Speaker 1: This is Me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely
Speaker 1: vote bitten in my case underwear listening podcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything, all right, John Arrack, I'm gonna start by
Speaker 1: kind of um, I'm gonna make you uncomfortable and butter
Speaker 1: you up. Uh you. I wanted to talk to you
Speaker 1: for for twenty years I think or what year to
Speaker 1: trout Bump come out, um, mid eighties, maybe six. I
Speaker 1: didn't discover it until a little bit later than that.
Speaker 1: But I've wanted to talk to you since I did.
Speaker 1: Because there's a thing like like that book, which was
Speaker 1: your first book, right, No, because you had you had
Speaker 1: the fly Fish in the High Countries before that. But
Speaker 1: troump Bomb fell into When I say our lap, I
Speaker 1: mean the lapse of me, my brothers and like our
Speaker 1: main hunting and fishing friends that we grew up with,
Speaker 1: and it fell into our lap at this time in life.
Speaker 1: That will always stick in my head because it was
Speaker 1: we're kind of coming out of coming out of college,
Speaker 1: being mid college, and there was just this uh tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of anxiety that was unspoken at the time, but
Speaker 1: there was sort of like a lot of there's just
Speaker 1: like like this palpable anxiety in the air about what
Speaker 1: we were all gonna what was gonna happen to us? All, yeah,
Speaker 1: like not like now right, No, I I just feel
Speaker 1: like I know better. I kind of like now I
Speaker 1: have anxiety about my kids. Right. But at the time,
Speaker 1: I just, yeah, I know, I kind of could picture
Speaker 1: it all. Now by the time I couldn't picture it.
Speaker 1: There was like a tremendous amount of anxiety. But there's
Speaker 1: a thing that we were just discovering, is that that
Speaker 1: we'd all grown up fishing all the time because our
Speaker 1: dad's fish. We just fished. But all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I was like, it seemed like there's so much possibility
Speaker 1: out in the world, and we were starting to to
Speaker 1: to screw around with traveling to go places and and
Speaker 1: just do nothing, and almost making a conscious decision to
Speaker 1: not have a lot of the material goods that you
Speaker 1: saw other people going towards at that age, because we
Speaker 1: were just really in love with just messing around with
Speaker 1: our friends and camping and pulling your money together to
Speaker 1: buy gas to go fish somewhere and doing these things
Speaker 1: that didn't make sense. And you're doing all this stuff
Speaker 1: that doesn't make sense and you felt like anxiety about
Speaker 1: it and some level of guilt about it because it
Speaker 1: didn't seem sustainable and seem foolish and childish. But we
Speaker 1: were so in love with how we were living. And
Speaker 1: then I read when your book came out, man, and
Speaker 1: I remember this so clearly, all these years later and
Speaker 1: all the things I've read since then, but it was
Speaker 1: like it made me feel like, oh my god, this
Speaker 1: is okay. Like this is a thing that people do
Speaker 1: and it happens to people, and there's like a way
Speaker 1: you can live your life like this. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, I recognize everything you said, except the guilt part.
Speaker 1: I never felt an ounce of guilt. You never had
Speaker 1: the guilt. You feel like. You grew up in a
Speaker 1: working class family though, Yeah, that didn't Robot. I mean
Speaker 1: not that you don't work. I mean you didn't have
Speaker 1: that sense of like that you needed to be do
Speaker 1: you needed to be doing something you didn't like. Well,
Speaker 1: I had the sense I needed to make a living,
Speaker 1: and I always did. I mean I worked all kinds
Speaker 1: of jobs. Um, even while I was writing, I worked
Speaker 1: a lot of odd jobs and part time jobs and
Speaker 1: full time jobs sometimes and just to get by because
Speaker 1: you were brought up in Ohio, right well, born in uh, Illinois,
Speaker 1: small town Illinois. Moved to Minnesota for a while, moved
Speaker 1: to Ohio. Dad worked for serious so we moved around. Uh.
Speaker 1: I was in Ohio for my last two years of
Speaker 1: high school, and then I went to college in Ohio,
Speaker 1: and then after that I was just I was in
Speaker 1: New York, I was in Colorado, I was in hate Ashbury,
Speaker 1: I was And you studied philosophy. Yeah, we like explain that.
Speaker 1: I don't even explain philosophy. What why? I mean, what
Speaker 1: kind of led you to that? Um? Well, I started
Speaker 1: out was an English major, and always hard for me
Speaker 1: to say that without thinking to Garrison Keeler now, But um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I didn't like the way they taught
Speaker 1: There's an arrogant thing to say, but I don't like
Speaker 1: the way they taught English literature. It was just, you know,
Speaker 1: it was like it was code and you were supposed
Speaker 1: to decode in and it was like they kept asking
Speaker 1: what does the author mean? And I kept asking why
Speaker 1: can't he just mean what he said? I remember that
Speaker 1: being I remember that being difficult too, and in the
Speaker 1: way they kind of march you through the timeline being
Speaker 1: frustrating as well. All right, we'll start with bail Wolf, yeah,
Speaker 1: and this year we'll make it to Shakespeare and then
Speaker 1: we'll pick up and yeah, yeah, talking about hitting meanings
Speaker 1: and like you'd read something and dig it, but then
Speaker 1: you felt like, well, I must not have really liked it,
Speaker 1: because when they asked me that for what it meant,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you what the symbolism was. I liked it.
Speaker 1: If that counts for anything. Yeah, well, you know I could.
Speaker 1: I can sort of do it now, but I've read
Speaker 1: probably thousands of books since then. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: you don't. I think you don't do enough reading. By
Speaker 1: the time you're studying English in college. I think you
Speaker 1: haven't done enough reading yet. Oh you mean like it's premature.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I mean you're you're just you're just being
Speaker 1: introduced to literature and you're being asked to look at
Speaker 1: it as deeply as anyone ever looks at it. And
Speaker 1: I think maybe you should. Maybe you should read for
Speaker 1: twenty years and then study English. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's only so much time. But yeah, I remember meet
Speaker 1: a guy I was fishing with, a late friend of
Speaker 1: mine on the big hole river. I'm sure you fished
Speaker 1: that river in Montana. We're on the Big Hole River.
Speaker 1: And we met a guy who had was explained as
Speaker 1: that he had been a doctor and had just recently retired,
Speaker 1: and the two things he was never able to do
Speaker 1: as a doctor was read and fish, And so now
Speaker 1: he was devoting his retirement to fishing in the morning,
Speaker 1: and then while he was still fresh of mind to
Speaker 1: go and read, and he had in his head that
Speaker 1: he was going to read even at the word he
Speaker 1: was he was going to read the Cannon. Yeah, struck
Speaker 1: me as like you'll probably get more out of it
Speaker 1: than I did when I read the Canon starting at
Speaker 1: eighteen years of age, exactly, exactly. Yeah, So you bumped
Speaker 1: the philosophy. Yeah, And was there like a thing you
Speaker 1: thought you were gonna go do with it? Like did
Speaker 1: you want to be a philosophy teacher? No? I mean
Speaker 1: I realized at some point that that was what you did, right, No,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't. I mean, if if if you
Speaker 1: were to get a degree in philosophy, that's the only
Speaker 1: outlet you're not gonna go. You're not gonna go home
Speaker 1: and hang out your shingle. You know, you're gonna be
Speaker 1: a teacher, that's it. Or you're gonna go to law
Speaker 1: school because law schools like philosophy majors because they could
Speaker 1: read complicated stuff and you figure out what it. Man.
Speaker 1: But I don't know, I was just never I wasn't
Speaker 1: on that track. It was man, birds banded against the window, yeah,
Speaker 1: dead know. No, I saw him going, He's all right,
Speaker 1: tis the five with him? Those were those were doves.
