Our fishing friend Harry Briscoe of Hexagraph Fly Rod Company sends us this email:
I'll start with an introduction to a wonderful gentleman, personality and writer named Gordon Wickstrom. I came to meet Gordon at a fly-fishing trade show when he, as a member of the wandering press stopped by to check out our new concept in fly rods. He's grown to be an excellent friend. Gordon has published two books and writes a newsletter, now a blog, and I find his "take" on things to frequently be just a "twist" away from most of what we read these days about fly-fishing (theatre, politics, music and a great many other things). I think that Maggie's readers would likely enjoy many of his perspectives. Gordon is retired from a long and successful career as a professor of Literature and Theatre at Franklin and Marshall College (he's a master Shakespearean actor and director as well). He lives in his original hometown of Boulder, Colorado and is a frequent contributor to The American Fly Fisher magazine, the journal of the American Museum of Fly Fishing. To initiate that introduction, following are links to two columns he's written - as a sample of his work.
Following is a link to a recent piece in Gordon Wickstrom's current blog - then another, as an introduction, and also a partial quote I lifted from another of his essays.
Transcription of a Paper Letter from One Old Fisherman to Another
Walking North with Walton
" .......As the snow keeps coming on, let me tell you that a few days ago an old friend sent me an old copy of an old issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal for April/May,1976-- an issue in which I had an essay on catch and release. That was thirty-one years ago. I thought that anglers were not looking hard enough at the ideology of no-kill, and so I should do it for them. As I re-read the essay now, it sounds all right, but the penultimate sentence caught me: pretty much what I believe today, and it’s in connection with my proposal of a sixth, The New Period, in American fly fishing.
Here’s that sentence: “Now let us go a-stream more like our fathers-- individual, unself-conscious, unreconstructed, and quiet with our streamcraft and our love more important than our equipage and image.” But how, I wonder, can I both blog and, at the same time, in Walton’s use of Scripture, study to be quiet….?
It’s snowing now, those great, beautiful, sloppy spring flakes. For us Westerners they fill the air with promise-- and are superbly quiet.....".
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread.
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in the stream,
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor,
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name.
It had become a glimmering girl,
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran,
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering,
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands.
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Pic is a sea-run Brown Trout we caught from a stream in Long Island a couple of years ago. Sea-run trout is a story in itself.
