Standing in a River Waving a Stick by John Gierach & GLENN WOLFF

Author:John Gierach & GLENN WOLFF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS
Published: 1999-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Second Nature

LAST summer I spent a lot of time exploring some fishing spots near where I live: a few places that were actually new to me and some others I’d just neglected. It turned out to be a good year for it. The runoff was moderate for a change, and the streams were in especially good shape from the end of June on.

Also, for reasons I won’t bore you with, I did a lot of traveling early in the season that had nothing to do with fishing. It had to be done, and some of it wasn’t even all bad, but it was nonetheless out in the big bad world where people rush like hell to get to places they don’t want to be, where sales of Prozac are at an all-time high and where basically everyone seems to spend their days pissing up a rope.

On a fishing trip you can pass through some places like that, but when that’s where you’re actually going, it can get grim. Anyway, I ended up getting on way too many airplanes without a rod case and a duffel bag, and by midsummer I’d burned myself out on traveling very far from home.

Looking back on it now, it was a clear message: I’d been wanting to snoop around my own county more than I’d been able to do in the last few years, the fishing was good, and I was fried on traveling anyway. So what more did I want, an engraved invitation?

Not that staying around home is much of a hardship when home is in northern Colorado, in the East Slope foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I’ve lived and fished in this neighborhood since the early seventies, it’s kept me busy and interested for all that time, and by now I know it pretty well, but there are still a handful of public waters I haven’t been to, not to mention plenty of places I haven’t been back to in a decade or more. There’s an awful lot of water within day-trip range of my house—hundreds and hundreds of miles of it—and, although none of it is exactly unknown or unfished, there’s a lot of it that’s over-looked and gets damned little pressure.

I try to remind myself of that whenever I get to complaining about our declining and overcrowded fisheries. After all, most of them are declining because they’re crowded, and they’re crowded because they’re on the short list of places where everyone goes. You know, the spots that are already at least locally famous, the ones they’ll tell you about down at the fly shop even if you haven’t just spent five hundred dollars.

I don’t mean to say there aren’t problems or that I’ve given up on trying to help come up with some of the solutions. It’s just that, as Edward Abbey once said, you should fight the good fight, but also save part of yourself for pure enjoyment. If you don’t, you can become a cynical old shit, as some say Abbey himself did once he stopped taking his own advice.

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