This is Me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely vote bitten in my case underwear listening podcast.

You can't predict anything, all right, John Arrack, I'm gonna start by kind of um, I'm gonna make you uncomfortable and butter you up.

Uh you.

I wanted to talk to you for for twenty years I think or what year to trout Bump come out, um, mid eighties, maybe six.

I didn't discover it until a little bit later than that.

But I've wanted to talk to you since I did.

Because there's a thing like like that book, which was your first book, right, No, because you had you had the fly Fish in the High Countries before that.

But troump Bomb fell into When I say our lap, I mean the lapse of me, my brothers and like our main hunting and fishing friends that we grew up with, and it fell into our lap at this time in life.

That will always stick in my head because it was we're kind of coming out of coming out of college, being mid college, and there was just this uh tremendous amount of anxiety that was unspoken at the time, but there was sort of like a lot of there's just like like this palpable anxiety in the air about what we were all gonna what was gonna happen to us?

All, yeah, like not like now right, No, I I just feel like I know better.

I kind of like now I have anxiety about my kids.

Right.

But at the time, I just, yeah, I know, I kind of could picture it all.

Now by the time I couldn't picture it.

There was like a tremendous amount of anxiety.

But there's a thing that we were just discovering, is that that we'd all grown up fishing all the time because our dad's fish.

We just fished.

But all of a sudden, I was like, it seemed like there's so much possibility out in the world, and we were starting to to to screw around with traveling to go places and and just do nothing, and almost making a conscious decision to not have a lot of the material goods that you saw other people going towards at that age, because we were just really in love with just messing around with our friends and camping and pulling your money together to buy gas to go fish somewhere and doing these things that didn't make sense.

And you're doing all this stuff that doesn't make sense and you felt like anxiety about it and some level of guilt about it because it didn't seem sustainable and seem foolish and childish.

But we were so in love with how we were living.

And then I read when your book came out, man, and I remember this so clearly, all these years later and all the things I've read since then, but it was like it made me feel like, oh my god, this is okay.

Like this is a thing that people do and it happens to people, and there's like a way you can live your life like this.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I recognize everything you said, except the guilt part.

I never felt an ounce of guilt.

You never had the guilt.

You feel like.

You grew up in a working class family though, Yeah, that didn't Robot.

I mean not that you don't work.

I mean you didn't have that sense of like that you needed to be do you needed to be doing something you didn't like.

Well, I had the sense I needed to make a living, and I always did.

I mean I worked all kinds of jobs.

Um, even while I was writing, I worked a lot of odd jobs and part time jobs and full time jobs sometimes and just to get by because you were brought up in Ohio, right well, born in uh, Illinois, small town Illinois.

Moved to Minnesota for a while, moved to Ohio.

Dad worked for serious so we moved around.

Uh.

I was in Ohio for my last two years of high school, and then I went to college in Ohio, and then after that I was just I was in New York, I was in Colorado, I was in hate Ashbury, I was And you studied philosophy.

Yeah, we like explain that.

I don't even explain philosophy.

What why?

I mean, what kind of led you to that?

Um?

Well, I started out was an English major, and always hard for me to say that without thinking to Garrison Keeler now, But um, I don't know.

I didn't like the way they taught There's an arrogant thing to say, but I don't like the way they taught English literature.

It was just, you know, it was like it was code and you were supposed to decode in and it was like they kept asking what does the author mean?

And I kept asking why can't he just mean what he said?

I remember that being I remember that being difficult too, and in the way they kind of march you through the timeline being frustrating as well.

All right, we'll start with bail Wolf, yeah, and this year we'll make it to Shakespeare and then we'll pick up and yeah, yeah, talking about hitting meanings and like you'd read something and dig it, but then you felt like, well, I must not have really liked it, because when they asked me that for what it meant, I can't tell you what the symbolism was.

I liked it.

If that counts for anything.

Yeah, well, you know I could.

I can sort of do it now, but I've read probably thousands of books since then.

I mean, I think you don't.

I think you don't do enough reading.

By the time you're studying English in college.

I think you haven't done enough reading yet.

Oh you mean like it's premature.

Yeah yeah, I mean you're you're just you're just being introduced to literature and you're being asked to look at it as deeply as anyone ever looks at it.

And I think maybe you should.

Maybe you should read for twenty years and then study English.

I don't know.

I mean, there's only so much time.

But yeah, I remember meet a guy I was fishing with, a late friend of mine on the big hole river.

I'm sure you fished that river in Montana.

We're on the Big Hole River.

And we met a guy who had was explained as that he had been a doctor and had just recently retired, and the two things he was never able to do as a doctor was read and fish, And so now he was devoting his retirement to fishing in the morning, and then while he was still fresh of mind to go and read, and he had in his head that he was going to read even at the word he was he was going to read the Cannon.

Yeah, struck me as like you'll probably get more out of it than I did when I read the Canon starting at eighteen years of age, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, So you bumped the philosophy.

Yeah, And was there like a thing you thought you were gonna go do with it?

Like did you want to be a philosophy teacher?

No?

I mean I realized at some point that that was what you did, right, No, I don't.

I don't.

I mean, if if if you were to get a degree in philosophy, that's the only outlet you're not gonna go.

You're not gonna go home and hang out your shingle.

You know, you're gonna be a teacher, that's it.

Or you're gonna go to law school because law schools like philosophy majors because they could read complicated stuff and you figure out what it.

Man.

But I don't know, I was just never I wasn't on that track.

It was man, birds banded against the window, yeah, dead know.

No, I saw him going, He's all right, tis the five with him?

Those were those were doves.

We could have eaten them.

So sorry.

I just wasn't on a career track.

It was his sixties and we were hippies and we weren't looking to go to the office every day.

But you like to fish at that point too, because you grew up fishing.

I did, but I didn't do much, um the last two years of high school and we lived in northern you know, Rush belt, northern Ohio.

And then in college, I mean, it just wasn't fishing around.