Speaker 1: We could have eaten them. So sorry. I just wasn't
Speaker 1: on a career track. It was his sixties and we
Speaker 1: were hippies and we weren't looking to go to the
Speaker 1: office every day. But you like to fish at that
Speaker 1: point too, because you grew up fishing. I did, but
Speaker 1: I didn't do much, um the last two years of
Speaker 1: high school and we lived in northern you know, Rush belt,
Speaker 1: northern Ohio. And then in college, I mean, it just
Speaker 1: wasn't fishing around. Yeah, let's just fishing bullheads and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah. And when I lived in northern Ohio, Um,
Speaker 1: that's when the Cuyahoga River caught fire every couple of
Speaker 1: years and Lake Erie would eat the paint off a
Speaker 1: ship's coming in. And nobody wants to fish in that
Speaker 1: she just didn't feel a strong connection to it there
Speaker 1: all the time, I feel any connection to it at all.
Speaker 1: When because if you're if your self described like that
Speaker 1: you were that you were hippi or affiliated with the counterculture,
Speaker 1: and we're familiar with fishing. Did you at the time
Speaker 1: were you reading uh like Trout Fishing in America by
Speaker 1: broad Again? I remember what year that came out, but
Speaker 1: that came out later. I did read it. What were
Speaker 1: your thoughts of that? And you know the Curtis Creek
Speaker 1: Manifesto and all that stuff. Um my thoughts, Well, you
Speaker 1: know I always like brought Again. Um he might be
Speaker 1: a little thin in retrospect, but I liked him at
Speaker 1: the time. Yeah. Broad Again's like, um, like Tom Robbins
Speaker 1: if you read Time, but but later you can't go retime,
Speaker 1: Like once you get in your forties and you have
Speaker 1: kids and stuff, you can't go like it doesn't hold upright,
Speaker 1: not like holy Ship, this guy's a genius. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of you kind of like, how did I used
Speaker 1: to think this was good? But broad Again is still
Speaker 1: funny though, Man, he is still funny. Yeah, didn't not
Speaker 1: have a funny end um So when so if you.
Speaker 1: Here's I guess what kind of driving at this I
Speaker 1: maybe I should just ask you, at what point did
Speaker 1: you At what point did you like make these connections?
Speaker 1: Like there is such a thing as a guy. There's
Speaker 1: such thing as a guy who writes about an activity
Speaker 1: like fishing, and if he is really good, can make
Speaker 1: it living at it. And I will shoot for that. Um.
Speaker 1: I was probably probably in the mid seventies, um, because
Speaker 1: you know, I got into fly fishing. I didn't get
Speaker 1: out of it. I didn't get into fly fishing until
Speaker 1: I came out West in my early twenties, late sixties,
Speaker 1: early seventies. I've never really seen it before. It's that
Speaker 1: in the Midwest you never saw people fly fishing. You
Speaker 1: do now, but you didn't then. And I just got
Speaker 1: into it for what I think were the purest reasons.
Speaker 1: I thought, that's beautiful. That's the prettiest thing I've ever seen,
Speaker 1: and I mean just the act of it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and people are catching fish and I thought that was
Speaker 1: just freaking beautiful. And was what was the year that
Speaker 1: you had that sort of thought or oh, eight sixties, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe seventy maybe, um. And at some point and I
Speaker 1: was still trying to be a serious writer. Dan. I
Speaker 1: had a little book of poetry and print. I was
Speaker 1: writing for a little literary magazines, and but I was
Speaker 1: fly fishing and I was reading fly Fisherman magazine. I
Speaker 1: don't think fly fishing the West was out, um, I
Speaker 1: think trout, salmon and steelheader was out. Then there weren't
Speaker 1: many and I just sort of of course. There were
Speaker 1: the you know, field and stream out theor life guys
Speaker 1: like Lee Wolf around, and I just thought, well, people
Speaker 1: do make a living at this. Did you feel like
Speaker 1: it was coarse and low because you want, because you
Speaker 1: were an aspiring poet. Did you feel like it was
Speaker 1: less artful to become like a a like a a
Speaker 1: writer with sort of a beat? You know? Not really?
Speaker 1: Not really? I mean there were people I knew at
Speaker 1: the time who thought it was I mean I had
Speaker 1: writer friends at the time who thought it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't like the fine arts. Yeah, yeah, And maybe it's
Speaker 1: not to like the fine arts. I don't know. Well
Speaker 1: for most it's not. But I think that the reason,
Speaker 1: the reason that you're you, and the reason that you've
Speaker 1: been around so long and people like you so much,
Speaker 1: is that you're one of the one of the rare
Speaker 1: few who has transcended. Well, what it was was reading
Speaker 1: Tom mcgwain, Jim Harrison, Russ Chatham, some of those guys.
Speaker 1: And also you know, the new journalists were working in UM,
Speaker 1: Tom Wolf, Hunter, Thompson, Um, Peter Matheson, and they were
Speaker 1: they were sort of bringing literary techniques into what had
Speaker 1: normally been journalism up to now. They were becoming dropping
Speaker 1: the pretense of objectivity and becoming characters in their own
Speaker 1: stories and UM and writing in a stream of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, Electric Kuwaite acid test was not
Speaker 1: a news story about LSD. It was you know, a
Speaker 1: little deeper than that, and UM. But I think it
Speaker 1: was probably the single writer that showed me that this
Speaker 1: could be done as well as any other kind of writing,
Speaker 1: It could be just as as legitimates literature was Tom
Speaker 1: mcgwain and some of his earlier stuff. So you were
Speaker 1: reading his stuff then, yeah, like in Shade and some
Speaker 1: of them. I don't know if I was going to
Speaker 1: the earlier works. Yeah, but also his you know, he
Speaker 1: wrote for uh sports a Field or I don't know,
Speaker 1: he wrote for some of the magazines and Harrison back
Speaker 1: then like in the seventies, Harrison was doing hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing pieces for Sports Illustrated. Yeah, it's amazing. And that era,
Speaker 1: even though participation was not super high in this country,
Speaker 1: and that era the room that mainstream publications made for
Speaker 1: like cooking bullet right hook and bullet writing of the finest,
Speaker 1: highest caliber would find its way into very mainstream magazines.
Speaker 1: But that's all stuff that I've always been like like
Speaker 1: a thing that if if I look at sort of
Speaker 1: the stuff I've written and where it's been, I'm always
Speaker 1: kind of like proud of those moments when I've been
Speaker 1: able to take a wedge A thing about hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing in an unexpected location always feel like it's like,
Speaker 1: uh like counting coup almost, you know, to be able
Speaker 1: to stick it in somewhere or no one ever expect
Speaker 1: to see it. Just like being a sniper, like yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're shooting shooting stories instead of bullets. You know what,
Speaker 1: do you know? This is like a side out of
Speaker 1: any kind of chronology we're following with you, but you
Speaker 1: might have some perspective on it. One of the things
Speaker 1: that troubles me most about fishing writing is that why
Speaker 1: would why does spin tackle? Why why does spin tackle
Speaker 1: not spawn great writers? That's a mixed metaphor. Why does
Speaker 1: spin tackle spin fishing not produce the writers that fly
Speaker 1: fishing does. I kind of get it, but I don't
Speaker 1: get it. Um. I don't know. That's a good question
Speaker 1: I've never given in a moment's thought. But it could
Speaker 1: be just that writers tend to be attracted to fly
Speaker 1: fishing because it's you know, it's old, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of primitive, and it's complex, and the esthetics are complicated,
Speaker 1: and yeah, there's a lot to write about. And so
Speaker 1: you think it said like the writerly sensibility is drawn
Speaker 1: to fly fishing rather than like fly fishing inspires writers. Yeah. Maybe,
Speaker 1: Like I say, I've never I've never thought of it before,
Speaker 1: But you're right. Name name a great spin fishing writer
Speaker 1: like Gray wrote some pretty good pieces about now I
Speaker 1: it was mostly because, yeah, having he wrote about deep
Speaker 1: water well any and he wrote about fishing trout with
Speaker 1: worms too, um and Hopper's big two hardered river fishing
Speaker 1: live bait. So I mean, it's it's out there. But
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody would consider him away a fishing writer. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean he's definitely like informed by that, and I
Speaker 1: think that he's like recognized as being I mean he's
Speaker 1: as much of like he's recognized as much of a
Speaker 1: dude who liked to watch bullfights as he is the
Speaker 1: guy like the hunt fish. We definitely had that with
Speaker 1: the Zane gray fly fish. I don't know, I've only
Speaker 1: did like I think it was fishing Virgin Sees is
Speaker 1: the book I have at home, And yeah, well he
Speaker 1: did some steelheading too, But he not only was just
Speaker 1: a writing about it, he was like an innovator of
Speaker 1: tackle and equipment. I mean he goes into great depth
Speaker 1: describing like making custom line back when he they didn't
Speaker 1: have line they could hold up to an eight pound marlin.
