Quantum Leaps
	One time many years ago a man dressed in the heavy rubber waders of the day approached a bridge crossing over a deep pool of a Catskill river. He purposefully, you would be led to believe, climbed up on the railing of the bridge, hesitated not a whit, and jumped in. Now under many circumstances this might be considered the correct or even the noble thing to do, gentleman's code and all. One might even think that perhaps, after five years of trying, the angler had succeeded in hooking Mister BIGFISH and had lost him to a snag after a 90 minute fight; or, conversely, that the angler had caught 45 big fish in the past hour and figured that there was nothing left to live for, that fishing and life would forever after be anticlimactic. Instead, we are to believe, the angler was Lee Wulff, testing the then firmly held assertion that waders would fill with water and drag the hapless angler down to certain death. Note that this happened in the 1920's, when waders were REALLY baggy, and heavy, and no one had yet suggested a wading belt. What Mr. Wulff found was that the waders quickly filled with water, and then became buoyancy neutral, neither sinking nor floating. One wouldn't win any swimming contests, but one could and would float just fine, thank you. About this event one writer was once led to state, "I sleep better at night just knowing there are people (like Lee Wulff) out there, testing and checking out each new development in our sport for the safety of us all." Well, putting the actual Lee Wulff question to the side for a moment, it IS true that flyfishing and all its technological paraphernalia and aesthetic dogmas have evolved, both forward and backward in a continuum of mini-steps and giant leaps. The origin of the first chest waders, for example, remains dim; at least Lee Wulff did not claim it, but they were certainly a quantum leap forward; necessitating the leap downward off the bridge to test the actual safety of the new devices. And just how sane did Mr. Wulff appear at that moment to any casual observer? The point is that behind almost any major development in our sport there was some farsighted genius who for awhile to everyone else looked the total fool. And for each one of those, there were and are probably ten farsighted fools that look to everyone else just like that...and still do. This genius stuff can be downright dangerous. Would we be enshrining Lee Wulff in death now if he had drowned then? For example, clearly the very first fly fisherman to weight his flies with #4 fuse wire needed to have his head examined....... for wrappings of #4 fuse wire. X-rays would do. And how could he predict that he would be creating a whole new class of flyfishing headgear.....protective, that is.
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