Description
Brilliant, witty, perceptive essays about fly-fishing, the natural world, and life in general by the acknowledged master of fishing writers.
Fly-fishing’s finest scribe, John Gierach, takes us from a nameless stream on a nameless ranch in Montana to a secret pool off a secret creek where he caught a catfish as a five-year-old, to a brook full of rattlesnakes and a private pond where the trout are all as long as your leg. As Gierach says, “The secret places are the soul of fishing.” Hearing about a new one never fails to entice us.
And so Where the Trout Are All as Long as Your Leg transports the reader to the best of these places, where the fish are always bigger and the hatches last forever. After all, it’s these magical places that Gierach so vividly evokes that remind us how precious—and precarious—are the unspoiled havens of the natural world.
“The secret places are the soul of fishing…. It may be a private spring creek with armed guards where there are huge browns and lots of them, or it may just be an unknown beaver pond where a handful of book trout have grown to a whopping eleven inches. In either case, it’s a spot that, by the simple virtue of being left more or less alone, has reached is full potential.” So begins this brilliant short book, in which half a dozen such places are featured. There is a pool made memorable because it is part of a risky childhood adventure; hidden local streams; sections of a wealthy ranch; secret stretches – full of rattlesnakes – and private ponds with trout as long as your leg. All are made magically vivid by Gierach’s special prose – and all stand starkly against a more public natural world increasingly threatened with ecological disaster.