Jason

While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous, and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual, and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies—day in, day out, from season to season, with friends, and alone.

From the irrepressible author of Trout Bum and The View from Rat Lake comes an engaging, humorous, often profound examination of life's greatest mysteries: sex, death, and fly-fishing. John Gierach's quest takes us from his quiet home water (an ordinary, run-of-the-mill trout stream where fly-fishing can be a casual affair) to Utah's famous Green River, and to unknown creeks throughout the Western states and Canada. We're introduced to a lively group of fishing buddies, some local "experts," and even an ex-girlfriend, along the way.

Whether debating bamboo versus graphite rods, describing the pleasure of fishing in pocket waters or during a spring snow in the mountains, or recounting a trip in pursuit of the "fascinatingly ugly" longnose gar, Gierach understands that fly-fishing is more than a sport. It's a way of life in which patience is (mostly) rewarded, the rhythms of the natural world are appreciated, and the search for the perfect rod or ideal stream is never ending.

Fly-fishing's finest scribe, John Gierach, takes us from a nameless stream on a nameless ranch in Montana to a secret pool off a secret creek where he caught a catfish as a five-year-old, to a brook full of rattlesnakes and a private pond where the trout are all as long as your leg. As Gierach says, "The secret places are the soul of fishing." Hearing about a new one never fails to entice us.

In Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, Gierach looks back to the long-ago day when he bought his first resident fishing license in Colorado, where the fishing season never ends, and just knew he was in the right place. And he succinctly sums up part of the appeal of his sport when he writes that it is "[A]n acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives".