In other words, it’s the first ideal Blue Winged Olive day of the year.

Some of us wait for the BWO hatch like children wait for Christmas.

Whether the olives actually come off or not is immaterial; we wait for these “first” days like children wait for Christmas, the tension building, our heads spinning.

Every sport has its variants: if it’s not the BWOs it’s the drakes, or the opening of deer season, the playoffs, the World Cup, etc.

The Silk Lines and Paper Hulls blog (a gem I’ve overlooked) writes powerfully about upland bird hunting, and you can almost feel the tension draining:

Mornings were crisp, followed by hot afternoons. A few birds here and there, each a reward for considerable effort. My best memory: a mistake I made after climbing a little too high above a bowl that held a covey of birds. While I sat resting, gasping for O’s and chewing on jerky, I watched the show unfold on my own personal IMAX theater. From a few hundreds yards beneath my feet I saw a point, a single flush, a fallen bird, a relocation, occasional laughter, then another flush, and finally a long poke from way downtown resulting a collected bird brought to hand. After the smoke cleared, the reports silenced and the birds collected, I watched a few strays escape out the back door, those with enough nerve to hold their ground and flip us a furry footed bird. It’s here. It’s finally here.

“It’s finally here” is the kind of statement an old writing friend would have labeled an archetypal phrase — words so heaped with meaning they’re more symbol than sentence.

“The steelhead are in.”

“The drakes are hatching.”

“The BWOs are coming off.”

“Runoff’s done.”

“The trail’s clear.”

“The [insert your archetypal phrase].”

Some build their lives around these phrases, the phone ringing, words coming down the line, life interrupted.

Lately, I’ve missed a lot more of these than I’ve hit, the product of work, a small daughter, and a lot of daycare hiccups.

For those with families and jobs and adult responsibilities, the words don’t lose their impact; you simply lose the ability to drop the phone and run for the door.

Which is why I sat with Little M today while Chris Raine went exploring, and while he’s typically not above sending the occasional taunt, this time he said he caught a few, didn’t see any BWOs, and may have been there too early.

It’s either the unvarnished truth or a friendly gesture from someone who knows the score up here at TU/Man Cave World Headquarters, but either way, it means there’s still hope.

After all, I may have missed the first day of BWO weather (and because I’m teaching, I’m going to miss it Wednesday and Thursday too), but I haven’t missed the BWO hatch, which can run into January.

With a new 5wt to test (and the BWOs represent one leg of the perfect 5wt test), I expect I’ll get a few trout at some point in the hatch.

After all, the BWOs are almost here.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

John Gierach

As testament to his broad appeal, all 16 of his essay books — dating back to the original Trout Bum in 1986 — are still in print. In a small publishing niche — where 4,000 books is a pretty good run for an essay title — Gierach’s hardcovers and paperbacks sell upwards of 60,000-70,000 books per title.

In other words, not only does Gierach have a lot of fans, he’s one of the tiny handful of fly fishing writers (some suggest he’s the only writer) making a decent living in the fly fishing genre.

He’s also an interesting interview; he’s remarkably unguarded, and as a result, the conversation tends to take on interesting shapes. As an interviewer, you’re willing to take a few chances to see what happens.

A note about this interview; Gierach and I talked at length and he also answered a few questions via email, and while I tried to avoid transcription errors, any odd Gierach phrasings or other errors are the result of my frantic scribbling. I did rearrange the order of the larger subject areas, and at times chopped away some of the less-relevant digressions.

Without further qualification…

Gierach On “No Shortage Of Good Days”

Q: In an interview, you suggested your earlier books were cobbled-together essay collections, but that later efforts are actually books that have been pieced out as essays. Which of those best describes No Shortage of Good Days?

Actually, I would say this new one is more on that older model. I think what I meant is that I have a book in mind, and I sometimes write the essays that way. I sort of carry a book in my mind, but it’s not like I have an outline already written.

I’m an instinctive writer; I don’t think about this stuff. I suspect I’m a guy who has been picking away at this same theme for the last 16 books.

Q: That theme being?

My theme is how do you live in the world as it is, while that world really tries to step on that? That’s really the only question isn’t it; how do you live?

Q: You refer to what I’ll call “fly fishing’s class wars” a bit more here than in prior books.

I think I notice it more. I’m more aware of it because I end up stumbling into this other end of it. For the longest time I was just this little blue collar fly fishing hippie, and as I get more well known, I’m suddenly in these places I never dreamed I’d find, or in some cases even existed.

If you’re a writer — hell a thinking human being — you’re bound to ask yourself exactly what this means. And what’s my role, I’m here as a guest, and I paid for the plane ticket, but this trip would have cost a $100K if I’d paid for it, which you couldn’t even do.

As something of a populist, how am I supposed to feel about this?

