The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 092: John Gierach

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

Lyons, CO- Steven Rinella talks with author and angler John Gierach, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: Gierach's work at a pivotal moment in Steven's life; the palpable anxiety of young adulthood; reading the literary canon in the autumn of life; "fly fishing is friggin' beautiful"; hook and bullet writing; why spin fishing doesn't produce the writers that fly fishing does; what's best for hunters and fishermen in America?; writers and their love of explaining and telling; the tricky thing about conservation; glimpses of abundance; catch and release fishing; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. John Gerak, I'm going to start by kind of, I'm'm gonna make you uncomfortable and butter you up uh you i've wanted to talk to you for for 20 years i think or what year did trout bum come out

um mid 80s maybe 86 i didn't discover it till a little bit later than that but i've been wanting to talk to you since i did because there's a thing like like that book which was your first book right no second because you had a you had a the fly fish in the high countries before that yeah but trout boom fell into when i say our lap i mean the laps of me my brothers and like our main hunting and fishing friends that we grew up with and it fell into our lap at this time in life that will always stick in my head because it was we were kind of coming out of uh coming out of college being mid-college, and there was just this tremendous amount of anxiety that was unspoken at the time,

but there was sort of like a lot of, there's just like this palpable anxiety in the air about what we were all going to, what was going to happen to us all. Yeah. Not like now, right? No, I just feel like I know better. I kind of like, now I have anxiety about my kids, right?

But at the time, I just, yeah, I know I kind of could picture it all now. But at the time I couldn't picture it and there's like a tremendous amount of anxiety. But there's a thing that we were just discovering is that we'd all grown up fishing all the time. Because our dads fished, we just fished. But all of a sudden it was like, it seemed like there's so much possibility out in the world. And we were starting to to screw around with traveling to go places and and just do nothing and almost making like a conscious decision to not have a lot of the material goods that you saw other people going toward at that age because

we were just really in love with just messing around with our friends and camping and pooling your money together to buy gas, to go fish somewhere and doing these things that didn't make sense. And you're doing all this stuff that doesn't make sense. And you felt like anxiety about it and some level of guilt about it because it didn't seem sustainable and seem foolish and childish, but we were so in love with how we were living. And then I read when your book came out, man, and I remember this so clearly all these years later and all the things I've read since then. But it was like, it made me feel like,

oh my God, this is okay. Like this is a thing that people do and that happens to people. And there's like a way you can live your life like this. Yeah, I was going to say, I recognize everything you said except the guilt part. I never felt an ounce of guilt. You never had the guilt?

No. No, no. You grew up in a working class family though. Yeah. That didn't rub off. I mean, not that you don't work, but I mean, you didn't have that sense of like that you needed to be doing something you didn't like.

Well, I had the sense I needed to make a living and i always did i mean i worked all kinds of jobs um even while i was writing i worked a lot of odd jobs and part-time jobs and full-time jobs sometimes and just to get by because you were brought up in Ohio, right? Well, born in Illinois, small town Illinois. Moved to Minnesota for a while. Moved to Ohio. Dad worked for Sears, so we moved around. I was in Ohio for my last two years of high school. And then I went to college in Ohio. And then after that that I was just I was in New York I was in Colorado I was in Haight-Ashbury I was really and you studied

philosophy yeah well like explain that like I don't mean explain philosophy but what was your what was your life I was gonna, how long you got? Why? I mean, what kind of led you to that? Well, I started out as an English major. And always hard for me to say that without thinking of Garrison Keillor now. But I don't know. I didn't like the way they taught. It was an arrogant thing to say, but I didn't like the way they taught it was an arrogant thing to say but I don't like the way they taught English literature it was just you know it was like it was code and you were supposed to decode it and it was like they kept asking what does the author mean and I kept asking why can't he just

mean what he said yeah I remember that being I remember that being difficult too and in the way they kind of march you through the timeline being frustrating as well. Like, all right, we'll start with Beowulf. Yeah, yeah. And this year we'll make it to Shakespeare, then we'll pick up and... Yeah. Talking about hitting meanings and you'd read something and dig it, but then you felt like, well, I must not have really liked it

because when they asked me for what it meant, I can't tell you what the symbolism was. I liked it, if that counts for anything. Yeah, well, you know, I can sort of do it now, but I've read probably thousands of books since then. I mean, I think you don't do enough reading by the time you're studying English in college. I think you haven't done enough reading yet. Oh, you mean like it's premature? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you're just being introduced to literature and you're being asked to look at it as deeply as anyone ever looks at it. Got you. And I think maybe you should read for 20 years and then study English. I don't know. I mean, there is only so much time. Yeah.

I remember meeting a guy. I was fishing with a late friend of mine on the Big Hole River. I'm sure you've fished that river in Montana. We're on the Big Hole River. And we met a guy who was explaining to us that he had been a doctor and had just recently retired and the two things he was never able to do as a doctor was read and fish and so now he was devoting his retirement to fishing in the morning and then while he was still fresh of mind to go and read and he had in his head that he was going

to read even at the word he used he was going to read the canon yeah struck me as like you'll probably get more out of it than i did when i read the canon starting at 18 years of age exactly exactly yeah so you bumped to philosophy yeah and was there like a thing you thought you're going to go do with it like did you want to be a philosophy teacher no i mean i realized at some point that that was what you did right no i don't i don't i mean if if if you were going to get a degree in philosophy that's the only outlet you're not going philosophy, you're not going to go home and hang out your shingle. You're going to be a teacher. That's it.

