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

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.”

Sadly, that interview never saw the light of day.

The original Trout Bum

It was destined to be a short, “ten questions” thing – a quick glimpse into the life of fly fishing’s most-famous trout bum.

Instead, the new recording gadget I’d bought (and tested several times) fizzled exactly three minutes into the interview, which turned into a rambling talk almost two hours long.

Naturally, I didn’t know it had failed (it worked perfectly prior, and never worked after, earning it a trip to the trash bin).

So I didn’t take notes.

Later – after discovering the empty space where the recorded interview should have been – I didn’t feel like publishing my impressions of what Gierach may or may not have said in response to my questions (“When asked about his motivation for devoting his life to fly fishing, the author presumably could have said something sorta like this…”).

In a career spanning almost 2.5 decades, this was not my proudest moment.

That’s why stumbling across a new Gierach essay and interview is like finding a pod of big, happy trout eating Green Drakes – on a small stream you’ve driven by, but never fished before.

It’s not something you expect to happen, but because fly fishermen live in hope, you allow for the possibility.

And you sure as hell take advantage when the stars finally align.

In this essay, Gierach muses about his own writing process – a dangerous place for any writer to go (that way lies madness).

That’s because writers are often hideous egoists, though in Gierach’s case, the essay offers proof of the opposite:

One of the things that happens when you gain some small measure of notoriety as an author is that strangers begin to write about you. In the beginning it’s book reviews, which both you and your publisher are happy to see. Good reviews are naturally better than lukewarm or outright bad ones, but bad ones aren’t the worst thing that can happen. The worst that can happen is dead silence.

But although a merciful percentage of my reviews have been favorable, it never seemed to me that the reviewers got it entirely right. The problem was that they never quite saw me as I secretly see myself. Of course there was no way they could, but I was still always a little disappointed when they didn’t.

The interviews and profiles that came later should have been better because I was allowed to speak for myself, but then I was thinking on my feet (something writers aren’t typically good at) and if I was in the proper state of mind for being interviewed, I was eager to please, so there was the temptation to come up with glib, easily digested sound bites.

This is encouraged, especially in the broadcast end of the business. Once, five seconds before going on the air, a DJ said to me, “Remember, this is talk radio, not an intelligent conversation.” I began to understand what William Kittredge meant when he said that the lies told by the media are “truths twisted about a quarter turn.” He might have added that you quickly learn to do the twisting yourself, if only to keep someone else from doing it for you.

During my interview, I asked Gierach about fame – at least fly fishing’s version of it, where you’re unlikely to be recognized on the street unless the sidewalks happen to be jammed with fly fishermen.

His response was remarkably direct: “Any writer who says he doesn’t like the attention is an asshole.”

Gierach’s essay also offers up a definition of his work, and many fly fishermen might be surprised at the result:

I write books of personal essays that are ostensibly about fly fishing, although as far as I’m concerned, they’re about grace, acceptance, sport as metaphor, the relationship between technological humans and the beleaguered natural environment, and how to live well in an imperfect world. Still, when I once quoted the poet Gary Snyder, a reviewer said he thought that might be “a little too high-brow for the beer and bass crowd.” When you write what are considered to be genre books—as opposed to literary novels or dense tomes on foreign policy—you’re expected to color inside the lines.

Attached to the essay is an interview with Gierach, and – boldly seizing the opportunity – I plan to offer a few of the nuggets that survived my interview, placing them within the context of Gierach’s interview with Lawrence Morgan – an assistant professor of English.

In the meantime, you can read Gierach’s essay here.

You can read his interview here.

And you can read my review of his latest book – Fool’s Paradise – here.

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See you in the stacks, Tom Chandler.

Enjoy.

Just Thinkin’ About the Weather

California’s in the grip of a three year drought, though all that *could* change over the next 2-3 weeks – and in catastrophic fashion.

A 200+ mph El Nino jet stream is aimed squarely at the coast of the state, and we’re expecting a potentially disastrous situation: a big, cold, snow-laden storm followed by a big, warmer, wetter storm.

Something similar happened at the end of 1996, and half the state disappeared underwater. Those that fish the Upper Sac at its mostly serene 200cfs – 350cfs will be shocked to know that flows handily exceeded 100,000 cfs on Jan 1, 1997.

We could be looking at something similar.

At Trout Underground/Man Cave World Headquarters – which is now entirely snow free (an astonishing thing at this point in the winter) – we’re trying to batten down the hatches a bit.

More on Harriman Ranch

The storm of controversy brewing over Idaho Governor Butch Otter’s plans to de-fund the Idaho Parks Department (handing the state parks to an agency without a recreation/access mandate) has escalated to the point where it’s officially OK to call it a “shitstorm.”