So yeah, you think about this stuff. It’s just odd. This is how some people do it. We’re all some kind of populists out here in the west, and you have to ask why isn’t this public water?

I don’t know if I have an answer.

Q: Your earlier books introduced us to people like AK Best, Mike Clark and Ed Engle — and did so in some depth — yet the people you write about these days don’t seem as fully revealed to your readers. It that a conscious thing? Did you find people getting skittish about showing up in your books?

The reason is that I don’t know those people as well. I don’t know Jim Babb as well as I know AK Best. I don’t have the decades of history with some of these folks. And I may have said all there is to say about these guys, at least publicly. I mean I know a lot of stuff about AK Best that is none of my business, let alone any of yours, and maybe I’ve exhausted everything that needs to be publicly said.

When you’re writing about your friends, they’re kind of trusting you. I can reveal stuff about myself, but that’s my decision.

And yes, I’m traveling more on my own. It’s the worse recession in 30 years; everybody’s broke.

Q: I’m tempted to label this the small stream book — there might be more references to small streams in this book than there are in your actual small stream book.

I’ll have to check that, but these things are autobiographical, and that’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately.

Q: How do you think you fit into a more extreme fly fishing media landscape?

I’m suspicious of this trend towards making fly fishing an extreme sport. For example, on this book tour, I’m constantly asked “what do you think about the fly fishing film tour?”

I appreciate the adventure and the fishing they’re showing and technically it’s awesome stuff, but that’s just not the sport I recognize. Maybe I’m a little more invested in this pastoral stuff.

Q: That’s interesting. The video guys are trying make a living by going fishing and selling the experience, so in one sense, they’re the new Gierachs, the new trout bums — they’re your children.

I… I guess I can accept that. They’re into a counter-culture head — they live outside the mainstream.

And while I say I don’t recognize the sport, I do recognize those guys. Those are bohemian guys who don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about what they’re doing — they’re doing it for love, and I certainly recognize and understand that.

And those guys will grow up.

Q: In our earlier interview I compared Trout Bum to Kerouac’s On the Road, the idea being Trout Bum afforded fly fishers permission to view the sport — which was saddled with a painfully highbrow image — in a different context. It was possible to see it from the perspective of a subsistence, almost hippie, nearly obsessive lifestyle that also happened to be no big deal.

Again, I heard that a lot — that I wrote some kind of counterculture testament. You weren’t hearing about it, but what was going on was that there was a handful of guys in the West living this way; all these guys were exploring fly fishing as a possible path to enlightenment.

So while I think it’s fair to say Trout Bum was counter-culture, it’s also true I was just reporting what was going on. That’s what journalists do — they pick up the stuff they’re doing and start talking about it.

Q: I’d suggest you’ve achieved a largely iconic status, yet you seem largely bemused by it, especially while someone is fawning over you in a vid…

[Interrupting] Well, what would you do?

[ED: Point taken.]

Gierach on Steelheading

You once said that fly fishing for steelhead was going to be “your next thing.” Have you become one of those existentialist steelheaders?

I do it as much as I can; but I’m in the wrong place. I’m too far away.

I try to get out twice a year; in some years it’s only once. A couple times I didn’t go at all. One problem I had was that I was always trying to fish in the winter, which seemed like a great deal; go out and catch a steelhead when the fishing here was limited.

Problem is the flows are unstable and you plan a trip and the river’s blown out and you go anyway — which happened on one trip, when we probably shouldn’t have even gone. I suppose you’re kind of buffalo hunting — you’re doing something without much chance of success, but it’s there to do, and you might as well do it.

I finally started fishing in the fall, which makes all the difference in the world. You can use floating lines, the fish are more predictable and it’s not as cold.

Still, fishing in winter is really compelling; I recently fished a river I’ve been spey casting with conventional lines without success. I had no idea what wasn’t working, but my fly had no ability to get down.

Someone loaned me a new kind of sinking line and the clouds parted. The casting’s great and you can rocket those things across the river. Of course I’m a fly fisherman, so I came home and got on the phone and called people and told them I’ve got these rods, now what do I need to do this kind of thing?

So the winter fish are hard, but they’re still worth it. They’re huge and they’re bright and they’re raspy and they still have sea lice on them.

It’s worth it. It’s just worth it.

You may only get one or a few, but it’s like rhinoceros hunting; you don’t bag thirty of them, you get your Teddy Roosevelt picture holding it and leave it at that. It’s not about the body count, and more people should probably fish trout that way. They really should.

Q: You’ve been fly fishing for decades, yet when it comes to steelheading, you might be in the same boat as your average reader; it’s something you don’t do often enough to really stay sharp.

That’s right. Especially at first, when I was learning, I’d have trouble. But the last couple of times I’ve pretty much gone out and flubbed the first 2-3 casts, mostly because I was pushing with my top hand instead of pulling with the bottom. I’d remind myself to pull, and lately, I’ve recovered pretty quickly, and then I’m just fishing.

