The Story Tells Itself

The stream is cool through my waders. The moving water makes me feel clean again. Aches from the day are dulled by the heavy water from yesterday’s thunderstorm. Most other anglers are gone. I’m tired from a long day’s work and readying myself for another. My family is away, and there’s nothing but an empty house, leftovers, Netflix and the last cold beer waiting for me a few miles from where I stand, relishing the cool, evening air and the abundance of insect life that has suddenly emerged.

The bugs are grayish white. I’m sure they’re caddis flies, but entomology has never been my strong suit. I pick out a size 16 white, dry fly tied by my friend, artist C.D. Clarke. I asked him what it imitates. “Nothing,” he said. “Just looks buggy.” Good enough for me.

Rainbows rise at the tail of the pool near some rocks, feasting on whatever insects pop up, mate and die. The trout are fat and happy, and even though it’s late in the warmer months, the rain and milder temperatures have kept the stream cool for longer than usual, which is why I’m here.

Two drifts with C.D.’s pattern, and I’ve caught a fish. It’s plump, respectable and feisty, and it posed nicely for a photo in my net before I sent him back. I hadn’t expected to find fish, but I was rewarded for my efforts. My thoughts wander, and I think of writer John Gierach. He’d like this place and this moment in time. I’ve read every one of his books and have a new one sitting on the nightstand. Gierach would appreciate the singularity, the quiet and the beauty of an evening hatch, an empty river, and catching a fish on a “buggy” fly tied by a mutual friend.

I had always wanted to talk to Gierach the way I supposed Dante wanted to talk to Virgil. I never thought it would happen. I’m not sorry to say that I imagined it a few times streamside.

“Fish sense, applied in the field, is what the old Zen masters would call enlightenment,” Gierach wrote nearly four decades ago in Trout Bum, but it’s easy for me to imagine them in conversation. “Enough is a useful concept for the sportsman, especially the young one,” he would continue as I listen intently. And then, just to bring the point home, he would extol: “Coffee is OK on warm mornings when the wool shirt is shed while the bacon sizzles, but it’s best on cold, winter trout streams, or during claustrophobic storms when the almost painful sting of its heat telegraphed through the thin walls of a tin cup seems like the center of the universe, a very real element of basic survival.”

That’s right. Coffee is the thing. Each Gierach essay from the book is like bellying up to the bar with a master and shutting up long enough for him to knock some sense into you.

When I got a copy of Gierach’s recent book, All the Time in the World — signed and with a pencil sketch from artist Bob White — I knew it was about time to see if I could turn some of those telepathic, writer-to-reader conversations into something less esoteric. I reached out to C.D., and he called Gierach. I passed the initial test, it seemed, and was surprised when C.D. came back a few days later and said, “John’s looking forward to talking with you.” The onus was on me. I had to think of all those mock conversations and translate them into reality.

When it comes to writing about fishing, there’s John Gierach, and then there’s everyone else. Best-selling author Monte Burke says of Gierach: “I’ve always loved the laid-back feel of his writing, how he brushes in subtle digressions that never detract and only add to his stories. It’s a singular voice. Many have tried to imitate it. None has succeeded.”

This singular voice has been entertaining us for nearly 50 years. Gierach’s prose has warmed souls like a single-malt Scotch after a soggy day on the stream since the 1970s. “It started sort of by accident,” Gierach tells me from his office in Lyons, Colorado. I eye the shelves behind him, overflowing with paperbacks, Polaroids of great fish from his past, various papers and notes, and variegated bric-a-brac that make up the life of a prolific writer.

“I wanted to be a writer in high school. I came from the Midwest and moved to Colorado because it was the ’60s and I didn’t need any other reason,” he says. Gierach worked odd jobs that included trash collector and miner while pursuing his dream of becoming a writer. His fly-fishing days were spent under the tutelage of locals, but he was mostly self-taught.

“I thought guiding was a glamorous profession until I tried it,” he writes in All the Time in the World, and he confirmed that his foray as a guide didn’t last long. He began reading fly-fishing publications and thought, Well, they must pay these people to write stuff. So he tried his hand at it mostly for the money at first, but he genuinely enjoyed the process of composing a story. The process became salvatory for him. “I like writing things down if they seem like they need writing down,” he tells me. He never chronicles a fishing trip during the trip, but he jots down details along the way. The formula works; he recently published his 22nd book. He is constantly looking to “break out and see into the human condition.”

It’s not all stress-free, though. “I worry about spot-burning every time I sit down to write, and I screwed it up a time or two,” he says.

“[John] has taught me that if you stay true to what fly-fishing is and report it honestly, you never need to look back and second-guess what you’ve written,” says hall-of-fame angler and author Tom Rosenbauer.

This “second-guessing” for Gierach ended years ago on a river in Montana. “Literary agents are like bank loans,” Thomas McGuane had said to Gierach. “If you can prove you don’t need one, you can get a really good one.”

