Picture yourself floating lazily down a river in the heart of the Montana Rockies on a warm August afternoon. To while away the time, you and your buddies fly fish off the side of the raft. If it sounds relaxing, then you havent ever been fly fishing.

Fly fishing is living proof of the old adage, "It's only fun and games after someone loses an eye."

The basic equipment for fly fishing is a pole, some fishing line, hundreds of sharp, pointy hooks disguised to look llike gnats and microbes, and a fencing mask. At least, I wish I'd have had a fencing mask, and perhaps Stage III bio/chem warfare protective clothing.

You know the scene in Indiana Jones where Indy uses his whip to blah blah blah? Well, he didn't have a little nasty hook on the end of his whip, because that really would have scared the bad guys.

Fly fishing works something like this: you let out enough line so that if you were to whirl it in a circle around your head, you would coccoon yourself. Next, you whirl it in a circle above your head. Then, you make a snap with the tip of the pole, and the fly, like a minature F-14, immeidate stops trying to attach itself to nearby trees, rocks, the raft, etc., and rushes directly towards your eyeball on a kamikase blitzkreig of doom. If, by some miracle, it misses imbedding itself in your brain like an ancient Egyptian mummification hook, it will land in the water some distance away from the boat and bob quietly as if to say, "Who, me? I'm just an innocent fly, not a mechanized mosquito bent on letting your blood. tee hee."

I wasn't alone in the boat. Oh no, that would give me plenty of space to dodge and nothing else to worry about. Also floating with me were Hendrik, another potential target, and our brave, foolish guide. At first, Hendrik and I were concerned that we wouldn't remember his name, which would be a problem when the authorities arrived, so we decided to split it up and each remember half.

Boob was from Wyoming and had nerves to shame a driving instructor.

"Lift your arm higher and try not to lacerate me next time," was a common piece of advice.

One of his more endearing traits was his habit of yelling whenever a fish came within, oh, say, 150 yards of one of our hooks. The art of fly fishing is in keeping a very close watch on your fly. This includes not looking where the raft is going, not watching where your partner's fly is whizzing, and not blinking. If you can refrain from all of these, you'll make a great fly fisherman.

Boob, I think, would get secret pleasure out of telling me whenever I looked away that I'd missed a huge fish. He also kept track of how many I'd missed.

"Seven," he call out as I looked up to see why the raft had run aground.

"Sixteen," he chanted when I dropped my camera into the river and looked down to watch it sink.

"Thirty-four," as I sneezed.

Sometimes, when he was feeling especially bold, he'd tell me a fish had gone for my hook even while I was watching it.

"Didja see that one hit your lure? Mister, you must be as slow as molasses in jam."

No, not Jan(uary), jam. It's a regional delicacy, Boob explained.

Boob had a few other Gump-isms he didn't mind sharing.

"Somedays are diamonds, others are dirt."

"You don't catch fish unless your fly's in the water."

"Sixty-seven."

However, fly fishing does teach a person one thing: humility. After standing on the river's edge at what Boob declared a particularly good fishing hole, and catching nothing but my own clothing, Boob walked up to me.

"Lemme see if there's sumthin' a-wrong with yer pole," he said.

I handed it to him.

He snapped the rod like a magic wand and the line, which previously had acted like a piece of college cafeteria spaghetti, extended across the water to a shady pool about two inches downstream from a large rock and 40 feet from us. The fly danced like a marionette as Boob twitched the pole with scalpel precision.

All of ten seconds later, a 12-inch rainbow trout grabbed the fly and darted up stream.

"Nope," said Boob, handing me the rod with the reel still screaming as the trout dashed for freedom. "Nothin' wrong there."

Well, at least I found out that my equipment wasn't defective.