‘I Just Needed to Fish and Find My Soul’

Our friendship began in the mid-1950s. Day after day as a teenager consumed by fly fishing, I passed an older angler on Deep Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. At some point polite “Howdy” or “Any luck?” gave way to conversation. Gradually we became friends although college, graduate school, and marriage soon ended my halcyon days of youth. For two decades the link forged by fly fishing was lost.

Then, in the early 1980s, a classified ad appeared in a local weekly, the Smoky Mountain Times. It offered two vintage bamboo fly rods for sale—a one-piece Hardy and a three-piece F. E. Thomas. By that point I was regularly writing on the subject for magazines and, curious, I called the number listed in the ad. A woman with a distinctive accent straight from the heart of the Smokies answered. When I identified myself she said: “Oh, you’re that Casada boy who was so crazy about fishing. You need to talk to Frank.”

Thus was my acquaintance with a remarkable man and skilled taker of trout re-established. The telephone conversation morphed into a renewed, closer friendship. From that point until his death Frank opened up before me an angling world constantly filled with new wonders. One was his motivation for fishing.

Although he said little about it, Young saw active duty in World War II as a teenager, and then again in the Korean War. His military service, filled with violent combat, clearly troubled him. Once, on a camping trip (a campfire back of beyond is a fine place for confidences), I garnered sufficient courage to probe a bit. Frank began to open up. “In two wars I saw too many die, and performed too many dreadful duties. Afterward, I just needed to fish and find my soul.” 

From when our paths first crossed until heart troubles slowed him, that is precisely what Young did. Over four decades he likely spent more time on Smokies’ streams than anyone alive, fishing an average of between 200 and 250 days annually. 

On weekdays after work he headed to nearby Deep Creek or the Nantahala River, while weekends and vacations found Frank in the backcountry. A true minimalist, he carried nothing but a sheet of plastic for rain protection, sleeping bag, basic cooking kit, grub, and fishing gear. Through skill, patience, perseverance and remarkable powers of observation, he became an angler for the ages.

One summer his employer, Carolina Wood Turning Company, sponsored a fishing contest with multiple categories of competition. Over the contest’s two months Frank caught 47 wild trout measuring at least 20 inches in length. On another occasion I watched, mesmerized, as he landed 25 trout from a small Nantahala River pool. When I asked him about the pattern on his fly, he shrugged: “Oh, it’s a little grey one.”

While he may not have been particularly keen on fly pattern minutiae or the insects they imitated, Frank was a master fly tier with an exceptional knack for substituting inexpensive tying materials for pricey catalog offerings. For example, instead of costly material known as “kip tail” involved in patterns such as the Royal Wulff, he tied his with ‘possum belly fur. “If a man can’t find dead ‘possums he’s blind or ain’t traveling mountain roads,” he said with a chuckle. 

Ever a serious student of fly fishing, Young’s understanding of the habits and haunts of large trout was extraordinary. We once made a multi-day trip down Deep Creek, covering the entire stream from its headwaters to the Park boundary. Frank already had heart trouble and had little energy left to fish after we hiked from one campsite to the next. Yet he was up at daylight each morning, knowing the early hour is magical for big browns. In the course of those few days he taught me more about dealing with browns than I had learned in all of my prior years of fishing.

That outing was memorable in other ways. Not only did Frank open up on his wartime experiences, but we also healed a festering wound that had long troubled our friendship. Frank and Maisie, his wife, were passionate advocates of constructing the so-called Road to Nowhere along Fontana’s North Shore. I opposed it. Some of their contentions, such as broken government promises and cemetery lack access, were inarguably valid. On the other hand, completion of the road would have wrought ecological havoc.

I had long studiously avoided the subject, but one evening Frank broached the matter around the campfire. “Frank,” I muttered, “you’ll never change my mind and I’ll never change yours. Why don’t we agree to disagree?” He stared at me for what seemed like an eternity, laughed, shook my hand and said, “You know, I reckon that’d be best.” 

Whenever he comes to mind, I invariably think of the timeless wisdom in a Robert Herrick poem:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying,

And this same flower that smiles to-day,

To-morrow will be dying.

Frank likely never read those lines, but rest assured he understood their message. He spent decades gathering symbolic rosebuds while wading hundreds of miles of stream and netting untold thousands of trout. Along with those personal memories he collected physical ones in a fashion remarkable for its simple genius.