The thing I had to learn about spey casting was this; like so much in fly fishing, people make it more complicated than it has to be. I mean, It’s a change of direction roll cast. You put that loop in the right spot and punch it, and it’s going to go. You just have to remember to pull more on the bottom hand than the top hand.

Q: So why — given the distance — are you still doing it?

I don’t get jaded, but at the same time, I’ve been fly fishing for at least 35 years, and it’s cool to do something new. There’s an enthusiasm. And yes, it’s kind of less important that I catch fish now.

If you really don’t care about catching fish, you should just quit. But then, I write about actually catching fish a lot less than I used to.

My first time steelheading, I fished a week and caught two fish.

Q: You seem to have a predilection for that kind of difficult fishing — you keep returning to it. You fished at least a week in Scotland without a bite, your Atlantic Salmon trips have been hardly any better, and now you’re bombing around the Northwest to catch a couple fish over the course of a week.

When I fish small streams, I tend to catch a lot of fish and that’s great, but steelheading is very different. I know my local small streams pretty intimately and I’ve got the timing down, but with steelhead, you’re suddenly playing chess against somebody who really knows what they’re doing.

Especially when I go steelheading in the fall, I’ll come off my small creeks — which I fish about as well as anybody and I catch a lot of fish, and then I’m not.

And it’s really interesting to go out to somewhere and fish eight hours a day for a week and not catch anything, which is still really interesting to me.

It’s hard and it kind of makes you dig a little deeper — the idea that I’m going to fish my brains out and fish as well as I can and maybe I’ll catch one, maybe I won’t.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and there’s a lot of water within a day’s drive of my home I still haven’t fished yet. The stuff you know still applies, but there’s always some new wrinkle you have to work out. That’s just fascinating to me.

Gierach On Writing For a Living

Q: Editors of fly fishing magazines have admitted their pay rates essentially haven’t gone up since the 70s, and you’re probably one of two writers making a living in the fly fishing space. Have things gotten better or worse for writers in the fly fishing space?

The only reason I make a living is Simon & Schuster. There was a time when it possible to make a passable living freelancing [articles]. But that’s not the case any more.

This book is like my 16th; and they’re all out there making money for me.

The guys now aren’t making much money. I’m not sure I would be able to do today what I did then.

I’m frankly glad I don’t have to figure it out.

Q: What do you think about fly fishing’s online writers, the bloggers and ezine writers?

The quality of the writing is there, but the density isn’t. Something looks good and the idea is there, but then the essay just stops short. I don’t know if people are going to stretch out, or if this is the way it’s going.

Q: For a while you were writing for the New York Times; what’s it like to be a trout bum writing for this monstrous newspaper?

The problem was this; they were publishing one column a month, and that column would get bumped if a football player got a hangnail, and I called them and told them I couldn’t keep writing columns that I wasn’t going to get paid for.

The editor didn’t get it, and so I asked her if she had someone else she could call. She mentioned another guy, and I told her to call him next time.

It was the New York Times and it was very prestigious, and I wasn’t making any money.

Q: In the fly fishing niche — where an essay book is doing pretty well if it sells 4,000 copies — your first print runs are rumored to be in the 70,000 copy range. True?

For my last book I think they printed 26,000 hardcover copies, so if you add in the the paperback sales, that number is probably close (ED: I got the estimate from a well known book distributor.]

Q: That’s a lot of books in this industry. Why have you sold so many books and endured so long?

I have no absolutely no idea why that is; in private moments I’ll start to think I’m really that good, but that never lasts. I really think it’s because I’ve been around just so damned long.

Q: Have you ever heard of Imposter Syndrome?

What’s that?

Q: Every writer I’ve spoken to says that even after their first couple successes, they kept waiting to be discovered for the frauds they are.

Oh yeah, sure. I’m still waiting.

Q: You’ve said you write mostly in the winter so you can fish during the warmer months; is that strictly true, or do your deadlines enforce a fairly regular writing routine?

It’s as true as I can make it, but of course the reality of deadlines keeps me working more or less year around. It would be more accurate to say that I allow myself as much time as I want or need in season to fish locally or travel. And I still get the vast majority of work done over the winter.

Q: If so, do you write every day or chase XXXX words per week, or…?

I spend at least some time on the writing most of the days I’m home. That’s usually composing or editing, but also sometimes writing to editors and my agent and the other business that inevitably comes up. My problem isn’t forcing myself to write because I do it compulsively. My problem is forcing myself to stop for a while when I get stale.

I don’t chase word counts. A few thousand words a day is great (although they could eventually end up dumped or seriously pruned back) but so is a good, solid paragraph. Even a morning where I end up shit-canning every word amounts to progress because I’ve eliminated one possibility.

