multiple times, and those, I guess, mostly were in the sections known as no-kill zones.
[00:33:59] Judy Van Put: In the no-kill catch and release areas, they were designated because there is significantly less occurrence of spawning that may occur because of their location and tributary streams that are not nearby, so these fish are used to being fished over—Ed has written in the book of a number of instances where a fish had an identifying characteristic, such as a nasty hook scar or missing a fin or part of a fin. He talks about catching a trout that had a fly in its mouth that he couldn't remove with an upturned eye and, 20 minutes later, catching the same trout in the same location with the same hook with the upturned eye on it. He was once asked, "How many fish can you catch on the same fly?" And he recorded a trip, I think, to the Delaware, where he was fishing with an Adams and caught and released 20 or 21 fish, and the very last couple of fish were caught, and the fly had only the wings remaining, so when they're rising, they're rising.
[00:35:16] Brett Barry: It's the opposite for me. 24 flies, one fish. In 1984, your husband had a unique opportunity to guide a U.S. president. Can you recount that experience?
[00:35:29] Judy Van Put: That was one of the highlights of his life. He received a call at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and had written a letter inviting President Carter to come to the Catskills to fish as a fundraising event to raise funds for a bridge and a newly formed one—they wanted to form a fly fishing center building—and he agreed to come with his wife, who also fished, so in September of 1984, Ed had spent two weeks. He would come home from work and disappear in the car, just scouting the fishing here and there. "Where can I take this person so that the fishing would be good?" The evening that the president arrived, we were invited to the dinner held up at the Beaverkill Valley Inn, where he was staying, and he was told that the president wants to fish before dinner, so he suggested a place to go on the upper river, and we got there, and he came in his waders, took his waders off, and immediately started shaking hands. He was a real fisherman.
[00:36:32] Brett Barry: Tied his own flies.
[00:36:33] Judy Van Put: Tied his own flies. He gave Ed a couple of his flies, in fact, and his wife too, Rosalynn, was able to catch fish in both the Beaverkill and on the Delaware. When they went to the Delaware, the river was high, very high, and although there were Secret Service agents all over, Ed felt it was his responsibility to ensure the president's safety, and Mr. Carter was a fearless wader, but at one point, they were almost up to the top of their waders, and Ed showed him a method employed by interlocking arms as they crossed the river and back, and after that, he remarked to the president that now there are two presidents who have crossed the Delaware: George Washington in his boat and Jimmy Carter in his waders, and he really liked that.
[00:37:33] Nick Lyons: A wonderful story, and President Carter, for many years, contacted Ed and seems to have enjoyed his company. They were friends.
[00:37:47] Judy Van Put: Yes.
[00:37:47] Nick Lyons: They became friends and one of Ed's rare qualities, and sure, he had his tough moments, but I know him as someone who made friends very easily.
[00:38:01] Judy Van Put: Yes, he was. He was a wonderful person, and in fact, they would talk at the end of each day. Ed spent each day with them. We had a couple of dinners together. He said that he and his wife would talk about Ed every night before they left, and leaving Ed was one of the most difficult things about that trip he was leaving. They corresponded through the years. In fact, just a couple of years before they both passed, interestingly, they both passed at around the same time within a few weeks of each other. The president had reached the age of 100, and Ed was 88. Ed's mother, who was still alive, had sent a letter to President Carter with pictures taken from that day many years ago when he and his wife came to the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and she and I and my mother walked down to the fly fishing center with our children. Tyler was just four months of age in a baby carriage, and Lee was about two, and we had pictures of them holding the boys, and she sent them the pictures, and he autographed and sent them back to her, so that was pretty special.
[00:39:20] Brett Barry: We're talking about flies and hand-tying flies, and Ed had an original, at least one original, the Able Mabel.
[00:39:27] Judy Van Put: Yes, Ed was commissioned by the Woman Fly Fishers' Club. He was asked to create a fly in honor of Mabel Ingalls, who was an original member, and created that fly in a Catskill style, adding a bit of mink to the body for the panache of someone such as the likes of Able Mabel Ingalls, and then, again, in honor of Joan Wulff, he created the Joan Wulff Special, again, a Catskill-style fly.
[00:39:58] Brett Barry: Do you ever fish with the Able Mabel or the Wulff Special?
[00:40:02] Judy Van Put: Oh, yes.
[00:40:02] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:40:02] Judy Van Put: Yes, they're great flies. In fact, just in May this year, we wanted to honor Joan, who was in her 100th year. She'll turn 100 on October 18th. Members of our club had an outing during which we had a one-fly contest, and the one fly we were able to fish with was the Joan Wulff Special, and we did a little Zoom session with Joan from our clubhouse in which we toasted her and the Joan Wulff Special.
[00:40:29] Brett Barry: I'm detecting a thread of good longevity with fly fishers.
[00:40:35] Judy Van Put: Yes.
[00:40:37] Nick Lyons: I have some funny stories about—mostly about my incompetence that have obviously been when Ed was present. I once fished with him at night, an evening rise of some great dimension, with five or six different kinds of flies, and I was fishing one of his Adams that he'd put on. He was standing right next to me, and I cast right where the fly was, and Ed said, "You'll get him this time," and I didn't get a fish. Finally, it got a little too dark, and we walked off the stream. I discovered that I used to smoke a cigar in those days, and I'd burnt the fly off. I'd been fishing without a fly. Fishing with the great master of the Catskills in the right spot at the right time, I've burned the fly off.
