 Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the annual trout lecture of Montana State University Library. My name is Kenning Arlich and I'm the dean of the MSU Library. I want to give a big thank you to the Museum of the Rockies for hosting, and thank you to Montana PBS for live streaming this event for the first time in its history. And remember, your microphone is live. It would help if you just didn't talk until you got up here. Thank you also to the MSU Foundation, which continues to help us raise funds for the trout and salmonid collection as we grow it and digitize it to make it widely available. Our development officer, Jane Howard, is in the audience. Jane, give a wave. There you are. And Jane and I would welcome conversations with anyone who would like to contribute to our efforts. We're honored to have Tom McGuane as our speaker tonight, and he will be introduced in a few moments. But first, I would like to recognize just a few people in the audience. This lecture series is brought to the public free of charge by the trout and salmonid Lectureship Endowment, which was established in honor of one of Montana's fly-fishing legends, Bud Lilly, who at nearly 91 years of age is with us again tonight. Bud, will you please give us a wave? Bud continues to be a strong supporter of the library's trout and salmonid collection, which was founded 20 years ago. Other great supporters, some of whom have recently donated or promised their own papers to the collection are here tonight. I'd like them to stand and please hold your applause until they're all up. A.K. Best, Ed Engel, John Girac, and Craig and Jackie Matthews. Thank you. And now, to introduce our speaker for the evening, please welcome Dr. Chris Kearns, MSU's vice president for student success, and an avid fisherman himself. Now I know how the warm-up act for the Rolling Stones feels. I told Tom this evening when I met him that it's a little embarrassing to be introducing anyone when you're a fan. And when I look out at the group that's here this evening, I can tell that the trout are worried. Well, welcome to the Museum of the Rockies and this wonderful, this wonderful venue. I hope you're as excited as I am to hear our speaker this evening. In fact, I imagine that most of us here tonight need no introduction to Tom McGuane. That's fortunate, since as one of the true treasures of our treasure state, Tom McGuane has done so many things and has done them so well that any attempt to inventory his many accomplishments in a few brief remarks would otherwise seem hopeless. How do you succinctly convey the scope of someone who is a novelist, short story writer, screenplay author, movie director, cutting-horse champion, conservationist, rancher, outdoor writer, political thinker, surely most importantly for those of us here tonight, someone who's a good deal more than what we would usually mean when we describe a person as an angler. Tom's wide-ranging adventures in his skill with a rod and a fly are well known. But his writing about fishing carries us far beyond geography and technique and it lifts us towards something that we might want to call grace. As he himself observes in the prefatory remarks to his book, The Longest Silence, A Life in Fishing, quote, If you can find no higher ideal than outfishing your buddies, catching something big enough to stuff or winning a trophy, you have a lot of work to do before you are what Isaac Walton would call an angler, close quote. When I first read this remark, I was reminded not of the fishing guides, the how-to manuals of my youth. Those writings that offer us tips and tricks and techniques, I was instead carried back to one of my other heroes of that deeper kind of teaching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and what he had in mind in the Divinity School Address when he challenged the students of Harvard, hard to think of here in Montana, on a Sunday evening in 1838 when he said this, Truly speaking, it's not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me or reject. And on his word or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. Like Emerson, I thought, Tom McQueen is provoking his readers in the way only the best of teachers challenges. And when I reflected on his topic tonight, the question, does fishing mean anything? I suddenly realized that I had simply assumed I knew the answer to a question that I had never actually asked, despite the fact that I began fishing with my father and my grandfather at the age of three. Tom McQueen has a rare talent for giving voice to those vivifying hints and suggestions in nature and in life that otherwise might go without saying, that might, without his provocative, his provoking prose, never in fact become part of our conscious experience. So if fishing isn't about winning some ego-driven contest, if it really isn't at its core about success or failure, what is the work that I must do to become more like what Isaac Walton and what Tom would call an angler? When Tom writes about Walton's classic