Q: With so many essays and articles under your belt, do you begin with some kind of formal process (outline, brainstorm, etc), or are you comfortable simply diving in? If so, what do you do when the thing comes off the rails on the 1456th word?

I like to start with an idea and a couple of thoughts about it and then dive in. I’m an instinctive, stream of consciousness writer, so I like to just turn over an interesting rock and see what crawls out.

When a story comes off the rails – and most do at one time or another – I leave it alone for a while. Sometimes it all comes clear the next morning. Other times it takes a month. Sometimes the problem is just the order of the story. A few months ago I had what I thought was a good lead, but it went nowhere. Then I realized it wasn’t the lead, it was the conclusion. Once in a great while a story just stalls and I abandon it.

Q: What writing tools do you use, and are you a stickler about them – or are you largely word processor/editor agnostic?

I use a computer. I wrote hundred of articles and three or four books on a typewriter way back when. I resisted computers, but after re-typing several book manuscripts, I opted for less drudgery.

Q: Any quirky writer behavior you’d like to reveal here for the first time ever (instantly embarrassing or endearing you to my readers?

Nothing all that quirky or endearing. I drink lots of coffee, stare out the widow a lot, talk to the cats, take long hikes on afternoons when I’m not fishing, carry a notebook at all times. I do like to work in the morning when, as a poet friend says, the mind is still informed by the non-linear dream world. I don’t know about that, but I do sometimes go to bed stuck and wake up knowing what comes next.

Q: With the rapid arrival of ebooks, have you wrangled with your publishers over things like ebook or other digital publishing issues? (e.g. some writers have rejected the 75%/25% royalty split publishers are trying to enforce on ebooks.)

I’ve sold ebook rights to some older books (that were published before such things existed) and electronic rights have been included in more recent contracts. I get slightly better than the usual split, thanks to my agent.

Q: Has the rise of digital publishing affected your writing — or the business end of things — at all?

Not that I can tell.

Q: You once said: “I happen to have fallen into this thing where I write mostly about fishing and outdoor sports but I could have gone another way.” You’re best known for your essays, but have you ever thought about branching out into fiction, or even writing a mainstream outdoor book?

I’ve written and published some sporting fiction – most thinly fictionalized accounts of real events. I’ve also written a column for the last dozen years for the Redstone Review published in Lyons, Colorado that you could describe as politics/social commentary. To write a mainstream fishing book I’d have to be an expert fisherman, which I’m not.

Q: How did you end up writing fly fishing essays — a market which supports few writers (and seems to be getting even less lucrative than in the past)?

I started out doing it just for the money while I worked on what I thought would be a career as a “serious writer” (whatever that means.) Then it just became the place where two passions came together and that was that. Also, when I started it was a more lucrative market than it is now. But it wasn’t a business decision. Anyone who takes up writing for the money is an idiot.

Q: You often mention Tom McGuane, Annie Dillard and Jim Harrison as favorite writers in part because they do very well what you’re trying to do. Who else would you recommend to your readers?

Alice Munro (new favorite), Richard Russo, Richard Ford, Scott Spencer, Larry Watson, Ernest Hemingway (the early Michigan stories and The Old Man and the Sea), John Casey, Ethan Canin, Ted Leeson, Tobias Wolff, James Galvin (The meadow), etc.

[ED: Gierach also said -- in relation to Thomas McGuane -- that: I will admit right here in print that The Longest Silence is better than anything I've written.]

Q: You’ve been in the writing business for approximately a bazillion years; what mistakes do you see younger/novice writers making over and over?

Worrying about showing how well they can write at the expense of serving the story they’re telling. The best writing is usually transparent.

Q: Any advice for other writers looking to make a dent in outdoor writing?

Beware of the Internet. If you want to make a living, you have to get paid.

Favorite Child Questions

Q: Can you point to a Gierach book (or even essay) as your favorite?

My favorite book is always the most recent one. That’s partly because it’s still fresh and partly because I’m trying to get better and want to think my most recent work should be my best.

Q: Favorite small stream fly rod?

My favorite for the last few years (ever since I got it) is a 7-foot 9-inch 4-weight bamboo made by Walter Babb of Sweetwater, Tennessee.

Q: Favorite species of trout?

Hard to pick between cutthroats and brook trout.

Q: Favorite fishing truck?

My current 2000 V-6 Nissan Frontier.

Older TU Posts Related To No Shortage of Good Days

Review of No Shortage of Good Days

Gierach on fly fishing’s class wars

Gierach on getting old

Small stream syndrome

Too cheap to pay someone to write

There are all sorts of good excuses for this (nowadays, I come home and feed/bathe/put the kid to sleep instead of writing a report), but in a still-high-water year, I’ve had a long string of trips I’d have to classify as “research” as opposed to “fish catching bonanzas.”