Or you need to go to law school because law schools like philosophy majors because they could read complicated stuff and figure out what it meant. But I don't know. I was just never – I wasn't on that track it was a man a bird just banged against the window huh yeah he's dead no no no i saw him go he's all right tie some flies with him those were uh those were doves we could have eaten them so sorry i just wasn't on a career track it was the 60s and we were hippies and we weren't looking to go to the office every day but you liked to fish at that point too because you grew up fishing i did had but i didn't do much um the last two years of high school and we lived in northern, you know,

Rust Belt, northern Ohio, and then in college, I mean, it just wasn't fishing around. Yeah, fishing bullheads and stuff like that. Yeah, and when I lived in northern Ohio, that's when the Cuyahoga River caught fire every couple of years. Gotcha. Lake Erie would eat the paint off of ships coming in and nobody wants to fish in that so you just didn't feel a strong connection

to it there at that time I didn't feel any connection to it at all when in this because if you're if you're self-described like that you were uh that you were a hippie or affiliated with the counterculture and were familiar with fishing. Did you, at the time, were you reading like Trout Fishing in America by Brodigan? I don't remember what year that came out, but. That came out later. I did read it.

What were your thoughts of that? And, you know, the Curtis Creek Manifesto and all that stuff. My thoughts. Well, you know, I always liked brodigan um he might be a little thin in retrospect uh-huh but i liked him at the time yeah brodigan's like um like tom robbins i love you read tom but later you can't go read tom like once you get in your 40s and you have kids and stuff you can't go like it doesn't hold up right you're not like holy

shit this guy's a genius yeah it's kind of you kind of like how did i used to think this was good but brodigan's still funny though man he is still funny yeah did not have a funny end no um so when so if you here's i guess i'm kind of driving at this i mean i should just ask you at what point did you at what point did you like make these connections like there is such a thing as a guy there's such a thing as a guy who writes about an activity like fishing and if he is really good can make a living at it and I will shoot for that. I was probably in the mid-70s. Because, you know, I got into fly fishing.

I didn't get into fly fishing until I came out west. In my early 20s, late 60s, early 70s, never really seen it before. In the Midwest, you never saw people fly fishing. You do now. But you didn't then. And I just got into it for what I think were the purest reasons. I thought that's beautiful. That's the prettiest thing I've ever seen. Really? I mean, just the act of it. Yeah.

Yeah, and people are catching fish, and I thought that is just frigging beautiful. And what was the year that you had that sort of thought or epiphany? I don't know, late 60s. Okay. Maybe 70, maybe 1970. And at some point, I mean, I was still trying to be a serious writer. Then I had a little book of poetry in print.

I was writing for little literary magazines. But I was fly fishing and I was reading Fly Fisherman magazine. I don't think Fly Fishing the West was out. I think Trout Salmon and Steelheader was out then. There weren't many. And I just sort of, and of course there were the, you know, Field and Stream Outdoor Life.

I got guys like Lee Wolf around, and I just thought, well, people do make a living at this. Did you feel like it was coarse and low because you were an aspiring poet? Did you feel like it was less artful to become like a writer with sort of a beat, you know? Not really. Not really. I mean, there were people I knew at the time who thought it was. I mean, I had writer friends at the time. Who thought it wasn't like the fine arts.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe it's not like the fine arts. I don't know. Well, for most it's not. But I think that the reason that you're you and the reason that you've been around so long and people like you so much is that you're one of the one of the rare few who has transcended well what it was was um reading tom mcguane jim harrison russ chatham some of those guys. And also, you know, the new journalists were working in Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Peter Matheson. And they were sort of bringing literary techniques into what had normally been journalism up to now. They were becoming, dropping the pretense of objectivity and becoming characters in their own stories.

Yeah. And writing in a stream of consciousness. I mean, you know, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was not a news story. Yeah. About LSD, it was, you know, a little deeper than that. Yeah, yeah. But I think it was probably the single writer that showed me that this could be done as well as any other kind of writing.

It could be just as legitimate as literature was Tom McGuane and some of his earlier stuff. So you were reading his stuff then? Mm-hmm. Yeah, like 92 in the Shade and some of the, I don't know if that was one of his earlier stuff so you were reading his stuff then yeah like 92 in the shade and some of the i don't know if that was one of his earlier works yeah but also his uh you know he wrote for uh sports afield or i don't know he wrote for some of the magazines and harrison back then like in the 70s harrison was doing hunting and fishing pieces for Sports Illustrated. Yeah.

It's amazing in that era, even though participation was not super high in this country, in that era, the room that mainstream publications made for like hook and bullet writing of the finest, highest caliber Would find its way into very mainstream magazines. Yeah, Esquire. But that's also something I've always been like, like a thing that if I look at sort of the stuff I've written and where it's been, I'm always kind of like proudest of those moments when I've been able to take and wedge a thing about hunting and fishing in an unexpected location.

I always feel like it's like counting coup almost. Yeah, yeah. You know, to be able to stick it in somewhere where no one would ever expect to see it. Right. It's like being a sniper. Like, yeah, but you're shooting stories instead of bullets. Yeah. You know, do you know, this is like a side note out of any kind of chronology we're following

with you, but you might have some perspective on it. One of the things that troubles me most about fishing writing is that why does spin tackle not spawn great writers? That's a mixed metaphor. Why does spin tackle, spin fishing, not produce the writers that fly fishing does? I kind of get it, but I don't get it. I don't know if that's a good question. I've never given it a moment's thought. But it could be just that writers tend to be attracted to fly fishing

uh because it's you know it's old and it's kind of primitive and it's complex and the aesthetics are complicated and there's a lot to write about and so you think it's that like the writerly sensibility is drawn to fly fishing rather than like fly fishing inspires writers yeah maybe like i say i've never i've never thought of it before but you're right name name a great spin fishing writer because he was like zane Gray wrote some pretty good pieces about, now it was mostly ocean fishing. Yeah, because I was going to say Papa. Yeah, Hemingway.

