Chatham, Summer Evening on the North Platte River, 2004
Ultimately, I don’t know exactly what happened in my angling
life. I had gone fly fishing for thirty-three years in Montana and then we
moved there, so now I’m up to forty-two. Mind you, this doesn’t mean I’m good
at it. Good and bad aren’t part of my fishing lexicon. The good can be part of
the quality of light that day, or the quality of bread, salami, or hot peppers
at lunch. The bad can be weather under forty degrees, which I no longer care
for. In the last nine years, having moved from Michigan to Montana to be closer
to our daughters and grandchildren, I’ve upped my fishing to sixty to seventy
days per season. I have reams of empty paper containing what I’ve forgotten.
Certain good fish are only remembered when I pass the landscape on the river
where I caught them. We can be as honest as we can be and still be hopelessly
dishonest. Our private mythologies have a soft stranglehold on us. Fishing
elicits tales and fables from us from another time.
Jim Harrison
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