All Fishermen Are Liars Read Free

of the best trout fishing in the country and there’s an airport an hour and a half away, so you see a lot of rivers, streams and lakes, sometimes on assignment, sometimes on your own dime. These waters are all beautiful in their own way, but in the course of your travels you discover a few real sweet spots: places that are incomparable and unforgettable for reasons that usually have to do with the fishing, as well as something else that you glimpse from time to time, but that resists being distilled into sentences and paragraphs. You want to believe that at least some of these places are remote enough to adequately protect themselves, but then time and experience reveal that to be less true than you’d hoped.
    So in your stories you begin to casually omit the name of a stream or river, or change its name, or move its location from one state or province to another in order to protect the innocent. You don’t really think you can single-handedly hold off the inevitable, but you do hope you can keep it from being your fault.
    In extreme cases, you engage in the fantasy that certain placesdon’t exist and even if they do, you were never there. The transaction between writer and reader comes with some responsibility, but if you never write the story, all bets are off. You realize you’ve become one of those people who make a living with public words, and although you’re not in the same class with lawyers and politicians, one thing you share with them is the real possibility of doing more harm than good. You adopt a quote from novelist Thomas McGuane as your professional motto: “Whenever you feel like falling silent, do it.”
    There was no calculation in this, but over time you develop a reputation in some circles as the rare fishing writer who can and will keep his mouth shut and are therefore sometimes taken to secret glory holes that few ever get to see. The worst that happens is that you occasionally go fishing without turning a profit: something normal people do every day.
    You’re now and then implicated as part of the fly-fishing industry. You don’t quite see it that way, but denying it seems pointless, so you take to saying, “I don’t do this because it’s a business; it’s a business so I can do this.” You also begin quoting John Mellencamp, who said, “I never cared about money—but I always wanted to get paid.”
    It’s a passable living and a good life. You have all the usual troubles—financial, medical, personal—plus a few that are peculiar to your profession, but you’re doing the only two things you ever really wanted to do. You’re profoundly interested in fishing when you’re fishing and just as fascinated by writing when you’re at your desk. Both are great fun when they’re going well, and still worth the effort even when they’re not. When an interviewer asks if you consider yourself a fisherman first and a writer second or vice versa, you truthfully answer, “Yes.”
    You may not have actually beaten the system, but there are certain small victories. For instance, the accountant who now handles your taxes says that if some of his other self-employed clients saw what you legitimately write off—fly rods, travel, fishing lodges, guidetips, etc.—they’d “shit a brick.” You now pay more in taxes in a year than you used to make as a writer. You suppose that amounts to progress.
    Some days this seems like such an uncertain career that you wonder if you should have done something else. Other days you have so much fun you can’t believe you’re actually getting paid. Finally it occurs to you that you’ve pretty much accomplished everything you set out to do, it’s just that you didn’t set out to do all that much. You realize that you’ve been writing about fly fishing professionally for thirty-five years and still haven’t run out of things to say. This can mean only one of two things: that the subject itself is inexhaustible or that you’ll never quite get it