Hemingway wrote about deep water. Well, and he wrote about fishing trout with worms too. And hoppers, big two-hearted river. Yeah. Fishing live bait. So, I mean, it's out there, but I don't think anybody would consider Hemingway a fishing writer. Well, I mean, he's definitely, like, informed by that,

and I think that he's, like, recognized as being, I mean, he's as much of, like, he's recognized as much of being a dude who liked to watch bullfights as he is the guy who liked to hunt fish, but he definitely had that. But did Zane Gray fly fish? I don't i've only read his i think it was fishing virgin seas is the book i have at home and yeah well he did some steelheading too but he not only was just a writing about it he was like an innovator of tackle and equipment i mean he goes into great depths describing like making custom

line back when they didn't have line that could hold up to an 800 pound marlin and then the great depths that he went to to have this line or the product shipped from you know who knows where and then it was you know spun somewhere else and then you do all these tests and still the big ones would get away but so he was hardcore he wasn't just a trigger man no no he was into it what was the first uh do you recollect what year was the first year that you wrote a fishing piece where you looked at it and thought like that's not technical writing it It's not how-to. It's like a piece of art about fishing that you published. Well, I think I felt that about

the essays in Trout Bum. And they were not, it came out in, I swear it was 86 86 so probably by the late 70s i was starting to do that like the writing things you're like this is what i want to do and i just did that well yeah yeah and you were placing them where i was placing them in uh in fishing magazines i was in sports of field field and stream fly fishermen um now defunct magazine called fly fishing the west I don't think Fly Rod and Reel. Fly Rod and Reel was still Rod and Reel then. John Merwin had it.

I recognize that name. Published in there. Here and there. And those could not have been, those couldn't have been huge paychecks to write in those places. So you kind of knew that you probably knew that you had to go toward books. those couldn't have been huge paychecks to write in those places. So you kind of knew that you probably knew that you had to go toward books.

Well, I wanted to go towards books. I think all writers want to see their name on the cover of a book. Yeah. Right? Don't you? I mean, magazines. Yeah, I hate to see someone else's name on the cover of my book. Yeah, magazines come and go, newspapers. I had a fight with my, I used to write outdoor column for the newspaper for 28 years.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, but go ahead. They totally screwed up one of my columns. Doesn't matter why, but they totally mucked it up. And I called my editor and yelled at him, and he said... Hold on, but what does that mean? Like, what happened to it? Well, they ran it in four columns, four vertical columns at the top of the page,

but the columns weren't in the right order. Got you. So it read like gibberish. Okay. And I called and yelled at him, and he said, man, that was yesterday. He said, it's on the bottom of a bird's cage by now. Yeah. So.

It's a shitty feeling. Yeah. But he's right. you know but it's like it's painful to articulate it that way though yeah but there's a truth to it yeah but that's that's that's newspapers newspaper that's the problem with newspapers and magazines if you're going to bring up the idea of having your name on the book because i've considered myself like a pretty careful reader okay and i'm aware of the publishing world and i pay attention to what's going on i'll read pieces and uh later someone be like uh who wrote the piece like you know what you don't

know as much as i've spent my life pursuing this and in in this business i never looked and then you imagine that and if you think of yourself as like a careful reader who's paying attention and you imagine how most people perceive it it winds up it winds up uh yeah it makes you hungry for something that um it makes you hungry for something that's more that you you can just continue to point to it as this thing that you did. Because it sounds shallow in some ways in vain, but people do want to be recognized for their work. Yeah, and I wouldn't be the first writer that was shallow in vain, right? No, no.

If there wasn't a little hint of it, you wouldn't be a writer. Yeah, I mean, we do sign our work, right? No, no. It happens. If there wasn't a little hint of it, you wouldn't be a writer. Yeah, I mean, we do sign our work, right? We could all write under a pseudonym and be anonymous, but we don't. Not many of us do. Yeah, I just, and the other thing is, I mean, people are going to, somebody reads a book and likes it, they're going to remember who wrote it.

And a book could conceivably last. No guarantees. But, you know, a book could last. Whereas a magazine, right, it's going to end up on the coffee table in a dentist's office eventually, and then it's gonna get recycled and it's gonna be gone people don't retain them well some people do some people save every issue of some magazine but i mean not like they retain a book man when people are done reading the book they don't throw it in the garbage they go bring it to a right donation center well or they put it

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When you came out with your first book and then many of your subsequent books, and you can correct me if it's in fact all of them, are collected pieces. Do all of your books appear in print before they go into your books? Or do you have original material that appeared nowhere else that goes into your books? There's been original material that appeared nowhere else that goes into your books uh there's been original material that appeared

nowhere else and most of the stuff that was originally published somewhere else has been expanded and into a book chapter have you ever thought about uh like like why is it you haven't done like a full narrative book? I did. It's the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman. Oh, that is? Yeah. Okay. Tell me about that book, like what that was like doing

or what it was like doing that book. It was, you know, it was one of those seasons of the angler thing. I mean, it was a four-season thing. And I just had this idea that that would be the way of them in magazines and then collected them into a book. Yeah. That's the thing about your writing that I kind of admire most about it is your books are often collections of pieces that are freestanding pieces. They make sense and work in a freestanding form, like chapter-length form. But throughout it is this broader story of you and your life and your friends.

And one of the things that most strikes me in it is the affection and love you have for friends that have been your friends for a long time and you come to kind of know them and you have a way of really capturing this long arc of friendship and how it works and goes from you being young and then you're kind of not young right together and then you're all kind of like past some tipping point, headed in another direction together. And it does, together, create this sense of that it is this long meta-narrative. Yeah. And another thing that happens that was really striking me with your new book

is that I'm looking at it like you're always somewhere else, right? You're always on trips. You travel. It seems like you travel incessantly. And in a fly route of your own, you're gone. You spend a lot of time in Labrador. You're up in Alaska. You're fishing around Colorado.

