>BORN in Deadwood, SD, 75+ years ago.

>FLYFISHED for 60+ years Black Hills creeks and other streams, sometimes as far east as Michigan and Pennsylvania, but usually further west in Yellowstone Park, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and Idaho. Spearfish Creek and The Henry's Fork are the two most necessary now.

>MARRIED 50+ years to a bright, beautiful wife, also a college teacher. We have had two fine sons. The younger is a lover of stories told in agates and knows where they can be found. The older loved Utah's mountains and his family, but died of pancreatic cancer in May 2009, leaving all the family wonderful images we'll not put away until our own last day.

>RETIRED after 37 years of teaching both writing and literature at a liberal arts college. It didn't raise callouses but was nonetheless hard, honorable work. I enjoyed doing it.

>CONVINCED fishing bamboo fly rods and storytelling are two of the four essential things one does in order to remain human. Most have their private ideas about the other two.

>Ernest Hemingway's Foreword to A Fly Fisher's Life by Charles Ritz

Charles Ritz is one of the very finest fishermen I know. He is not only
a great fly fisherman for trout and salmon but he is an articulate writer
and a splendid technician.

He is also an iconoclast who never hesitates to destroy an idol in order
to deal only with true and important facts.

Because he is a charming companion he does not bore a non-technical
reader with his knowledge. But it is there like a mine of true information
for anyone with the desire and the intelligence to work it.

Fishing with Charles Ritz you come to know the streams of Normandy
and Austria and the salmon rivers of the North.

As the world is run now few people can fish as far as Monsieur Charles
fishes. No matter how it is run even fewer people could ever fish as well.

>Arnold Gingrich in The Fishing in Print on Vincent Marinaro, A.J. McClane,
and John McDonald

"No fisherman above the literacy level of our sport can possibly be
unaware of Marinaro's Modern Dry Fly Code, McClane's Standard
Fishing Encyclopedia or McDonald's The Complete Fly Fisherman:
The Notes and Letters of Theodore Gordon."


>John Gierach's last two paragraphs in Fishing Bamboo

I have heard of fishermen gluing lead shot in the frames of their
reels to add weight for balance. That seems a little extreme to me
(although it's not the weirdest thing I've ever heard of fishermen
doing), but why not if they think it matters and it makes them happy?

I mean, that's why some of us use bamboo fly rods and, as far as that
goes, why we fish at all: because we think it matters and it makes us
happy.

*********************************************************

Sacrifice on Beulah Road, Wyoming

A Modern Shepherds' Play/Poem in Five Acts
With, of All Things, a Fly Fisherman in It

by William Geyer

"Was I never a shepherd, but now I will lear.
If the flock be scar'd, yet shall I nip near."
--The Second Shepherds' Play
"Wakefield Master" (c. 1385)

1
It didn't strike us, so young were we then,
there might be something in our building of
that plateau road (all Interstate now) with
emblems enough for any so inclined.
The candywagon--with water for rollers,
diesel for paver, juice for each machine--
was overdue. Foreman Mel was beside
himself. For without the candywagon
our paver idled useless and forlorn
under Western clouds--the asphalt in its
hopper cooling at about the same rate
Mel was heating up.

2
--------------------------Lloyd! Where's my candy
car? If you brought your damned fly pole again . . .
He jumped into his pickup, whose spattered
windshield was long past seeing through. Not that
that mattered much. Mel had but one good eye.
He trained it out the open side window--
neck craning while he careened down stony
section lane toward the trout-rich ranch pond
whose water, for a fee, quenched our machines,
hair flapping wildly in the slipstream wind,
voice booming clearly over wheel-scraped rocks.
Lloyd, you loafing lead-assed clown! Bring the wagon
schnell! I mean honking right away!

3
-------------------------------------He had
raced less than forty yards before broadsiding
midlane an old sheep: solitary ram
munching grasses, serenely self-absorbed,
suzerain of all he surveyed, having not yet
surveyed Mel. Nor Mel him. When they met,
the ram flew--ah, it was majestic, that
sheep's ascension!--great grayish ghost grazing
the sky above the meadow clover then landing,
as both slowed, plop in the bed of Mel's pickup.
Friend ram, who takes away sin of the world,
have mercy on us. Grant us in season
a peace profound as that we've granted you.

4
They linger still with sweet-clover smell
among other fatal fragrances of mind:
Mel's mad, already ravaged face tinged by
shame. The sheep's last bleating flight. Lloyd's
slack-jawed stare. Having sped candywagon
along back routes, Lloyd was in fact about
to link it to our languishing paver,
his fly rod tucked safely beneath a tarp.
Jumping Jehoshaphat! he swore, or prayed,
fixing upon impromptu shepherd Mel.

5
This was as sheepish as Mel ever got.
Returning, windshield more opaque, he slunk
into shade of the only cottonwood for miles.
A thing even he could find. Fleecy carnage
stained both bed and battered grill of his truck.
He'd squared things with the rancher. The rest was
silence. He said nothing to Lloyd or us.
Heat waves danced again above our paver.
Serenity reclaimed the Beulah road.

>>>from Gray's Sporting Journal, The Fly Fishing Book,
Volume Twenty-Two, Issue 1, February 1997, p. 136.

***************************************

A Remembrance for Mark

That spring he left us
The thawing wind spoke softly
Young so young too young

On the clasp he wore
Pinned now to my fishing cap
A gold trout rises

****************************************

An Elegy

is a song of mourning, a poem which offers solace
through observation of processes and seasons
recurring in nature, This is something to which
fishermen are instinctively drawn. Even when a
season or a moment of special beauty passes, the
process itself continues and renews, an ultimate
consolation which all of us need at some time or
another. The elegy which has helped my family and
me most is Robert Frost's brief and beautifully
unflinching poem which follows and which I'm
placing here for your reading if you're ever in need.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

************************************************

Hamlen Brook
by Richard Wilbur

At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy's trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.