book, The Complete Angler, near the end of the longest silence, he says this, quote, today's faithless reader will be somewhat baffled by the long shelf life of this unreliable fishing manual until he realizes that it's not about how to fish, but how to be, close code. Angling in this larger sense is not about the rhythms of cast and mend, of slack and tightened lines, of catch and release. It is about living more vividly and more true, or at least that's how I read it. Quote, the Bible, Tom writes at the end of his prefatory remarks, quote, tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about. Using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves, close code. I can think of no more fitting advice than this beautiful invitation to watch and listen. And to that purpose, I ask you to join me in welcoming to the podium a true angler, Tom McQueen. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I really ought to just leave it at that. This was, you know, I sort of tossed off this title earlier in the summer when we knew that I was going to do this. And I've ever since been trying to live up to it. I said, my wife asked me what the title of the talk was, and I said, does fishing mean anything? And she said, do you know the answer? I pretty well stonewalled her on that one. I heard yesterday somebody said, yes, fishing means something, but it's a secret. And it may remain that way. But let me tell you why, how I got thinking about this. A couple of years ago, we had some of the Iraqi and Afghanistan soldiers who were variously physically and psychologically damaged. And they were visiting in our area. And I talked to some of the people who were leading them around. They had docents and doctors and all sorts of people kind of keeping them whole for this experience of learning to be trout fishermen. And I thought, this is a little far-fetched. We're going to give them a hobby and sort out their problems. It just didn't seem like a great idea. And I kept hearing that it was kind of working. So I thought, well, I'd like to find out a little bit more about that. And so I talked to some of my friends who'd had similar experiences. Many of you probably know Craig Fellen over at Wise River. He was a marine in Vietnam, had a lot of firefights. He made me really understand what firefights were like. He said, you can't believe the level of noise. It's all-encompassing, inescapable noise. And when you're not doing that, you're lying out like a tiger trying to assassinate somebody. At one point, they were bivouacking and digging in. And the Viet Cong had found an abandoned Catholic church and they climbed up to the top of the steeple and they saw where everybody went. And they bombarded them all night long. And when Craig got up in the morning, some of his friends were gone. He said at that point he felt enveloped by an inescapable sadness and that everything that he had loved as a boy before he went to Vietnam was gone. He came back, got out of the army, received the customary shameful reception that Vietnam vets got. And he went up to the Missoula area and he started fishing Lolo Creek. He caught every single fish in Lolo Creek. He watched a guy, an old man coming down the creek with a creel, with trout tails sticking out of it. And he said, can I look in there? When he opened the creel, he knew where every single fish in that creel lived. And he said it was the beginning of an aperture for him to see his way back to the life he'd had before Vietnam. And from that point on he rediscovered his love of life, his love of nature. But without fishing, he says he didn't think he could have ever gotten there. Then I talked to Lefty Cray. I think all of you know who Lefty Cray is. Lefty was a poor boy, was a ward of the town that he grew up in. They'd buy him clothes at Christmas and increase his humiliation by putting him on the front of the newspaper. So he joined the army. And he went almost immediately to the Battle of the Bulge. He was in unending firefights. He was instructed to go up and wipe out a Nazi machine gun nest, which he did, but they were all kids running the machine guns. He came back pretty psychologically beat up and they put him in, he thought he was going on from there to Japan. But the war there was over. So Lefty went into a biological warfare center and he tended a seven-story column of liquid which was distilling anthrax. And in his famous casting arm, he got anthrax and it turned black. And Lefty said, I've got to do something. And he went fishing. And through fishing, he crawled his way back into a fantastic life. Glenn Brackett came to the house one day and he brought Doug Merrick, the great broad builder from the Winston Rod Company. And Doug was very old at the time, pretty decrepit. And do you remember this? Put him out in a sandy spot in the river where he'd be secure. And I looked over and I thought, gee, he looks so contented. He's in the river, his casting stroke is as lovely as ever. But not all that many decades before, he'd been on