I think you're in Washington. You spend time in Idaho. I don't know where else in your new book but while this is going on there's like this life that you're having where your mother's dying yeah um there's a big forest fire ripping by your house and you're on this trip in maine checking in back home and there's like chores that didn't get taken care of back home and there's a flood that destroys people you're the property of people that you're close with back home and i think that a lot of writers like like with travel writing is sort of it's that you're just immersed in the experience but you do well i think capturing all just like

the nagging shit that you cannot escape from yeah like i used to joke that i used to joke about that if you look at like what a writer writes what's in a writer's head they don't match up because if you spend a bunch of time somewhere and you're writing about it you're just like really cherry picking the opportunities. An example would be we do a show where an episode of the show is 22 minutes long. But we'll go, how many hours, Giannis, how many hours of footage would we film? It's 100 to 1 most of the time. So 100 to 1 ratio. now when you go and put together if you go on a trip and you're gone four or five days

and you put together 22 minutes you are like cherry picking yeah you're not creating a representation of what exactly happened there because if you were for every two minutes that you watched there'd be one minute where you're watching people sleep so you are doing like a there's a there's a fiction to nonfiction in that you're weighting things and talking about what's of interest. Oh, yeah. Well, and you're not only doing that, but you're pulling in memories. You're changing time.

You know, time isn't always linear. Yeah, and you certainly don't. And that's one of the things that like the craft of your writing too is you're not deceptive about chronology, but you're just very good at like dealing with. Occasionally vague about it. Yeah. Well, just like when you get done, when you're back from something,

I think that you're not really concerned with, well, I did this, and then this, and then this, and then this. I think you're more concerned about, here's the flow of my ideas. Yeah.

And I'm not going to be, I don't need to tell you like, this happened, and that happened, and this happened, and that happened, necessarily in that order. Sometimes I'll see like,

I'll be cruising along in one of your pieces, and I'll all of a sudden, like whatever, you flip the page, you realize it's about to end, and I'll my god how is he gonna he doesn't have enough space left to get us back out of here right right to do all the shit to get on the airplanes and load like there's no space and then you're all of a sudden all of a sudden you're just like and that's all i have to say about that subject yeah and it's just refreshing well it's why you never see anybody

in the movies go to the bathroom pulp fiction well yeah but but he dies he gets shot in the bathroom but um i mean it's just assumed that people go to the bathroom yeah throughout the movie but you don't have to see it. You don't have to tell everybody everything. You tell them what's worth telling. Yeah. So I'm kind of saying two things that are crossways a little bit because you do great with that, and you do great with delivering a version of a story

that's most useful to the reader to get the reader where you want them to go but in that calculation that you're making you're also not abandoning all sense because you get the sense in reading your work that you're still always very aware of the world that you left behind when you went somewhere well you are aren't you yeah absolutely and and uh but i think all people are but i don't know that many people have really embraced it and has done as well as you've done it where you can be writing about a trip you're on but also you're writing about this kind of like the loss of your mother and the the weird family stuff that goes around the the death of a family member and what are

your obligations to everyone when that happens. But it's all occurring sort of like this humming noise in your head while you fish. Like when you're out of town and you know something bad's happening at home, you can't escape it. And the rhythm with which you go from being in the moment to being, oh shit, there's a big fire by my house

on the other 2,000 miles away, is really, there's a big fire by my house on the other 2,000 miles away. It's really, it's impressive. Well, it's stream of consciousness and it's more like, stream of consciousness writing seems familiar to people because it's how people think. That's a good point. You don't spend an hour thinking about one

thing you spend an hour bouncing around about 20 things and if you're writing 17 of those things are of no interest to anyone so you leave them out yeah but you you bounce around and um you know you're someplace or you're someplace on a fishing trip you see something that reminds you of something that happens at home or somebody you haven't talked to at home or whatever and that's how people think and so they recognize that in a piece of writing what is your what is your gauge how do you know like when you get into something that's not interesting the 17 things that aren't interesting to other people who who or what are you imagining to know when you've gotten there that you're now into things of interest only to John Geerak?

Well, it's somebody, I think this was actually my old high school English teacher, said every time you say something as a writer, you have to ask yourself, okay, but who gives a shit? Yeah. And so you just do that. You say, why would anyone care about this? Well, no one would, so let's skip this and go on to the next thing that might interest someone. I mean, it takes a tremendous, it really takes a tremendous ego

to assume that anything at all you have to say would be of interest to anyone else. And so you understand you're really out there exposed. I mean, you're spilling your guts to people. And the least you can do is try to do it well and in a way that's useful to them. That's the thing too is that I find that you do well, and I don't know if you mean to do it well, is you do, as much as I talk about being transcendent in writing or transcending genre writing and turning it into art and something that's beautiful and that can move people emotionally

or make them reconsider the world and their place in it you also have you do you also deal in the technical there's a thing i read in your new book that had never occurred to me before where um i can't remember i can't remember what piece it was in, but you'll remember this when I bring it up, is that, let me approach this a different way. If I'm standing on a riverbank, okay, and I see a fish, a trout rise, I'll be like, there's a trout, okay? And then I'll see, let's say I'm slightly down,

I'm looking like downstream, I'm facing the river and I'm looking downstream toward 10 o'clock. I'm like, let's say I'm slightly down, I'm looking downstream, I'm facing the river, and I'm looking downstream toward 10 o'clock. I'm like, there's a trout. And then all of a sudden, a couple minutes later, a fish rises at 2 o'clock. I say, there's another one. And then one goes at noon, and I'll be like, another one. And it wasn't until reading your recent book

that it occurred to me that that could be a fish who's moving around it's just like like i get it now but just like never conceptually i always would have been like one two three trout yeah i i think that he's he's like actively going back and forth through some area. Yeah. Creating the illusion that most guys would come and think it was a shitload of trout. I figured that out on the Henry's Fork years ago. These big trout would get in a run, usually not drakes, but smaller bugs. And they would just, they'd drift down a run and they'd just eat here, and they'd move up and eat one there and eat one there. Might eat five bugs, and then they'd just drop down and just drop back and do it again.

