Just wanted to make sure you all knew that I moved fishingpoet to it’s own domain. Just click here and you’ll be taken to fishingpoet.com. You’ll see an easy email subscription box up at the top right. Just enter your email, submit and confirm and you’re good as gold.
I look forward to having you all over to the new digs!
Cool.
Matt
Filed under Uncategorized
Fishingpoet now has it’s own newly minted URL: fishingpoet.com
On the great advice of some folks who have been the iffy road of free blogging platforms before, I decided to put this journey called fishingpoet into a better pair of waders and boots and really get out into the current of this crazy electronic river. I’ll still be writing stories and poetry about fishing, hunting, fatherhood and my time in the Army, I’ll just be doing it on a site that is truly my own.
For those who have subscribed to this wordpress site, it’s easy to now follow at the new address. You can simply bookmark it or subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll get notifications just like you do now.
Thanks all.
Filed under Uncategorized
I’m not counting the days…I’m just close enough that I can say “three” without looking at my fingers.
I just packed and shipped a big box with my gear to Josh’s place in Portland. Inside, a duffel filled with fly boxes, waders, boots, a couple hats, handwarmers, my hunting backpack, chest pack, trout net, fly reels, wet-weather gear, clothes, head-lamps, hunting knife, one corncob and 2 Grabow pipes (plus lighters)…oh yea and my 8 wt Loomis, 5 wt Scott and 3 wt Eagle Claw (yes, you read that right…Eagle Claw). It’s going to be like Christmas morning unpacking that box when it arrives Friday morning.
The plan is to camp 2-3 days each on three rivers: the Upper Deschutes, the Upper Fall and the Crooked below the Prineville Reservoir. I’m excited. Heading toward sleepless. In all my travels, I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest. I’ve read stories about the rivers and the muscled spirits they hold. I’ve got my notebook for stream-side thoughts and fire-side recollections. I’m taking pics and video, downloading it all to my laptop when we pack out to the truck between rivers. It’s time for stories of my own. My imagination is stuck somewhere between the Field & Stream magazines of my childhood and Wonka’s factory. Golden ticket. Damn right I’ve got one.
The coolest part: I get to be on the water for 7 days with an old friend. It’s been 17 years since we we’re stationed in Germany, working god-awful hours at an ammo supply point, and keeping god-awful hours at the local bars. 17 years. We’ve got a lot of fishing to do.
Stay tuned.
Filed under In the water
Another from the thesis. I spend a total of two months in the Delta doing research for a book about the Delta Blues. One day I had a chance to paddle on the river in a dugout canoe, hand made by John Ruskey. There’s only a handful of natural wonders in this great country that can grab you by your soul and fill you full of a profound new perspective. The Mississippi is one.
[17]
Yesterday on the river, the Old Man spoke in roiling current & half buried bleach-white branches. Heading upstream, hugging the shoreline to avoid thousand-yard barges & the Coast Guard tug snagging stranded buoys, we paddled past lifetimes of conversation gouged out of the rip-rapped banks, past forty, fifty foot trees beached thirty foot above water-line, like broken toothpicks discarded after a dinner of catfish, fried okra, black-eyed peas & sweet tea.
When you’re on the Mississippi you’re on river time.
I kept waiting for something to happen.
We made a fire among driftwood on a sandbar & boiled water for coffee while the river slipped past silent as the smoke from the black walnut we were burning. I crossed the tracks of beaver that had gnawed down brush-branches & dragged them to the water, a raccoon’s small hand-prints following the waterline for dead fish, the ghosts of coyotes wrestling around higher up the bank—tails swishing sand, paws, bellies, backs & snouts imprinted. The river is down 18 foot from normal for this time of year & we’re all taking advantage.
When spring sends its run-off from the Continental Divide & Ohio River valley, from Canada & the northern plains, our tracks here will be washed away—disappearing in that immense breath.
One of the best things about being a creative at an advertising agency is that I’m fortunate enough to call some amazingly talented people my friends….artists, designers, writers, musicians, photographers. Another bonus is being asked to collaborate with some of these talented people on a project that’s outside the confines of work…especially when the project is about bowhunting.
I had been on some shoots for Grant Taylor, a photographer, friend and kindred outdoors spirit. He’s slogged his way into a muddy January field, climbed 25 feet up a tree and hunkered down in a snowy hedgerow to get shots like these (and the masthead image on this blog):
So when he asked if I’d be willing to write poetry for a bowhunting photography promo book that he was planning, I was all-in. An added bonus: I got to work with another close friend and tremendous designer, Rachel Spence.
Aside from it being a beautiful collection and representation of Grant’s outdoor photography and Rachel’s design, the finished product turned out to be, for me, a pretty significant reflection on my passion for this sport and the outdoors, as well as my relationship with my dad. It’s not often that I get emotional about anything I write, but at one point while writing the piece for the image of the the generational picture, I actually got choked up – realizing just how fortunate I’ve been to have the time in the field that I do with my dad. It’s a big deal, and something I look forward to enjoying with my kids.
