John Gierach Quotes

Sure, it was your idea and your fly, but he caught the big fish. Remember, fairness is a human idea largely unknown in nature.

If people don't occasionally walk away from you shaking their heads, you're doing something wrong.

Really, the only thing a psychiatrist can do that a good (fishing) guide can't is write prescriptions.

A couple of hundred dollars for a fishing pole!?¨ You'll hear that all the time if you don't keep your mouth shut in certain company. You can talk about the aesthetics and even mention a cane rod will appreciate in value while a new graphite rod will depreciate, but the best thing to do is turn around and say, ¨$9,000.00 for a car? I only paid $500.00 for mine.

Trout are among those creatures who are one hell of a lot prettier than they need to be. They can get you to wondering about the hidden workings of reality.

There are people in my life who sometimes worry about me when I go off into the fields and streams, not realizing that the country is a calm, gracious, forgiving place and that the real dangers are found in the civilization you have to pass through to get there. When

And never fall into that statistical macho trap that’s so prevalent in fly-fishing these days. If you keep score, you can be beaten, but if you refuse to compete you can leave the impression that you have long since risen above that kind of crap. When someone says to you, “I caught forty-eight trout and ten of them were twenty inches or better. How’d you do?” say, “Yeah, we got some. Couple nice ones, too.

Fishing has never lent itself to the kind of satisfaction on demand that technology has trained us to expect for the simple reason that fish don’t want to be caught and go to great lengths to avoid it. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to take up fly-fishing for the bragging rights alone; it’s better to see it as an acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives. Fishermen who care too much about the size and numbers of fish they catch are insufferable on good days and as harried as overworked executives on slow ones. On the other hand, it’s possible to be a happy angler who doesn’t catch many fish; it’s just that no one will ever say you’re good at it.

I understand that not everyone is so lucky; a precious few have it easier, but most have it harder. I might once have said that you make that kind of luck for yourself, and in some ways you do, but it’s just as often true that people end up where they are through no fault of their own and are then faced with making the best of it.

Rene Harrop’s Green Drake Biot Emerger, a

Sure, sometimes a non-angler will ask how I can stand to hook, play, and land these increasingly rare fish that I claim to love and respect so much, adding to their already heavy burden of survival. To that I can only say, “It’s because life is more complicated than either of us could ever imagine.” 21.

I noticed that at some point the strategy of hiking farther and the reality of getting older began to diverge in inconvenient ways. It sneaks up on you, but eventually a mile at altitude begins to feel like a mile and a half, then two miles, and so on.

Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America

Charles Waterman, Gerald Almy,

Dave Hughes, in his fine book An Angler’s Astoria, has

Once the runoff comes down in a normal year, the online readout from the gauging stations forms a gentle wave: up slightly at night as the day’s snowmelt reaches the gauge and down slightly during the day to reflect the cold, high-elevation nights. It looks like the slow heartbeat of a large animal at rest, disturbed only by the occasional thunderstorm.

At a certain age, you’ve made so many dumb mistakes that you’re able to identify the kind of faulty thinking that leads up to them,

For the moment at least, we fall into that class of fishermen who fancy themselves to be poet/philosophers, and from that vantage point we manage to pull off one of the neatest tricks in all of sport: the fewer fish we catch the more superior we feel. -----

but the rule here, as it is in Montana, is that you can fish through any private property as long as you stay in the streambed.

While you’re at it, get that straight in your own head, too. You want peace, quiet, wildlife, scenery, wild trout, and you don’t expect miracles

much

usually rather fish down than just

It was colored like a regular brown trout on the side facing the open stream, but the other side, the one facing the undercut, was an almost chocolate brown. It must take a long time—years—for that to happen.

It’s