My life outdoors began as an escape, a way to get away from people, yet now I’m involved in the outdoors because of people — the people I’ve met there. Over the years, the most common question I’ve been asked about my painting is “How did your...
An unlikely life. He was an English banker who ran off to America at an early age. He nearly starved in Mexico, bunked in a California bordello. He passed himself as a cowboy, farmer, lumberjack, Yukondog-musher and gold miner. He drove an ambulance in the First War...
There was once a land with no people, no mammals, just forested mountains and clear rushing rivers since the rocks were laid down. No deer or antelope, no wolf or bear had ever left a footprint there. That place lay brooding for millions of years, a thing unto itself....
“Many people have the basic ability to draw what they see. All children love to draw. It’s just that most lose interest in it for whatever reason. But I never did. I fell in love with art and the outdoors when I started fishing the stream by my house as a...
The situation in Iceleand reminded me of an existentialist stage play, like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Being lost in the fog, with its sensory and sound-deadening effects…was akin to having wandered into the off-stage of life. Iceland...
It was a scene of primal, primitive savagery; it seemed like something out of a corrupted Moby Dick, with the inept, half-crazed Wolf in the role of Queequeg, the aboriginal harpooner who prided himself on his lethal professionalism. Below Elizabeth Falls, where it...
If Hell was cold, wet and windy, it would probably look a great deal like Volcano Bay in Alaska’s Aleutians. But in one of those lovely little touches of irony at which God is so devilishly good, if Heaven was made just for fishermen with a sense of adventure,...
57 years ago, on January 14th, 1965, Bob Dylan recorded his hit single “Subterranean Homesick Blues” Here are some thoughts on fly fishing set to this classic tune. Down in the basement, Thinnin’ out the head cement, Thumbin’ through a...
When I was seventeen, it was a very good year. It was a very good year for small- town girls and soft summer nights. We’d hide from the lights on the village green When I was seventeen. – Ervin Drake I was not yet 17 when I first heard The Kingston Trio...
Islands in the stream…eras in the flow of a man’s lifetime. Days lapse January meager now, and this one is dying. In the twilight of its wake, snow is born. Death to one, life to another. Waylaid at my threshold by the magic, rescued from the zephyr of...