A couple of small stream efforts resulted in some damned interesting new water being found, but due to high, cold water, damned few trout were caught.

The same was true for last weekend’s drive to a snowed-in pass; Wally the Wonderdog loved it, but the fisherman driving the truck mostly got a nice hike out of it.

This weekend, Wayne Eng wanted to scout some Upper Sacramento locations for a couple upcoming guide trips, and while scouting gives you the chance to see a lot of water, you also realize the goal isn’t to hammer a lot of fish, but to find places where other people — presumably less capable waders and casters — might catch a few trout.

Wayne Eng cast-o-rama

We didn’t get skunked, but the trip would have been a success even if we had, which says a lot about goals, expectations, and reality.

Fly fishing writers rarely visit the side of the ledger labeled “paying dues” — the trips where you don’t catch many fish, but sock away the knowledge that pays off later, when the water’s lower, the bugs are moving and the fly fishermen seem more smug.

You can’t “land” a new stream and stuff its face in the camera for a hero shot and you won’t high-five each other at the truck after going fishless on a promising-but-over-its-banks stretch of small stream.

Still, when the water’s lower, there’s a good chance you’ll catch some reasonably sized trout on dry flies, and the concept of “investment” probably applies better here than it does in the financial markets, where different rules apparently exist for different people.

This kind of thing becomes more palatable when you realize every trip doesn’t have to be the Trip of a Lifetime, and that in fact, the whole enterprise makes more sense once you realize fly fishing’s best practiced as a lifetime trip.

So maybe the water’s high and the trout won’t eat dries today, but the heat is here and the snow will melt (a month late), and soon enough, you’ll see how that new stretch of river really fishes. Soon enough.

See you (exploring) on the river, Tom Chandler.

=====================================

Requiem For a Vizla, by [Name Redacted]

Among the saddest things in life is that we outlive our dogs.

Sienna was a petulant princess in a red fur coat. There may never have been been a more demanding creature — animal or otherwise. Accompanying her imperious personality was a lot of highly un-doglike behavior.

She would watch (scrutinize actually) television for hours waiting to see animals. If animals or even close cartoon likenesses of animals — like an elephant logo on Animal Planet — appeared, she would charge the television barking, ready to fight or at least sniff. All our TV screens wore nose blotches from these electronic encounters.

She was never once deceived by a human dressed in a costume. Now that it is too late I realize that we should have screened the famous Northern California footage of the purported Sasquatch so that she could have authoritatively settled its authenticity.

The most astonishing example of how attuned Sienna was to animals was when she ran barking at a windblown leopard-pattern scarf being worn by a starlet in a 60′s driving scene.

Demanding? Several times almost every night she would start up a tiny plaintive ” Uh huh, huh, huh” just loud and repetitive enough to wake Janet or me up to re-cover her with a blanket.

Like Chico Marx she loved to rest her body on people. She particularly liked planting her bottom on people’s feet or sitting in their laps. It must have seemed to Sienna that people existed mainly to cushion her from hard objects.

Unlike the good dogs that obediently request permission to sit anywhere but on the floor, Sienna knew that she belonged in lofty places. Even at the Vet’s Office she would automatically jump up on one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room. During a recent visit that included a nail trim her pose moved one of the veterinary technicians to say “Here comes Sienna for her pedicure.”

Vizslas are supposed to be what is called “versatile” hunting dogs; capable of marking and retrieving all sorts of game, including waterfowl.

Sienna would have none of that. Her self-appointed role in the field was narrowly focused — locate and point living birds. At that specialty she excelled. Her nose (the same nose that unerringly knew when you had opened a Hershey Kiss upstairs) was spectacular. She could smell pheasants from a football field away and was clever enough to anticipate their every evasive maneuver. Her fluid grace tracking birds was enthralling to follow.

Once a bird was dead, though, she lost all interest, as if to say, “You shot it, pick up yourself.”

Sienna also drew the line at swimming. She hated even getting her dainty paws wet. Reluctantly she would sometimes wade into the water, but never deeper than her chest. The few times we tried to force her to swim her frantic flailing was hilarious; they became part of family lore.

Like other royals she was afflicted with genetic infirmities of the too narrowly bred. She was allergic to beef and had to eat what we dubbed Klamath Falls Diet: duck and potato dog food.

This rare and expensive kibble was augmented with freshly cooked chicken; smoked during the summer months, crock-potted during the winter. She tolerated this diet (much better nutrition than what is available to most of humanity) but preferred to daintily pull a piece of whatever you were having off a dinner fork.

The combination of her Futaki-horned, overly convoluted ear passages and her allergies necessitated constant otic attention. Something she often provoked by loud and persistent ear rubbing with her paws or on the carpet.