[00:41:34] Brett Barry: "How shall I describe that wild, beautiful stream, with features so like those of all other mountain streams? The solitude was perfect, and I felt that strangeness and insignificance which the civilized man must always feel when opposing himself to such a vast scene of silence and wildness." John Burroughs: "Speckled Trout." Ed ponders in the book fishing the same Catskill streams as John Burroughs in the mid-to-late 19th century when he was fishing these streams, and these streams are still home to native brook trout, so the Catskill Park is largely protected by the New York State Constitution, but the "Forever Wild" designation can't protect against global forces like climate change. Do you think it's possible for fishers 50 years from now or 100 years from now to have and share some of the same experiences that Ed had or that you two had?
[00:42:37] Judy Van Put: Hopefully.
[00:42:37] Nick Lyons: I hope so.
[00:42:38] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:42:39] Judy Van Put: I hope so, yeah.
[00:42:41] Nick Lyons: It's hard. Things are changing so quickly that AI will sneak onto the trout streams, and other things will happen, and there's been tremendous growth of fly fishers, and that's going to put more and more pressure on them and turn a lot of what was the soul of fly-fishing, which is dependent upon the wilderness and the wild. It's going to change it to something different. The tendency is to have self-supporting rivers and to eliminate most of the stocking. This has happened in Montana for some years. It's happening more and more in our time, but that's going to be if that ever changes because of the pressure. It's going to change from stocked fishing, which Ed, as a young man, determined that he never wanted to do.
[00:43:41] Judy Van Put: Yeah, and those boyhood streams, Meeker Hollow and Hardscrabble Brook, they still contain heritage strains of wild brook trout, as do a lot of our Catskill streams [further and further upstreams]. Brook trout require the cleanest, purest, most highly oxygenated, and coldest water. Water, as it is colder, retains more oxygen, which is critical, and they are the most sensitive to environmental disturbances. Hopefully, those protections of the rivers and the beds around them and the banks and the forests will continue. Hopefully, they'll still be protected by clean waters and environmental laws that keep the waters clean and the air clean and safe. All of those things will come into play, so hopefully 50 years from now, our grandchildren and their children will still be able to fish for trout.
[00:44:42] Nick Lyons: I think Ed was one of the few people who seemed to maintain his own connection to fly-fishing at a time when it became more and more a game of going to some exotic part of the world and catching particularly large fish in Patagonia or even Montana or other places, and Ed found fishing a little feeder creek in the Catskills filled with wild brook trout to be a joyous and soulful kind of fishing, and I hope that remains everything that overpromotes automatically kills, and I think Ed stood against that, and he showed how much is lost when that happens.
[00:45:41] Brett Barry: I'm sure there are many things, Judy, throughout your day that connect you back to Ed, but fishing must still be a special experience in that way.
[00:45:49] Judy Van Put: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, I think of Ed all the time. I carry him with me in my heart. His picture is all throughout our house. All of his things are still there. He taught me how to fly-fish. I fished with my dad from the time I was probably two or three years old and learned the ins and outs of where the fish were, so I sort of could read a stream already, but Ed taught me how to fly-fish, and I found it to be such a beautiful, peaceful, and relaxing sport, and you just sort of seek that solitude. That was one thing that he loved about fishing was the solitude, and he found that as more and more anglers came to the stream, he would sort of shy away from the overpopulated areas and seek the wilder places to fish.
[00:46:42] Brett Barry: And this book is another nice connection, Nick.
[00:46:44] Nick Lyons: Yes, it's—I had the great joy in my little career as a book publisher in this field to publish a number of books that sold very well and became quite famous in their ways, books that sold several hundred thousand copies, but I loved nothing more than publishing Ed's three books, "The Beaverkill," "Trout Fishing in the Catskills," and now, "A Fly Fisher's Revelations" because they had, to me, the spirit and the love of fly-fishing for trout in a beautiful part of the world that is so often marginalized by people who fish the famous places and use phrases like, "Have you ripped more jaws today?" Ugly little statements about the nature of fly-fishing, which I worry about. I worry that bad money drives out the good, and in economics, it's the same thing. In fly-fishing, there are an awful lot of people whose relationships to it are very different. Ed is like a beacon of the best kind of fly fisherman, one of the most knowledgeable. The best researcher—I don't think there's anyone who did better research. The books that I've published of a historical nature don't hold a candle to the ones that Ed did. They were done with care, discernment, and a great deal of absolute belief in finding the fact of it and not the gossip of it. It's one of the great experiences I've had as a publisher and also as a lifelong fisherman to have known Ed—fished with him not enough times, but enough to remember—and to have known his wonderful wife, Obie, who is just the custodian of so much about him.
[00:49:04] Judy Van Put: Well, it's wonderful to be able to share this with Nick and with you, and thank you for allowing me the opportunity to do so.
[00:49:13] Brett Barry: Thank you both.
[00:49:14] Nick Lyons: Good.
[00:49:15] Judy Van Put: You're welcome.
[00:49:15] Nick Lyons: Thanks.
[00:49:29] Brett Barry: "Kaatscast" is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you stream your podcasts, and if you're a fan of the show, give it a rating or tell a friend. You can connect with us at kaatscast.com, where you'll find a full archive of shows fully transcribed and searchable. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.