Speaker 1: And then the great depths that he went to to
Speaker 1: have this line, or the products shipped from you know,
Speaker 1: who knows where, and then it was you know, spun
Speaker 1: somewhere else, and then you do all these tests and
Speaker 1: still the big ones would get away. But he was hardcore.
Speaker 1: He was just he wasn't just a trigger man, know,
Speaker 1: he was into it. What was the first do you recollect?
Speaker 1: What year was the first year that you wrote a
Speaker 1: fishing piece where you looked at and thought like, that's
Speaker 1: not technical writing, it's not how to it's like a
Speaker 1: piece of art about fishing. And then that you published,
Speaker 1: Um well, I think I felt that about uh the
Speaker 1: SSA Asian trout bum so and they were not you know,
Speaker 1: it came out and s where it was eighty six.
Speaker 1: So probably by the late seventies I was starting to
Speaker 1: do that, like the writing things. You're like, this is
Speaker 1: what I want to do, and I just did that.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, yeah, And you were placing them where I
Speaker 1: was placing them in in fishing magazines. I was in
Speaker 1: Sports of Field, Field and Stream Fly Fisherman um now
Speaker 1: defunct magazine called fly Fishing the West. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: think fly ron um fly Rod and Reel was still
Speaker 1: Rod and Reel. Then John Merwin had it recognize that
Speaker 1: name published in there and here and there, and those
Speaker 1: could not have been uh those couldn't have been huge
Speaker 1: paychecks in those places. So you kind of knew that
Speaker 1: you probably you probably knew that you had to go
Speaker 1: toward books. Um well, I wanted to go towards the books.
Speaker 1: I think all writers want to see their name on
Speaker 1: the cover of a book, right, don't you. I mean
Speaker 1: magazines see someone else's name on the cover of my book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: magazines come and go. Newspapers. I had a fight with
Speaker 1: my I used to write outdoor column for the newspaper
Speaker 1: for twenty eight years. I want, I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about that book. They totally screwed up one of
Speaker 1: my columns. It doesn't matter why, but they totally mucked
Speaker 1: it up. And uh. I called my editor and yelled
Speaker 1: at him, and he said, hold on, but what does
Speaker 1: that mean? Like, what did it what what happened to it? Well,
Speaker 1: they they they ran it in four columns, four vertical
Speaker 1: columns at the top of the page. But the columns
Speaker 1: weren't in the right order, got you, So it read
Speaker 1: like gibberish, okay, And I called and yelled at him,
Speaker 1: and he said, man, that was yesterday. It's on the
Speaker 1: bottom of a bird cage by now. So it's the
Speaker 1: shitty feelings. Yeah, but he's right. Yeah, but it's like
Speaker 1: it's painful to articulate it that way though, But there's
Speaker 1: the truth to it. But that's that's that's newspapers, newspapers.
Speaker 1: That's the problem with newspapers and magazines. If you're gonna
Speaker 1: bring up the idea of having your name on the book.
Speaker 1: Because I've considered myself like a pretty careful reader, okay,
Speaker 1: and I'm aware of the publishing world, and i pay
Speaker 1: attention to what's going on. I'll read pieces and uh
Speaker 1: later some and be like, uh, who wrote the piece?
Speaker 1: Like you know what, you don't know. As much as
Speaker 1: I've spent my life pursuing this and in this business,
Speaker 1: I never looked. And then you imagine that. And if
Speaker 1: you think of yourself as like a careful reader who
Speaker 1: is paying attention, and you imagine how most people will
Speaker 1: perceive it, it winds up. It winds up. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes you hungry for something that um, it makes you
Speaker 1: hungry for something that's more that you could just like
Speaker 1: continue to point to it as this thing that you
Speaker 1: did because it sounds shallow in some ways in vain.
Speaker 1: But people do want to be like recognized for their work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And um, you know, I wouldn't be the first writer
Speaker 1: that was shallow in vain, right, No, No, there wasn't
Speaker 1: a little hint of it. You wouldn't be a writer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we do shine our work, right, we could.
Speaker 1: We could all write under a pseudonym and be anonymous,
Speaker 1: but we don't not many of us do. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just And the other thing is, I mean people
Speaker 1: are gonna somebody reads a book and likes it. They're
Speaker 1: gonna remember who wrote it. And a book could conceivably
Speaker 1: last no ar in tees. But you know a book
Speaker 1: could last whereas a magazine. Right, it's gonna end up
Speaker 1: on the coffee table in the dentist's office eventually, and
Speaker 1: then it's gonna get recycled and it's gonna be going.
Speaker 1: People don't retain them. Well, some people do. Some people
Speaker 1: save every issue with some magazine, but I mean not
Speaker 1: like they retain a book. Man, you were done reading
Speaker 1: the book, they don't throw in the garbage. They go
Speaker 1: bring it to a donation center. Well, or they put
Speaker 1: it in the bookshelf. If you saw in my office,
Speaker 1: I don't know how many books I have down here.
Speaker 1: When you like when you came out with your where
Speaker 1: your were your first book? And then men, you I
Speaker 1: know many of yourself school books and you can cry
Speaker 1: if it's in fact all of them are collected pieces.
Speaker 1: Do all of your books appear in print before they
Speaker 1: go into your books, or do you have the original
Speaker 1: material that appeared nowhere else that goes into your books. Uh,
Speaker 1: there has been original material that appeared nowhere else, and
Speaker 1: most of the stuff that was originally published somewhere else
Speaker 1: has been expanded and into a book chapter. Have you
Speaker 1: ever thought about like, like, why is that you haven't
Speaker 1: done um, like like a full narrative book. I did
Speaker 1: um at the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman. Kay, tell
Speaker 1: me about that book, like what that was like doing
Speaker 1: or what was like doing that book? It was, um,
Speaker 1: you know, it was one of those uh seasons of
Speaker 1: the Angler thing. I mean it was it was a
Speaker 1: fourth season thing. And I just had this idea that
Speaker 1: that would be the way to to do a book
Speaker 1: is to go through the seasons and U and I
Speaker 1: wrote the chapters as essays and I published most of
Speaker 1: them in in magazines and then collected them into a book.
Speaker 1: The thing about that's think about your writing that, uh
Speaker 1: what does that kind of admire most about it is
Speaker 1: even like the books, your books are often collections of
Speaker 1: of pieces that that that are free standing pieces like
Speaker 1: that they make sense and work in a free standing
Speaker 1: form like chapter length form. But throughout it is this
Speaker 1: is this broader story of you in your life and
Speaker 1: your friends and one of the things that most strikes me,
Speaker 1: and it is that that the the affection and love
Speaker 1: you have for friends that have been your friends for
Speaker 1: a long time and you come to kind of know them,
Speaker 1: and you have a way of really capturing this long
Speaker 1: arc of friendship and how it works and goes from
Speaker 1: you being young and then you're kind of not young
Speaker 1: right together, and then you're all kind of like past
Speaker 1: some tipping point headed in another direction together and it
Speaker 1: does together create this sense of that it is this
Speaker 1: long meta narrative. And another thing that happens that that
Speaker 1: was really striking me with your new book is that
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it like you're always somewhere else, right,
Speaker 1: You're always on trips, travel. It seems like you travel incessantly,
Speaker 1: and then a flyer out of your own you're gone.
Speaker 1: You're you spent a lot of time in Labrador, you're
Speaker 1: up in Alaska, you're fishing around Colorado. I think you're
Speaker 1: in Washington, you spend time in Idaho. An you nowhere
Speaker 1: else in your new book. But while this is going on,
Speaker 1: there's like this life that you're having where your mother's dying. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: there's a big forest fire ripping by your house and
Speaker 1: you're on this trip in Maine checking in back home,
Speaker 1: and there's like chores that didn't get taken care of
Speaker 1: back home, and there's a flood that destroys people. You're
Speaker 1: the property of people that you're close with back home.