And your first thought is, there are six big rainbows in here. Oh, yeah. And you're still casting to where the one went. Exactly. Because even though you know fish move all over the place, you talk about another thing in a Labrador where they put some kind of tracking mechanism or tag on a brook trout that traveled 30 miles upriver. Yeah.

But I get that intellectually. I understand that. But in looking at when a fish rises, somehow I realize, it's just funny now all these years I've sat there, I've imagined him somehow being, like, static in space. Mm-hmm. So often they are. Yeah, a lot of times they are.

He really is just there. They just, fish do whatever they need to do to survive and flourish. Whatever they need to do, within reason. They can't get out and walk on land but some of them stay in a half mile of stream their whole life some of them go out to the ocean swim to the sea of japan and eat shrimp you know they just do what they want they do what they need to do is that like uh is understanding that kind of keep you going as a fisherman? I mean, I know you obviously fish because it's become your livelihood, right?

So there's that extra bit of motivation. But how do you really, like what keeps you fishing? Because you kind of write about fishing some of these same places where you've been fishing these same places for decades. Well, because you never quite get it right. The same thing that keeps you writing. I mean, you might do well at it, but you're never going to completely do it right or exhaust the subject.

And it's fun. So you keep doing it. It's pretty simple. Yeah. You feel like you've never like you can't like you've never mastered anything with fishing no fishing or writing or anything else anything else worth doing yeah you have a line in one of your books in an earlier book i read and you also mentioned in your new book this idea that um that there's

when it comes to fishing and i and i've quoted you on this a number of times even to some audiences where uh you say in fishing there you tend to view the world there's as there's your party and then the assholes right but it's what's funny when i read that from you is that um everybody does that yeah but what's funny like i read that from you is that um everybody does that yeah but what's funny like a guy like you though is you're producing all this beautiful work for the consumption of obviously the assholes like you hope to sell books beyond your immediate social circle so it just like brings up this interesting idea of like how, like I generally like in life, right. I want like, when I look at politically and culturally in the country, sort of the question I asked myself when I look at things that are going on,

I'm like, what's good for what's best for hunters and fishermen. Yeah. It's just like, like I feel that the obligation personally, I feel that obligation professionally to kind of look at that lens of like, what of this is what's good for hunters and fishermen in america on this issue i have that but i also have the feeling of when you pull in and you're there's a truck there where you're going

and you're like son of a bitch yeah hate that guy it's it's just it's like a funny thing of perception yeah yeah but see everybody else thinks that too i mean if i pull up in a river and go well look at that look there's an asshole standing in my pool he looks back at me and my pickup truck and goes well that asshole wants my pool we all we all do it and and it's like what's your take on it i mean you think about it much or it's just like just a natural thing oh it's just a natural thing and if you just go talk to the guy you wind up loving him yeah i mean if you just you know i've had people come up and stand while i was fishing and and i say you want in i'll go to the next pool do you you have a sort of composite kind of individual or a friend or whatever

that when you're writing, you imagine yourself that they're your bullshit gauge? Yeah. That they're who you're talking to? I do. I do. I mean, it changes from time to time, but I developed this trick. I wrote a column a week for 28 years. I can't do the math, but there's a lot of stinking columns in the newspaper, but mostly about fishing, some hunting, some other stuff. And, you know, I started that when I was pretty young and I kind of struggled with the style I wanted. I always wanted to write in a very conversational style.

And I had this running correspondence with my oldest continuous friend, Ed Engle, who's also a fishing writer. And we were also poets together back in the day. Oh, so you guys go way back. Yeah. And he's worked for the Forest Service. He's a fantastic outdoorsman.

But I just, and we had this correspondence, and it was, it just flowed like water. And one day, just on a whim, I was going to write a story about, I don't know, going fishing somewhere, and I just typed, Dear Ed. And I just told the story like I was writing to Ed, except, you know, like slightly more incomplete sentences. Yeah, no, I understand. And less profanity.

You fulfilled your obligations to the reader. And then when I was done, I scratched out Dear Ed, and that was it. Right? Yeah. No, a good tip that you used to always give me, when we were writing the guidebook, you'd say, yeah, just imagine you're at the bar with one of your buddies doesn't know quite as much about the subject as you do you had a beer or two you're feeling you know pretty loose you can you can roll it all out

fast and then imagine you're just going to deliver that content to that person yeah i it's similar to that i remember in in in writing school in graduate school i would turn in you know these pieces and workshop and i was working on magazine pieces that i later published and uh a teacher became a very dear friend of mine dear to my name or a novelist she would say she would look at and be like now it's now you're like writing yeah now you're writing and it's annoying to me you know it was better when i felt that you were like telling me something yep yep you know because you're slipping into this thing how you imagine a writer would sound tom wolf uh gave a series of lectures somewhere princeton or somewhere and i i a of mine had them, and I listened to him.

And he said a great thing. He said that his students, he'd hear them around campus, and he said they spoke so easily, and they had this real facility with language and slang, and they were playful. And then he said you get them in a writing class, and they write like they're Victorian lawyers. Yeah. With all these heretofores and whereases and stuff. And he said, my job was to say, you already play the instrument, just write it down.

