Gierach: a one-off when it came to capturing the zeitgeist

IF you buy this book hoping for a final fix of Gierach magic, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Dale Darling may have been friends with the late author of such gems as Trout Bum,TheView from Rat Lake and Another Lousy Day in Paradise for many years, but he is no JG Mark II. (Could anyone be?)

Well, Jerry Kustich, the author and former owner of Sweetgrass Rods, certainly whets your appetite in the foreword, stating: “With wit, wisdom and timely philosoph-ical quips, the author delightfully takes the reader along with him on frequent fishing outings and his regular visits with Gierach.”

Sounds promising, huh? But first, some background. Darling met JG and AK Best, whom he knows as Archie, in 1980, well before Trout Bum (1986) and four years before Gierach’s first angling book, Fly-fishing the High Country, was published (though a small book of his poetry, Signs of Life, came out in 1977).

They met in Boulder, Colorado, where Darling was a teaching assistant knowing nothing about fly-fishing. He caught the bug, so to speak, and became so immersed in the sport that he ended up selling the flies that he tied. He has authored more than a dozen books. So far, so good.

Except that, inevitably, you’re hoping (nay, expecting) those wonderful insights and wry asides that set Gierach apart; that being one of his oldest friends and spending much time with him would have rubbed off on Darling. After all, would JG have spent time in the company of a like-minded soul, or someone who was merely passionate about fly-fishing in places that avoided the crowds? I’d have plumped for the former.. But I’m not so sure after reading this book.

The two shared some mutual memories, and you find yourself wishing that Darling had offered more of these.They bought float tubes and fins, and shared the experience of waddling down roads in the cumbersome gear. It’s apparent that they got on very well.

“In those days, John and I shared a sort of creative poverty.We understood the ideal
of getting by and doing the things to hand because that’s how we’d been raised.

‘When I got a rabbit or two during the season, that’s what we ate for supper,’ I told John.‘Same here,’ he said.”

Darling’s fly-tying business was doing well, and he even managed to persuade
Gierach to help him, though JG had told him that he had no interest in tying flies on a commercial basis. It appears that Darling was supplying substantial numbers of flies to vari- ous shops at peak times, and occasionally was overwhelmed with orders.

“I’ll supply the materials and write you a check as soon as the flies are finished. No one needs to know,” I added.

How many Colorado fly boxes hold Gierach flies, you wonder.

But there are not enough of these shared experiences.This book is more about Darling’s fishing life, and how he progressed from being a tyro fly-fisher and tyer to a highly competent one. It’s an interesting tale, but if you think that it is going to supply insights into and stories about Gierach, this is not the book for you, despite its title.

A sub-headling to the book’s title says:Early Years with John Gierach, and it appears that after those early days, Darling and JG were following the paths that their own lives had taken, and that didn’t meet as much. Frustrating, as you end up thinking that so much more could have been told.

Keith Elliott