Speaker 1: And I think that a lot of writers, like like
Speaker 1: with travel writing is sort of it's that you're just
Speaker 1: immersing the experience, but you do well. I think a
Speaker 1: capturing all just like the nagging ship that you cannot
Speaker 1: escape from. Like I used to joke that I used
Speaker 1: to joke about that if you look at like what
Speaker 1: what a writer writes was in a writer's head, they
Speaker 1: don't match up. Because if you spend a bunch of
Speaker 1: times somewhere and you're writing about it, you're're just like
Speaker 1: really cherry picking the opportunities. An example would be we
Speaker 1: do a show where an episode of the show is
Speaker 1: twenty two minutes long, but we'll go out how many
Speaker 1: hours will be honest, how many hours of footage would
Speaker 1: be filmed? It's a hundred of one most of the times,
Speaker 1: hundred of one ratio. Now, when you go and put
Speaker 1: the together, if you go on a on a trip
Speaker 1: and you're gone four or five days and you put
Speaker 1: together twenty two minutes. You are like cherry picking. You're
Speaker 1: not creating a representation of what exactly happened there, because
Speaker 1: if you were, for every two minutes that you watched,
Speaker 1: there'd be one minute where you're watching people sleep. So
Speaker 1: you are doing like there's a there's a fiction to
Speaker 1: nonfiction and that you're waiting things and talking about what's
Speaker 1: of interest. Oh yeah, well and you're not. You're not
Speaker 1: only doing that, but you're you're pulling in you're pulling
Speaker 1: in memories, You're you're changing time. You know, time isn't
Speaker 1: always uh linear, Yeah, and you certainly don't. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the things that like the craft of your
Speaker 1: writing too, is you're not you're not deceptive about chronology,
Speaker 1: but you're just very good at like occasionally vague about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was just like when you get done, when you're
Speaker 1: back from something, I think that you're not really concerned
Speaker 1: with what did this and then this and this and this.
Speaker 1: I think you're more concerned about here's the flow of
Speaker 1: my ideas and and and I'm not gonna be I
Speaker 1: don't need to tell you like this happened, and that happened,
Speaker 1: and this happened, that happened necessarily in that order. So
Speaker 1: and Ames, I'll see, like I'll be cruising along in
Speaker 1: one of your pieces and I'll all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: like whatever, you flip the page, you realize it's about
Speaker 1: to end, and I'll think, my god, how is he
Speaker 1: gonna He doesn't have enough space left to get us
Speaker 1: back out of here right right to do all the
Speaker 1: ship to get on the airplanes and low like there's
Speaker 1: no space. And then you're all of a sudden, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you're just like, and that's all I
Speaker 1: have to say about that subject, and it's just refreshing. Well,
Speaker 1: it's why you never see anybody in the movies go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom. Well, yeah, but he dies, he gets
Speaker 1: shot in the bathroom. But um, I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: assumed that people go to the bathroom throughout the movie.
Speaker 1: But you don't have to see it exactly. You don't
Speaker 1: have to tell everybody everything you're telling what's worth telling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but you know so, so I'm kind of saying
Speaker 1: two things that are cross ways a little bit, because
Speaker 1: you do great with that, and you do great with
Speaker 1: delivering a version of a story that's most useful to
Speaker 1: the reader to get the reader where you want them
Speaker 1: to go. But in that calculation that you're making, you're
Speaker 1: also not abandoning all sense, because you get the sense
Speaker 1: and reading your work that you're still always very aware
Speaker 1: of the world that you left behind when you went somewhere.
Speaker 1: Well you are, aren't you? Absolutely? And and and uh,
Speaker 1: but I think all people are. But I don't know
Speaker 1: that many people have really embrace it and is done
Speaker 1: as well as you've done it, where you can be
Speaker 1: writing about a trip you're on, but also you're writing
Speaker 1: about this kind of like the loss of your mother
Speaker 1: and the weird family stuff that goes around the death
Speaker 1: of a family member and what do you're obligations to
Speaker 1: everyone when that happens. But it's all occurring sort of
Speaker 1: like this, like humming noise in your head while you fish,
Speaker 1: Like when you're out of town and you know something
Speaker 1: bad is happening at home, you can't escape it. In
Speaker 1: the rhythm with which you go from being in the
Speaker 1: moment to being, oh, ship, there's a big fire by
Speaker 1: my house on the other you know, miles away. It's
Speaker 1: really it's impressive. Well, it's stream of consciousness and it's
Speaker 1: more like it's scream of consciousness. Writing seems familiar to
Speaker 1: people because it's how people think. That's a good point,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't You don't spend an hour thinking
Speaker 1: about one thing. You spend an hour bouncing around about
Speaker 1: twenty things. And if you're writing seventeen of those things
Speaker 1: that are of no interest to anyone, so you leave
Speaker 1: him out. Yeah, but you you bounce around and uh um,
Speaker 1: you know you're someplace here, you're someplace on a fishing trip.
Speaker 1: You see something that reminds you of something that happens
Speaker 1: at home, or somebody you haven't talked to at home
Speaker 1: or whatever. And that's how people think, and so they
Speaker 1: recognize that in a piece of writing, what is your
Speaker 1: what is your gauge? How do you know? Like when
Speaker 1: you get into something that's not interesting, the seventeen things
Speaker 1: that aren't interesting to other people? Who who are what
Speaker 1: are you imagining to know? When you've gotten there, that
Speaker 1: you're now in the things that are of interest only
Speaker 1: to John girok Um, Well, it's somebody I think. This
Speaker 1: was actually my old high school English teacher said, every
Speaker 1: time you say something as a writer, you have to
Speaker 1: ask yourself. Okay, But who gives a ship. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so you just do that. You say, why would anyone
Speaker 1: care about this? Well, no one would, So let's skip
Speaker 1: this and go on to the next thing that might
Speaker 1: interest someone. I mean, it takes a tremendous it really
Speaker 1: takes a tremendous ego to assume that anything at all
Speaker 1: you have to say would be of interest to anyone else.
Speaker 1: And so you understand you're really out there exposed. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're spilling your guts to people, and the least you
Speaker 1: can do is to try to do it well and
Speaker 1: in a way that's useful to them. That's the thing, too,
Speaker 1: is that that I find that you do well, and
Speaker 1: I don't know if you mean to do it well
Speaker 1: as you do as muchs I thought about like being
Speaker 1: like transcendent in writing or transcending genre writing and turning
Speaker 1: it into turning it into art and something that's beautiful
Speaker 1: and that can move people emotionally or make them reconsider
Speaker 1: the world in their place in it. You also have
Speaker 1: you do you also deal in the technical m hmm.
Speaker 1: There's the thing I read in your new book that
Speaker 1: had never occurred to me before, where um, I can't remember,
Speaker 1: I can't remember what piece it was in, but you'll
Speaker 1: you'll remember just when I bring it up. Is that
Speaker 1: let me approach this a different way. If I'm standing
Speaker 1: on a riverbank, okay, and I see a fish a
Speaker 1: trout rise, I'll be like, there's a trout, okay, and
Speaker 1: then I'll see, let's say I'm slightly down I'm looking
Speaker 1: like downstream, I'm I'm facing the river. I'm looking downstream
Speaker 1: towards ten o'clock and like there's a trout, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, a complements later. Fish rises at
Speaker 1: two o'clock. I say, there's another one, and then one
Speaker 1: goes at noon, and I'll be like, another one. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't until reading your recent book that occurred to
Speaker 1: me that that could be a fish who's moving around
Speaker 1: just like like, I get it now, but it's like
Speaker 1: never conceptually, I always would have been like one, two
Speaker 1: three trout. Yeah, I see that he's he's like actively
Speaker 1: going back and forth through some area, a ating the
Speaker 1: illusion that most guys would come and think goes a
Speaker 1: shipload of trout. I figured that out on the Henry's
Speaker 1: four years ago. He's big trout would get in a run,
Speaker 1: usually not drakes, but but smaller bugs, and they would
Speaker 1: just they they drift down a run and they just
Speaker 1: eat one here, and they'd move up and eat one there,
Speaker 1: and they're might eat five bugs and then they just
Speaker 1: dropped down and just drop back and do it again.