At any rate I wanted to share the book with all you kindred outdoor spirits…enjoy.
And with that, I give you SEASONS.
(Just click the link. It’s attached as a PDF)
Filed under In the woods, Making a living
I turned right out of the driveway onto Main Street, as I do every weekday morning–the kids clamoring from the back seat for for me to pump up the iPod and give them something to get their day started. Music to them is about 3 cups of hi-test for me. God love ‘em.
A quarter-mile down, as I pulled into the turning lane for a left onto Gibson Street, a big, black object flew across Main Street from my right, just low enough for me to catch a glimpse through the windshield. That’s one hell of a big blackbird was the first thing that popped into my head, followed within a fraction of a second by the realization that it wasn’t actually a blackbird. At that same moment, my 6 year-old son’s voice from the back seat: Holy crap! A TURKEY!
My wife told me the other day that Cam had confided in her that his vision, when it comes to certain animals in their natural habitat, is sharper than mine. His words: I see geese and ducks better than dad. And sometimes deer too. I know exactly where his estimation comes from.
We live in the Finger Lakes region in Upstate NY. Wildlife in our neck of the woods is enjoying a resurgence. Geese, duck, whitetail, pheasant, rabbit, red-tail hawk, coyote, beaver, heron, fox, squirrel. Bear are even starting to find the area hospitable. It’s a bitter-sweet resurgence though. I’m very excited that pheasant are back and that other game animals have healthy populations. But available hunting land is drying up, as are numbers of hunters in the field. Both are troubling from the standpoint of conservation. I saw a hell of a lot more deer dead on the side of the road this year, which, ironically, is also a hell of a lot more than I saw in the woods this year.
So, given the uptick in animal numbers, every car ride that involves a route even remotely close to the outskirts of our fair city includes wildlife-spotting, just like they did when I was a kid.
Deer, I announce.
Looks like 4, no 5, no 7, reports Cam. No bucks though, dad?
Nope, looked like doe.
I hear geese, I state. Where are they at?
Got ‘em, points Cam. Followed by a few make-shift honks into his closed hand, like he’s holding a call.
Recently, he’s taken to leading the spotting charge though. And he’s good. On a recent drive to my wife’s parent’s house, we were heading down our usual country road route when Cam says:
Geese.
Where? I ask, glancing both ways and up through the windshield.
Up ahead, over there.
Where?
He rolled down the window and pointed into the wind. It took me a few more seconds to figure the trajectory of his finger, but sure as shootin’…he had a string of 7 or 10 birds pegged just above the treeline about a mile away.
Good eye, bud. You got ‘em.
His smile in my rear view mirror couldn’t have been any bigger.
But that turkey caught us all by surprise…as only the jarring juxtaposition of Main Street and a wild turkey can. And while I’d call it a draw on who actually saw it first, I’m sure the next time he mentions his ability to spot game, as compared to dad’s…his list will include that gobbler. Which is exactly how it should be.
Filed under Fatherhood and venison jerkey, In the woods
[10]
I once fished a brackish water lake in Holland near the Port of Rotterdam for rainbows. Bought a train ticket & boarded at Den Haag Centrum at 6:21 for a twenty-two minute ride to Rotterdam, catching a subway at Rotterdam Centrum bound for Spijkenisse to meet Harry, who would drive to Oostvoornse Meer & show me how to fish the lake.
Meer is Dutch for lake.
I traveled with my waders, boots, vest, rod case & wore my Stetson.
The train & subway rides were like this:
Buildings in their geometric slumber.
Steel wheels switching track, screaming & switching again.
Gray-violet sky & street lights over efficient cars parked in impossible spaces.
Graffiti. O the heavenly, decadent graffiti.
Tiny seasonal shacks & greenhouses splitting a canal with a factory, both
sending blooms skyward.
Bridges & irrigation canals & bridges & graffiti & clean architectural lines & a
low skyline & two white geese & poplar windbreaks & crazy single lane streets &
high voltage power line towers.
Light in the clouds like the blood of God.
[11]
Standing in saltwater that big, playing the odds with a bet that’s the size of a gorged mosquito, I felt pointless & foreign.
Beyond the dunes lay a highway, beyond that rail-cars carried armored personnel carriers to be shipped out of the port; ships moored on the horizon, stoic iron architecture below the labor of cranes & smoke stacks.
This lake is protected, the fish introduced.
I dipped my hand & tasted the water.
Here they are trying to find ways to include nature within the crowd.
Harry showed me a tern’s nest in the cattails, full of eggs–explained how the lake would be completely freshwater in thirty years due to springs throughout the shallows.
Warm air blew in from the east & emptied me.
The fish were immense & beautiful. We hooked them on size 16 green nymphs & hawthorn fly imitations.