Yeah. You know, you've been talking for 20 years. You know how to have a conversation. Just write it down yeah you know you've been talking for 20 years you know how to have a conversation just write it down yeah but it's not a given that everyone knows how to have a conversation but i think that it's a given that most people who go into the field probably come from that because they have sort of like a love of x a love of of like explaining and telling for the bullshit thing that I'm talking about, which, which probably the same thing, like your friend,

Ed is I have in my head, like anything I do, like whatever kind of media I might be dealing with in the moment. I always imagine, I always try to imagine the response of my two older brothers. Yeah. And gauging, like if I i like if i'm doing good it's the kind of thing that i would hope that they would stumble across if i'm not being my best self it's the

kind of thing where i'm like i hope those guys don't stumble across this yeah and that is and that to me is like worked well as as a, but I don't think everyone has the luxury of having older brothers who are interested in the same shit they're interested in, which I realize is a luxury. It is a luxury. The luxury I've had is I've had some really good colleagues and teachers

who've taught me things about writing, and often not much, but just a little piece that i can put together um i always think of ed because he's a he's a withering critic he sort of really just cut you down to size he once said of trout bomb somebody asked him how he liked trout bomb and he said well i said i think it makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in quality yeah ouch i don't know man i see from your perspective that might be bad but here's the thing like a word that sticks in my head for not not just Troutbone, but all your books is just like an exuberance. Yeah.

Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try On x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all i don't know if you really like i don't know if you really like life and being alive as much as yourself on the page does,

but there's an infectious enthusiasm for just being alive. I like it. I've had a good time with it. But it's not like you paint being alive as just nothing but just good times and laughs. Yeah. Because being alive is in some ways, it's a struggle and a hassle. But you paint being alive as like something that's really worth doing. Yeah.

Well, don't you think it is? Yeah. But I think it's also easy to fall into a trap where you lose sight of how worthwhile it all is. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Or that you don't take time to say to say to yourself like my god is it worthwhile being alive yeah yeah because you can have weeks go by without realizing that and it's like one of the beauties of the natural world is like for me the reminder i get it through my kids now because

i have young kids but for me that a long time the only real genuine reminder of that was the natural world yeah it was the time that i felt it was the time that i would be like holy shit being alive man i need to do more of this would be like inspired by by how much you love your friends and love being outside with them yeah and seeing things with them and now like i get in a very different way because i get it because i have young kids and and the minute you need anytime you feel like slog slog down or slow down or in a bog just take one second to imagine not being able to see them grow into what they'll become right and it makes you just really, really glad.

Yeah. About the fact that you're breathing air. Because it's such a, like a daunting, miserable thought. Well, and you know, you spend a lot of time outside, you know, with other people who spend a lot of time outside, and you just see great stuff. Yeah. You know, you other people who spend a lot of time outside, and you just see great stuff. You know, you see beautiful stuff. And not everybody, I don't think everybody has that in their life.

Or they don't, you know, you schlep off to work for the 9,000th day in a row, you know, maybe you don't look around and go, geez, it's a nice day. Do you self-identify as an environmentalist like in the way that many people would recognize that um in your i think when you're talking about you know you spend a lot of time talking about like like like habitat for fish like what fish need to live but you lot of time talking about like like like habitat for fish like what fish need to live but you also spend time talking about just sort of like the general um way that things go with nature and and i think that and sometimes in there there's like a bit of um in your voice and in your worldview there's a bit of cynicism and maybe like a little bit of pessimism that we won't be able to stop the bleeding.

Yeah, well, I think that. We may not be able to. I mean, it's hard when you've just had the the two biggest hurricanes on record within months of each other and we've pulled out of the paris accords yeah um and the epa is dropping all their regulations all their environmental regulations. You think, well, I don't know, maybe this is the end. But, you know, all you can do is just say to people in a roundabout way, this is, not only is this beautiful and worthwhile, not only is it good for you to spend time out here,

but we'll die without it. And you really should maybe think about that the next time you go to the polls. Or maybe you should just think about going to the stinking polls. I mean, it kills me that half the eligible voters in this country don't vote. After all, the people who've died, so they have a right to vote. That's a good way of putting it. It's just shameful. Do you think that you have an obligation in your work?

When you bring up an idea in your books, I remember you were talking about being in some remote outpost somewhere i can't remember what it was and you're saying that everyone there was either uh everyone there was either there to go fishing or there for mineral extraction and you kind of talked about the two different views they had of the future of that place when you're when you're talking about that kind of stuff and thinking about those things are you putting it in there because you can't um you can't help yourself but put it in there or do you feel that you have an obligation because you're talking to outdoorsmen and fishermen do you have an obligation to steer

them in a direction that you feel that they need to go in order to understand probably a little of both i don't i don't uh sit down at the keyboard with a sense of obligation um but when something like that comes up i feel like i should make note of it just to keep people aware. I mean, a lot of ways I'm just preaching to the choir. I don't know if there's a lot of people who read me who wouldn't consider themselves environmentalists or conservationists or, you know, in some way. So you don't think that somewhere there's a guy,

I bet you there are. I bet you there are guys who read you and think you're funny and they love to fish, but it annoys them when you go down that path. Oh yeah, I suppose there are. There are. I mean, I'm not saying I've talked to them, but there are.

Yeah, yeah. No, there have to be. Well, I don't care. I mean, people like that need to be tweaked too. Maybe they just need to be reminded, well, all these guys I'm hanging out with having such a great time, they're worried about the environment.

I wonder if I should look into that. I don't know. And you have concerns too. So there's the environment, which is the place we live in, what's in our backyards and what's in our communities and just this big, huge, broad thing. But you also seem to have a lot of concerns for wilderness. And there was a thing that you mentioned.

You're talking about float planes. And you start out, this is in a fly rod of your own. And you're talking about float planes. You start out by describing this kind of crazy place you arrive at and the things that go on there and the wildlife there. And there's graves from possibly old French trappers laying around and all this 10-foot-high mound of caribou antlers and you paint this picture you go like yeah that's the kind of place where a float plane can get you and then you go on to explain how you used to have a more uh you had this like different view of float planes and the access they provided and now

that your view of float planes is sort of tainted by the idea that oh that's right everything comes at a cost yeah yeah and the simple fact of this plane allowing me to be here in some way some way that's a corrupting force too now well yeah it like brings us and it brings this kind of like it brings this bittersweet sort of feeling to it yeah but it's just um it's just by way of reminding people that there is a cost i mean i i think i remember that passage it's something like you know you've you've gone to this absolutely remote, beautiful, pristine place, and you step out of the float plane onto the pontoon as there's a stinking oil slick from your plane. Yeah, your plane. Yeah.

