For the first time in my flyfishing life, I have purchased something from Cabela's. L.L. Bean had better watch out.

I needed a flyrod rack, something to hold my various rods, in their tubes. The old lean-'em-in-the-corner method of rod storage looked a bit sloppy and disorganized. Time to spruce up my image, make the place look a bit less like a bachelor flyfisherman's pad. I don't know why my office at home should be any neater than my professorial office at the university, but it was just one of those urges for yet another piece of fishing equipment -- or in this case, non-fishing but fishing-related equipment.

Each week of this past semester as I have driven north on the Maine Turnpike on my weekly peregrination from classroom to home I have cast glances at the humongous new Cabela's store taking shape in Scarborough. In the past I have thought of Cabela's as a southern basser's store, a place to buy another jar of DayGlo orange pork rinds or a Hula Popper. Then I received Cabela's flyfishing catalog in the mail.

Not only did the Cabela's catalog outweigh the L.L. Bean Spring Fishing catalog by nearly a hundred pages, they have a wider range of options on rods, reels and other gear. And they had something L.L. Bean did not offer in their catalog or in their store: a flyrod rack. Just what I'd been looking for! I went to the Cabela's website, where the rack was even cheaper than in the catalog, and bought one. It arrived within a few days. I unpacked it, assembled it using only a Phillips-head screwdriver, and it now stands in a corner of my office where all of the rods that used to lean in various corners are now standing in neat ranks in the rod holder.

Needless to say I am not a shill for Cabela's and I have been a faithful customer of Bean's for forty years; I still feel like I'm sneaking off to the No-Tell Motel with a floozy when I buy cut-rate flies online. But as I said, L.L. Bean had better keep its corporate head up. The Scarborough Cabela's opens in May.