By a master’s hands in the Colorado mountains, the bamboo fly rod lives on | Subscriber Content

LYONS • It’s not often Mike Clark shows guests to the back of his shop. It is, after all, his space. His domain. A little, wooden world of fine, meticulous work.

One might say magic happens here, if they are so romantically inclined to the bamboo fly rod. Clark is not all that inclined, a man of few words between drags from his Marlboro Red.

More inclined was Norman Maclean, who wrote: “Grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.” Clark does not like being called an artist. He is not an artist making something to be displayed. He is rather a craftsman making something to be used, a tool — and ideally by someone who is more serious about fishing than they are about the Maclean-inspired movie, “A River Runs Through It.”

Around a craftsman, it tends to be messy. “Sorry,” the bearded, ponytailed 75-year-old says to his guests, slowly bending over. “I’ll get those cat treats out of the way.”

Patch and Smudge live with Clark here in the business that doubles as his home. South Creek Ltd. is a plainly named business for a plain man. Built over four decades, Clark’s reputation is anything but.

Just ask John Gierach, the author and fly-fishing legend who happens to live nearby in these river-cut mountains of northern Colorado.

“I’ve had people come out and visit me and say, ‘Can we go see Mike?’ Like they’re asking if I can get them an audience with Mahatma Ghandi or something,” Gierach says. “He’s known as one of the old masters.”

An old master of a rare, centuries-old craft.

Long before today’s graphite and fiberglass rods, there was bamboo. The mighty grass rises 12 feet high in a corner of Clark’s shop, shipped from China. Clark spends his days transforming it, not so unlike 19th-century master Hiram Leonard.

Culms are split and tapered into smaller strips, sanded and planed and glued together to a point measuring so many thousandths of an inch. It’s a precise, slow process also of varnishing, silk-wrapping, heating, cooling and waiting. It’s a process Clark refuses to change, just like his hand tools from 1979. That’s when he built his first bamboo fly rod.

The product is a dream for the purist of the sport’s pure — something of an Excalibur starting around $3,000.

And few, Gierach says, are producing like Clark.

“I know some rod makers, they’re hobbyists who make a couple of rods a year and sell them,” Gierach says. “But Mike, you know, he lives above his shop, he turns on the lights, walks down the staircase, pets the cats, gets a cup of coffee and goes to work.”

Still, due to his refusal of machines and extra manpower, his supply is limited. Clark says he’s making around 25 rods a year. “I can’t stand at that bench like I used to,” he says.

His wait list hovers around three years. “At one time, the backlog was almost six years,” he says. “That’s when I said, ‘That’s enough.’”

That’s when he enlisted his sole employee of today, Kathy Jensen. She was an unlikely choice, a transplant from the California tech world. They met at the local coffee shop.

“I told him, ‘I’ve never picked up any rod, let alone a fly rod. I don’t know anything,’” she says. “He said, ‘Perfect. When can you start?’”

Now she specializes in the rod’s aesthetics — the finishing flourishes of metals, woods and colorful wraps. Nothing too colorful, Jensen warns customers, at Clark’s behest. Earth tones, she implores.

“We like to make traditional kind of rods,” Jensen says. “Not carnival rods.”

She likes that creative part of the job more than the paperwork and customer service. But someone has to tend to that part.

“That damn tin block over there,” Clark says, motioning to the computer, “I hate it.”

He’d rather do away with his cellphone, too. “Only three people have the number, and that’s the way it’ll stay,” he says.

Clark is no romantic, and yet he’s best described by poetry framed on the wall. It’s a testament by the late writer Robert Traver.

“I fish because I love to; because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly,” Traver professed. He loved fishing “because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion.”

Before making bamboo fly rods, Clark hated what he did. He hated the job that had him plowing snow and towing cars around Boulder County, that had his Motorola buzzing in the middle of the night for emergencies.

And before that, out of high school in Lakewood, he hated his time in Vietnam. He returned to an ungrateful nation in 1969.

“I hid for about nine months,” Clark says.

He moved to the mountains. He did a lot of fishing. He did what he did in his childhood, always looking forward to the weekends when his dad loaded the camper and in the crisp, early mornings, the family embarked to some far-off lake.

His dad fished with bamboo. Clark thought about that in hard times, thought about casting it in the yard as a kid. It was, he later decided, the simplest representation of the simplicity he sought.

So he would put more of that into the world — one rod at a time, hand-made after hand-made.

And so he continues today, unrelenting, uncompromising.

“I think it’s perfectionism,” Gierach says. “You want to do it just as well as it can be done, or as well as you can do it. And you never quite decide, OK, I’ve got it nailed down.”

But Clark is learning to draw boundaries. Someone recently called about coming in for business. It’d be Wednesday or Thursday, the caller said.

“Make it Tuesday or Thursday,” Clark countered. “Wednesday, I’m going fishing.”