For Old Time's Sake

WALK TOO SLOW

Talk Too Much

fish just a bit

WALLPAPER:  AUTUMN IDYLL

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NECESSARY GEAR

.. The flasks are loaded, the thermos is hot and black, the hard salami, cheese and stale bread are mashed together in plastic bags and, the old gear is ready for work.
.. Each year about this time a few of us get together for a saunter in Yellowstone National Park. We're mostly older than our ancient gear but we use it on purpose.

FIREHOLE FALL

.. We arise early. We gather at the chow house for coffee. We look strange. But the stories start up before the mugs arrive.
.. This is our little celebration of surviving another year on this side of the grass.  We've done this on an informal basis for the last decade or so.
.. The last few years it has been a firm and ritualized gathering. We've lost a few story tellers. We miss them.

ONE FROM PAYNE

.. We will take a couple of old trucks and switch riders along the way. We will stop often and wet a line. We may even catch a fish or two. We know where the benches are. We will tell old truths and a few lies. We will reminisce and enjoy the day. It will be all too short.
.. We trade rods and share flies. The muscle memory of bamboo comes back quickly - maybe never left. We speculate on the future of our pastime.

ONE FROM GRANGER

.. We revel in the past and bemoan it's passing. It's not the maudlin kind of discussion: rather an immersion in the good times remembered.
.. There are very few folks left that have fiddled around in the park since before the middle of the last century.

ONE FROM LEONARD

.. We wonder if we have discovered anything previously unknown. We remember the famous folk that have passed this way. Some stayed or passed through and some moved on. They stamped the place with legend and lies. So be it.
.. We stop to puff a bit of Cuba. We sip some old stuff and pretend that we are warmed by it. Bitter is as bitter does. Fire of a different kind in our belly.

BYGONE GEAR

.. We observe the small changes and large. Trees blown down or burned up. Good holes filled in by sand and silt. New holes opened up by heavy runoff - not yet immortalized by recent sages of the local rivers.
.. We catch a fish and wonder if the tales of ours and others are the truth. Were those fish really bigger before the warming of the Firehole River? Were there more of them?

YES,  IT IS A FLY

.. We relive the battles over the Brown Trout in the North Fork Of The Snake that made headlines in the 50's and 60's. Back before it became fashionable to call that bit of water the Henry's Fork.
.. We observe certain rituals that have long since disappeared. They disappeared with the gear that made them necessary. We take turns stretching each other's lacquered lines.

RIVERSIDE SUSTENANCE

.. We dry and change the silk one. What nuisances we put up with. We thought it was the best of all possible ways to do things.
.. We will pretend that we can build a sandwich from the mashed fixin's in the plastic bags.

ONE FROM F.E. THOMAS

-- It is a brutal bit of nourishment and we pretend to enjoy it. So dry it is that it requires a slosh of something - bitter - burning - or black. Such simple rituals.
.. We, and so many others, create them and extol their value as necessary adjuncts to our pastime. After all fishing is just fishing otherwise.
.. It's getting late early and we need to buzz along. Time's a wastin'.

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WALLPAPER:  ORVIS 99