Yeah, let's just fishing bullheads and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And when I lived in northern Ohio, Um, that's when the Cuyahoga River caught fire every couple of years and Lake Erie would eat the paint off a ship's coming in.

And nobody wants to fish in that she just didn't feel a strong connection to it there all the time, I feel any connection to it at all.

When because if you're if your self described like that you were that you were hippi or affiliated with the counterculture, and we're familiar with fishing.

Did you at the time were you reading uh like Trout Fishing in America by broad Again?

I remember what year that came out, but that came out later.

I did read it.

What were your thoughts of that?

And you know the Curtis Creek Manifesto and all that stuff.

Um my thoughts, Well, you know I always like brought Again.

Um he might be a little thin in retrospect, but I liked him at the time.

Yeah.

Broad Again's like, um, like Tom Robbins if you read Time, but but later you can't go retime, Like once you get in your forties and you have kids and stuff, you can't go like it doesn't hold upright, not like holy Ship, this guy's a genius.

Yeah, it's kind of you kind of like, how did I used to think this was good?

But broad Again is still funny though, Man, he is still funny.

Yeah, didn't not have a funny end um So when so if you.

Here's I guess what kind of driving at this I maybe I should just ask you, at what point did you At what point did you like make these connections?

Like there is such a thing as a guy.

There's such thing as a guy who writes about an activity like fishing, and if he is really good, can make it living at it.

And I will shoot for that.

Um.

I was probably probably in the mid seventies, um, because you know, I got into fly fishing.

I didn't get out of it.

I didn't get into fly fishing until I came out West in my early twenties, late sixties, early seventies.

I've never really seen it before.

It's that in the Midwest you never saw people fly fishing.

You do now, but you didn't then.

And I just got into it for what I think were the purest reasons.

I thought, that's beautiful.

That's the prettiest thing I've ever seen, and I mean just the act of it.

Yeah, yeah, and people are catching fish and I thought that was just freaking beautiful.

And was what was the year that you had that sort of thought or oh, eight sixties, okay, maybe seventy maybe, um.

And at some point and I was still trying to be a serious writer.

Dan.

I had a little book of poetry and print.

I was writing for a little literary magazines, and but I was fly fishing and I was reading fly Fisherman magazine.

I don't think fly fishing the West was out, um, I think trout, salmon and steelheader was out.

Then there weren't many and I just sort of of course.

There were the you know, field and stream out theor life guys like Lee Wolf around, and I just thought, well, people do make a living at this.

Did you feel like it was coarse and low because you want, because you were an aspiring poet.

Did you feel like it was less artful to become like a a like a a writer with sort of a beat?

You know?

Not really?

Not really?

I mean there were people I knew at the time who thought it was I mean I had writer friends at the time who thought it wasn't it wasn't like the fine arts.

Yeah, yeah, And maybe it's not to like the fine arts.

I don't know.

Well for most it's not.

But I think that the reason, the reason that you're you, and the reason that you've been around so long and people like you so much, is that you're one of the one of the rare few who has transcended.

Well, what it was was reading Tom mcgwain, Jim Harrison, Russ Chatham, some of those guys.

And also you know, the new journalists were working in UM, Tom Wolf, Hunter, Thompson, Um, Peter Matheson, and they were they were sort of bringing literary techniques into what had normally been journalism up to now.

They were becoming dropping the pretense of objectivity and becoming characters in their own stories and UM and writing in a stream of consciousness.

I mean, you know, Electric Kuwaite acid test was not a news story about LSD.

It was you know, a little deeper than that, and UM.

But I think it was probably the single writer that showed me that this could be done as well as any other kind of writing, It could be just as as legitimates literature was Tom mcgwain and some of his earlier stuff.

So you were reading his stuff then, yeah, like in Shade and some of them.

I don't know if I was going to the earlier works.

Yeah, but also his you know, he wrote for uh sports a Field or I don't know, he wrote for some of the magazines and Harrison back then like in the seventies, Harrison was doing hunting and fishing pieces for Sports Illustrated.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And that era, even though participation was not super high in this country, and that era the room that mainstream publications made for like cooking bullet right hook and bullet writing of the finest, highest caliber would find its way into very mainstream magazines.

But that's all stuff that I've always been like like a thing that if if I look at sort of the stuff I've written and where it's been, I'm always kind of like proud of those moments when I've been able to take a wedge A thing about hunting and fishing in an unexpected location always feel like it's like, uh like counting coup almost, you know, to be able to stick it in somewhere or no one ever expect to see it.

Just like being a sniper, like yeah, but you're shooting shooting stories instead of bullets.

You know what, do you know?

This is like a side out of any kind of chronology we're following with you, but you might have some perspective on it.

One of the things that troubles me most about fishing writing is that why would why does spin tackle?

Why why does spin tackle not spawn great writers?

That's a mixed metaphor.

Why does spin tackle spin fishing not produce the writers that fly fishing does.

I kind of get it, but I don't get it.

Um.

I don't know.

That's a good question I've never given in a moment's thought.

But it could be just that writers tend to be attracted to fly fishing because it's you know, it's old, and it's kind of primitive, and it's complex, and the esthetics are complicated, and yeah, there's a lot to write about.

And so you think it said like the writerly sensibility is drawn to fly fishing rather than like fly fishing inspires writers.

Yeah.

Maybe, Like I say, I've never I've never thought of it before, But you're right.

Name name a great spin fishing writer like Gray wrote some pretty good pieces about now I it was mostly because, yeah, having he wrote about deep water well any and he wrote about fishing trout with worms too, um and Hopper's big two hardered river fishing live bait.

So I mean, it's it's out there.

But I don't think anybody would consider him away a fishing writer.

Well, I mean he's definitely like informed by that, and I think that he's like recognized as being I mean he's as much of like he's recognized as much of a dude who liked to watch bullfights as he is the guy like the hunt fish.

We definitely had that with the Zane gray fly fish.