Gierach was standing in a stream on McGuane’s ranch in Livingston, Montana. They had connected after Trout Bum, Gierach’s third book, gained notoriety. Simon and Schuster had just bought the paperback rights to the book, which has become a staple on most anglers’ shelves. “One of the editors at the time said, ‘This fly-fishing thing is getting big,’ and happened to know my editor in Colorado,” Gierach recalls.

Writer, editor and publisher Nick Lyons, who was with them streamside, was trying to convince Gierach to put in a call to Knox Burger, an agent of note in New York City. Gierach was hesitant. “I figured that I had gotten in on my own, what did I need an agent for?” It was a good thing he placed the call. “Knox quadrupled the advance on my next book, and that’s when I felt like writing was going to pay the bills,” he says.

Gierach’s collected papers, like McGuane’s, have become enshrined in academia. His files are stored in a permanent collection at the University of Montana. “I didn’t even look at the papers,” he says to me with a laugh. “I just made sure there weren’t mice in the box, threw them in the truck, and drove to Montana and fished for a few days. I guess it’s gratifying that anyone wants my old papers.”

It’s quiet. Nothing but the sound of the river and the occasional dive bomb of a huge fly. Gierach stands in the river casting a heavy streamer toward a riffle. A guide, one of the younger ones at the lodge but fishy as hell, leans on his landing net. The line comes tight, and Gierach connects with a mammoth brook trout in its full fall colors. The fish is a beautiful green and orange with spots in all the right places. Gierach manages a smile as he holds the fish up to the camera. “It’s a connoisseur’s fishery,” he tells me some time later. “You don’t go to Labrador to catch a lot; you go there to catch the fish of a lifetime.”

Gierach has been a frequent visitor to Three Rivers Lodge in southwest Labrador for many years. As the name indicates, the lodge sits at the confluence of three river systems. Anglers come for a chance to catch brook trout measured in pounds, not inches, but there also are lake trout, char, grayling and salmon. “Everything is at the mercy of the weather in Labrador,” Gierach says. He has been stuck more than a few times in remote locales. “Me and C.D. Clarke left the lodge and flew out for Arctic char some years back, and we ended up stuck out here for the better part of a week.” They were starting to run low on food, but they had all the fish they wanted. “The only real touchy part was we were running low on coffee, but I believe C.D. would have been happy to be stuck there forever,” he says.

They eventually built C.D. a lean-to with a tarp so he could paint, and he produced some amazing work. Fellow artist Bob White then rendered C.D.’s makeshift lean-to in watercolor from one of Giearch’s photos from the trip. “Every time I go to Labrador something unique happens,” Gierach says. I try to imagine getting there one day, but in the meantime I soak in the stories.

“I first encountered Gierach’s work when I was 17 or 18, when a writing life entwined with a fishing life felt impossible,” says author and guide Chris Dombrowski. “Formative books like Trout Bum or Sex, Death and Fly Fishing revealed the possible, that one could write with authenticity, honesty, originality and humor about one’s passion. Since then, Gierach has been nothing short of a Parachute Adams or a No. 16 pheasant tail — an utter go-to. As close to a sure thing as there is in the fly-fishing world.”

I spoke to Dombrowski at one of his readings, and we circled around to discussing Gierach’s work. We agreed that the comforting thought of a new Gierach book has the same healing powers as sitting at a fly-tying vise in the dead of winter.

In All the Time in the World, Gierach explores some of his most poignant themes. The title essay debates the mortality of his close friend and the lessons they shared while fishing. “Later in life,” he writes, “the death of a friend is no longer unbelievable because you’ve learned about mortality the hard way, but that doesn’t make the news land any easier.”

Gierach intends to spread his friend Paul’s ashes, but there never seems to be the right time or place to get it done. “I had been idly waiting for the right spot to jump out at me with the certainty of a revelation,” he writes, “although in the end, it may not happen that way.” He continues by celebrating the lessons Paul taught him, but acknowledges the unfinished nature of their relationship with that small task yet to be performed. It is this most relatable bit of procrastination that brings the piece to its conclusion that, “like most fisherman, Paul always acted like he had all the time in the world, and now he does.”

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We imagine ourselves as invincible sometimes, yet Gierach reminds us that we are, indeed, frail and small, but in a way that one might look through the window of some greasy spoon diner and see that it’s pouring outside. Might as well have another cup of coffee. Gierach’s prose has a way of infusing readers with the notion that things will work out. The fish will rise another day. There are a few pieces of jerky left in your pack, fresh feathers on your bench and no better place to be. “In the back of my mind, I think about not repeating myself. I let the story tell itself and help it along as best I can,” Gierach says.

I think about this as I drive back to that stretch of river where I was inspired to write about him. I want to re­-create that moment of clarity streamside where C.D.’s fly worked and Gierach’s words swirled above me like cloud art. But then I pause and decide to let the story tell itself.