Ted Leeson, On The Take, Gray's Sporting Journal, April 1990. (The Fly Fishing Special Edition)

"The edges of any landscape -- horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall -- quicken an observer's expectations.  That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places, is part of the shape of human curiosity."
- ...Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

 ...Resting on the surface, a dry fly becomes a point of contact between the world of the angler and the world of the fish, between the world of seeing and the domain of understanding; it is a visual extension of our imagination, probing what cannot be seen.  In a lyric and exquisite geometry, a drifting fly traces the contours of human inquisitiveness and expectancy.  A dry fly is a test, a series of questions continuously asked:  "Are the trout here?"  "Does the pattern adequately replicate something real?"  "Have I sufficiently concealed my presence from the fish?" -- In short, "Have I successfully observed the rules of the river's world?"

At the instance of the take, the boundary of the surface is shattered.  Hidden things are disclosed. . . The take is a visual analog of an answered question, curiosity satisfied, the visible confirmation that we have, if only very locally and temporarily, understood some small thing about a river:  the dynamics of its liquid atmosphere; the lies of its fish; their mechanisms of predation; the range of their senses; the character of their senses; the character of their instincts...