Filed under In the water, My thesis was about fishing
[51]
Deep evening.
I light my pipe & pull up a chair by the lake.
Geese are arriving, one pair at a time, sometimes two.
Their song in flight echoes as they pass
on my side of the island. It is different
than the song that signals their circling,
different still than their song as they finally descend.
Into the water they careen feet first, wings wide as spring,
breasting the water & pollen film, a cacophony
of clucks & growls & sharp honks,
haggling with geese that have already settled in the water.
To sit close enough at waters’ edge is to hear
their pinion feathers rattle like playing cards in spokes,
& with ample light, to see muscles working at their shoulders & breast,
to see the outstretched tongue of the loud lead bird as he wails,
to see each white belly feather as they arc around a bend,
to see water spatter ahead of their webbed feet on the still surface.
After a time they float, still & silent as decoys,
as the few remaining pairs arrive. Some land directly
on the island. Others sing & circle & sing & splash down.
8:45 & like clockwork they have all made their way to nests
in the shadow that is the island, have had one last blaze of voices
& assured that all are accounted for, have gone silent
or murmur beneath my hearing.
A bullfrog sounds.
Filed under In the water, My thesis was about fishing
My dad told me a long time ago that one of the things he admires about me is that I always do things 30-degrees left or right of center. I’ve managed to find or create my own path, no matter how arduous or easy it may turn out to be… and more often than not, I come out just peachy in the end. Hell, what fun is life if you don’t get some dirt under your fingernails or find your way into the weeds every now and again along the way?
Choosing my thesis topic when I was getting ready to finish my MA in poetry at George Mason was the same way. I could’ve gone with a highly academic investigation/critique of some literary topic… something like:
Stop. What’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.
An exploration of the use of imagery, sound and cultural reference among the New York Avant-garde school of poets.
OK, so maybe I did actually write a paper with that title. But my thesis– the baby I was to birth as the culmination of my academic career, the printed and hard-bound proof of my time there– was a book-length poem about fishing, titled All Water.
52 sections. 60-some-odd pages. Modeled after Whitman’s Song of Myself. I wrote about the change in our American landscape–physical, spiritual, cultural, socioeconomical–through the eyes of a fisherman, father, husband and veteran. My research was stream-side and in books like Sand County Almanac, Founding Fish, Walden and My Secret Fishing Life; stories like Big Two-Hearted River and A River Runs Through It; the humor of Patrick McManus and Gordon MacQuarrie. I wrote while listening to The Dead, Paul Simon, Van Halen, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson, Robert Earl Keen, Radiohead, The Stones, Zeppelin.
I wrote in first light and evening’s slow exhale. Before the kids woke up and after they gave in to the sandman. I wrote high on wine. I wrote depressed. I wrote and started to figure out who I am and my place in this shifting landscape that is America…and I’m still writing.
That said, I’ll be posting some excerpts from time to time. Just a heads-up.
Here’s the first:
[1]
Once I saw a gator snatch a deer by the head & drag it flailing into a small lake in Georgia.
We were fishing for bass in a boat along a weed-bed fifty yards from the explosion.
The deer was quietly sipping at the shore.
We left the water ringing with the noise-memory & blackbirds lighting out from the trees.
Ten years later blackbirds still remind me.
Even on this stream, their calls crash through sun-up or mid-day or dusk quiet & my hackles raise & I look to the water at my feet.
All the while, trout snatch mayflies from the surface around me, splashing, leaving ripples & small bubbles, noise-memory & blackbirds lighting out from the trees.
Filed under In the water, My thesis was about fishing
I’m going to Oregon and I’m going fishing.
I’m leaving work for a full week in one big hurry. I’ve booked my flight.
Fly rods, reels, flies, waders, boots, rain gear, clothes, camera, notebook, whiskey (snake bites) all need to be packed.
I’m going to stand in rivers like the Deschutes, Crooked and Fall. Knee-to-waist-deep in their shifting story.
I’m going to stand in these rivers and cast flies to brookies, native rainbows and steelhead.
All the stress I’ve picked up and carried around like 80 pounds of crap in an 80 pound bag for the last 6 months will drift off, swirl from eddie to eddie, bust itself on the rocks and disappear downstream, dilute and no longer mine.
I’m going to take pictures of the wildness of the northwest. The immense breath of rock, pine, whitewater and sky. Possibly a fish.
I will tie flies with cold fingers. I will tie them in the rain.
I will make casts that fall brilliantly short.
Rain will drip from the brim of my baseball hat and from pine boughs. The sky a crowded gray.
I will abandon frustration and anger for the humility that a broken leader teaches.
I will sit on boulders larger than imagination and simply listen. I will not interrupt.
Morning chill and possibility. Evening hush and perspective.
Heaven is still.
Solitude will remind me of the beauty of my wife, the pure music of my children. I will finally be awake.
I’m going to Oregon and I’m going fishing.
Filed under In the water
