April 2004, Book Review                                         For Long Ridge Writer’s Group

Presented to Mary Rosenblum                                            Presented by Ed Vachal

                                                                                     Email:  evachal@hevanet.com

Book Name:  Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders;     Author:  John Gierach

Publisher:  Simon & Schuster,                      Copyright 2000, ISBN 0-684-86858-X

 

           

 

Of course you remember Mark Twain.  Now, resurrect him, baptize him a fisherman, locate him in a town just east of the Continental Divide (naturally on a river), put a pen in one hand, a bamboo rod in the other, add a spartan drop of anarchy, stick him on a cloistered alpine stream, give him a protean knowledge of fly fishing, a knack for explaining the obvious in uncanny ways, a passion for finding virgin water or prolific ponds boiling with rainbows, cutthroats, and hatch, and you will find a sly, curmudgeonly, middle-aged fart named John Gierach. 

 

 You need not be a fish person to experience or enjoy this thoughtful and wry conglomeration of Twain, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Skeleton, and Audubon.  Non-fishers will quickly soak up the wit and satire that oozes through the tip of Gierach’s pithy pen.  Philosophy slashes through countless one-liners.  He challenges his readers to reflect on the sanctity of life, our ineptitude to live it well, and the boredom most people endure—unless they love nature and can stand knee-deep in a tender stream waving a stick.  (Sounds a lot like Thoreau, right?)

 

            Gierach’s wit stings your ears:  “If people don’t occasionally walk away from you shaking their heads, you’re probably doing something wrong;” your

assumptions:  “In all of human experience there are only four metaphysical

summits, Valhalla, Heaven, Nirvana, and the Green Drake Hatch on the Henry’s Fork;” your attitude towards people:   “Do not go fishing with someone who is so set on being back at a certain time that he will refuse to invent a case of car trouble to keep you on the water an extra day;” or your assumptions about work:  “responsibilities fade in direct relation to…windshield time.”

 

            He swaggers through this compilation, unafraid of lambasting society, psychology, science, absurdity, rituals, mortality, and his own sense of insignificance.  Humor laces the chapters.   Whether the reader knows how to tie a Royal Wulff, Pale Morning Dun or Callibaetis to a floating line via a blood knot doesn’t matter.  His irreverence is infectious.  His sentence structure is filled with red herrings:  you assume you catch his drift—and then he foils you (“…in a technical sense, the cast is the soul of fly-fishing.  When you have it down you’re there.  In a nontechnical sense, you can then begin to consider where ‘there’ is”).  His perspective is green, pregnant and taut, just like his fish line as he controls a pike.  He loves to fish and we, vicarious readers and fly fisher wanna be’s, wade with him up pristine box canyons, listen to cranes, ducks, and boils of hungry cutthroats, pikes, and for us red necks, even the splash of carp.

 

           

 

I am curious, about Gierach’s motivation for this anthology.  This book compiles six bestsellers starting in 1986, with Trout Bum, and swims forward every two years with titles like: The View from Rat Lake, 1988; Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing, 1990; Even Brook Trout get the Blues, 1992; Dances with Trout, 1994; and Another lousy Day in Paradise, 1996.  Suddenly, pun intended, we receive an anthology copyrighted in 2000, and then we must wait until 2003 for the next best seller.   What happened?

 

 Well, I know what it is:  he took his own advice, said “to hell with it” fired up his USA, antique Chevy pick-up, “tied another dozen Ugly Radimuses (or is it Radimi?),” found another stretch on his private St. Vrain or Madison or Yellowstone or Gunnison River, and returned to what he always loves to do. Fish and write about fishing.  As he says, “Fishing is one of the few ways I know of to let go of the past, forget about the future, and live in the moment.”  That gives me inspiration to fish my own waters and become one with my eternal self—forget death.  Fish on!