And I just feel it's worth reminding people that that's there. But it isn't, I don't know how calculated it is. You know what I mean? I mean, it occurs to me. And so, and I'm writing about what's happening with me. So I say, well, here's this. Yeah. Because in my stream of consciousness, this is a real theme that ought to be explored.

Yeah. And it passes the test of is this something that people are going to give a shit about. I should show you the photograph. I've got it somewhere. A good friend of mine, Mike Dvorak, wonderful black and white photographer, took some photos on a trip to Labrador. And one of them is this beautiful shot down the board dock out to the float plane, beautiful old de Havilland beaver tied up. And in the foreground are just oil barrels, like 20 or 30 of them. And I said

I asked him was that intentional he said oh hell yeah have you read John McPhee's coming into the country his history of Alaska yeah but not for a long time he spends a significant portion of that book talking about the oil drums oil barrels

and it's really like in a way it's not heavy handed but it's just this ever present thing is oil drums, oil barrels. It's really like, in a way, it's not heavy-handed, but it's just this ever-present thing is oil drums. Well, Alaska is, I mean, you go up to Alaska, it's beautiful, it's wilderness. You catch all these fish and the whole, I mean, the only reason there's any civilization up there is oil and salmon. Yeah. That's the crazy thing about it.

You speak, you know, 100 years ago, sea otters. Yeah. yeah that's crazy thing about you speak you know 100 years ago sea otters yeah i've had a feeling just kind of the back to that feeling of uh the conflictedness right that you love places and so you want to go see them but knowing that somehow your presence yeah i've had criticism before like i was i was hunting one time in anwar, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And I remember hearing criticism from someone. I can't remember who it was. It was pointing out how unfair it was. Be like, here you are.

You want this place to be hands off. And no one can go there, but you get to go there. You have the economic means to go here. And so you're saying all the things that should or shouldn't happen here. Most people would never be able to go here. And so you're saying like all the things that should or shouldn't happen here, most people would never be able to go there. What gives you a right to have an opinion about what happens to this place? It's not fair. Yeah, yeah.

And I remember thinking like, if I could make a deal right now though, if someone came to me and said, we'll never touch it again, but you can't go. you can't go i would say deal yeah me too i would say okay great me too let's get the lawyer and sign this let's get the lawyer and draw this thing up right now i will never come back and since that'll never happen people just have to believe you when you say that yeah no it's it's a it's a tricky thing

it's a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing. What do you feel about... Where do you feel that catch-release fishing is at? In light of new thinking and new awareness that you see in the food world, in the chef world, of people having this idea that they're um reconnecting with sources of food and people want to have these like these experiences where you see food go from

you know the water to your plate yeah i think it's useful and necessary to a degree because there are so, there are too many people fishing for the fisheries not to be degraded seriously. So I think the idea that, you know, I fish a lot. And if I killed all the fish I caught, I would make a big dent. But I think it's permissible. I was never one of those guys who thought killing a fish was murder. Yeah.

And I've written about that any number of times. Talk about eating a char at the end of the book. Yeah. A guy chunking up char and mixing it in under the seat of a plane? Well, there was that that but there was also um i just we went out caught a couple of big char like six eight pound char beautiful fish and flew them back and francis the camp cook cooks them up but i said in that i said

something like you know i didn't blink when i killed it and i didn't think twice about it uh somehow i felt like the world owed me that fish yeah and i was happy to eat it there's another passage where you're up in a place and you're fishing you actually you actually talk about you're in camp and you know i don't know if it's the same trip you're talking about being up there and eating king salmon but then you do kind of point out that um some of these places like in alaska when you get these glimpses of abundance right because unless you'd be in a river in in in uh ten and a half months out of the year i mean shit in the river right but then there's this this flurry and people coincide their trips to catch the flurry and it creates this like sense of

never-ending abundance and you talk about this feeling that um some people have a hard time being around that without being i'm gonna take 50 pounds of these things home and let them get freezer burned in my freezer when thinking about the you know the environment and the state of clean water and healthy fisheries and wildlife habitat, you kind of get into this point where you're talking about you can either live with regret about the things that are gone or the things that have become overexploited. Like live with regret and become bitter or just look for new water yeah and i feel like you're being like you're being metaphorical there yeah for sure good good pickup yeah like like can you can you explain you're thinking on that like kind of what you what you mean when you say that in a in a literal sense than what you kind of mean in a more and more figurative sense like live with regret or look for new say that in a literal sense than what you kind of mean in a more figurative sense.

Like live with regret or look for new water. Well, in a figurative sense, it's what we were talking about earlier. Yeah, you know, maybe the world's ending, but why give up? Yeah. I mean, we could stop it, maybe. We could turn things around. So, I mean, you can't just give up. Right?

Yeah. And then there's the subtext of every time you go find new water, you know, you're one more guy exploiting that place. So I just would like people to think about this stuff. It doesn't mean you have to change what you do or anything. I mean, I don't plan to stop fishing because I think there's too heavy a burden on the streams. But I think it's worthwhile to be aware that there is too heavy a burden on the streams.

That's why a lot of us catch and release fish. Yeah. To continue doing what you love but not have a... Yeah. Just, I mean, there's no... You know, I'm happy to go someplace, catch two fish. There's a little creek up here, not too far from here. I like to go up there in the late summer, fall,

and get a couple of brook trout and a handful of perfect little doorknob-sized boletus mushrooms and some wild raspberries. And either cook them there or come home, cook them at home. And I usually cook them a little, they're usually a little better if I cook them at home. And I would never want to lose that.

