I would call myself a slow writer but that feels willfully understated. The 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition took place a scant five years ago. My first book, Principles of Navigation, was begun in 1983 and published in 2013. (I’ll trust you to do the math.) My second, The Coconut Crab, originated as a story told to my daughter in 1999—and was released in 2022. Rowing to Baikal ships on December 5. So at least I'm getting faster with age.
Paralyze The Mind
. . . so the soul can rest.*
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Rowing to Baikal, the book
Wednesday, December 14, 2022
Lost and Found
In the Summer 2021 issue of Sport Literate, I wrote about a group of feral dogs in Tangier, Morocco, who had welcomed me as one of their own: “They were not really stray dogs but street dogs. Unrestrained and untended. Of all the pack members, current and former, only I am truly a stray. None of my dog friends actually wandered away from her proper home or lost himself in transit from one place to the next. But I have, over and over and over.”
At the time, I’d been living in Morocco for seven years. And now, in the winter of 2022, I find myself on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Though perhaps find is too strong a word. You can read about that transition in issue 14.2 of The FlyFish Journal.
While I was looking for a place to land, a handful of other stories also found their way into print.
Issue 13.3 of The Flyfish Journal features my story about the most endangered species of trout on the planet: “The Ocean Under the Mountain.”
The spring 2022 issue of Guidefitter Journal offers a look back at my first visit to Mongolia.
The March 2022 issue of High Country News published my essay, “Hard Lessons from Poker Joe.”
“The Necessity of Success,” in Strung magazine’s spring issue, once again paired my words with the images of artist Frederick Stivers.
Another excerpt from my upcoming book about the 2018 Baikal Expedition appeared in Plants & Poetry Journal. Oddly enough, it is not about a taimen but a porcupine fish. (If you click on this link, be forewarned that it takes a long time to load and you must scroll persistently to find the story.)
And the summer 2022 issue of The Montana Quarterly includes my tribute to the dog who underlies my appreciation of all dogs . . .
Thursday, September 16, 2021
Trading a Pair of Oars for Pen and Keyboard
During the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, the easiest thing for me to do on any particular morning was to get in the boat. After all, it’s what I want to do on nearly every morning, what I would choose if water, especially new water, was always and everywhere available. The relief I felt on picking up the oars some days was palpable, as if a dark sky had perceptibly brightened or the load on my shoulders had shifted to a more comfortable position.
Since March 2020, however, my opportunities for rowing a boat on a Mongolian river have literally dried up. For consolation, I’ve been telling myself stories, some of which have since found themselves in print.
More than one describes the expedition itself: “Rowing to Baikal” appeared in the fall 2020 issue of The Drake, while “The Messenger from Heaven” was published in Politics/Letters in May 2021.
“The Ocelot and the Caiman,” set on Tsimane Lodge’s Sécure River, appeared in the February–March 2020 issue of Fly Fisherman.
“On Safari, Fly Rod in Hand” ran in the summer 2020 issue of Strung and describes my stay at African Waters’ Gassa Camp in Cameroon.
Two stories can be found in Volume 12 of The Flyfish Journal: “The Word for ‘Fish’ in Speyside” in Number 2 (Winter 2021), with some fantastic art by Frederick Stivers; and “On the Way to Dragon Island,” set in Morocco’s Dakhla Bay, in Number 4 (Summer 2021).
Moving closer to home, “Solace of the Pack”—about my friendship with an athletic gang of
Tangier’s feral dogs—appears in the most recent issue of Sport Literate.
And more work is forthcoming before the end of the year, including another story about the expedition in Litro’s nature issue, along with a novel for children and adults from Green Writers Press . . .
Tuesday, May 18, 2021
The Sixty-Second Martini
I didn’t become an expert on this topic by doing research or writing a book. I did it the old-fashioned way: by drinking. For weeks, months, years, decades. Through many trials and some near-grievous errors, shaken, stirred, and on the rocks (me, not the martini).
This recipe bears no relation to what you may have previously encountered in hotel bars or James Bond movies. It requires neither a jigger nor a two-piece shaker. Though fastidious, it is not fussy.
This is what I believe: martinis should be cold and they should be sipped. They should not be blasphemed with vodka or water. One is enough to get you to dinner. (Most of the time.)
I call it the sixty-second martini not because I am in a rush to drink it, but because that’s all the time you need to prepare for its charm. My motto: gin without haste, enjoy in leisure, no repentance necessary.
