I read the New Yorker magazine from one cover to the next, and while it contains damned little fly fishing information, it does publish some of the best writing to reach paper.
This issue throws us outdoor sporting types a lucidly written bone; it contains a
lovely John McPhee remembrance of a fly fisherman who also happened to be a New Yorker Editor:
Pat Crow, who died last week, liked to fish from Table Rock, in the middle of the Delaware, three hundred river miles above the ocean. With heavy currents high up his chest, he would make his way there without the aid of a wading staff, climb up, stand in water scarcely covering his ankles, and walk around on the rock's remarkably flat top, where he could be king of the universe, or at least of a river two hundred feet from bank to bank. From his red head to his wading shoes, he was every inch a king, and around the middle as well.
Among many reasons he liked the rock was that it weighed more than he did. It weighed a hundred and fifty tons. Pat was an easy and supple, drape-fold flycaster. At his vise, he was a meticulous, artistic tier, and spent many additional hours just puttering with his inventories of reels, lines, rods, and tapered leaders, even going so far as to release from his own surface a rare outburst of emotion ("I love my gear!").
You can wrap your wondering eyes around the
rest of McPhee's piece here, and while you'll learn nothing about fly fishing, you'll learn plenty about writing a witty eulogy.
When he wasn't busy winning the Pulitzer Prize, McPhee also wrote
The Founding Fish - an entertaining history of the American Shad and his obsession with the fish.
It's well worth a few dollars from your wallet and few hours of your time.
See you reading a magazine, Tom Chandler.