I don't know, I've only did like I think it was fishing Virgin Sees is the book I have at home, And yeah, well he did some steelheading too, But he not only was just a writing about it, he was like an innovator of tackle and equipment.

I mean he goes into great depth describing like making custom line back when he they didn't have line they could hold up to an eight pound marlin.

And then the great depths that he went to to have this line, or the products shipped from you know, who knows where, and then it was you know, spun somewhere else, and then you do all these tests and still the big ones would get away.

But he was hardcore.

He was just he wasn't just a trigger man, know, he was into it.

What was the first do you recollect?

What year was the first year that you wrote a fishing piece where you looked at and thought like, that's not technical writing, it's not how to it's like a piece of art about fishing.

And then that you published, Um well, I think I felt that about uh the SSA Asian trout bum so and they were not you know, it came out and s where it was eighty six.

So probably by the late seventies I was starting to do that, like the writing things.

You're like, this is what I want to do, and I just did that.

Well yeah, yeah, And you were placing them where I was placing them in in fishing magazines.

I was in Sports of Field, Field and Stream Fly Fisherman um now defunct magazine called fly Fishing the West.

Um, I don't think fly ron um fly Rod and Reel was still Rod and Reel.

Then John Merwin had it recognize that name published in there and here and there, and those could not have been uh those couldn't have been huge paychecks in those places.

So you kind of knew that you probably you probably knew that you had to go toward books.

Um well, I wanted to go towards the books.

I think all writers want to see their name on the cover of a book, right, don't you.

I mean magazines see someone else's name on the cover of my book.

Yeah, magazines come and go.

Newspapers.

I had a fight with my I used to write outdoor column for the newspaper for twenty eight years.

I want, I want to ask you about that book.

They totally screwed up one of my columns.

It doesn't matter why, but they totally mucked it up.

And uh.

I called my editor and yelled at him, and he said, hold on, but what does that mean?

Like, what did it what what happened to it?

Well, they they they ran it in four columns, four vertical columns at the top of the page.

But the columns weren't in the right order, got you, So it read like gibberish, okay, And I called and yelled at him, and he said, man, that was yesterday.

It's on the bottom of a bird cage by now.

So it's the shitty feelings.

Yeah, but he's right.

Yeah, but it's like it's painful to articulate it that way though, But there's the truth to it.

But that's that's that's newspapers, newspapers.

That's the problem with newspapers and magazines.

If you're gonna bring up the idea of having your name on the book.

Because I've considered myself like a pretty careful reader, okay, and I'm aware of the publishing world, and i pay attention to what's going on.

I'll read pieces and uh later some and be like, uh, who wrote the piece?

Like you know what, you don't know.

As much as I've spent my life pursuing this and in this business, I never looked.

And then you imagine that.

And if you think of yourself as like a careful reader who is paying attention, and you imagine how most people will perceive it, it winds up.

It winds up.

Yeah, it makes you hungry for something that um, it makes you hungry for something that's more that you could just like continue to point to it as this thing that you did because it sounds shallow in some ways in vain.

But people do want to be like recognized for their work.

Yeah, And um, you know, I wouldn't be the first writer that was shallow in vain, right, No, No, there wasn't a little hint of it.

You wouldn't be a writer.

Yeah, I mean we do shine our work, right, we could.

We could all write under a pseudonym and be anonymous, but we don't not many of us do.

Um, yeah, I just And the other thing is, I mean people are gonna somebody reads a book and likes it.

They're gonna remember who wrote it.

And a book could conceivably last no ar in tees.

But you know a book could last whereas a magazine.

Right, it's gonna end up on the coffee table in the dentist's office eventually, and then it's gonna get recycled and it's gonna be going.

People don't retain them.

Well, some people do.

Some people save every issue with some magazine, but I mean not like they retain a book.

Man, you were done reading the book, they don't throw in the garbage.

They go bring it to a donation center.

Well, or they put it in the bookshelf.

If you saw in my office, I don't know how many books I have down here.

When you like when you came out with your where your were your first book?

And then men, you I know many of yourself school books and you can cry if it's in fact all of them are collected pieces.

Do all of your books appear in print before they go into your books, or do you have the original material that appeared nowhere else that goes into your books.

Uh, there has been original material that appeared nowhere else, and most of the stuff that was originally published somewhere else has been expanded and into a book chapter.

Have you ever thought about like, like, why is that you haven't done um, like like a full narrative book.

I did um at the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman.

Kay, tell me about that book, like what that was like doing or what was like doing that book?

It was, um, you know, it was one of those uh seasons of the Angler thing.

I mean it was it was a fourth season thing.

And I just had this idea that that would be the way to to do a book is to go through the seasons and U and I wrote the chapters as essays and I published most of them in in magazines and then collected them into a book.

The thing about that's think about your writing that, uh what does that kind of admire most about it is even like the books, your books are often collections of of pieces that that that are free standing pieces like that they make sense and work in a free standing form like chapter length form.

But throughout it is this is this broader story of you in your life and your friends and one of the things that most strikes me, and it is that that the the affection and love you have for friends that have been your friends for a long time and you come to kind of know them, and you have a way of really capturing this long arc of friendship and how it works and goes from you being young and then you're kind of not young right together, and then you're all kind of like past some tipping point headed in another direction together and it does together create this sense of that it is this long meta narrative.

And another thing that happens that that was really striking me with your new book is that I'm looking at it like you're always somewhere else, right, You're always on trips, travel.

It seems like you travel incessantly, and then a flyer out of your own you're gone.

You're you spent a lot of time in Labrador, you're up in Alaska, you're fishing around Colorado.

I think you're in Washington, you spend time in Idaho.

An you nowhere else in your new book.

But while this is going on, there's like this life that you're having where your mother's dying.

Yeah, um, there's a big forest fire ripping by your house and you're on this trip in Maine checking in back home, and there's like chores that didn't get taken care of back home, and there's a flood that destroys people.