top of a Nazi freight train warding off Allied strafing. When he came back, he had a long way to dig out. And he dug out through angling. So it's not just a hobby. It's more than that. And all of us who fish a lot, we don't want anybody to call it a sport or a hobby or an art. We don't know what to call it. We're working on, it's a calling, like the priesthood. So anyway, that's sort of the downside of why I wanted to really think about, could it mean something more than we have acknowledged? Because when I saw those guys from Iraq and Afghanistan staring at the Boulder Road looking for IEDs and looking at the ridgetops for snipers, I thought, man, they've got a long way to go. I don't know if you can get them out of this with a fly rod. But it seems to work. Let me see. Let me look at some of my notes because at my age, you have short-term memory loss. I was going to tell a silly joke about that. I was going to burst into laughter. I was going to say, that's no laughing matter. I was going to burst into laughter. Well, I maybe promise not to say this. And then I was going to say, I can't remember what I'm laughing at. Anyway, in Jack Hemingway, Jack Hemingway was captured by the Germans after parachuting in with his fly rod. If you read his autobiography, you know he seems to think it was worth it. So my father and my grandfather were fly fishermen. And it was not such a delete thing in the back of the day. My grandfather worked for the railroad. And I really looked up to both of them. I looked up to my father. And we had a great sort of family friend, my so-called uncle Ben, who was my father's fishing companion. Years after my father had passed away, I was living down on the Keys. And my uncle Ben came down there and he hired Harry Snow Jr., who was a legendary bonefish guy. He weighed about 350 pounds. And you could always tell where Harry Snow had been fishing because you see all the Diet Coke cans and the mangroves. So anyway, my uncle Ben said, let's go fishing. And we went out and we fished and talked about my dad and other things. And I said to my uncle Ben, I said, my dad was a great fisherman, wasn't he? And there was a long pause. And my uncle Ben said, no, Tommy, he wasn't. And he said, but nobody loved it more. So there was another little fork at the road for me. What makes a great fisherman? Loving it more, seeing more in it, finding more that attaches you to the great themes of life and nature? Or is it developing a high level of skills that allows you to perform others? Now, I tried this trope on a friend of mine, this English guy. And he said, well, what would you say about a guy who was a hunter and he never hit anything? Would you say he was a great shot? And I said, no, I guess it's different. Fishing's different. And I think the philosopher Ortega Gasset said that fishing and hunting are identical because he saw it as part of this primeval predatory activity that people have. When I, James Prosek, who spoke here before, he and I talked. He said, one of the great drives for anglers is to see fish. We're very frustrated to say in a long fight with a fish if we never get it up to where we can see it. And once we've seen it, we're there. And I think most of us from the time we were children wanted to pick them up or look at them and see what they were. Because they're emblematic of the perfection of nature. E.O. Wilson got the same bang out of ants and they led him to one of the highest views, understandings of the universe that we know of. So that's my father. He wasn't a great fisherman. What else? What makes people fish? Nat Reid spoke here a while ago. And I asked Nat, I said, why are you so committed to fishing? What made you spend your life fishing? And he said, well, he said, when I was a kid at Christmas time, friends of our family sent us a salmon that had just been caught for Christmas dinner. And he said, I couldn't believe my eyes. And he said, I never had a thrill like that in my life looking at that fish. And he said, I just wanted to keep trying to look at them, wherever they were. So I took to fishing early on. Not everybody does. Not everybody who loves fishing does. But I crawled to the edge of my aunt's yard in western Massachusetts. And she had a little stream that ran through there. It had a little pool. And I crawled up to it. I was about four years old. And there were brook trout swimming around in there. And I had, apparently, an epileptic seizure. And my mother carried me to the house. And they tried to decide whether they needed to get medical help for me. But I was just pretty overwhelmed. And I thought, well, that's kind of crazy. And maybe that describes why I behaved in certain ways later in life. But then I read the great Russian writer fishing and hunting subject Sergei Oksakov. And he also suffered a seizure at first seeing a salmone. No, I felt absolved. So I want to just read a couple of little things, very short. And then we'll go back to kind of chatting about this. There's always been an attempt to concentrate experience often to the point that the experience is elusive. This has happened to fishing, which ought, in general, to be slow, difficult, and personal. Commercial entities promising bonanzas are really offering to pelletize the experience of fishing. Not long ago, I watched a YouTube of a new fishing technique, which combined using a long soft rod to sling an array of tungsten nymphs upstream of holding water where the apparatus would dredge its way downstream to be picked up and slung again. The demonstrator cried out, I've already got 15 out of this hole. It doesn't strike me as a spiritual experience. I grew up fishing the rivers of northern Michigan, the Pyramarcat, the Pine, the Boardman, the Black, the Pigeon, and I still love to say those names. Under the instruction I got from my elders, one did not use lead in any form. And if those men had heard about tungsten, they would have gone mad. Dry flies, wet flies, and streamers were the orders of the day. Anything more was considered tennis without a net. But no lead. Lead was considered to be contrary to the spirit of things. A person with sinkers in his pocket was considered to be something very, very low, perhaps in the words of my uncle Ben, who had a great turn of phrase, a booger-eating moron. I've got some split shot. I got a level with you people. Trout are not an insurgency. They are not something to be defeated. They are creatures into which we wish to develop a relationship, and it can be the most satisfying to take up a form of fishing for them, which is intentionally limited and enter into a sort of dialogue with them. This is how our old-fashioned dry fly purists saw things. Often we fish not to be productive, but to fish in a way that seems right to us. Where's Archie Best? You're the last of the dry fly purists. Don't buckle! Here's a little story I want to read about a famous old angler that Glenn and I knew pretty well. He's been gone for years, but we've never stopped talking about him. Have we, Glenn? No? Even tonight, right? Bill Shad. Anybody here know Bill Shad? Anybody know who Bill Shad was? He was an unbelievable fisherman. In 1956, fishing in a public river in Northern California, he caught between 6 and 800 steelhead on a fly. He was a... There's never been anybody like him for the kind of fishing that he was best at. And I want to read a little thing I wrote about a time I spent with Bill that where he learned something about the meaning of fishing. I first met Bill Shad in San Francisco, and by the way, Glenn, did you call me the first flower child at the Winston Rod Shop in San Francisco? I'll get you for that. I first met Bill Shad in San Francisco, his hometown in the 60s. It was a summer of love, and Russ Chatham and I had already painted flowers on our Flugermetalus. Bill was one of the greatest anglers who ever lived. Those of you with double-sided wheatly boxes with 100 compartments will be interested to know that Bill kept his flies in the cellophane sleeve from his pack of cigarettes. When he came to fish with me later in Key West, I had a chance to see what he considered a fishing day filled with meaning. He wanted to try permit fishing, which I was then obsessed with. He climbed into my skiff one early spring morning, bringing with him his peculiar tackle, fiberglass rod, unshaped cork grip, taped-on guides, and an assortment of shooting heads, just part of his very broad-based escape from materialism. We ran straight from Key West, and I pulled Bill around behind Woman Key. I found one tailing fish. Bill raised his rod at about 70 feet, and the permit flushed. Bill turned to look at me and said, Huh? Time to move. I ran to the Northwest where I had a favorite finger-flat, long, narrow, covered with crunchy staghorn coral. The tide was falling obliquely across it. We had the light and the conditions seemed ideal. We found tailing permit from one end of the flat to the other. But Bill had perhaps 30 good shots, firing shooting heads with pinpoint accuracy. The permit swam right over the top of his fly, looking for something better. Finally, as Bill threw down his rod in the bottom of the skiff, I was able to hear his famous booming voice at first hand. These goddamn things are not game fish. A game fish has to have a mouth. I didn't know what to do. We lost the tide. The fish were gone. I cranked up and ran around the end of Boca Grande Quay where a cold and unseasonable North wind was blowing. And migrating warblers stopped by the wind. We're falling into the sea on spread wings. Bill saw them first and yelled, We've got to do something. So I motored around on the ocean while Bill hung off the bow and captured dozens of half-drowned little birds in a net. When we gathered the last we could find, we headed back to the beach on Boca Grande, spread them out on the warm sand. One by one, they dried out, took wing, and resumed their migration. Sitting in the sand, we watched them fly away. And Bill said it was one of the best fishing days he had ever had. So I'm going to read something, a little bit of technical philosophy here which gives you sort of the basis of what I'm thinking a little bit. And it comes from the word fun because Bill died some years after that surrounded by friends and one of the, maybe the last thing he said was, I can't believe how much fun I've had. So there's that word fun, right? And this little chase that we're involved in here. Does this statement or anything he did suggest that Bill had led a frivolous life or a superficial life? I'm going to bring in my authority on such things. It was a Dutch philosopher, Johann Heisinger, who wrote a book that means a lot to me called Homo Ludens, which translates as Man at Play. I won't belong at this, but please pay close attention. Heisinger said that no other modern language has quite the sense of the English word fun. And he associates the word fun with play while claiming profound aesthetic qualities for it. All field sports, he said, ventilate our monotony and produce a longing for the past as a time when the importance of play was self-evident. And it relieved its practitioners of the need to explain themselves. Heisinger added that in fun and in play, quote, the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin. Law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science are all rooted in the primeval soil of play. He says that its first characteristic is freedom, a word that shines for every fisherman and man's imperishable need to live in beauty. I think that absolves Bill Shad from Frivolity. We could start by understanding where we fish. We could learn from American Indians who did not view rivers the same way we do, that is, as boundaries, like the Ohio River dividing slave from non-slave states, the East-West Division of the Missouri, the Rio Grande that divides Mexico from the United States. Indians thought in terms of watersheds in which the river was but one component. And they viewed different sections of rivers as other entities in themselves, almost what we would call beets. But they tried to absorb a river in every way they could look at it, isometrically in its parts and in its whole, but they didn't really see them as boundaries between places. Is there a way to persuade people that difficult fishing is good fishing, that there is mortality even with catch and release fishing, and that crowing about your 30 fish day is nothing to be especially proud of? If you put all three of them on Facebook, Facebook kills a lot of fish. Missouri anglers are concerned with the well-being of fish generally, not just where they pursue them, but anywhere they live. Otherwise, it's a greedy crowd, poised to move on of the fishing declines. You hear that the most essential piece of equipment an American fly-fishing can own is a passport. Abandoning home waters because you can spend more in fly farther is a pretty low idea. We had an impressive group of anglers here in Bozeman, maybe we still do, whose passion was downtown Browns. Does anybody know about this little phenomenon? A lot of them were fishing guides. Their quest was to catch big fish inside the city limits. I think this is serious glory. I once saw fish and wildlife shocking a small stream around the Walmart parking lot, and was surprised at the number of flourishing cell monads. I imagine tiptoeing around the pavement with a three-weight and a six-foot liter. Might be fun. I have more admiration for the skill of catching an 18-inch brown in downtown Bozeman than for the herniating Browns I actually did catch, Tierra Del Fuego. I'm an avid spaycaster. It's interesting and frankly helps to pass the time steelhead fishing. Once on the bulkly, two local steelheaders stopped to visit and asked me if I would like to smoke some dope with them. Presumably the infamous BC Bud. When I politely declined one of them in his hoodie, his fanny pack, and his get-or-done baseball cap, said, how in the world can you stand a fish for steelhead, not stoned? There just aren't that many bites, he said. I could have told him that with my 14-foot burkheimer and 650-grain Skagit head, I was already high on narcissistic spaycasting. I have a little section here about the unintended consequences of angling. And I'm thinking this time last spring I was fishing on the west coast of Florida from my skiff, which I leave down there. And I was trying a little place that I hadn't found fish before. This was tarpon fishing. And I staked up on this thing and the fish started coming. And I realized a few of them. I had them around the boat, hooked some, had some long runs and ping-offs. But it was pretty exciting. And I thought, you know, I need to share this news with my friends who are fishing in other parts of Pine Island Sound and are not seeing any fish. So I texted all of them. I told them about the running fish, the running tarpon, the tarpon around the boat, the tarpon in the air, the small tarpon I actually landed. And I sent these all out. And unfortunately, autocorrect changed the word tarpon to tampon. I don't have to flesh that concept out for you, but running tampons, tampons around the boat just wasn't working for me. So another angling hazard. My 10-year-old nephew in Rhode Island caught a bright bass and disengaging it from the Adam Popper plug he caught it on. He managed to bury one of the treble hooks in his hand. My cousin Fred, his father, took him into a nearby hospital where the hook was removed. And he was given a tetanus booster. The nurse administering the shot managed to not only stick my nephew, but she stuck herself. This triggered the AIDS protocol. And my nephew was taken to another room to be grilled about his sex habits and intravenous drug use. After this, the confused little boy was anxious to get back to fishing. But with a reinforced view, there's something really wrong with adults. So with respect to our theme tonight, he'll be looking for the meaning of fishing elsewhere. I want to read to you a little bit here. We now live in an era of unprecedented distraction. Money has been deified. Religion is waning. The digital revolution has raised distraction to warp speed. It's an ominous speed because it's virtually shoving us through our lives, using our craving for information to handle us like livestock. But fishing is something of an antidote, reminding us of the rewards of mindfulness. Years ago, when we rigged up for a fishing session, we idled around the trunk of a car, not an SUV. Probably lighting a cigarette in those years before the Surgeon General's report, and nothing kept mosquitoes off your face better. Chatting, making sure the guides were aligned, strengthening the leader with a bit of inner tube, making wild guesses as to which fly should be first. Usually a non-technical gem on a seven and a half foot forex platel leader. Remember platel leaders? Then is now a success for me and uncertain, but we face failure with greater equanimity because so many other parts of the experience fulfilled us. Roderke Brown said you can really only learn one river in a lifetime, and probably only parts of that river. So what's the rush? The great Nobel Prize Laureate, Laureate J.M. Koets has said, we recognize in the clock the machine that destroyed the wilderness. The uncertainties of fishing undermine all forms of smugness. As to losing fish, remember what Walton said, how can you lose what you never had? But I would like to describe to you a day of diminishing smugness. Three of us were preparing to fish a tricohatch, and these irritating bugs were everywhere. Two of us were garden variety trout nuts, and it rigged up with 15 foot seven X leaders and tiny imitations that we tied on by putting our reading glasses over the top of our flip fogals. The third member of our group was Bob, a six and a half foot Mormon cowboy who fished once in a while and had brought along his glass rod, his short leader, and a large rubber-legged floaty toy for a fly. I won't drag you through this. Bob had a big day. We had tough going. Our knots could have been better, but we didn't fool any fish. Maybe something more impressionistic in the fly department instead of our literal offerings. But because Bob is a cowboy, he made no secret of his triumph over a couple of feet fuss budgets. Huy Fellows said Bob, examining our flies, that stuff is too small for a fish to see. They think it's pollen. For stream-side entomologists, this was below the belt. The trouble with knowing why you fish is that you may find there are others who you don't want to fish with. The nature-driven spiritualist does well to avoid the numbers guy. A friend of mine was pulling a famous tarpon fisherman when he spotted a rare and beautiful wading bird. When he pointed it out to the renowned angler, he was told, that is a bird. That is not a tarpon. Let's start paying attention. I made the mistake of telling the story to one of the new breed of keys guides, the kind in board shorts making gang signs behind the permit just landed. He agreed that it would have been wrong to look at that bird. He said, as though speaking to an idiot, obviously it was no tarpon. You know, anywhere you're near a university, you want to have all your PC lights up so you don't do anything stupid. But I wanted to talk about women and fishing just a little bit. You know, there are more and more women coming into fly fishing. I believe that they fish a little differently than us guys do. They're not as obsessive about casting straight lines. They're not as obsessive about rushing to the next run. They really look things over. They seem to be, as we old hippies say, in the moment. And it's a mystery, a world mystery, that the biggest Atlantic salmon have almost all been caught by women who probably did much less fishing than the Atlantic salmon fishing than the men. I wanted to tell the story that one of my relatives reveals one side of this. I was in Iceland and I was in a hotel in Reykjavik and I got introduced to a group of English sports older fellows who were lifelong Atlantic salmon fishermen. And one fellow had just lost his mother and she must have been very old because he was quite old and they had been fishing the Alta in Norway for over a century. And his mother was not interested in fishing. His father was a fanatic and the sort of ultimate fish on the Alta River is a 50 pounder. It's this thing that people strive for over their lifetime. And his father had never caught one and one day talked his mother into trying fishing and she would rather read under a tree and she said, I'll go one day for a 50 pounder. That's pretty obvious. So many decades later she's dying and she's in her deathbed and her son, the avid angler is sitting next to the bed and she's in and out of a coma and he's waiting to see if she'll speak to him one more time. And she wakes up a little bit and she looks at him and says you'll never get a 50 pounder. And and she died. I had a little adventure last spring it was impatient to get fishing the river was still in runoff and I was creeping through the brush trying to find some little slick or something that might be fishable and I tangled my foot up on something and then my calf and my other leg kind of hurt so I looked down and learned that I was standing on a rattlesnake. So I thought, well you don't want to get excited about this you'll just spread the poison. And so I kind of shuffled back to my house and my neighbor who lives up the road has a summer place up there as a doctor and he came down and sat with me well we waited to see what was going to happen and cleaned the little fang holes and and then he told me rattlesnake stories about the doctor in California and he said that 80% of the people bitten by venomous snakes in California are either drunk or on drugs but his favorite he had a kind of ghoulish sense of humor his favorite was a guy who got a big diamond back and was mimicking the diamond back his little flickering tongue and it bit him in the middle of the tongue and then he said as though this needed explaining he said to me, that wasn't bright so anyway we lay around there for about an hour and he said well you're lucky it was a dry strike at which point my wife came in the raging Cajun and I said told her everything had happened turned out well and she wanted to go back to the beginning you were standing on a rattlesnake and I said yes that's correct and she said I need well this is just a little anecdotal thing I do want to say this to you before we get toward the end I have lived next to a creek for decades and you begin to sense in freestone creeks what kind of drives them they're very dynamic and they change colors depending on where stuff is running off and you get very sensitive about what makes them work as living things in some ways freestoneers or spate rivers are very interesting that way you can get very caught up in their dynamism and last winter I heard this tremendous rumbling sound in the woods up above my house it sounded literally like a locomotive was coming toward the house and I went down to the edge of the yard and this massive ice which probably is 7 or 8 feet high in about 40 or 50 feet long came rumbling down the river turning it into a brown kind of creamy looking suds and it was so unusual so I called a friend of mine who lives almost next door but actually lives in California and he said we're going to go to the fishing and I thought maybe there's more to it than that so I thought I made a couple of notes to myself and it has to do with this Montana is a snow driven ecosystem long story short and if you stand in a freestone river as it changes through the year it really embeds you profoundly or in this case our biological home place actually operates you could say this about other riverine systems as well as tidal water in any case all are enmeshed in quite broad even planetary systems but fishing is one way in a good way figuring out where you are and I'm still learning my place on earth experiencing nature is something objective but learning as best I can that I'm only a part of it the imaginary firewall that modern man believes exists between himself and nature is truly a malignant fantasy because mankind urgently needs a better approach to its own survival the 20th century was the most war written in history but now that heedless economic competition or what Klausowitz called war by other means has replaced conventional warfare all signs suggest that we are actually at war with the earth itself for today's purposes I can say that unless something is done to reduce the effects of global warming you can kiss cold water fisheries goodbye two years ago I fished the Render River in Russia with a fine man named Sasha excellent fisherman guide who bore the fragility resulting from three tours of duty in the war in Chechnya when I mistakenly asked him about it he fell completely apart he made me see that his recovery was incomplete and his war experience had been more terrible than anything I could picture but then he shook his head and he pointed to the beautiful Render River and said but I'll be okay I'm with the river now thanks a lot