We couldn’t be happier.

The Henry’s Fork Lodge has posted a note on their Web site urging anglers to send emails to the governor, and we’re going to echo that with a post of our own next week.

In the meantime, perhaps someone should point out what Governor Butch Otter should have learned from his counterpart in California (Ahhhhnoooold), who learned the hard way. Screw with the state parks, and you’ll be walking funny for the next couple weeks…

The AFFTA Trade Show Wars – Over?

Is the dust finally settling on the AFFTA Trade Show wars? AFFTA’s announced dates for its own IFTA show in September (Denver), Fly Fishing Show owner Chuck Furimsky has cancelled plans for his own dealer show, and the CEO of Far Bank (Sage, Rio and Redington) is circulating a letter in support of the new show:

As part of the debate around the various shows, I think I’ve heard most of, if not all, the reasons for not supporting an industry trade show: the show is at the wrong time, not enough retailers come, not enough manufacturers come, my reps do a great job and thus the show is irrelevant, it’s too expensive, it’s the heart of our season, I don’t like Denver, and on and on. I won’t try to contest all these arguments in this letter. Rather, I’d like to give you my pitch for why I think everyone should support the show: It is the only venue in the world where the fly fishing trade gets to come together in one place and at one time to work toward improving an industry and a sport that for most of us provides both our livelihoods and our lifestyles. I am convinced that without a strong show our industry stands little chance of effectively competing against the macro forces working against our businesses – things like kids not being exposed to the outdoors, the closing of public access to fishable waters, and aquatic nuisance species to name just a few.

In addition, it appears new hire – and trade show czar – Randi Swisher is being groomed to run AFFTA. Current AFFTA Director Gary Berlin is becoming an operations manager, and it appears he’s going to eventually step aside.

World Trout Coughs Up $$

An email from the folks at the World Trout Initiative wanted it known they just threw down $75,000 for eight conservation projects:

Ventura, CA (January 12, 2010) Patagonia, Inc, the outdoor gear and technical apparel company announced today their World Trout initiative has issued eight grants totaling $75,000 to global grassroots groups whose diverse efforts to protect and enhance fish and their habitat around the world exemplify the philosophy of World Trout.

Grant recipients include the Wild Salmon Center at $10,00 for their Koppi River Salmon Diversity project; Pacific Rivers Council at $8,000 for their Umpqua River Legacy Program; Truckee River Watershed Council, who’s efforts on Lahontan Cutthroat Trout Restoration received $15,000; Takshanuk Watershed council was allocated $10,000 for completion of their water rights reservations initiatives; Bahamian-based Friends of the Environment was the recipient of $8,000 for their sustainable crawfish campaign, Henry’s Fork Foundation’s film, Watershed, which is about impressive hands-on projects completed over the past 25 years, was allotted $3,000 to help distribute this informative film to anglers and other grassroots groups in the hopes these efforts can be replicated; Bonefish and Tarpon Trust’s research on critical tarpon habitat received $15,000 and Italian group Societa Valsesiana Pescatori Sportivi was sent $8,000 for enhancement of their threatened grayling habitat.

Want to know more about World Trout – or maybe snag a little of their dosh for your project? Click here.

Rhode Island Catch & Release Site

A site (and group) dedicated to seeing more catch & release waters in the state of Rhode Island (there are currently only one) has been formed (it’s a nice looking site too).

Think You’re a Trout Bum?

The phrase “trout bum” has become overused to the point that it’s lost all meaning – especially among those who actually have jobs, or worse – trust funds.

Here’s the story of ski bum who frankly puts everyone else to shame – and how the police are mishandling his situation. It’s not all that pretty…

Toups’ tale is the embodiment of ski bumdom. Since the 1970s, he has bummed at Mammoth in California, Snowbird in Utah, Oregon’s Mount Hood, Aspen Highlands and all the ski areas in Summit County. His home — for nearly a decade — was a Volkswagen Beetle, the passenger seat torn out so he could sleep.

“He had a little tunnel down to it like a snow cave,” said Halsted Morris, a longtime Loveland skier.

The story surrounding his recent arrest is not a pretty one, and suggests a heavy-handed approach by the police. Read it, and tell us what you think.

Enjoy Your Weekend!

Play, have fun. After the wear and tear of the last couple months – a hectic kind of time that’s had its lows right alongside its considerable highs – I may just take the whole weekend off from the Underground.

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

“It took a few seconds to sink in, but, sure enough, one end of the tube had been opened neatly with a sharp knife and there was nothing inside. It wasn’t a mistake and it wasn’t a joke. Maurer’s sense of humor is a little odd, but he wouldn’t do something like that.”