You're the property of people that you're close with back home.

And I think that a lot of writers, like like with travel writing is sort of it's that you're just immersing the experience, but you do well.

I think a capturing all just like the nagging ship that you cannot escape from.

Like I used to joke that I used to joke about that if you look at like what what a writer writes was in a writer's head, they don't match up.

Because if you spend a bunch of times somewhere and you're writing about it, you're're just like really cherry picking the opportunities.

An example would be we do a show where an episode of the show is twenty two minutes long, but we'll go out how many hours will be honest, how many hours of footage would be filmed?

It's a hundred of one most of the times, hundred of one ratio.

Now, when you go and put the together, if you go on a on a trip and you're gone four or five days and you put together twenty two minutes.

You are like cherry picking.

You're not creating a representation of what exactly happened there, because if you were, for every two minutes that you watched, there'd be one minute where you're watching people sleep.

So you are doing like there's a there's a fiction to nonfiction and that you're waiting things and talking about what's of interest.

Oh yeah, well and you're not.

You're not only doing that, but you're you're pulling in you're pulling in memories, You're you're changing time.

You know, time isn't always uh linear, Yeah, and you certainly don't.

And that's one of the things that like the craft of your writing too, is you're not you're not deceptive about chronology, but you're just very good at like occasionally vague about it.

Yeah.

It was just like when you get done, when you're back from something, I think that you're not really concerned with what did this and then this and this and this.

I think you're more concerned about here's the flow of my ideas and and and I'm not gonna be I don't need to tell you like this happened, and that happened, and this happened, that happened necessarily in that order.

So and Ames, I'll see, like I'll be cruising along in one of your pieces and I'll all of a sudden, like whatever, you flip the page, you realize it's about to end, and I'll think, my god, how is he gonna He doesn't have enough space left to get us back out of here right right to do all the ship to get on the airplanes and low like there's no space.

And then you're all of a sudden, all of a sudden, you're just like, and that's all I have to say about that subject, and it's just refreshing.

Well, it's why you never see anybody in the movies go to the bathroom.

Well, yeah, but he dies, he gets shot in the bathroom.

But um, I mean, it's just assumed that people go to the bathroom throughout the movie.

But you don't have to see it exactly.

You don't have to tell everybody everything you're telling what's worth telling.

Yeah, but but you know so, so I'm kind of saying two things that are cross ways a little bit, because you do great with that, and you do great with delivering a version of a story that's most useful to the reader to get the reader where you want them to go.

But in that calculation that you're making, you're also not abandoning all sense, because you get the sense and reading your work that you're still always very aware of the world that you left behind when you went somewhere.

Well you are, aren't you?

Absolutely?

And and and uh, but I think all people are.

But I don't know that many people have really embrace it and is done as well as you've done it, where you can be writing about a trip you're on, but also you're writing about this kind of like the loss of your mother and the weird family stuff that goes around the death of a family member and what do you're obligations to everyone when that happens.

But it's all occurring sort of like this, like humming noise in your head while you fish, Like when you're out of town and you know something bad is happening at home, you can't escape it.

In the rhythm with which you go from being in the moment to being, oh, ship, there's a big fire by my house on the other you know, miles away.

It's really it's impressive.

Well, it's stream of consciousness and it's more like it's scream of consciousness.

Writing seems familiar to people because it's how people think.

That's a good point, you know, you don't You don't spend an hour thinking about one thing.

You spend an hour bouncing around about twenty things.

And if you're writing seventeen of those things that are of no interest to anyone, so you leave him out.

Yeah, but you you bounce around and uh um, you know you're someplace here, you're someplace on a fishing trip.

You see something that reminds you of something that happens at home, or somebody you haven't talked to at home or whatever.

And that's how people think, and so they recognize that in a piece of writing, what is your what is your gauge?

How do you know?

Like when you get into something that's not interesting, the seventeen things that aren't interesting to other people?

Who who are what are you imagining to know?

When you've gotten there, that you're now in the things that are of interest only to John girok Um, Well, it's somebody I think.

This was actually my old high school English teacher said, every time you say something as a writer, you have to ask yourself.

Okay, But who gives a ship.

Yeah, and so you just do that.

You say, why would anyone care about this?

Well, no one would, So let's skip this and go on to the next thing that might interest someone.

I mean, it takes a tremendous it really takes a tremendous ego to assume that anything at all you have to say would be of interest to anyone else.

And so you understand you're really out there exposed.

I mean, you're spilling your guts to people, and the least you can do is to try to do it well and in a way that's useful to them.

That's the thing, too, is that that I find that you do well, and I don't know if you mean to do it well as you do as muchs I thought about like being like transcendent in writing or transcending genre writing and turning it into turning it into art and something that's beautiful and that can move people emotionally or make them reconsider the world in their place in it.

You also have you do you also deal in the technical m hmm.

There's the thing I read in your new book that had never occurred to me before, where um, I can't remember, I can't remember what piece it was in, but you'll you'll remember just when I bring it up.

Is that let me approach this a different way.

If I'm standing on a riverbank, okay, and I see a fish a trout rise, I'll be like, there's a trout, okay, and then I'll see, let's say I'm slightly down I'm looking like downstream, I'm I'm facing the river.

I'm looking downstream towards ten o'clock and like there's a trout, and then all of a sudden, a complements later.

Fish rises at two o'clock.

I say, there's another one, and then one goes at noon, and I'll be like, another one.

And it wasn't until reading your recent book that occurred to me that that could be a fish who's moving around just like like, I get it now, but it's like never conceptually, I always would have been like one, two three trout.

Yeah, I see that he's he's like actively going back and forth through some area, a ating the illusion that most guys would come and think goes a shipload of trout.

I figured that out on the Henry's four years ago.

He's big trout would get in a run, usually not drakes, but but smaller bugs, and they would just they they drift down a run and they just eat one here, and they'd move up and eat one there, and they're might eat five bugs and then they just dropped down and just drop back and do it again.

