Tutorial in Microcosm
Bream fishing with a fly rod is God’s way of making up for lack of funds. The old man wheezed as he made his way up the bank from the boat. Had to sit awhile on a stump to get his breath and reorganize his lungs. He wished he really could reorganize them. There’d...
Nervous Water
A father and son are finally reunited, on a secluded lake high in the Colorado Rockies. On a clear June morning, I took my father bass fishing into the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I had not seen or spoken to him in ten years. We ate an early breakfast at a truck stop on...
Ted Williams: The Greatest Hitter (and Fisherman) There Ever Was
They called him The Kid. The Splendid Splinter. Teddy Ballgame. And by his own admission all he wanted in life was to walk down the street and have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter there ever was.” Arguably the best player the game has ever...
Failure To Launch
What on earth? I could swear I had the wheel perfectly straight. My face burned as I pulled forward again. Another restart. Another apologetic wave.
Portlandia Falls: How Oregon Collected 120,000 Signatures for the Right to Arrest Fishermen
The proposed PEACE Act may be the most unmistakably Portland development in modern American politics: a ballot initiative so detached from practical reality that it sounds less like legislation and more like the product of a group hallucination that occurred during an...
The Call of the Surf
There are fish in the surf that will take the angler half off his feet with the violence of their attack and cause him to shout aloud in the excitement of the combat. Game and fish are fast disappearing as our remoter sections become settled, as lakes and bayous are...
Texoma Stripers!
“We’re almost over the top of them . . . start dropping ‘em. When they hit bottom, crank up three rounds.” Chris Carey instructed Luke Clayton, Jeff Rice and me. Turning toward me specifically, Chris said with a chuckle, “Larry start stripping!” Smiling wryly, I said:...
“Caring Karen” Messer Goes Bream Fishing
As those who have read previous episodes of the ongoing misadventures of Mollygrubs Messer will recall, his nosy, busybody, and termagant-in-training mother, who in rather grandiose fashion styled herself “Caring Karen,” was, to use a description common in the...