A Great Bit Of Writing

[Sheriff Joe]

I usually don't do this, but I'm sitting here subbing, and it's my prep period, and I'm bored. This is from M.R. Montgomery's "Many Rivers To Cross." So far the book has been pretty good: a little bit hoity-toity (in the true New Englander naturalist way-thank you Thoureau), but very informative and at times funny. It's also been a little sad, in that lonely-old-guy-pondering-mistakes-and-seeking-redemption-through-fishing-way that, of late in fishing writing (McGuane, Geirach, MacLean), has been publishing gold. This is describing Yellowstone...

"Inside the park, where geysers erupt on schedule and mud pots simmer constantly, where buffalo oblige by crossing the road mingled among a hundred stalled automobiles, such innocent cutthroat trout are perfectly appropriate and natural. All trout were once so foolish, as any reader of The Compleat Angler can attest. Modern Britian's notoriously fussy brown trout once ate oversize gaudy flies tied onto horsehair leaders. Isaak Walton's (and Charles Cotton's) sixteenth-century trout only became difficult quarry when we ate all the foolish ones, after we fried, boiled, and baked their dumb gene out of existence."

I love it! Here's to those still-dumb hard-to-reach uncooked trout. Go get 'em, and then let 'em go...

Joe

[Sheriff Joe]

Yup. I got three forks of the St. Vrain just waiting for summer and Hippie Chicks. Get out here!

[WanderingBlues]

Awesome! I love fishing prose. I actually got my son to appreciate Hemingway after giving him The Old man and the Sea. A party boat Captain we fish with always screams "Santiago!!!" when someone hooks a bonito. Now my boy knows why. Thanks again.