Speaker 1: And your first thought is there are shicks, big rainbows
Speaker 1: in here. Oh yeah, and you're still casting to where
Speaker 1: the one went, because he and you, even though you
Speaker 1: know a fish move all over place. You talk about
Speaker 1: everything in a laborator, or they put a some kind
Speaker 1: of tracking mechanism or tag on a brook trout that
Speaker 1: traveled thirty miles up river. Yeah, but like I get
Speaker 1: that intellectually, like I understand that. But and looking at
Speaker 1: like when a fish rise is somehow I realized this
Speaker 1: is funny. Now, all these years I've sat there, I've
Speaker 1: imagined him somehow being like static in space. So often
Speaker 1: they are, Yeah, a lot of times they are. They
Speaker 1: really is just there. They just fish do whatever they
Speaker 1: need to do to survive and flourish, whatever they need
Speaker 1: to do within reason. They can't get out on walk
Speaker 1: on land, but some of them stay in a half
Speaker 1: mile of stream your whole life. Some of them go
Speaker 1: out to the ocean, swim to the shape Japan and
Speaker 1: eat trump. You know, they just do what they want,
Speaker 1: They do what they need to do. Is that like,
Speaker 1: is understanding that kind of keep you going as a
Speaker 1: fishing excited? I mean, I know you obviously fish because
Speaker 1: that's your it's become your livelihood, right, so so there's
Speaker 1: that extra bit of motivation. But like, how do you really, um, like,
Speaker 1: what keeps you fishing? Because you kind of write about
Speaker 1: fishing in some of these same places where you've been
Speaker 1: fishing the same places for decades. Well, because you never
Speaker 1: quite get it right, the same thing that keeps you writing.
Speaker 1: I mean, you might do well at it, but you're
Speaker 1: never going to completely do it right or exhaust the subject.
Speaker 1: And it's fine, so you keep doing it. It's pretty simple. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you feel like you've never like you can't like
Speaker 1: you've never mastered anything with fishing, fishing or writing or
Speaker 1: anything else anything else worth doing. Yeah, you have a
Speaker 1: line in one of your books, in an earlier book
Speaker 1: I read, and you also mentioned in your new book
Speaker 1: this idea that um that there's when it comes to
Speaker 1: fishing and I and I've I've quoted you on this
Speaker 1: in a number of times, even to some audiences where uh,
Speaker 1: he's saying fishing there. You tend to view the world
Speaker 1: there's as your's, your party and then the assholes. But
Speaker 1: it's what's funny when I read that from you, is that, um,
Speaker 1: everybody does that, but it was funny like a guy
Speaker 1: like you, though, as you're producing all this beautiful work
Speaker 1: for the consumption of obviously the assholes like you, hope
Speaker 1: to sell books beyond your immediate social circle. So it
Speaker 1: just like brings up this interesting idea of like, how
Speaker 1: like I generally in life, right, I want like when
Speaker 1: I look at politically and culturally in the country, sort
Speaker 1: of the question I asked myself when I look at
Speaker 1: things that are going on, I'm like, what's good for
Speaker 1: what's best for hunters and fishermen. It's just like, like
Speaker 1: I feel that the obligation personally and I feel that
Speaker 1: obligation professionally to kind of look at that ends of
Speaker 1: like what if this is what what's good for hunters
Speaker 1: and fishermen in America on this issue? I have that,
Speaker 1: But I also have the feeling of when you pull
Speaker 1: in and you're there's a truck there where you're going
Speaker 1: and you're like, son of a bit. Yeah, I hate
Speaker 1: that guy. It's it's just a it's it's like a
Speaker 1: funny thing of perception. Yeah yeah, but she everybody else
Speaker 1: thinks that too. I mean, if I pull up in
Speaker 1: a river and go, well, look look at look, there's
Speaker 1: an asshole standing in my pool, he looks back at
Speaker 1: me and my pickup truck and goes, well, that asshole
Speaker 1: wants my pool. We all we all do it, and
Speaker 1: and it's like, what's your take on it? And what
Speaker 1: do you think about it? Much? It's just like just
Speaker 1: a natural thing. It's just a natural thing. And if
Speaker 1: you just go talk to the guy you want to
Speaker 1: be loving him. Yeah, I mean, if you just you know,
Speaker 1: I've had people come up and stand while I was
Speaker 1: fishing and and I say, you want to end, I'll
Speaker 1: go to the next pool. Do you have a sort
Speaker 1: of of a composite kind of individual or a friend
Speaker 1: or whatever that when you're writing, you imagine yourself that
Speaker 1: that they're your bullshit gauge. Yeah, they're that, they're who
Speaker 1: you're talking to. I do, I do. I mean it
Speaker 1: changes from time to time, but um I developed this trick,
Speaker 1: you know, I wrote, um a column a week for
Speaker 1: twenty eight years. I can't do the math. But there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stinking columns in the newspaper, but mostly
Speaker 1: about fishing, some some hunting, some other stuff. And you know,
Speaker 1: I I started out when I was pretty young, and
Speaker 1: I kind of struggled with the style I wanted. I
Speaker 1: always wanted to write in a very conversational style. And
Speaker 1: I had this running correspondence with my my oldest continuous
Speaker 1: friend at angle, who's also a fishing writer, and we
Speaker 1: were we were also poetched together back in the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's worked for the Fourth Service. He's a he's
Speaker 1: a fantastic outdoorsman. But um, I just and we had
Speaker 1: this correspondence and it was it just flowed like water.
Speaker 1: And I one day, just on a whim, I was
Speaker 1: going to write a story about I don't know, going
Speaker 1: fishing somewhere, and I just typed dear head, and I
Speaker 1: just told the story like I was writing to Ed,
Speaker 1: except you know, like slightly more in complete sentences and
Speaker 1: less perfect fulfill obligations yea to the reader. Um. And
Speaker 1: then when I was done, I scratched out dear ed
Speaker 1: and that was it, right, Yeah, good East always gave me.
Speaker 1: You know, we were right in the guy book, you'd say, yeah,
Speaker 1: just imagine you're at the bar with when your buddies
Speaker 1: doesn't know quite as much about the subject as you do.
Speaker 1: You had a beer too, You're feeling, you know, pretty loose.
Speaker 1: You can, you can roll it all out fast, and
Speaker 1: then imagine you're just gonna deliver that content to that person. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I's similar to that. I remember in in in writing
Speaker 1: school and in graduate school, I would turn in, you know,
Speaker 1: these pieces and workshop and I was working on magazine
Speaker 1: pieces that I later published in Uh. A teacher became
Speaker 1: a very dear friend of mine, dear to name or
Speaker 1: a novelist. She would say she would look at and
Speaker 1: me like, now it's now you're like writing. Yeah, now
Speaker 1: you're writing, and it's annoying to me. You know. It
Speaker 1: was better when I felt that you were like telling
Speaker 1: me something, you know, because you're slipping into this thing
Speaker 1: how you imagine a writer would sound. Tom Wolfe gave
Speaker 1: a series of lectures somewhere Princeton or somewhere, and I,
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, had him, and I listened to him,
Speaker 1: and he said a great thing. He said that his
Speaker 1: students he'd hear him are on campus, and he said,
Speaker 1: they just they spoke so easily, and they had this
Speaker 1: real facility with language and slang, and they were playful.
Speaker 1: And then he said, you get them in a writing
Speaker 1: class and they write like their Victorian lawyers, with all
Speaker 1: these here here to fours and whereases and stuff. He said,
Speaker 1: My my job was to say, you already play the instrument,
Speaker 1: just write it down. You know, you've been talking for
Speaker 1: twenty years. You know how to have a conversation. Just
Speaker 1: write it down. But it's not a given that everyone
Speaker 1: knows how to have a conversation. But I think that
Speaker 1: it's a given that most people who go into the
Speaker 1: field probably come from that because they have sort of
Speaker 1: like a love of X, a love of of like
Speaker 1: explaining telling for the bullshit thing that I'm talking about,
Speaker 1: which probably the same thing like your friend ed is.
