Introduction: Shop Talk One way or another, we're all anglers.On a Saturday afternoon before lighting out for the territories, I stopped at Stroud Tackle to see my friends Bill and Eileen Stroud and John Bowman. As usual, I needed the atmosphere more than the gear.My plan for the next couple of years was to take a new look at my country -- through the unique prism of fishing.Stopping at the tackle store seemed like a good place to start.Now in its twenty-eighth year, Stroud Tackle is located in a bland stucco building on San Diego's Morena Boulevard. The shop is bracketed by cut-rate furniture outlets, a massage-equipment-and-lotions store, and a building contractor's office. All of this is bathed in freeway noise and jet fumes from nearby Lindbergh Field, and Southern California sun.

Walk in from the street, out of that harsh light and sun, let the door swing closed behind you, hear the little bell ring, and you enter another world.The shop is calming, a refuge from the chaos outside. Flecks of dust glow in thin rays of bright light that splay through the blinds. Your eyes take a moment to adjust. One wall is dedicated to freshwater fish. Across it you see mounted golden trout, rainbow, cutthroats, brown, lake trout, and a replicated 27.4-pound steelhead, sleek and shiny -- the state record steelhead caught on a fly, from the Smith River in Northern California.Everything's a little dusty, as if the fish have been freeze-dried in the arc of their jump, and then shellacked.

Bill and Eileen look a little bit like that, too.The shop's back wall is given over to saltwater fish: halibut, bat ray, marlin, opah, amberjack, sheephead, yellowfin tuna, dolphin, roosterfish, jack mackerel, white sea bass, wahoo, dorado, yellowtail, bonefish, sharks (bonita, tiger, dusky, blue). Until recently, a baby hammerhead shark sat on the counter on a pedestal, but Eileen took him home. She was afraid someone would steal him.These days, many fishermen consider it more reasonable and correct to photograph their catch, release it, and send the photo off for replication in three-dimensional plastic and paint. But these fish, sixty of them, once moved through green and blue, through kelp and lily pad, through life.I look around. The merestuffof the store is comforting, all this medicating paraphernalia: hand-tied flies (these days, 90 percent of them tied in Sri Lanka or Colombia or Kenya or some other developing country); Orvis, 3-M, Lamson, and Ross single-action, click and pawl and disk drag reels of Orvis; and Sage, Thomas & Thomas, Scott, Loomis rods, all graphite.

Bamboo rods are back in vogue, not because they catch more fish, but because of how they make the angler feel. Special. Elite. Part of a tradition. Bill and Eileen do not carry bamboo rods, because, as Eileen explains, "they're so expensive, one thousand to twenty-five hundred dollars, and the last one I had got stolen here, right out of the store."Such a theft makes no sense. "Think how you'd feel fishing with a stolen bamboo rod. Kind of defeats the purpose.

" Or, she says, maybe the thief just sold it. "The latest thing is guys come in here with Scotch tape wrapped around their hands, sticky side out. They run their hands through the fly box, and the flies stick to the tape underneath their hand.""Next time I see that happen," says Bill, peering over his glasses, "I'm going up to that guy, close his fingers into a fist, andshake his hand real hard.""I tell you," Eileen says, "fishing is changing."The room, only 850 square feet, is packed like, well, a sardine can. Eileen and Bill, both in their seventies, stand behind the counter. Eileen learned to fly-fish as a child, from her father.

She does not talk readily of this, but I hope some day to hear her stories. I do know that she is reputed to be a better angler than Bill, and better still than most of the fishers who come into this shop.Bill, tall,.