Let’s talk about a bug guy named Louis Rhead.
Louis started out as an artist in Staffordshire, England, where his family had worked in the pottery industry for generations.
He had a huge talent.
When Louis was thirteen, his parents sent him to Paris for formal art training.
And when he was twenty-four, Louis came to America to work as an art director in a New York publishing house.
For the next dozen years, he produced posters in the art nouveau style then the rage for store windows and magazines.
His best works were quite good, rivaling French poster artist Toulouse-Lautrec’s.
Some now hang in museums and collectors pay top dollar for them.
Later, when the commercial interest in posters faded, Louis turned to children’s book illustration.
And these works were very good, too.
But Louis’s true love was trout fishing.
And in the second half of his life, he wrote and illustrated several books on the subject.
One of them, entitled American Trout-Stream Insects (1916), was considered significant because it was the first comprehensive study of American stream insects.
It was a book about bugs.
Flies, actually.
And Louis filled his book with detailed illustrations of them.
He used this knowledge to develop and market a line of artificial flies which were used by anglers all across the country.
“Louis Rhead was one of the most creative, fresh-thinking, and stimulating of American fly-fishing writers, a man of extraordinary gifts.” — Paul Schullery, American Fly Fishing—A History (1987)
But Louis’s story ends badly.
He moved to a nice piece of land on Long Island and installed trout ponds on the property.
But a thirty-pound snapping turtle discovered the ponds and took to gorging himself on the trout.
Aghast and determined, Louis baited a fishhook and went after the turtle.
And he snagged him, but the turtle put up a half-hour struggle.
Exhausted from the ordeal, poor Louis suffered a heart attack and never recovered.
He died two weeks later.
From his New York Times obituary: “He fished almost literally from his back door to the time of his death.”
This may strike you as an insignificant story.
But, to me, it illustrates in a practical way the actual meaning of the overused term ‘freedom.’
It means there’s room for everybody, even those who pursue odd or obscure interests.
And there’s room for them to try to make a go of it.
Even a bug guy.
That’s freedom.
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I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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