Speaker 1: I have in my head like anything I do, like
Speaker 1: whatever kind of media might be dealing with in the moment,
Speaker 1: I always imagine I always try to imagine that the
Speaker 1: response of my two older brothers and gauging like if
Speaker 1: I like, if I'm doing good, It's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that I would hope that they would stumble across
Speaker 1: if I'm not being my best self. It's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing where I'm like, I hope those guys don't
Speaker 1: stumble across this. Yeah, and that is and that to
Speaker 1: me is like worked well as as a guide. But
Speaker 1: I don't think everyone has the luxury of having older
Speaker 1: brothers who are interested in the same ship they're interested in,
Speaker 1: which I realized is a luxury. You know, it is
Speaker 1: a luxury. The luxury I've had is I've had some
Speaker 1: really good colleagues and teachers who've taught me things about writing,
Speaker 1: and um, often not much, but but just a little
Speaker 1: piece that I can put together. Um. I always think
Speaker 1: of that because he's a he's a withering critic. He's
Speaker 1: really just cut you down the size. He once said
Speaker 1: of trump Bum. Somebody asked him how he liked trout Bum,
Speaker 1: and he said, well, I said, I think it makes
Speaker 1: up in enthusiasm what it ll action quality. Ouch. I
Speaker 1: don't know, man, I see from your perspective that might
Speaker 1: be bad. But here's the thing, like a word that
Speaker 1: sticks in my head for not not just traumdum, but
Speaker 1: but all your books is just like an exuberance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you really like I don't know
Speaker 1: if you really like life and being alive as much
Speaker 1: as yourself on the page does. But there's an infectious
Speaker 1: enthusiasm for just being alive. Well, not that you paint,
Speaker 1: but it's not like you paint it as just it's
Speaker 1: not like you paint being alive is just like nothing
Speaker 1: but just good times and laughs, because being alive is
Speaker 1: in some ways it's a struggle in a hassle. But
Speaker 1: you paint being alive is like something that's really worth doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well don't you think it is? Yeah, But I think
Speaker 1: it's also easy to fall under trap where you lose
Speaker 1: sight of how worthwhile it all is. Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: or that you don't take time to have to say
Speaker 1: to yourself, like, my god, is it worthwhile being alive? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you can have weeks go by without realizing that,
Speaker 1: and it's like one of the beauties of the natural
Speaker 1: world is like for me, the reminder I get it
Speaker 1: through my kids now because I have young kids, But
Speaker 1: for me a long time, the only real genuine reminder
Speaker 1: of that was the natural world. It was the time
Speaker 1: that I felt it was the time that I would
Speaker 1: be like, holy sh it, being alive, man, I need
Speaker 1: to do more of this would be like inspired by
Speaker 1: by how much you love your friends and love being
Speaker 1: outside with them, yeah, and seeing things with them. And
Speaker 1: now like I get in a very different way because
Speaker 1: I get because I have young kids and in the
Speaker 1: minute you need, anytime you feel like slog slog down
Speaker 1: or slow down or in a bog, just take one
Speaker 1: second to imagine not being able to see them grow
Speaker 1: into what they'll become. And it makes you just really
Speaker 1: really glad, yeah about the fact that you're breathing air,
Speaker 1: because it's such a like a daunting, miserable thought. Well,
Speaker 1: and you know, you spend a lot of time outside,
Speaker 1: you know, with other people who spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time outside, and you just see great stuff. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you see beautiful stuff and not everybody. I don't think
Speaker 1: everybody has that in her life, and or they don't.
Speaker 1: You know, you slip off to work for the nine
Speaker 1: thousands day in a row. You know, maybe you don't
Speaker 1: look around and go, jeez, it's a nice day. Do
Speaker 1: you do you self? Do you self identify as an environmentalist,
Speaker 1: like in the way that many people would recognize that
Speaker 1: um in your I think when you're talking about. You know,
Speaker 1: you spent a lot of time talking about like like
Speaker 1: like habitat for fish, like what fish need to live,
Speaker 1: But you also spend time time about just sort of
Speaker 1: like the general um way that things go with nature.
Speaker 1: And I think that and sometimes in there there's like
Speaker 1: a bit of um in your voice and in your
Speaker 1: world view, there's a bit of cynicism and maybe like
Speaker 1: a little bit of pessimism that that that we're it's
Speaker 1: like that we won't be able to stop the bleeding. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I think that we may not be able to UM.
Speaker 1: I mean it's hard when you've just had the the
Speaker 1: two biggest hurricanes on record within months of each other,
Speaker 1: and we've pulled out of the Paris records UM, and
Speaker 1: the e p A is dropping all their regulations, all
Speaker 1: their environmental regulations. You think, well, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: this is the end. But you know, all you can
Speaker 1: do is just say to people in a in a
Speaker 1: roundabout way, this is not only is this beautiful and worthwhile,
Speaker 1: not only is it good for you to spend time
Speaker 1: out here, but we'll die without it. Yeah, And you
Speaker 1: really should maybe think about that the next time you
Speaker 1: go to the polls, or maybe you should just think
Speaker 1: about going to the stinking polls. I mean, it kills
Speaker 1: me that half the eligible voters in this country don't vote,
Speaker 1: after all, the people who've died so they have a
Speaker 1: right to vote. Yeah, um no, yeah, it's a good
Speaker 1: way of putting it. You know, it's it's just shameful.
Speaker 1: Do you think that you have an obligation in your work? Um,
Speaker 1: Like when you bring up an idea in your books.
Speaker 1: I remember you're talking about being in uh, you're talking
Speaker 1: about being in some remote outposts somewhere I can't remember
Speaker 1: what it was, and you're saying that everyone there was
Speaker 1: either everyone there is either there to go fishing or
Speaker 1: there for mineral extraction, and you kind of talked about
Speaker 1: the two different views they had of the future of
Speaker 1: that place. When you're when you're talking about that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff and thinking about those things, are you putting
Speaker 1: it in there because you can't, um, you can't help yourself,
Speaker 1: but put it in there? Or do you feel that
Speaker 1: you have an obligation because you're talking to outdoorsman and fisherman,
Speaker 1: do you have an obligation to steer them in a
Speaker 1: direction that you feel that they need to go in
Speaker 1: order to understand probably a little of both. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't sit down at a keyboard with a sense
Speaker 1: of obligation. Um, but when something like that comes up,
Speaker 1: I I feel like I should make note of it,
Speaker 1: just to keep people aware. I mean a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: I'm just preaching to the choir. I don't know if
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people who read me who wouldn't
Speaker 1: consider themselves environmentalists or conservationists or you know, in some
Speaker 1: way so you don't think this. Somewhere there's a guy.
Speaker 1: I bet you there are. I bet you there are
Speaker 1: guys who read you and think you're funny and they
Speaker 1: love to fish, but it annoys them when you go
Speaker 1: down that path. Oh yeah, I suppose there are. I
Speaker 1: mean I'm not saying I've talked to them, but there are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they have to be um, well, I don't care.
Speaker 1: I mean people like that need to be tweaked too.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe they just need to be reminded. Well, well,
Speaker 1: all these guys I'm hanging out with having such a
Speaker 1: great time, they're worried about the environment. I wonder if
Speaker 1: I should look into that. You know, I don't know,
Speaker 1: and you have concerns too. So there's like the environment,
Speaker 1: which is like the place we live in, are in,
Speaker 1: what's in our backyards, and what's in our communities, and
Speaker 1: just this big, huge broad thing. But you also seem
Speaker 1: to have a lot of concerns for wilderness. And there
Speaker 1: was a there was a thing that that you mentioned.
