Write What Is Important (But Who Am I To Say)

I have just finished a four week writer’s workshop with 21 of the most incredible teachers. What I saw was dedication to their craft, commitment to their students, and a desire to be better writers. Ultimately, these three add up to an investment in their own humanity, and mine, and the increased sense of our students’ connection to the world.


Post writing class, I have been in the fishing loop. Cole and I fished the Gallatin on Sunday, and I caught a 9” brown on a Goddard caddis and rainbow about the same. Cole had 5 inch ‘bows chasing his flies all over the river, but they were hard to hook.

Today I drove to Ennis to see my 15 year old son Kerby, and we went to our regular lunch spot the Pharmacy, and I finally tried the sour cream chive fries, and had the special of chicken sandwich on sourdough bun, and he had the cheeseburger. I am amazed, not at how much he can eat, but how easy going he is, how grown up he is, and how huge his feet are. He told me today he feels like a bum because he just gets up and puts on clothes. He has been wearing a Dodge headband he found. I like that about my son. In a couple days he leaves for Palo Alto, CA to Stanford for a debate camp. He’s excited about that, but he is normal, and Great America and $5 pizzas are also really exciting. I love all those things about my son as well.

Arriving back in Bozeman, I washed the Explorer, and found Louis in front of me in his company car "Rainy" at the westbound light at Four Corners. I called him, and through the rear window of his Suburban, I watched him lift the phone to his ear as he answered "Hey Jeff". I asked him to look behind him- surprise!  Within a couple of sentences he said he really wants to go fishing.

Now that I have had some time, I have been doing some reading for my doctoral work. Lately I read Paul Schullery’s If Fish Could Scream which blew my mind, and today I have picking through John Holt’s Knee Deep in Montana’s Trout Streams. When I checked this latter book out for the year I am allowed as a graduate student, I had no idea how much it would read as a guide book. Holt spends a lot of time in the 19 year old book telling anglers how to catch Montana trout in places I have not fished. I recoil at the pedantic nature of the book.

However, there is one chapter that really carried some substance. In “Clark Fork River (Upper Section)” Holt finally gets into what is important. Olive wooly buggers on the Musselshell, or tiny nymphs on the Big Horn are not odd. However, what is important is what humans, (what MAN) have done to major river drainages in the west in the quest to conquer and prosper. In this chapter, he describes the devastation of the Clark Fork drainage, which includes the Rock Creek valley, all the way down to the Columbia River valley and ultimately the Pacific Ocean. In human kind’s quests for progress, electrifying the world, we also created an ecosystem disaster, and Holt nymphs deeply about that.

The rest of the chapters I have read so far “Big Spring Creek” “Big Horn River”, “Gallatin River”, barely describe what is really important in fly fishing now. In the chapter on the Big Horn, he complains about the crowds, but does nothing in regard to the tribal implications of thousands of white men fishing tribal water. To me, that is huge in 2010, and maybe in 1991 it wasn’t. Actually, in 1991 it was, but minds weren’t ready.

Like a lot of old fishing books, we see a snapshot of time, when minds in America weren’t ready for the next step, the next lifting of the veil. Where my work will lead me I am not sure, but I hope my polarized shades can cut through the glare of centuries, and see things for what they are, or ought to be.