Later in his essay, Gierach says:

“I had thing for this rod because it had spoken to me, and because the one that had been in the now-empty shipping tube was serial number 001 of a model George calls the Trout Bum, an allusion to some old fishing book.

“So I stood on the porch, looking down into the empty tube, and after those few initial moments of disbelief, my first rational thought was, this was bound to happen.”

It’s a typically engrossing Gierach essay, and having worked with George Maurer on his rod-building Web site, I discovered exactly what Gierach meant about Maurer’s sense of humor.

A pair of George Maurer bamboo fly rods

Still, I admit to being surprised when I received an email from a man who said he had Gierach’s lost Maurer fly rod in his possession, and that he intended to auction it off to support Intermountain – a Montana children’s charity.

From his email:

A friend bought a container full of lost items from UPS and it was in there (at least 15 years ago). This friend gave the rod to his son after he learned to fly fish, but the son died in a car accident before he ever used it. The father gave it to a mutual friend – the man who taught the boy how to fly fish.

After some research, the new owner contacted Gierach to give him his famous rod, but Gierach said my friend should keep it since his friend technically paid for it.

My friend even has a letter signed by Gierach stating that he is, indeed, the rightful owner. The serial number is 001, and it’s still never been used. My friend has given it to me, or more appropriately to the charity I work for. He wants us to auction it off, with all of the proceeds going toward saving abused and neglected children.

I live in Western Montana, among some of the greatest trout streams in the World, and the current owner is the consummate fly fisherman, who also lives in this area. He already has a semi-parabolic bamboo rod that he loves, so he has no use for this rod other than for stories, which will no doubt be enhanced when he is able to add that the rod he once owned literally saved the lives of children.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen a photograph of the rod or any evidence of the letter mentioned above, but the whole story seems plausible enough to be the real thing. I’ll continue checking as I have the opportunity.

Still, has Gierach’s lost fly rod been found? And is it about to come to market a year after Underground Fave builder George Maurer’s unexpected death?

George Maurer inspecting bamboo in China

Perhaps. And yes, I’m tempted to cast this story in terms of one of fly fishing’s most-interesting literary mysteries – involving a famous writer and one of its most-famous bamboo rod builders – finally being put to rest.

And one wonders what price the rod might bring at auction. Any guesses from the Undergrounders?

More as it happens from the Trout Underground’s Breaking Bamboo-Related News Division.

(image courtesy [name redacted])

This weekend, I play Ride Director for the Shasta Summit Century bike ride. In addition to all the money the 700 riders spend in hotels and restaurants, we raise better than $26,000 – most of which goes to support a lot of severely underfunded youth sports in the area.

So the ride’s a good thing for this rural community – especially in a year when tourism isn’t exactly booming.

And yet – despite the massive goodness visited upon the community, and despite the fact I volunteer to run the ride, and despite the fact I just spent 2.5 weeks fly fishing in Maine and Montana – I feel cheated because I can’t walk back into the mountains and fly fish for brookies this weekend.

Several times this week, I forgot about the ride entirely, and planned a hike into the backcountry.

It sounds awful. I mean, I feel awful just saying it.

But there it is. Doing Good Deeds vs fly fishing is not exactly good vs evil, but it’s definitely good vs a far lesser good.

And guess what; I’m not alone. Pretty much every week, I get emails from people who – by any measure – live healthy, productive lives.

They’ve been blessed with good jobs, families who love them, excellent health (maybe even good hair, which is important)… and they’re still idly noodling with the idea of chucking it all and living in a shack in the mountains.

So what’s wrong with fly fishermen?

It would be easy to point a tippet-scarred finger at John Gierach’s Trout Bum, which opened the door to an alternative, fin-driven lifestyle.

Or perhaps fly fishermen are simply society’s low-level malcontents; we’re not quite strong enough to simply be content, but we know better than to grab a carbine and climb a tower.

Of course, this is part of the narrative where I start dispensing wisdom, but it’s Saturday morning, and I just don’t have time (I’ve got about 30 hours of ride-directing to do).

Instead, the Undergrounders get the floor.

The question isn’t “Why do we fly fish?”

It’s “Would we still dream about fly fishing if that’s all we did, or is a fulltime fly fishing lifestyle/paradise simply a mirage that fades away once we’ve arrived?”

Discuss.

– John Gierach, Fool’s Paradise

With sixteen fly fishing books to his credit – all of which have been continuously in print since their release – John Gierach might just be fly fishing’s most-read writer.

Twenty years have passed since the publication of Gierach’s eponymous Trout Bum — a book that remains the favorite of many Gierach fans — and while Gierach’s perspective has evolved, his style remains recognizably (and comfortably) his own.