Speaker 1: You're talking about float planes, and and you start out
Speaker 1: and you start out this is in a fly out
Speaker 1: of your own, and you're talking about flow planes. You
Speaker 1: start about this describing this kind of crazy place you
Speaker 1: arrive at and the things that go on there and
Speaker 1: the wildlife there, and there's like graves, some possibly old
Speaker 1: French trappers laying around, and all the just ten ft
Speaker 1: high mounded cariboo antlers, and you paint this picture. You
Speaker 1: go like, yeah, that's the kind of place where a
Speaker 1: floatplane can get you. And then you're going to explain
Speaker 1: how you used to have a more uh, you had
Speaker 1: this like different view of float planes and the access
Speaker 1: they provided, and now that your view of floatplanes is
Speaker 1: sort of tainted by the idea that, oh, that's right,
Speaker 1: everything comes at a cost, yea, And the simple fact
Speaker 1: of this plane allowing me to be here in some
Speaker 1: way some way that's a corrupting force to now and
Speaker 1: like brings us and it brings us kind of like
Speaker 1: it brings us bitter sweet sort of feeling to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's just it's just by way of reminding people
Speaker 1: that there is a cost. I mean, I think I
Speaker 1: remember that passage. It's something like, you know, you've you've
Speaker 1: gone to this absolutely remote, beautiful, pristine place and you
Speaker 1: step out of the floatplane under the pontoon as there's
Speaker 1: a stinking oil slick from your plane your plane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I just I just feel it's worth reminding people
Speaker 1: that that's there. But it's it isn't I don't know
Speaker 1: how calculated it is, you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: mean it occurs to me and so and I'm writing
Speaker 1: about what's what's happening with me? So I I say, well,
Speaker 1: here's this because in my stream of conscious this this
Speaker 1: is a this is a real theme that ought to
Speaker 1: be explored. Yeah, and it passes the test of is
Speaker 1: it something that people are gonna give us it about?
Speaker 1: I should show you the photograph. I've got it somewhere.
Speaker 1: Good friend of mine, Mike, We're Jack wonderful black and
Speaker 1: white photographer took some photos on a trip to Labrador,
Speaker 1: and one of them it's beautiful shot down the the
Speaker 1: board dock out to the float plane, beautiful old dehaveling
Speaker 1: beaver tied up, and in the foreground are just oil barrels,
Speaker 1: like twenty or thirty of them. And I said, was that?
Speaker 1: I asked him, was that intentionally? He said, oh, hell, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's good. Have you read John mcfees coming into the
Speaker 1: Country's History of Alaska? Yeah, but not for a long time.
Speaker 1: He spends a significant portion of that book talking about
Speaker 1: the oil drums, oil barrels. It's really like, in a way,
Speaker 1: it's not heavy handed, but it's just as ever present
Speaker 1: thing as oil drums. Well, Alaska is I mean, you
Speaker 1: go up to Alaska, it's beautiful, it's wilderness, catch all
Speaker 1: these fish, the whole, I mean, the old reason there's
Speaker 1: any civilization up there's oil and channeling. You know, it's
Speaker 1: crazy think about used to be, you know, a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago with sea otters. I've had a feeling just
Speaker 1: kind of back to that feeling of the conflictedness, right
Speaker 1: that you love places and so you want to go
Speaker 1: see them, but knowing that somehow your presence I've had
Speaker 1: criticism before, like I was. I was hunting one time
Speaker 1: in anwar the Arctic National Wildlife Refugere, and I remember
Speaker 1: hearing criticism from someone I can't remember who it was,
Speaker 1: was pointing out like how unfair it was, Like here
Speaker 1: you are, you want this place to be hands off
Speaker 1: and and no one could go there, but you get
Speaker 1: to go there, like you have the the economic means
Speaker 1: to go here, and so you're saying, like all the
Speaker 1: things that should or shouldn't happen here, most people would
Speaker 1: never be able to go there. What gives your right
Speaker 1: to have an opinion about what happens to this place?
Speaker 1: It's not fair? Yeah, yeah, And I remember thinking like
Speaker 1: I would if you if I could make a deal
Speaker 1: right now though, if someone came to me and said,
Speaker 1: we can never we'll never touch it again, but you
Speaker 1: can't go, but you can't go, I would say deal
Speaker 1: me too. I would say, okay, great, me too. Let's
Speaker 1: get the lawyer and sign this. Let's get the lawyer
Speaker 1: and draw this thing up right now. I will never
Speaker 1: come back. And since that will never happen, people just
Speaker 1: have to believe you when you say that. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a it's a tricky thing. It's a
Speaker 1: tricky thing. What do you feel about where do you
Speaker 1: feel that catch release fishing is at in light of
Speaker 1: like in light of kind of like new thinking and
Speaker 1: new awareness that you see in the food world, in
Speaker 1: the chef world of people sort of like sort of
Speaker 1: having this this idea that there um reconnecting with sources
Speaker 1: of food and people want to have these like these
Speaker 1: experiences where you see food go from you know, the
Speaker 1: water to your plate. Yeah. I think it's useful and
Speaker 1: necessary to a degree because there are so there are
Speaker 1: too many people fishing for the fisheries not to be
Speaker 1: degraded seriously. So I think the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: I fish a lot, and if I killed all the
Speaker 1: fish I caught, I would make a big dent. So
Speaker 1: but but I think it's permissible. I was never one
Speaker 1: of those guys who thought killing a fish was murder,
Speaker 1: and I've and I've written about that any number of times.
Speaker 1: Um talk about eating a char and at the end
Speaker 1: of the book and chunking up a char and mixing
Speaker 1: it in with under the seat of a plane. Well
Speaker 1: there was that, but there was also I just we
Speaker 1: went out and caught a couple of big char, like
Speaker 1: six eight pound char, beautiful fish, and flew him back
Speaker 1: in Francis. The camp cook cooks him up. But I
Speaker 1: shed in that I shed something like you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't blank when I killed it, and I didn't think
Speaker 1: twice about it. Uh. Somehow I felt like the world
Speaker 1: owed me that fish, and I was happy to eat it.
Speaker 1: There's another passage where you're up in a place and
Speaker 1: you're fishing. You actually you actually talk about your camp
Speaker 1: and you know, I don't know the same trip. You're
Speaker 1: talking about being up there and eating king salmon. But
Speaker 1: then you do kind of point out that, um, some
Speaker 1: of these places, like in Alaska, when you get these
Speaker 1: glimpses of abundance, right because un last of you be
Speaker 1: in the river and in in uh ten and a
Speaker 1: half months out of the year, I mean ship in
Speaker 1: the river. Right. But then there's this this this flurry,
Speaker 1: and people coincide their trips to catch the flurry and
Speaker 1: it creates this like sense of never ending abundance. And
Speaker 1: you talk about this feeling that, um, some people have
Speaker 1: a hard time being around that without being And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna take fifty pounds of these things home and let
Speaker 1: him get freezer burned in my freezer. When thinking about
Speaker 1: the you know, the environment in the state of clean
Speaker 1: water and healthy fisheries and and wildlife habitat you you
Speaker 1: kind of get into this point were you talking about
Speaker 1: you can either live with regret about the things that
Speaker 1: are gone or the things that have become overexploited, like
Speaker 1: live with regret and become bitter, or just look for
Speaker 1: new water. And I feel like you're being like you're
Speaker 1: being metaphorical there, Yeah, for sure, good pick up, Like
Speaker 1: like can you can you explain you're thinking on that,
Speaker 1: like kind of what you what you mean when you
Speaker 1: say that in a in a literal sense and what
Speaker 1: you kind of mean in a more and more figurative sense,
Speaker 1: like live with regret or look for new water. Well
Speaker 1: in a figurative sense. It's what we're talking about earlier. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe the world's ending, but why give up?
Speaker 1: I mean we could stop it, maybe we could turn
Speaker 1: things around. So I mean you can't just give up, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then there's the uh, there's the sub text of
Speaker 1: every time you go find new water, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: you're one more guy exploiting that place. So I just
Speaker 1: I just would like people to think about this stuff.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean you have to change what you do
Speaker 1: or anything. I mean, I don't plan to stop fishing
Speaker 1: because I think there's too heavier burden on the streams.
Speaker 1: But I think it's I think it's worthwhile to be
Speaker 1: aware of that there is too heavier burden on the streams.
Speaker 1: That's why a lot of us catch a release fish. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: continue doing what you love, but not have a Yeah,
Speaker 1: just I mean, there's no you know, I'm happy to
Speaker 1: go someplace catch two fish. There's a little creek up here,
Speaker 1: not too far from here. Um. I like to go
Speaker 1: up there in the late summer fall and get a
Speaker 1: couple of brook trout and a handful of perfect little
Speaker 1: door knobs sized belitas, mushrooms, ants a wild raspberries and
Speaker 1: either cook him there or come home cook him at home. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I usually cook him a little there, usually a little
Speaker 1: better if I cook him at home. And um, I
Speaker 1: would never want to lose that. And a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of places I go kill fish and eat it.
