I once worked at a bakery and noticed how often the bakers would throw out perfectly good treats or send them home in a box with me at the end of my shift. I certainly didn’t complain, but it always confused me. These were items loyal customers would undoubtedly pay good money for. One day, I asked the owner and head baker why she kept tossing them.

“They aren’t right,” she would admit, dumbfounded at her own stubbornness. After further prying, she said, somewhat embarrassed, it was her loyalty to “the code.” I accepted her answer and later came to understand that most humans are not inherently born with a code. Codes are learned and developed over the span of a lifetime—through heartbreak, loss, panic, joy, connection and moments of deep shame and embarrassment. “The code” is a list of rules that cannot be broken, no matter how extraneous the circumstance.

Those bakers were artists and, like any good artisan, maker or craftsperson, their list of failures often superseded their list of accolades and accomplishments. When I first moved to the Florida Keys, I worked in a fly shop that was opening in Marathon and had the great pleasure of working with one such artisan: Jillian Tisdale. What fascinated me about Jillian immediately was her fascination with tying, testing and talking about knots, specifically for big tarpon…

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