I'm not sure about other people's brains work. I've heard some people create pictures and other people think in words. In my head there are images and videos with sounds and feelings. When I read I see the scene created by author. I feel the emotion that I imagine the participant is feeling. There is a constant reinforcement between reality and the mentally created world. We I read about Lee Wulff flying over a large salmon pool and seeing hundreds of fish scatter as the shadow of his plane passed through them. I can see the fish scatter and I can feel the plane's vibration and hear the engine cranking and pulling the cub through the air. When I read the description I can easily imagine those things because I fly a cub and I have flown over water. I have seen pictures of fish from above. I have seen them while looking down from bridges. My experiences augment the mental world and the mental world augments the real world. SDo when I am fishing down through a pool I can picture the salmon lying in the pool moving their fins just enough to hold them steady in the flow.
I became Lee Wulff little by little over the years. At first I was him in waders fishing a salmon pool. It was all in my head. Then I added the small light weight fly rod. Then I learned to fly. Then I bought a cub and put it on floats. I actually created a reality that duplicated his reality. When I flew my plane from my lake in Sutton I was taking off from a seaplane base in Labrador. When I flew over the Mumford river it was full of salmon.
Last year I decided to make a 6' long bamboo fly rod and catch an Atlantic salmon on it. I did it and it was great -- complete with crossing a beaver dam and seeing a moose. I made a video of that experience:
Through his books I learned how to read salmon water, how to present a wet fly properly, and how to understand salmon and the way they act and why. I learned about bravery. Imagine the courage to fly alone into a remote river deep in the woods knowing that if you could not get the engine of your plane running you would be stuck there miles from help. If you have ever been in the wet woods near a salmon river as darkness falls you know what mosquitoes can do to human flesh. Lee taught me how to play a fish fast and hard tp wear him out quickly so he could be released with recuperative reserves of energy.
From Lee Wulff I progressed to the more scientific writings of Edward Hewitt and George LaBranch to gain greater insight into the fish and how to catch them. All of these guys were born long ago but the lessons they learned are ageless and despite more recent material I do not believe anyone since has come close to approaching their knowledge about this amazing animal.
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