Speaker 1: Shore launch. Yeah, you talk about that in your boat.
Speaker 1: We were in the Northwest Territories a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: and uh, great Bear Lake, and the the fishing was
Speaker 1: so good we wanted a five pound lake trout for
Speaker 1: lunch and we had to fish all morning to almost
Speaker 1: one o'clock to catch one that small. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean that's just it's it's it really is wonderful to
Speaker 1: see that kind of abundance. But you gotta there were
Speaker 1: there are people who would have kept all those fish
Speaker 1: if they could not as many as there used to be.
Speaker 1: I mean, I really think people are becoming aware that,
Speaker 1: you know, why I kill fifty pounds of fish, like
Speaker 1: more aware about the finiteness of of nature. Yeah, uh yeah.
Speaker 1: If I can do it, everybody else could do it.
Speaker 1: And then what happens? I think there. I think it
Speaker 1: was in that book there's a I recounted an argue
Speaker 1: went between a bush pilot and a sport and the
Speaker 1: guy said, well, why not keep fifty pounds of salmon?
Speaker 1: They're gonna die anyway, And the pilot said, well, they're
Speaker 1: gonna die after they spawn, and everyone you kill is
Speaker 1: one it isn't going to spoil. And then he went
Speaker 1: on to ask the guy, are you really that stupid
Speaker 1: or you're just playing dumps that you can go on
Speaker 1: being an asshole. Yeah, no, I don't know. That's the
Speaker 1: term you used to see so much. I think I
Speaker 1: read it and your things like they used to be.
Speaker 1: This idea of the game hog, which I hadn't heard
Speaker 1: a long time. Um, do you you're you're careful about
Speaker 1: not naming places that would be easy for people to
Speaker 1: get to. But have you felt have you come under
Speaker 1: criticism with friends or have you ever felt like that
Speaker 1: because your work so widely known that you've provided sort
Speaker 1: of a compass and map two people looking for for
Speaker 1: good fishing, or doesn't it work that way that you
Speaker 1: write about somewhere and then come back and it's different
Speaker 1: than it was because you drive, because you personally drove
Speaker 1: everyone there. I've never been directly criticized for that, but
Speaker 1: I know it happens. I mean, I've written about the
Speaker 1: South Platte River, Cheeseman Canyon down through Deckers, which isn't
Speaker 1: as good now as it used to be, and it's
Speaker 1: really not because of fishing pressure so much as whirling
Speaker 1: disease and then flash floods that silted everything in because
Speaker 1: a lot of bugs. You know, it's coming back in
Speaker 1: after a fashion. But um, that was crowded when I
Speaker 1: first wrote about it, And is it more crowded now
Speaker 1: because I wrote about it? Yeah? Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: But um, I've never really been held to account for that.
Speaker 1: But I'm aware of it. I'm aware it happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think that it's probably say to say that,
Speaker 1: but it's also why. It's also why I'm so careful
Speaker 1: about not saying where places are. UM some places at
Speaker 1: Engle again said to me once his rule is he
Speaker 1: won't write about any stream he can roll cast across.
Speaker 1: And he said, and I can roll cast a hell
Speaker 1: of a long way. That's good, you are. The thing
Speaker 1: I need to keep in mind is that regulated recreational
Speaker 1: fishermen are not going to destroy a fishery. They might
Speaker 1: destroy some bit of the experience of participating in the fishery,
Speaker 1: but they're not going to destroy the fishery. They're not
Speaker 1: gonna fish out every fish like a like a a
Speaker 1: toxic spill, would you know, But they're gonna degrade it
Speaker 1: to the point where where you once could go catch
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty fish on a dry fly. Now the
Speaker 1: best you can do as a foot long fish. You've
Speaker 1: seen that, UM, not quite to that extreme, But yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen it, like like you've you've felt the repercussions
Speaker 1: of a lot of recreational fishing. Yeah. And then you
Speaker 1: have a thing that you're talking about in a funny way.
Speaker 1: You're talking about being in a camp in the past.
Speaker 1: You're talking about, you know, having been pretty drunk where
Speaker 1: you're blowing out a fire and like passed out in
Speaker 1: the fire and burnt your beard. And uh and I
Speaker 1: think in that same thing you talk about you just
Speaker 1: don't drink like you you kind of like don't drink
Speaker 1: like you used to. Is that sort of um, is
Speaker 1: stopping drinking sort of like this acknowledgement that is it
Speaker 1: like a personal acknowledgement that you won't be on earth forever?
Speaker 1: It was a different than that. Well, I think I
Speaker 1: always knew I wasn't gonna be on earth, but we
Speaker 1: don't know it, know it. Um. No, it was more
Speaker 1: that I I knew I was drinking more than I
Speaker 1: probably should, and I knew it wasn't good for me,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't feeling good. And h I was in
Speaker 1: my forties, I was making a living as a writer,
Speaker 1: and I just thought, I I'm not enjoying this like
Speaker 1: I used to. It doesn't make me feel good, and
Speaker 1: I need my wits about me if I'm going to
Speaker 1: keep doing this. I think it was more there was
Speaker 1: less an actual intimation of mortality and more just the
Speaker 1: idea that, um, at forty, I could have another forty
Speaker 1: years in me if I don't pickle my brains, right,
Speaker 1: But if I pickled my brains, maybe I've only got twenty.
Speaker 1: Was it Mickey Man who said if I hadn't know
Speaker 1: when I was gonna live this long, I was of
Speaker 1: taaking better care of myself. Yeah. I find that Like
Speaker 1: a joke I often make is when I think about
Speaker 1: how old I am or other people's age, I always
Speaker 1: double it and then remind them that they're halfway to X,
Speaker 1: so I'm not halfway to eighty six. What's helpful is
Speaker 1: I know how long I've been alive and I can
Speaker 1: picture that span of time. So understanding where I'm at
Speaker 1: in the halfway mark helps me like conceptualize whether or
Speaker 1: not I have that long again. Yeah, reaching out ahead
Speaker 1: of me, and I'm not at the point where I
Speaker 1: might not have. I might not have the amount of
Speaker 1: time behind me ahead of me. I could We'll try
Speaker 1: being halfway to a forty Do you feel that you're
Speaker 1: gonna do you feel you'll be doing more books? Are
Speaker 1: you gonna keep writing? Like? Do you have a plan?
Speaker 1: And not? Right? If he just writes he just cannot write, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna write, chill, I can't write. I I just
Speaker 1: signed a contract um earlier this year for two more
Speaker 1: books over six years, did the same publisher. So that's
Speaker 1: a nice relationship you've had with your publisher, man, a
Speaker 1: long nice relationship. Uh yeah, yeah, it isn't all sweetness
Speaker 1: in roses, but um, you know, it's kind of a weird,
Speaker 1: friendly but slightly adversarial relationship. But um, yeah, they've been
Speaker 1: good to me. Simon Schuster has been a really good
Speaker 1: outfit and um, I mean they've made me a good
Speaker 1: living in my in my agent Pamela Maltics too. Do
Speaker 1: you wanna see any kind of like do you have
Speaker 1: any kind of little stump speech plug you'd like to
Speaker 1: give for your new book? Yeah? I would like to
Speaker 1: give one go ahead. I think that I want to
Speaker 1: say if you like the ish, but I think it's
Speaker 1: like if you'd like to fish laugh, if you like
Speaker 1: being alive on Earth. I think it's like worthwhile to
Speaker 1: check out um, John gear Rock's latest book, which is
Speaker 1: just like new, right fairly new. Yeah, just a spring
Speaker 1: a fly rod of your own and it is your
Speaker 1: or eighteenth or something like that. So once you talk
Speaker 1: into that book and dig it, you do not need
Speaker 1: to worry about running out of more books for a while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all still in print. Thank god. Thank you very
Speaker 1: much for joining us on the show. Happy to do it.