living large

Listening to Dean Martin which is gives me great pleasure when it is cold and snowy outside.  We don't have much in the way of saloon singers anymore.  The music got more amped up, wrapped in anger and pushed something called romance out the door.  Lyrics like "be my whore"or "your my bitch" seem so distant from a thing called love.  Oh well, more end of millennium signs.

Here are some great books to read this winter.

1.  William Manchester's biographies of Winston Churchill.  Nobody bounces back like Winston Churchill.

2.  Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawerence.  Coming out of the soot and grim of Northern England to make an argument for our humanity.

3.  Tennessee Williams - Streetcar Named Desire, Night of the Iguana or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  Williams always sided with our angels and is our lyrical poet. 

4.  Thomas McGuane and the Longest Silence.  I have been fishing and guiding for 30 years.  McGuane lets me see my world in a different and often times better lens.

5.  Anything by Ramond Chandler.  Chandler is the white knight for my soul.

Playing in Hemingway’s shadow

Playing in Hemingway’s shadow.

If you are a certain age and you happen to read, fish and in your spare time do a little thinking at some point you run into Hemingway.  I’ve been bumping into Hemingway on and off for most of my life.  When I was in my early 20’s, discovering how much I liked to read, I remember a Time magazine review of Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two Degrees in the Shade.  The Time interviewer asked McGuane who he liked to read.  McGuane said, “He liked all the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.”  He handed me my reading list.

I started with Hemingway because I liked to read books with big print and wide margins.  I could knock them off pretty quickly go down to a bar and drink heavily while feeling slightly literary.  Hemingway would get a little tight, while I got totally shit faced.  There was something romantic, adventuresome and purely American for me in his novels.  So, I read them all and his short stories and anything that mentioned Hemingway I read.  At the time of his death the three most widely recognized words in English around the world were Singer (for the sewing machine), Coca Cola and Hemingway.   Not bad for a kid from Oak Park, Illinois.

We had a Professor of English from an Ivy League College on one of our Smith Rivers trips who would make these wonderful declarations about literature.  “Jane Austin wrote the perfect novel with Emma,” he said.  Or, “The Great Gatsby is the American Novel.”  Having no fears of being thought an idiot I declared, “All of Hemingway starts with A Big Two Hearted River.”  It sounded good and I think there is an element of truth in it.  The Professor like anyone else who has anything to do with the outdoors and a fly rod has dealt with Hemingway.  So you have a middle-age fishing guide and an older Ivy League Professor sparing about Hemingway on a river in the middle of nowhere Montana forty years after Hemingway’s death.  I call it the somethingness of Hemingway.

High Hopes

Hope all of our elected officials put their communties and country ahead of their re-elections bids.

Hope to find trout that prefer dry flies to nymphs.

Hope all of our soldiers come home and reunite with their families.

No more wars, no more a saber rattling.  Work harder at peace. 

Find more Vets work.

The Seattle Seahawks make the playoffs next year.

We all want to remember this is the way war’s end.  Gone is the patriotic fervor or the 24 hour news cycle, which dominated the television.   There isn’t the gaggle of embedded reporters that escorted the troops into the war.  The embedded reporters came home quite some time ago. 

The war seems to end silently for America.  The one percent that fought the war slide into their communities.   In places like Ft. Benning, Ga. or Ft. Hood, Tx. they carry the weight with high suicide rates and high divorce rates.  Soldiers and their families seem to go unnoticed.  Valor is ignored, honor slighted and sacrifice lost.

In Afghanistan, on the far side of the planet, a 19 year old kid with a rifle and 70 pound pack stands guard watching the moon come over the Hindu Kush.  Unfortunately, his fate is wrapped up with a group of people who claimed a pizza is a vegetable.

Here comes Santa Claus

This is Santa last year in Bagram Air Base.  He resided in a place called Cherry Beasley where I spent two winters.  We lived in dilapidated shacks called B-Huts and we were the lucky ones.  We weren't in the 100 man tents with no privacy and soldiers living out of their duffel's.  There wasn't a Best Buy, Christmas lights or Christmas Carols there was just the soldier to your left or right wishing you a Merry Christmas.  Christmas came from the heart.

with a whimper

The war in Iraq ended today reported the evening news.  Soldiers are coming home.  Our national character will be measured on how we treat the men and women in uniform in the years to come.  Today, there isn't a ticket tape parade in New York or Washington D.C.  It seems we give a national yawn and turn the channel.

Guides and sons

John Howard is as good as it gets when it comes to guiding.  John is just plain fishy but what makes him invaluable is his innate sense of joy.  Fishing is not a quantitative experience it is quality experience.  Quality can be clear skies, empty streams, a feel for the both the wild and the wilderness or hitting an inside straight with an all in bet. Regardless, joy is always best shared.  Fishing with John is joy unbound.   He just got off the Smith and had no problem getting into fish.   His son, Jensen starts as a gearboater with us tomorrow.  Let the games begin.