She had a collection of more than a dozen “dollies” strewn about the house; stuffed animals with their offending eyes pulled off. She liked to sleep with them and would carry one into the living room whenever a guest visited or absent family member returned home. She would then insist on a game of catch, never really accepting the part where she had to return the animal to the thrower. Instead she would trot back and then immediately turn her back, forcing you to either pull or verbally command her to drop the animal.

We hear that animals live in the moment; Sienna planned for the future. When all of us left the house for prolonged periods she’d stash food, her favorite being unopened bags of bread; food laid away against the eventuality that this time we wouldn’t return.

Sienna had been such a part of our lives for so long — half of Anna’s life and two-thirds of Robby’s — that it’s impossible to believe that this time she is the one who won’t be back.

Recognizably the same, but subtly different...

Fortunately, no high fives mar Gierach’s latest effort, and you can either be thankful or disappointed, though given Gierach’s ability to sell books, it seems many fishermen happily chose the former.

In No Shortage of Good Days, Gierach offers the usual mix of essay subjects, and though this book feels like it rambles a teensy bit more than his earlier efforts, he still delivers the goods, and does so in a way that invokes what I’ll loosely call “the larger picture.”

When you reach your mid-60s it seems natural to tumble the larger picture around in your head a lot more than when you were 35, and while Gierach isn’t threatening to retire (then again, I didn’t ask), he is writing passages like this:

My generation has been especially prone to this kind of foolishness, and I’m not the only one of us who woke up in his early 40s— with not much more than a pot to piss in— thinking, Okay, I’m functionally self-aware and I know how to fish. Now what? On the other hand, fishing when the fishing is as good as you’ve seen it in years can seem like a civic duty. And for that matter, it’s comforting to live by your wits in one of the few places left on earth where your wits are sufficient. In the end, you may never get it exactly right— Annie Dillard said, “There is no shortage of good days; it’s good lives that are hard to come by” — but it’s still worth trying.

This book lacks the darker edge of Grave of the Unknown Fisherman and the optimistically uplifting feel of his earliest books, and the latter is wholly understandable — if your perspective doesn’t shift over the course of 25 odd years, then you might want to check yourself for signs of fossilization.

What emerges is a snapshot of a fly fisherman who has made a choice many of us wonder if we should have made— and is now looking hard at the significance of it.

To his credit, he doesn’t exactly flinch from the looking, nor does he populate the book with droning monologues about what it all means. It’s just included along with the reports about which flies worked best on which streams, and somehow, he makes it seem relevant.

The Small Stuff

One aspect of No Shortage of Good Days immediately captured my interest; what appeared to be a real spike in Gierach’s love affair with small waters.

He does the big-water trips to Baja and for Atlantic salmon, but a surprising chunk of the book was devoted to smaller waters and even smaller fishing parties, and like it always is with Gierach, I found myself moving through his essays, nodding along at what feel like “universal” insights (like most of humanity, I mistakenly assume the rest of the universe shares my exact tastes).

Outside of the small stream efforts, a favorite essay was titled “Cheating,” which offered something of a history of some of fly fishing’s class wars (nymphing, etc). Like many of the essays in the book, I wished it had gone longer.

No Shortage of Good Days also showcases Gierach’s ability to wrap seemingly insignificant details into his narrative which add immeasurably to the story, and I fully admit that I don’t really know how he does that.

It’s very easy to drown your words in details that appear superfluous, and in fact, it almost always turns out they are.

In Gierach’s case, mentioning the combined smell of diesel fuel and cow flop in the same breath he uses to describe the best steak dinner he ever ate shouldn’t necessarily work, but there it is (and yes it does).

Gierach’s best skill as a writer has always been his ability to wander through a fishing trip, picking out the relevant pieces and enhancing the narrative with insight gained elsewhere— all of which happens just prior to the reader’s arrival at a point he often never saw coming.

The one aspect often explored with less depth than before are the characters accompanying him on his fishing trips; we got to know people like AK Best, Ed Engle and Mike Clark in some depth, yet those populating Gierach’s modern essays seem less fully revealed.

Gierach suggests that’s simply because he doesn’t have three decades of history with most of today’s fishing buddies, and that he’s traveling alone more often (“It’s a recession,” he said. “Everybody’s broke.”)

The Big Finish

I’m tempted to suggest the obvious; with 16 essay books still in print (dating back to 1986, a remarkable record), those who like Gierach will buy this book because it’s recognizably his work, and those that don’t like his work won’t be swayed by a review.

In that vein, one of the worst things a writer can hear is that their latest effort is basically more of the same, but in this case, this is more wholly recognizable Gierach writing, which could be a bad thing if so many of us didn’t put down his last book wishing he’d tacked on just one more essay (and one more after that, and…).

No Shortage of Good Days offers us the usual engrossing mix of straight reportage, insight, and goofy anthropomorphism alongside a larger perspective on a life that most of us envy, yet couldn’t (or won’t) embrace, and that aspect of it made it seem engrossing and relateable.