In his newest book — Fool’s Paradise — Gierach’s facility for one-liners and wry observation from outside the mainstream remain undiminished, and he combines the two frequently:

“I’m still waiting for Americans to realize that being in constant communication is not an advantage, but a short leash. Cell phones have changed us from a nation of self-reliant pioneer types into a bunch of men standing alone in supermarkets saying ‘Okay, I’m in the the tampon aisle, but I don’t see it.’”

Later — at the start of one of my favorite chapters in the book (“Creeks”) — Gierach does it again with:

“While killing time in a Starbucks in Portland, Oregon, not long ago, I was idly eavesdropping on two businessmen when one — invoking the tired cliche — said that their problems might be solved if they could start thinking outside the box. The other, younger man replied, ‘Dude, there’s no box.’”

Some fans might be shocked to hear that Gierach spent time in a Starbucks, or that he’s softening his stance on bamboo rods to the point that he fished a graphite rod all week long on another road trip:

“So one afternoon I was happily casting a foam stonefly pattern on a graphite rod when our guide said, ‘You know, if this gets out, you could lose your charter membership in the Old Farts’ Club.’”

Of course, revealing snapshots of your life to strangers comes at a cost; our view of Gierach is partially one of a writer who existed 20 years ago, and in the meantime, Gierach has moved along in his life, and frankly, that’s part of the allure of reading his newer books.

I mean, exactly what is happening with AK, Mike Clark, Ed Engle and the rest of the gang?

I’m tempted to suggest the “theme” of Fool’s Paradise revolves around the concept of change, and I could back it up with a lot of carefully selected passages, but in truth, that’s the kind of thing a critic says out loud while an author scratches his head and wonders what book the guy was reading.

Still, Gierach’s recent books (Fool’s Paradise is his first in three years) recognize the fact he’s not 30 any more, and in places, he does what you’d expect anyone approaching 60 might do; he looks back on his life.

To Gierach’s credit, he does so with a sense of wonder:

“This is how time occasionally works. One minute you’re a thirteen-year-old drowning worms for bluegills because muskies are among the countless things that are out of your league; the next minute you’re a decently preserved fifty-eight and finally landing a muskie. Surely all kinds of things have happened in between, but at the moment, you can’t remember any of them.”

On a fishing trip to the Fryingpan River with Jim Babb, Gierach cops to the changes that have occurred since he became a trout bum, though he also recognizes the dangers of relying on his own memory:

“One afternoon between hatches, I even started in on how the fish used to be bigger here but lost steam after I saw Jim’s skeptical glance. It does seem true, but then over the years we’ve drifted away from the shoulder-to-shoulder hog holes up under the dam (the most famous one is known as the ‘the Toilet Bowl’) into lesser, but also less crowded, water downstream that we’ve since come to know and love. And when I go back over old photos and see that the Fryingpan fish don’t seem as big as I remember, it’s not entirely reasonable to assume that all the snapshots of the really big trout must have gotten lost.

“Jim listened to all this politely, understanding that the old-timer’s litany we all grew up hearing becomes irresistible once you realize that the list of things that just aren’t the same anymore will soon include you — if it doesn’t already.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is Gierach’s wholly readable style. I’ve often said he’s a deceptive writer; he folds keen observation and surprising insight into essays so readable that you arrive at the “a-ha!” moment without realizing he’s been herding you that way the last four pages.

Fool’s Paradise will no doubt be snapped up by Gierach’s faithful.

Those looking for fly fishing instruction will be disappointed, though anyone looking for insight into the fly fishing life — without the trappings of ego that cloud the writings of so many others — will find this is a typically enjoyable (and re-readable) collection of essays.

[Note: You can find the dates & locations of Gierach's book tour here]

Technorati Tags: john gierach,gierach,fools paradise,trout bum,book review

If you’re one of the lucky few who lives near the right city (the tour touches down in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, with a trip to Orvis in Vermont), then consider making plans to see fly fishing’s most popular writer.

It seems like a lifetime’s passed since I first read Gierach’s Trout Bum (late 1980s), and in one sense, it was a lifetime ago.

Back then, I lived in the kill-or-be-killed Silicon Valley, and today I live minutes from good trout water in a sparsely populated rural county.

I won’t pretend Gierach’s wholly responsible, but yeah, his books did suggest there was an alternative to slowly growing heavier, angrier and more desperate in the grip of "civilization," and though I didn’t make a play for the whole trout bum lifestyle, I worked things out well enough to get a little chunk of it.

My favorite Gierach book? The answer varies almost hourly, but I seem to keep returning to Even Brook Trout Gets the Blues, mostly for the title essay.

What about the Undergrounders? Can you pick a favorite Gierach title?

See you at the bookshelves, Tom Chandler.