And your first thought is there are shicks, big rainbows in here.

Oh yeah, and you're still casting to where the one went, because he and you, even though you know a fish move all over place.

You talk about everything in a laborator, or they put a some kind of tracking mechanism or tag on a brook trout that traveled thirty miles up river.

Yeah, but like I get that intellectually, like I understand that.

But and looking at like when a fish rise is somehow I realized this is funny.

Now, all these years I've sat there, I've imagined him somehow being like static in space.

So often they are, Yeah, a lot of times they are.

They really is just there.

They just fish do whatever they need to do to survive and flourish, whatever they need to do within reason.

They can't get out on walk on land, but some of them stay in a half mile of stream your whole life.

Some of them go out to the ocean, swim to the shape Japan and eat trump.

You know, they just do what they want, They do what they need to do.

Is that like, is understanding that kind of keep you going as a fishing excited?

I mean, I know you obviously fish because that's your it's become your livelihood, right, so so there's that extra bit of motivation.

But like, how do you really, um, like, what keeps you fishing?

Because you kind of write about fishing in some of these same places where you've been fishing the same places for decades.

Well, because you never quite get it right, the same thing that keeps you writing.

I mean, you might do well at it, but you're never going to completely do it right or exhaust the subject.

And it's fine, so you keep doing it.

It's pretty simple.

Yeah, Like you feel like you've never like you can't like you've never mastered anything with fishing, fishing or writing or anything else anything else worth doing.

Yeah, you have a line in one of your books, in an earlier book I read, and you also mentioned in your new book this idea that um that there's when it comes to fishing and I and I've I've quoted you on this in a number of times, even to some audiences where uh, he's saying fishing there.

You tend to view the world there's as your's, your party and then the assholes.

But it's what's funny when I read that from you, is that, um, everybody does that, but it was funny like a guy like you, though, as you're producing all this beautiful work for the consumption of obviously the assholes like you, hope to sell books beyond your immediate social circle.

So it just like brings up this interesting idea of like, how like I generally in life, right, I want like when I look at politically and culturally in the country, sort of the question I asked myself when I look at things that are going on, I'm like, what's good for what's best for hunters and fishermen.

It's just like, like I feel that the obligation personally and I feel that obligation professionally to kind of look at that ends of like what if this is what what's good for hunters and fishermen in America on this issue?

I have that, But I also have the feeling of when you pull in and you're there's a truck there where you're going and you're like, son of a bit.

Yeah, I hate that guy.

It's it's just a it's it's like a funny thing of perception.

Yeah yeah, but she everybody else thinks that too.

I mean, if I pull up in a river and go, well, look look at look, there's an asshole standing in my pool, he looks back at me and my pickup truck and goes, well, that asshole wants my pool.

We all we all do it, and and it's like, what's your take on it?

And what do you think about it?

Much?

It's just like just a natural thing.

It's just a natural thing.

And if you just go talk to the guy you want to be loving him.

Yeah, I mean, if you just you know, I've had people come up and stand while I was fishing and and I say, you want to end, I'll go to the next pool.

Do you have a sort of of a composite kind of individual or a friend or whatever that when you're writing, you imagine yourself that that they're your bullshit gauge.

Yeah, they're that, they're who you're talking to.

I do, I do.

I mean it changes from time to time, but um I developed this trick, you know, I wrote, um a column a week for twenty eight years.

I can't do the math.

But there's a lot of stinking columns in the newspaper, but mostly about fishing, some some hunting, some other stuff.

And you know, I I started out when I was pretty young, and I kind of struggled with the style I wanted.

I always wanted to write in a very conversational style.

And I had this running correspondence with my my oldest continuous friend at angle, who's also a fishing writer, and we were we were also poetched together back in the day.

Yeah, and he's worked for the Fourth Service.

He's a he's a fantastic outdoorsman.

But um, I just and we had this correspondence and it was it just flowed like water.

And I one day, just on a whim, I was going to write a story about I don't know, going fishing somewhere, and I just typed dear head, and I just told the story like I was writing to Ed, except you know, like slightly more in complete sentences and less perfect fulfill obligations yea to the reader.

Um.

And then when I was done, I scratched out dear ed and that was it, right, Yeah, good East always gave me.

You know, we were right in the guy book, you'd say, yeah, just imagine you're at the bar with when your buddies doesn't know quite as much about the subject as you do.

You had a beer too, You're feeling, you know, pretty loose.

You can, you can roll it all out fast, and then imagine you're just gonna deliver that content to that person.

Yeah.

I's similar to that.

I remember in in in writing school and in graduate school, I would turn in, you know, these pieces and workshop and I was working on magazine pieces that I later published in Uh.

A teacher became a very dear friend of mine, dear to name or a novelist.

She would say she would look at and me like, now it's now you're like writing.

Yeah, now you're writing, and it's annoying to me.

You know.

It was better when I felt that you were like telling me something, you know, because you're slipping into this thing how you imagine a writer would sound.

Tom Wolfe gave a series of lectures somewhere Princeton or somewhere, and I, a friend of mine, had him, and I listened to him, and he said a great thing.

He said that his students he'd hear him are on campus, and he said, they just they spoke so easily, and they had this real facility with language and slang, and they were playful.

And then he said, you get them in a writing class and they write like their Victorian lawyers, with all these here here to fours and whereases and stuff.

He said, My my job was to say, you already play the instrument, just write it down.

You know, you've been talking for twenty years.

You know how to have a conversation.

Just write it down.

But it's not a given that everyone knows how to have a conversation.

But I think that it's a given that most people who go into the field probably come from that because they have sort of like a love of X, a love of of like explaining telling for the bullshit thing that I'm talking about, which probably the same thing like your friend ed is.

I have in my head like anything I do, like whatever kind of media might be dealing with in the moment, I always imagine I always try to imagine that the response of my two older brothers and gauging like if I like, if I'm doing good, It's the kind of thing that I would hope that they would stumble across if I'm not being my best self.

