At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman

For John Gierach, fishing is about letting go of the past and the future because "living in the moment is the only way I know of to accurately understand life without getting pissed off." If that line makes you smile, you'll get caught up in this audiobook even if you've never tied a fly or hooked a brookie. The story follows Gierach during a year of fishing-related travels in the U.S. and Canada, but the real journey is a stylistic one. Michael Prichard's narration is a perfect match to the writing. He's got just the right feel for Gierach's wisdom and dry sense of humor. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

March 1, 2003
These 20 magazine columns--most from Field & Stream--follow Gierach's year of outings in Northern Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Pennsylvania, and include some of his best strokes of style since Sex, Death and Flyfishing. Each travelogue plucks the required notes of Gierach's angling country song formula: a conversational, self-deprecating voice; good-humored reporting from the Eden streams of the West, appreciation for his local angling fraternity. Fishing-is-the-antidote-to-real-life is the axis of every Gierach collection, and several of these stories are convincing as well as entertaining. The angling reader already understands perfectly well the real reason Gierach is perched on the back of an ATV with a Labrador retriever riding through heavy May mud to reach remote ranchland ponds. As Gierach gets older, his reach into his angling hat is slower but he pulls out better rabbits:"If you wanted a fish that could sip white wine and discuss Italian poetry, you'd look for a trout. If you need a ditch dug, you'd hire a carp." The title reference is to a streamside marker dedicated to a deceased conservationist that Gierach seems to acknowledge is the epitaph for anyone who, like himself, spends his life in the thrall of something as gloriously inconsequential as fly-fishing.