Excerpts From No Shortage of Good Days

Gierach on Steelheading

“So you fish well to the bitter end, telling yourself, truthfully, that how well you do something is probably more important than why you do it. If you have the disposition for it, this is a better way than most to spend your time, even if you never hook that wild twenty-pound steelhead. You’ll hear fishermen talk about being humbled by a river and we all know what that means and how it feels, but but somehow the language of competition doesn’t quite ring true. It’s not so much that the river beats you; it’s more that the river doesn’t even know you’re there.”

Gierach on Local Water

“I’ve always been fascinated by fishermen’s peculiar fondness for certain local water, and I mean my own as well as others. Sometimes it’s so obvious it amounts to a cliche, like the lake at the old summer cabin or the secret honey hole where you always hike in by a different route so as not to wear a trail others might follow. But just as often it’s a spot that’s too popular and crowded, too trashy, or a second-rate stream that you have a soft spot for in spite of the fish being small and far between.”

Gierach on Ego

“I have met some high-brow fishermen who bragged that they only fished at the best places with the best guides at the best times of the year and who claimed to not only always catch fish, but to always catch lots of real big ones. If true, a life without drama must be awfully boring, and if false — as you have to suspect — then lugging around an ego that requires that much preening must be a terrible burden.”

Gierach on Bluelining

“The idea is to fish obscure headwater creeks in hopes of eventually sniffing out an underappreciated little trout creek down an un-marked dirt road. Why is another question. I suppose it’s partly for the fishing itself and partly to satisfy your curiosity, but mostly to sustain the belief that such things are still out there to find for those willing to look.”

Gierach on Home Water

“I think the need for these places is genetically encoded, which is why we all had our secret spots as kids. At first it was behind the couch or under the bed, but eventually we got our legs under us and ventured outside. If were weren’t lucky enough to have a patch of woods and a creek close by, there was at least an alley or a vacant lot or an unlandscaped corner of a friend’s back yard that we could claim as our own because no one else was using it.”

Gierach on… Life?

“Roughly along the same lines, being left alone to do something you love is a rare pleasure that’s denied to many, but some are more suited to it than others. I won’t get all New Age about this, but even if you’re not your own best friend, you should still at least be able to stand your own company.

In my case, lots of solitude on my home water has trained me to be a low-key, persistent, and appreciate fisherman, but it has also made me too shy of crowds and noise to ever be comfortable in the twenty-first century. But then I’ve always had this tendency to go a little overboard. For most, there’ll be more of a happy medium.”

—Garrison Keillor

Less than a month to go. Better get those keys moving...

This is the American Idol-style competition where James Babb — erstwhile Gray’s fly fishing columnist — searches for his replacement, inviting pretty much everyone with a computer to submit two sample columns.

We thought it was yet another shocking example of just how bad America’s drug problem has become, but he’s serious, and seems unafraid of the potential for brain damage (from the columns, not any drugs).

For more information, visit my post announcing the contest.

See you at the keyboard, Tom Chandler.

And as the winter slowly closes out, those phone calls turn to spring.

Naturally, there’s an unspoken etiquette when discussing the upcoming fly fishing season – especially when that season involves a record 170% of normal snowpack and a forecast for a cooler-than-normal spring.

First, you don’t come right out and admit the obvious: You’re screwed.

That’s considered poor form.

Instead, you’re encouraged to speculate wildly about best-case scenarios, often couching your speculation in experience: “The snowpack was higher in ought-whatever” we’ll say, “but we were still fishing by the Fourth of July.”

Of course, the snowpack wasn’t higher in ought-whatever, and plenty of years the river was still unhappily elevated by the Fourth of July.

But you don’t say that out loud. That way lies insanity.

Instead, you dance around the subject, but slowly — because you’re not blind to reality — the evidence builds.

Record snowpack. Cold spring (the temperature is 15 degrees lower than “normal” for this time of year).

High water.

Lots and lots of split shot.

Thus concludes the discovery portion of the phone call (over the past two days, I went through this with both Wayne Eng and Steven Bertrand).

Then we move into the Adaptation phase.

Wayne, ever the optimist, suggested we’d just have to look for the right spots on the river, which will become difficult to fish just as soon as water starts spilling over the Box Canyon dam at Lake Siskiyou.

Bertrand – who is not so optimistic – suggested trips to reservoirs and tailwaters, which set off a whole new round of speculation about what happens to the Lower McCloud and McCloud Reservoir once that 170% snowpack hits Mud Creek.

Even with the Optimist setting turned up to 11, we quickly started running out of fishable water.

I even essayed a classic backcountry gambit, where I suggested I’d be able to fish a couple of my alpine streams as early as late May or June, which is total bullshit.