After Frank returned from service, he and Maisie bought a modest home alongside old Highway 288 near the Tuckasegee River below Bryson City. There he launched a long-running project which turned that humble home into a place of wonder.

Whenever Frank went fishing, he carried with him a capacious wicker creel. It functioned quite nicely as a dinner bucket along with its intended purpose of holding fish, but only rarely, such as when he promised some shut-in a meal of trout, did he actually keep the trout. Instead, he invariably returned home with rocks in his creel. Any special moment lightening his day or brightening his way—catching a big trout, spotting beautiful bluets at streamside or trilliums along a path, encountering a rattlesnake—demanded addition of a rock to his creel. 

Frank would look around for an attractive stone and pick it up. Once back home, he cleaned the rocks and placed them in a homemade wooden frame the size of a standard concrete cinder block. Each time the frame was full, he arranged rocks so the most attractive stuck out above the frame’s top then filled it with cement. Once it dried, he had a building block with lovely stones protruding from one side.

In that fashion, rock by rock, block by block, Frank Young built a house of memories. In my mind’s eye I still see him on a winter’s day sitting at ease next to his wood-burning stove surrounded by mementoes of trips past. It is difficult to envision a more satisfying place than that common man’s mansion built of memories.

A master of “make do with what you’ve got,” Frank was as creative with fly fisherman’s gear as with rocks. He fished with some of the sorriest looking rods imaginable, often cobbled together from bits and pieces picked up in flea markets. Somehow though, he turned them into tools of superb functionality. His rods might have been eyesores, but in his hands they performed splendidly.

It wasn’t that he never owned fine equipment. The bamboo rods mentioned above were collector’s items given to him as tokens of appreciation. After we agreed on a price for the pair, I asked why he was selling these treasures. “Jim,” he said, “I’ve got plenty of rods and I need to raise some money for Camp Living Water.”

That comment revealed another side of Frank Young. Deeply religious, he was particularly devoted to the mission of Camp Living Water, a youth outreach program. As my brother, who attended some summer camps at Camp Living Water, recalls: “He was a great fisher of boys as well as trout.” Selling those high-dollar fly rods provided him a means of assisting the youth ministry.

In his final years Frank’s failing heart left him barely able to walk. The last time I saw him—a chance encounter on the lower Nantahala River—was at a lovely pool where there always seemed to be trout on the prod. Frank had shown me the pool many years before. As I entered it, wading carefully and cautiously in the rapid, treacherous current, I noticed a rod leaning against a streamside tree. Then a small dog showed up, angrily barking as if I was the most unwelcome of intruders. Looking around, I finally spotted a man seated on a bed of moss and half hidden beneath a clump of rhododendron. It was Frank Young.

We exchanged hearty greetings and after a bit of catching up he said: “I’m too weak to wade out to where I can cast to those rising trout. But you are strong enough to handle the current. Why don’t you wade out there and cast. I’ll be pleasured just to watch.” I did just that, catching and releasing several fine trout. That moment, in effect performing for a mentor, meant a great deal to me. I had the distinct feeling Frank felt the same way.

We parted with my promising to visit him the next time I was in the high country. Fate decreed otherwise. Soon afterwards I received an e-mail indicating Frank was hospitalized in Asheville. Reading between the message’s lines, it seemed clear that his earthly days were drawing to a close. With that in mind and in fulfillment of a promise I made myself years before, I wrote a two-part tribute to him in the Smoky Mountain Times. The second installment appeared mere days before this staunch patriot, devoted Christian, marvelous fisherman, and exemplar of mountain ways went to his reward.

I learned of his death through a letter from a mutual friend of Frank’s and another member of the greatest generation, Wallace Calhoun. The missive noted our friend’s passing and Calhoun told me he had clipped my articles and shared them with Frank. “Frank read them carefully,” he wrote, “and he paused several times to look up and smile. I just wanted you to know that.” 

Realization that my modest tribute brought him a measure of pleasure meant a great deal. More meaningful though are lessons he offered me and countless others. Frank understood, with rare acuity, aspects of life which really matter. He greeted thousands of sunrises and enjoyed countless sunsets alone on streams in the Smokies. He knew the magic of a mountain May and the pure joy of a glade filled with wildflowers in bloom. He appreciated the grandeur of the world through which he walked and waded as few have ever done. His years transcended anything found in secure bank vaults or on the bottom line of portfolios. The riches Frank Young accumulated were the ultimate in earthly wealth.