John Gierach is a fly fisherman who has managed to turn his love into his profession. He gets paid to roam around the country looking for little used trout streams and pull trouts out of them. Along the way he talks about his hippie days, how he feels about the new rich, and how book tours are not as much as you might think. His many opinions all lead, one way or another, to fishing, specifically, fly fishing.
I’m not a fly fisherman, though I have been known to do a bit of fishing for carp, catfish, and the occasion red drum and sheephead on the Texas coast. So I can relate to a bit of what John has to say, but the finer points of the art of fly fishing are a bit beyond me. For example, he speaks a good deal about fly patterns, tippets, and bamboo rods and which combination he uses to take which type of fish lives in which body of water he happens to be standing or floating in. None of this makes much sense to me, but his writing is still crisp and brilliant and enjoyable.
As a poor schmuck myself, it is hard to take John’s many jabs at the über rich too seriously when he surrounds these jabs with stories of his countless fishing trips to the best fly-fishing spots in North America-where he is often, but not always, accompanied by a professional fishing guide. Doesn’t it take a slightly healthy bank account to globe trot, even if it is for the sake of your work? In all fairness he does say that many of his more high end adventures were freebies, and these are the ones that he seems to have been the most disappointed in.
John Gierach has a great writing style and he resists the urge of so many sports writers to fill his pages with technical jargon and latin names and endless insider talk He can’t help but lay out the many odd and interesting names of fly patterns he runs across, but this insider info is fun.
There is a natural snobbery that comes with fly fishing, just as a natural hillbilly factor goes along with noodling, the fine art of grabbing a catfish with your fist and yanking it out of the water. John Gierach comes across as both a gentleman and proud protector of not just fishing, but of the very way of life that fly fishing represents. At one point he mentions the many ways of taking fish from a body of water, and includes throw nets and sticks of dynamite. He clearly considers his skill with a fly fishing rod a step or two above Crocodile Dundee’s skill with explosives, but he wants to be clear that he is not a snob about it.
The fact that No Shortage of Good Days is John Gierach’s 16th book and I’ve never heard of him tells me that he is not exactly up there with Stephen King or Dave Barry. But then, fly fishing is not exactly as popular a topic as supernatural murder and making fun of the mundane facts of everyday life. A better comparison would be to other sports writers, or other fishing writers, and the only fly fishing writer that springs to mind is Izaak Walton. I will look for more of John’s books now that I have found him.
As a portrait photographer I often can’t help but be shocked by the Author’s Photos in the back of books, and John Gierach’s photo is no exception. On the cover of the book is a wonderfully old-fashioned sports painting of John wading in a stream by Bob White-but it’s not exactly a portrait. The Author’s Photo shows John with his mouth hanging open and a slightly addled look on his face as he holds up a very large trout. He looks for all the world like the PBS mock sportsman Red Green, but that may just be the beard, the hat, and the general age of the two men. It’s hard to look at the picture and not think, is this really the best portrait you could find?
No Shortage of Good Days is a great read, even if your not that into fly fishing
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