Ready to begin? Then reserve a place in the freezer for your bottle. That’s where it should live. Always. Store the olives and the vermouth in the refrigerator. I prefer fresh, green, unpitted olives, each about the width of a thumbnail, and extra dry vermouth. (Later, to reinforce some sense of self-respect, you may wish to experiment with other vermouths, a twist of lemon, or even a slice of cucumber.) You’ll also need a martini glass, preferably stemless.
Now things start to happen fast. Place an olive in the glass. Tip in just enough vermouth to cover the olive. Firmly grasp your freezing cold bottle of gin. Pour slowly and steadily, aiming a thin stream of gin at the olive’s rounded edge. (This is easy with the built-in flow regulator that comes with many brands.)
See how the differing viscosities of gin and vermouth conspire to turn the olive like a little green pig on an invisible spit? That’s Bernoulli’s principle in action—and all the stirring your drink needs. Continue pouring until the liquid reaches a polite distance from the rim of the glass.
That’s it. Your first sip will be a revelation: cooling, healing, and invigorating all at once.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Please Help Me Find This Book
Illustration by Russell Chatham from Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game (Clark City Press, 1990) |
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Trying Not to Count the Days
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
In Defense of Orwell’s Toad
Less than a month later, the recently widowed Orwell would leave London for the Scottish island of Jura, where he would write 1984, the novel that evokes the battles of our current spring like no other. The book is about much more than Newspeak and doublethink, of course, but how can one not feel terrified at the prescience of sentences like these: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” And not simply terrified, but saddened too, a sadness approaching despair.
Yes, we have given ourselves an unhealthy dose of Brexit and Trump and Wilders and Le Pen. But in some simultaneously parallel universe, the world has returned a veritable feast of migrations and blossomings, everything from ducks to daffodils. Now it is our responsibility to choose among them, to honor some and embrace others. As Orwell writes, “I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and—to return to my first instance—toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.
Not likely, you understand, he wouldn’t go as far as that. But we must nourish hope where we find it, as strange as that may seem. At some moment between 1946 and 1948, during repeated bouts with tuberculosis, Orwell had this thought: “In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result being that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked upon as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.” (The architects of President Trump’s 2017 budget blueprint appear to have taken these words as gospel.)
Sounds crazy, yes. Crazy and plausible. Which is much preferable to crazy and hateful, or crazy and demonstrably false. Both of which have been in depressingly abundant supply.
And by crazy and plausible, I don’t just mean Orwell’s reference to “deliberate policy.” I mean the notion of looking to dystopia for hope. Before inventing Winston Smith, Orwell created another hopeless nostalgist, George Bowling, the anti-hero of Coming Up for Air. This George admits, as a first confession, “that when I look back through my life I can’t honestly say that anything I’ve ever done has given me quite such a kick as fishing. Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison . . . . And the other confession is that after I was sixteen I never fished again.” Which was not true of Orwell himself; he fished and caught lobsters while in Jura and—so sure was he of his imminent recovery—his favorite fishing rods were leaning against the wall of the hospital room where he died at the untimely age of forty-six.
George Bowling explains his deprivation like this: “Because that’s how things happen. Because in this life we lead . . . in this particular age and this particular country—we don’t do the things we want to do.” But we don’t live in Bowling’s age (the late 1930s), Orwell’s prophecies are not yet a done deal, and neither is the previously unimaginable convergence of Russian plutocracy and American idiocracy.
Orwell would have disliked the idea of himself as oracle; he rather preferred the role of “pamphleteer.” In other words, he wished to move his readers to action, even if that activity was no more revolutionary than enjoying a strong cup of tea or another pint at the pub. Such things, after all, are what remind us of our truly common heritage, the bonds we share as creatures who live and yearn and die. If we want to raise the odds of that “peaceful and decent future” ever more slightly, then all of us in this particular age and this particular country need to do those particular things that we want to do. Now—before everything is, as George would say, “cemented over.”
I don’t advocate the sharing of inconsequential pleasures as a source of distraction from the news cycle or a respite from active resistance; I do it to prime the well. The small is not the enemy of the good. Without raindrops, there would be no river; without yeast, there would be no beer.
So enjoy a walk in a chestnut wood. Listen to the trilling song of a common blackbird. Plant a few nasturtiums in your window box. Me? I’m going fishing.