Bertrand noted that we normally fish those places by May or June, and this year wasn’t normal, which forced me to fall back on my “I’ll snowshoe or ski in” fantasy.

That works if you ignore the fact that you’d ski many, many miles one way, only find a creek over its banks.

In other words, it works not at all.

We did isolate on small creek that might be fishable before the others, and because you don’t want to find other people there, you speak its name sparingly on the phone (apparently out of fear the NSA is populated with fly fishermen).

The Lower Sac? The Rogue? There will be fly fishing, though it’ll likely involve some travel or AA sized split shot or sheer luck.

And naturally, you’ll occasionally encounter a spoiler; while I was writing this, Dave Roberts called to reveal he’d spent yesterday in a snowstorm on the Henry’s Fork, catching trout during a heavy BWO hatch.

You simultaneously curse him for the taunt, but quietly thank him for restoring some hope.

Now if only you could afford the gas.

See you working the phone bank, Tom Chandler

Earlier this week, a reporter called to write an article about the Trout Underground, and just as the conversation started, Wally the Wonderdog wandered slowly past my office window — holding a stiffly frozen, snow-encrusted squirrel in his mouth.

I considered telling the reporter about the squirrel-cicle, but then realized it really wasn’t that believable; the kind of thing a guy would make up to impress a reporter.

Moments like this force me to realize that much of the Underground’s universe — especially the bits concerning Wally the Wonderdog — simply aren’t fit for print.

Or maybe they’re just not readily explainable.

And that was only the start of the interview. It wasn’t long before he asked the inevitable, grind-my-brain-to-halt question:

“What is the Trout Underground?”

And, like every other time I’ve been asked, I had no answer — at least nothing that glibly approaches a sound bite (outside of the ill-advised “I’m simply oversharing my mental illness”).

Part of the problem lies with the sport itself; beyond the gear used (and that’s up for grabs these days), fly fishing is pretty hard to define.

Even Gierach — who writes far more gooder than I — refuses to be cornered:

“Fly-fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It’s not even clear if catching fish is actually the point.”

It gets worse.

A quick survey of the Internet suggests catching fish actually is the point fly fishing, but for some (an awful lot, actually), it clearly isn’t.

Others accumulate fly fishing gear and clearly think that’s the point, while others embrace minimalism as the One True Path to Heaven.

For others, it’s all about being miserable, and reminding everyone just how tough they are to withstand the suffering, or…

You get the picture.

Recruiting new people to the sport has never proved all that easy, with some quick to point to things like the high cost of equipment (ever compared the cost of a fly rod & reel to a bass boat?), the notorious stuffiness of the sport’s practitioners, surly fly shop employees, the fussiness (and shrinking habitat) of trout, the technical demands of casting, etc.

Here’s a thought; maybe it has nothing to do with any of the above.

Maybe it’s hard to sell a sport that you can’t really define.

Unlike tournament bass fishing (or golf, or whatever), fly fishing’s goals are a little unclear, and for some of us, they shift over the course of a day.

Which is a long-winded way of making myself feel better about an inability to clearly define the blog I’ve been writing for better than 720,000 words, especially after the reporter asked me to pick a couple of highlights (posts) from the prior year.

I ended up picking three posts that felt like they represented the blog, then realized that one was definitely not about fly fishing, and two that were about fly fishing kinda dealt with it in the periphery (OK, they were all about Little M, though fly fishing featured heavily in this one and here).

A sport with shifting goals? Blogs with no visible point? An writer’s inability to summarize 720,000 words of his own work?

Frankly, it’s enough to make me want to wander off and find a beer.

Maybe watch Wally the Wonderdog eat his squirrel-cicle.

Right now, that makes perfect sense.

See you outside, Tom Chandler.

A week ago? Sure. But not today.

You know something’s turned a corner when you walk out onto your newly snow-and-ice-free deck, and for the first time this year, you hear the Wonderdog’s tail thumping on the worn wood.

He’s laid out in the warm sun splashing the far corner of the deck, and if you’ve been waiting for a sign of spring as long as I have, it’s a sound that makes the hairs on your neck stand up.

Later, Little M and Mimi (grandma) were laying on their backs (sans jackets) waving at the airplanes flying overhead in the clear blue sky, and…

Little M and Mimi waving at airplanes...

In other words, when Mother Nature gives you a springtime gimme on April 1, only a fool would screw with it by mucking about with people’s brains (next year, all bets are off).

It’s also zero day for the new website buildout, and so far, the move is going perfectly, the site will go live this weekend, and we’ll launch it next week, so there’s a very, very happy client on the other end of the Intertubes today.

It’s enough to make me want to rush out and buy two lottery tickets (when you’re feeling this lucky, why waste it on one fortune?).

In fact, I’m picking up my new netbook and going outside to work in the spring weather.

See you in the sunshine, Tom Chandler.