It's the kind of thing where I'm like, I hope those guys don't stumble across this.

Yeah, and that is and that to me is like worked well as as a guide.

But I don't think everyone has the luxury of having older brothers who are interested in the same ship they're interested in, which I realized is a luxury.

You know, it is a luxury.

The luxury I've had is I've had some really good colleagues and teachers who've taught me things about writing, and um, often not much, but but just a little piece that I can put together.

Um.

I always think of that because he's a he's a withering critic.

He's really just cut you down the size.

He once said of trump Bum.

Somebody asked him how he liked trout Bum, and he said, well, I said, I think it makes up in enthusiasm what it ll action quality.

Ouch.

I don't know, man, I see from your perspective that might be bad.

But here's the thing, like a word that sticks in my head for not not just traumdum, but but all your books is just like an exuberance.

Yeah, I don't know if you really like I don't know if you really like life and being alive as much as yourself on the page does.

But there's an infectious enthusiasm for just being alive.

Well, not that you paint, but it's not like you paint it as just it's not like you paint being alive is just like nothing but just good times and laughs, because being alive is in some ways it's a struggle in a hassle.

But you paint being alive is like something that's really worth doing.

Yeah, well don't you think it is?

Yeah, But I think it's also easy to fall under trap where you lose sight of how worthwhile it all is.

Yeah, for sure, or that you don't take time to have to say to yourself, like, my god, is it worthwhile being alive?

Yeah, because you can have weeks go by without realizing that, and it's like one of the beauties of the natural world is like for me, the reminder I get it through my kids now because I have young kids, But for me a long time, the only real genuine reminder of that was the natural world.

It was the time that I felt it was the time that I would be like, holy sh it, being alive, man, I need to do more of this would be like inspired by by how much you love your friends and love being outside with them, yeah, and seeing things with them.

And now like I get in a very different way because I get because I have young kids and in the minute you need, anytime you feel like slog slog down or slow down or in a bog, just take one second to imagine not being able to see them grow into what they'll become.

And it makes you just really really glad, yeah about the fact that you're breathing air, because it's such a like a daunting, miserable thought.

Well, and you know, you spend a lot of time outside, you know, with other people who spend a lot of time outside, and you just see great stuff.

Yeah, you know, you see beautiful stuff and not everybody.

I don't think everybody has that in her life, and or they don't.

You know, you slip off to work for the nine thousands day in a row.

You know, maybe you don't look around and go, jeez, it's a nice day.

Do you do you self?

Do you self identify as an environmentalist, like in the way that many people would recognize that um in your I think when you're talking about.

You know, you spent a lot of time talking about like like like habitat for fish, like what fish need to live, But you also spend time time about just sort of like the general um way that things go with nature.

And I think that and sometimes in there there's like a bit of um in your voice and in your world view, there's a bit of cynicism and maybe like a little bit of pessimism that that that we're it's like that we won't be able to stop the bleeding.

Yeah, well I think that we may not be able to UM.

I mean it's hard when you've just had the the two biggest hurricanes on record within months of each other, and we've pulled out of the Paris records UM, and the e p A is dropping all their regulations, all their environmental regulations.

You think, well, I don't know, maybe this is the end.

But you know, all you can do is just say to people in a in a roundabout way, this is not only is this beautiful and worthwhile, not only is it good for you to spend time out here, but we'll die without it.

Yeah, And you really should maybe think about that the next time you go to the polls, or maybe you should just think about going to the stinking polls.

I mean, it kills me that half the eligible voters in this country don't vote, after all, the people who've died so they have a right to vote.

Yeah, um no, yeah, it's a good way of putting it.

You know, it's it's just shameful.

Do you think that you have an obligation in your work?

Um, Like when you bring up an idea in your books.

I remember you're talking about being in uh, you're talking about being in some remote outposts somewhere I can't remember what it was, and you're saying that everyone there was either everyone there is either there to go fishing or there for mineral extraction, and you kind of talked about the two different views they had of the future of that place.

When you're when you're talking about that kind of stuff and thinking about those things, are you putting it in there because you can't, um, you can't help yourself, but put it in there?

Or do you feel that you have an obligation because you're talking to outdoorsman and fisherman, do you have an obligation to steer them in a direction that you feel that they need to go in order to understand probably a little of both.

I don't I don't sit down at a keyboard with a sense of obligation.

Um, but when something like that comes up, I I feel like I should make note of it, just to keep people aware.

I mean a lot of ways, I'm just preaching to the choir.

I don't know if there's a lot of people who read me who wouldn't consider themselves environmentalists or conservationists or you know, in some way so you don't think this.

Somewhere there's a guy.

I bet you there are.

I bet you there are guys who read you and think you're funny and they love to fish, but it annoys them when you go down that path.

Oh yeah, I suppose there are.

I mean I'm not saying I've talked to them, but there are.

Yeah, because they have to be um, well, I don't care.

I mean people like that need to be tweaked too.

I mean, maybe they just need to be reminded.

Well, well, all these guys I'm hanging out with having such a great time, they're worried about the environment.

I wonder if I should look into that.

You know, I don't know, and you have concerns too.

So there's like the environment, which is like the place we live in, are in, what's in our backyards, and what's in our communities, and just this big, huge broad thing.

But you also seem to have a lot of concerns for wilderness.

And there was a there was a thing that that you mentioned.

You're talking about float planes, and and you start out and you start out this is in a fly out of your own, and you're talking about flow planes.

You start about this describing this kind of crazy place you arrive at and the things that go on there and the wildlife there, and there's like graves, some possibly old French trappers laying around, and all the just ten ft high mounded cariboo antlers, and you paint this picture.

You go like, yeah, that's the kind of place where a floatplane can get you.

