A lack of light white wine dooms trip.

The best dry fly fishing on the Smith River in years.  We forgot 6 bottles of Sauvignon Blanc that doomed the trip.  Chardonnay was unacceptable.  Welcome to outfitting.

June 1 - Sunny cool with a little wind.  The grasses are green and it is still light at ten.  Spring is a tenuous season but so is life.  We are slowly leaning into to summer.  Tomorrow we fish the Missouri.  There is something like 8000 trout per river mile or one for every other angler out there.

Jack Lemmon as Shelly Levene from the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross.

Channeling my inner Shelley "the machine" Levene as I prepare to enter the bleak and lonely landscape  of cold calling trying to sell July 5 on the Smith River.  I am motivated by fear, desperation and paranoia.  I am chanting the A,B and C's of cold calling: "Always, Be, Closing..."   I am a beast.

Springtime in the Rockies

Yesterday there were three suicides in Montana with temperatures in the 30's and snow coming is sideways.  Today just as cold, snowy and windy.  More suicides?  Springtime in the Rockies.

water without pity

I crossed Crazy Woman creek south of Buffalo, Wyoming today.  The Big Horns off to the west with snow in the peaks and the foothills starting to green.  The Crazy Woman was a Cheyenne, who prostituted herself to soldiers.  By doing so the Cheyenne thought that only a crazy person would do so.  The creek today is muddy and meanders over the prairie.

Easter Sunday

Easter is about a boulder being removed from a cave and hope for the rest of the world.   Hope for a way out of the madness along with the endless procession of bad ideas, bad policy and bad politics.  The boulder from the cave transcends politics.  It is about spring.  The Cubs have a chance for a world series and this is the year the Seattle Mariners get it right. 

It is a wonderful time of year to go to a stream and tie on a dry fly.  It doesn’t matter if trout aren’t rising to the surface.  It only matters that a trout might rise to a fly.  It’s Easter and Jesus worked with fishermen he would of appreciated the hope in the effort

Read it over and over before you go to war.

Nefarious War

Nefarious War

Last year we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our armor horses on the Tien-shan’s snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on then thousand miles from home,
Our three armies are worn and grown old.

The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On this yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but
blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out,
There is no end to war!

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails.
Carry them up in their flight, and hang on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the dead grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereign