I am haunted by waters.
They were still so young they hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.
The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.
Poets talk about spots of time, but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fis...
Perhaps we always wondered which of us was tougher, but, if boyhood questions aren't answered before a certain point in time, they can't ever be raised again. So we returned to being gracious to each...
On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the...
It is those that we live with and love and should know who elude us.
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.
I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched... Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river...
For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy. (64)
The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.
Old Rawhide woke up and handed Paul the bottle of 3-7-77. Have a snort, she said. Paul took her hand and moved it around to where she was offering the drink to Neal. As I said, for several reasons, in...
Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, a...
It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.
I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That's what we mean by original sin—we don't have to do it to know about it.
As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I early developed the notion that he had done this by falling fr...
It is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.
When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say more perfect because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.
My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.