And then you're going to explain how you used to have a more uh, you had this like different view of float planes and the access they provided, and now that your view of floatplanes is sort of tainted by the idea that, oh, that's right, everything comes at a cost, yea, And the simple fact of this plane allowing me to be here in some way some way that's a corrupting force to now and like brings us and it brings us kind of like it brings us bitter sweet sort of feeling to it.

Yeah, but it's just it's just by way of reminding people that there is a cost.

I mean, I think I remember that passage.

It's something like, you know, you've you've gone to this absolutely remote, beautiful, pristine place and you step out of the floatplane under the pontoon as there's a stinking oil slick from your plane your plane.

Yeah, And I just I just feel it's worth reminding people that that's there.

But it's it isn't I don't know how calculated it is, you know what I mean.

I mean it occurs to me and so and I'm writing about what's what's happening with me?

So I I say, well, here's this because in my stream of conscious this this is a this is a real theme that ought to be explored.

Yeah, and it passes the test of is it something that people are gonna give us it about?

I should show you the photograph.

I've got it somewhere.

Good friend of mine, Mike, We're Jack wonderful black and white photographer took some photos on a trip to Labrador, and one of them it's beautiful shot down the the board dock out to the float plane, beautiful old dehaveling beaver tied up, and in the foreground are just oil barrels, like twenty or thirty of them.

And I said, was that?

I asked him, was that intentionally?

He said, oh, hell, yeah, that's good.

Have you read John mcfees coming into the Country's History of Alaska?

Yeah, but not for a long time.

He spends a significant portion of that book talking about the oil drums, oil barrels.

It's really like, in a way, it's not heavy handed, but it's just as ever present thing as oil drums.

Well, Alaska is I mean, you go up to Alaska, it's beautiful, it's wilderness, catch all these fish, the whole, I mean, the old reason there's any civilization up there's oil and channeling.

You know, it's crazy think about used to be, you know, a hundred years ago with sea otters.

I've had a feeling just kind of back to that feeling of the conflictedness, right that you love places and so you want to go see them, but knowing that somehow your presence I've had criticism before, like I was.

I was hunting one time in anwar the Arctic National Wildlife Refugere, and I remember hearing criticism from someone I can't remember who it was, was pointing out like how unfair it was, Like here you are, you want this place to be hands off and and no one could go there, but you get to go there, like you have the the economic means to go here, and so you're saying, like all the things that should or shouldn't happen here, most people would never be able to go there.

What gives your right to have an opinion about what happens to this place?

It's not fair?

Yeah, yeah, And I remember thinking like I would if you if I could make a deal right now though, if someone came to me and said, we can never we'll never touch it again, but you can't go, but you can't go, I would say deal me too.

I would say, okay, great, me too.

Let's get the lawyer and sign this.

Let's get the lawyer and draw this thing up right now.

I will never come back.

And since that will never happen, people just have to believe you when you say that.

Yeah, no, it's it's it's a it's a tricky thing.

It's a tricky thing.

What do you feel about where do you feel that catch release fishing is at in light of like in light of kind of like new thinking and new awareness that you see in the food world, in the chef world of people sort of like sort of having this this idea that there um reconnecting with sources of food and people want to have these like these experiences where you see food go from you know, the water to your plate.

Yeah.

I think it's useful and necessary to a degree because there are so there are too many people fishing for the fisheries not to be degraded seriously.

So I think the idea that you know, I fish a lot, and if I killed all the fish I caught, I would make a big dent.

So but but I think it's permissible.

I was never one of those guys who thought killing a fish was murder, and I've and I've written about that any number of times.

Um talk about eating a char and at the end of the book and chunking up a char and mixing it in with under the seat of a plane.

Well there was that, but there was also I just we went out and caught a couple of big char, like six eight pound char, beautiful fish, and flew him back in Francis.

The camp cook cooks him up.

But I shed in that I shed something like you know, I didn't blank when I killed it, and I didn't think twice about it.

Uh.

Somehow I felt like the world owed me that fish, and I was happy to eat it.

There's another passage where you're up in a place and you're fishing.

You actually you actually talk about your camp and you know, I don't know the same trip.

You're talking about being up there and eating king salmon.

But then you do kind of point out that, um, some of these places, like in Alaska, when you get these glimpses of abundance, right because un last of you be in the river and in in uh ten and a half months out of the year, I mean ship in the river.

Right.

But then there's this this this flurry, and people coincide their trips to catch the flurry and it creates this like sense of never ending abundance.

And you talk about this feeling that, um, some people have a hard time being around that without being And I'm gonna take fifty pounds of these things home and let him get freezer burned in my freezer.

When thinking about the you know, the environment in the state of clean water and healthy fisheries and and wildlife habitat you you kind of get into this point were you talking about you can either live with regret about the things that are gone or the things that have become overexploited, like live with regret and become bitter, or just look for new water.

And I feel like you're being like you're being metaphorical there, Yeah, for sure, good pick up, Like like can you can you explain you're thinking on that, like kind of what you what you mean when you say that in a in a literal sense and what you kind of mean in a more and more figurative sense, like live with regret or look for new water.

Well in a figurative sense.

It's what we're talking about earlier.

Um, yeah, you know, maybe the world's ending, but why give up?

I mean we could stop it, maybe we could turn things around.

So I mean you can't just give up, right, Yeah, And then there's the uh, there's the sub text of every time you go find new water, Um, you know, you're one more guy exploiting that place.

So I just I just would like people to think about this stuff.

It doesn't mean you have to change what you do or anything.

I mean, I don't plan to stop fishing because I think there's too heavier burden on the streams.

But I think it's I think it's worthwhile to be aware of that there is too heavier burden on the streams.

That's why a lot of us catch a release fish.

Yeah, um, continue doing what you love, but not have a Yeah, just I mean, there's no you know, I'm happy to go someplace catch two fish.

There's a little creek up here, not too far from here.

Um.

I like to go up there in the late summer fall and get a couple of brook trout and a handful of perfect little door knobs sized belitas, mushrooms, ants a wild raspberries and either cook him there or come home cook him at home.