And a lot of places I go, kill a fish and eat it. Shore lunch. Yeah. You talk about that in your book. We were in Northwest Territories a couple years ago in Great Bear Lake. And the fishing was so good, we wanted a five-pound lake trout for lunch. And we had to fish all morning until almost 1 o'clock to catch one that small. Oh, is that right?

Yeah. And, I mean, that's just, it really is wonderful to see that kind of abundance. For sure. But you got to, there are people who would have kept all those fish if they could. Yeah. Not as many as there used to be. I mean, I really think people are becoming aware that, you know, why kill 50 pounds of fish? Like more aware about the finiteness of nature. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, if I can do it, everybody else could do it, and then what happens? I think it was in that book, there's a, I recounted an argument between a bush pilot and a sport. And the guy said, well, why not keep 50 pounds of salmon? They're going to die anyway. And the pilot said, well, they're going to die anyway and the the pilot said well they're going to die after they spawn and everyone you kill is one that isn't going to spawn yeah and then he went on to ask the guy are you really that stupid or are you just playing dumb so you can go on being

an asshole yeah yeah no no that's a term you used to see so much i think i read it in your thing is like there used to be this idea of the game hog yeah which i hadn't heard in a long time um do you you're careful about not naming places that would be easy for people to get to but have you felt have you come under criticism with friends or have you ever felt like that because your work's so widely known that you've provided sort of a compass and map to people looking for for good fishing or doesn't it work that way that you write about somewhere and then come back and it's different than it was because you drive because you personally drove everyone there i've never been directly criticized for that, but I know it happens.

I mean, I've written about the South Platte River Cheeseman Canyon down through Deckers, which isn't as good now as it used to be. And it's really not because of fishing pressure so much as whirling disease and then flash floods that silted everything in, killed a lot of bugs. It's coming back after a fashion, but that was crowded when I first wrote about it. And is it more crowded now because I wrote about it? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But I've never really been held to account for that, but I'm aware of it. I'm aware it happens.

Yeah, but I think that it's probably safe to say that. But it's also why I'm so careful about not saying where places are. Some places, Ed Engel again, said to me once, his rule is he won't write about any stream he can roll cast across. And he said, and I can roll cast a hell of a long way. That's good.

The thing I need to keep in mind is that record regulated recreational fishermen are not going to destroy a fishery they might destroy some bit of the experience of participating in the fishery but they're not going to destroy the fishery they're not going to fish out every fish like uh like a toxic spill would yeah but they're going to degrade it to the point where where you once could go catch 18 to 20 inch fish on a dry fly now the best you can do is a foot long fish you've seen that um not quite to that extreme but yeah i've seen it like like you you've felt the the repercussions of a lot of recreational fishing yeah and then you have a thing that uh you're talking about in a funny way you're talking about being in a camp

in the past you're talking about you know having been pretty drunk where you're blowing on a fire and like passed out in the fire and burnt your beard yeah and uh and then i think in that same thing you talk about you just don't drink like you you kind of like don't drink like you used to yeah is that sort of a um is stopping drinking sort of like this acknowledgement that is it like a personal acknowledgement that you won't be on earth forever or was it different than that well i think i always knew i wasn't going to be on earth forever? Or was it different than that? Well, I think I always knew I wasn't going to be on earth forever. Yeah, we know it, but we don't know it know it.

No, it was more that I just, I knew I was drinking more than I probably should. And I knew it wasn't good for me. And I wasn't feeling good. And I was in my 40s. I was making a living as a writer. And I just thought, I'm not enjoying this like I used to. It doesn't make me feel good. And I need my wits about me if I'm going to keep doing this. I think it was more, it was less an actual intimation of mortality and more just the idea that at 40, I could have another 40 years in me. If I don't pickle my brains, right? But if I pickle my brains, Right? Yeah. But if I pickle my brains,

maybe I've only got 20. Was it Mickey Mann who said if I'd have known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. Yeah. Yeah. I find that like a joke I often make is when I think about how old I am or other people's age,

I always double it and then remind them they're halfway to x yeah so i'm not halfway to 86 yeah what's helpful is i know how long i've been alive and i can picture that span of time so understanding where i'm at in the halfway mark helps me like conceptualize whether or not i have that long again yeah reaching out of me. And I'm now at the point where I might not have the amount of time behind me ahead of me. I could.

Well, try being halfway to 140. Do you feel that you're going to be doing more books? Are you going to keep writing? Do you have a plan to not write? Or do you think just write so you just cannot write? Well, I'm going to write until I can't write. I just signed a contract earlier this year

for two more books over six years. With your same publisher? Yeah. That's a nice relationship you've had with your publisher, man. A long, nice relationship, huh had with your publisher man a long nice relationship huh yeah yeah it isn't all um sweetness and roses but um you know it's kind of a weird friendly but slightly adversarial relationship but um yeah they've been good to me. Simon Schuster's been a really good outfit. Yeah.

And, I mean, they've made me a good living, and my agent, Pamela Malpas, too. Do you want to say any kind of, do you have any kind of little stump speech plug you'd like to give for your new book? Yeah. I would like to give for your new book? Yeah. I would like to give one. Go ahead. I want to say if you like to fish, but I think it's like if you like to fish, laugh,

if you like being alive on earth, I think it's like worthwhile to check out John Gerak's latest book, which is just like new, right? Fairly new. Yeah, just this spring. A Fly Rod of Your Own. And it is your 17th or 18th or something like that? 18th. So once you tuck into that book and dig it, you do not need to worry about running out of more books for a while.

Yeah, they're all still in print. Thank God. Thank you very much for joining us on the show. Happy to do it. you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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