In The Last Best Day, Michael Altizer shares moments and meditations from a lifetime of fly fishing on streams from the Appalachians to Alaska.
For the first several decades of my life, the greening up time of spring meant single-minded obsession with sparkling waters and rising trout. Then wild turkeys laid hold of my being with such tenacity that I lost a corner of my sporting soul to America’s big gamebird. Thus, each year earth’s rebirth finds my plate full to overflowing. That delightful dilemma looms even larger because the two sports continue to produce adventure aplenty for armchair anglers and fireside turkey hunters.
While I’ve never met Michael Altizer, there’s little doubt we are kindred spirits. There’s the obvious link provided by this magazine’s masthead, but beyond that, reading his book, The Last Best Day, reveals the similar manner in which fly fishing for trout molds and moves our existences. One reason the book captures my fancy is geographical – goodly portions of it have the southern Appalachian waters of Virginia and Tennessee as a setting, streams similar in nature to those of North Carolina’s Great Smokies, which have held me in thrall from early boyhood.
Then there are factors such as brothers and fathers with whom we shared times astream, Tennessee tailwaters each of us have fished many times, and more.
Most of all, though, there is meditative common ground. Each of us has found fishing a metaphor for life and have a compulsion to share its meanings with others.
In that regard, what I consider one of the most important books I have ever written, Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: An Insider’s Guide to a Pursuit of Passion, is, as the subtitle suggests, a personal memoir.
Etching by Brett James Smith
Altizer’s The Last Best Day is also part memoir, but more significantly it is a deeply personal, intensely and intelligently reflective examination of the way in which fly fishing can weave golden threads through the fabric of life.
Fly fishing has often been described as the contemplative man’s sport. In The Last Best Day we are given an abundance of opportunities to pause and ponder, often with minds full of wonder, as the author shares moments and meditations from a lifetime of fishing.
While fly fishing binds the book’s 34 chapters together, this is in reality a chronicle of family, faith and the fullness of life that those of us who cherish the long rod and whistling line.
Altizer’s book is one to be sampled and savored, bit by bit, chapter by chapter, and if you aren’t moved by some of his thoughts and experiences, particularly those involving his deceased father, I have a simple, straightforward suggestion for you. Close the book and schedule the first available appointment with a psychiatrist – you have something seriously amiss in your soul.
Immersion in Altizer’s fine book reminded me of two other recently published books that have crossed my desk. The first is a 20th anniversary edition of Nick Lyons’ Spring Creek, replete with a new preface by the man who must be reckoned as the dean of today’s fly-fishing writers. Magical and mystical, this work is, at its heart, a tale of escape – a month of simplicity and soul-soothing time astream described in Nick’s enviable way with words and an uncanny knack for capturing the essence of a sport he dearly loves.
Strikingly different in nature, but of immense importance to those who find time spent on the tying bench before a vise both a comfort and another facet of the totality of the fly-fishing experience, is Eric Leiser ‘s The Book of Fly Patterns. It is a massive book, with hundreds upon hundreds of illustrations, “recipes” for more than a thousand flies, along with a glossary, bibliography, contact information for suppliers of fly-tying materials, list of sporting booksellers (here there are shortcomings, with two of the operations listed having long since ceased to be in business because of the deaths of their proprietors), an alphabetized listing of materials used in fly tying and a most useful ribbon marker to let you keep your place. This work, as well as the reprint of Nick Lyons’ Spring Creek, comes from Skyhorse Publishing.
On the turkey side of the equation, I’m going to venture into quicksand and mention a book of my own, noting as I do so that this magazine’s publisher insisted it be done. At the outset I noted that Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ranked as one of my two most important products from decades of scribbling on the outdoor experience. The other is Remembering the Greats: Profiles of Turkey Hunting’s Old Masters.
Firmly committed to the idea that turkey hunting’s past serves as a looking glass into the sport’s future, I have been an avid (some might say addicted) student of its lure and lore since that magic morning, decades ago, which found me standing mesmerized in a moment of bittersweetness while admiring my first gobbler. Since that occasion, mine has been an unending quest not only for turkeys but for information on turkey hunting’s rich and varied past.
My book looks into the lives of 27 icons from turkey hunting’s past, men whom old-timers are wont to describe as “true turkey men.” These talented men, all avid hunters, include call-makers, authors of articles and books, seminar speakers, television personalities, biologists and conservationists.
Two common threads typify every man profiled – from C. L. Jordan through household names such as Neil Cost, Ben Lee, M. L. Lynch and Tom Turpin down to “greats” lost such as Kenny Morgan and Dick Kirby. Each man was a fascinating character with a consuming love of the wild turkey. This book, as is the case with Altizer’s, is available through the Sporting Classics Store.
These stories come from the creeks and rivers of the Appalachians, to the high country and desert streams of the American Southwest, to the great salmon, rainbow, and grayling waters of Alaska, and back to “the little brook trout stream where the snow monster lives.”
They take you to places you may never have dared to venture. And in the end, they take you home.
But wherever they take you, you will most certainly remember the journey. And you might even find yourself returning again and again along the trail these stories weave until it is indistinguishable from your own.
Thirty-five true-life stories covering the author’s fly fishing adventures from the creeks on the Appalachians to the high country streams of the West to the great salmon and trout waters in Alaska. 250 pages; illustrated by Brett James Smith. Buy Now