Yeah.

I usually cook him a little there, usually a little better if I cook him at home.

And um, I would never want to lose that.

And a lot of a lot of places I go kill fish and eat it.

Shore launch.

Yeah, you talk about that in your boat.

We were in the Northwest Territories a couple of years ago, and uh, great Bear Lake, and the the fishing was so good we wanted a five pound lake trout for lunch and we had to fish all morning to almost one o'clock to catch one that small.

Yeah, and I mean that's just it's it's it really is wonderful to see that kind of abundance.

But you gotta there were there are people who would have kept all those fish if they could not as many as there used to be.

I mean, I really think people are becoming aware that, you know, why I kill fifty pounds of fish, like more aware about the finiteness of of nature.

Yeah, uh yeah.

If I can do it, everybody else could do it.

And then what happens?

I think there.

I think it was in that book there's a I recounted an argue went between a bush pilot and a sport and the guy said, well, why not keep fifty pounds of salmon?

They're gonna die anyway, And the pilot said, well, they're gonna die after they spawn, and everyone you kill is one it isn't going to spoil.

And then he went on to ask the guy, are you really that stupid or you're just playing dumps that you can go on being an asshole.

Yeah, no, I don't know.

That's the term you used to see so much.

I think I read it and your things like they used to be.

This idea of the game hog, which I hadn't heard a long time.

Um, do you you're you're careful about not naming places that would be easy for people to get to.

But have you felt have you come under criticism with friends or have you ever felt like that because your work so widely known that you've provided sort of a compass and map two people looking for for good fishing, or doesn't it work that way that you write about somewhere and then come back and it's different than it was because you drive, because you personally drove everyone there.

I've never been directly criticized for that, but I know it happens.

I mean, I've written about the South Platte River, Cheeseman Canyon down through Deckers, which isn't as good now as it used to be, and it's really not because of fishing pressure so much as whirling disease and then flash floods that silted everything in because a lot of bugs.

You know, it's coming back in after a fashion.

But um, that was crowded when I first wrote about it, And is it more crowded now because I wrote about it?

Yeah?

Maybe I don't know.

But um, I've never really been held to account for that.

But I'm aware of it.

I'm aware it happens.

Yeah, but I think that it's probably say to say that, but it's also why.

It's also why I'm so careful about not saying where places are.

UM some places at Engle again said to me once his rule is he won't write about any stream he can roll cast across.

And he said, and I can roll cast a hell of a long way.

That's good, you are.

The thing I need to keep in mind is that regulated recreational fishermen are not going to destroy a fishery.

They might destroy some bit of the experience of participating in the fishery, but they're not going to destroy the fishery.

They're not gonna fish out every fish like a like a a toxic spill, would you know, But they're gonna degrade it to the point where where you once could go catch eighteen to twenty fish on a dry fly.

Now the best you can do as a foot long fish.

You've seen that, UM, not quite to that extreme, But yeah, I've seen it, like like you've you've felt the repercussions of a lot of recreational fishing.

Yeah.

And then you have a thing that you're talking about in a funny way.

You're talking about being in a camp in the past.

You're talking about, you know, having been pretty drunk where you're blowing out a fire and like passed out in the fire and burnt your beard.

And uh and I think in that same thing you talk about you just don't drink like you you kind of like don't drink like you used to.

Is that sort of um, is stopping drinking sort of like this acknowledgement that is it like a personal acknowledgement that you won't be on earth forever?

It was a different than that.

Well, I think I always knew I wasn't gonna be on earth, but we don't know it, know it.

Um.

No, it was more that I I knew I was drinking more than I probably should, and I knew it wasn't good for me, and I wasn't feeling good.

And h I was in my forties, I was making a living as a writer, and I just thought, I I'm not enjoying this like I used to.

It doesn't make me feel good, and I need my wits about me if I'm going to keep doing this.

I think it was more there was less an actual intimation of mortality and more just the idea that, um, at forty, I could have another forty years in me if I don't pickle my brains, right, But if I pickled my brains, maybe I've only got twenty.

Was it Mickey Man who said if I hadn't know when I was gonna live this long, I was of taaking better care of myself.

Yeah.

I find that Like a joke I often make is when I think about how old I am or other people's age, I always double it and then remind them that they're halfway to X, so I'm not halfway to eighty six.

What's helpful is I know how long I've been alive and I can picture that span of time.

So understanding where I'm at in the halfway mark helps me like conceptualize whether or not I have that long again.

Yeah, reaching out ahead of me, and I'm not at the point where I might not have.

I might not have the amount of time behind me ahead of me.

I could We'll try being halfway to a forty Do you feel that you're gonna do you feel you'll be doing more books?

Are you gonna keep writing?

Like?

Do you have a plan?

And not?

Right?

If he just writes he just cannot write, well, I'm gonna write, chill, I can't write.

I I just signed a contract um earlier this year for two more books over six years, did the same publisher.

So that's a nice relationship you've had with your publisher, man, a long nice relationship.

Uh yeah, yeah, it isn't all sweetness in roses, but um, you know, it's kind of a weird, friendly but slightly adversarial relationship.

But um, yeah, they've been good to me.

Simon Schuster has been a really good outfit and um, I mean they've made me a good living in my in my agent Pamela Maltics too.

Do you wanna see any kind of like do you have any kind of little stump speech plug you'd like to give for your new book?

Yeah?

I would like to give one go ahead.

I think that I want to say if you like the ish, but I think it's like if you'd like to fish laugh, if you like being alive on Earth.

I think it's like worthwhile to check out um, John gear Rock's latest book, which is just like new, right fairly new.

Yeah, just a spring a fly rod of your own and it is your or eighteenth or something like that.

So once you talk into that book and dig it, you do not need to worry about running out of more books for a while.

Yeah, they're all still in print.

Thank god.

Thank you very much for joining us on the show.

Happy to do it.