In Praise of Small Triumphs (and Small Presses)

Like anyone who has suffered a passing acquaintance with rejection,  I enjoy stories of victory over long odds, tales of perseverance and pig-headedness that prove the value of a previously unknown or unloved work.

An early novel by one of my favorite contemporary authors, James Lee Burke, was rejected 111 times over nine years of submissions. When finally published by Louisiana State University Press, The Lost Get-Back Boogie was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It also endured multiple rejections, including its famous mistreatment at Alfred A. Knopf, which prompted one of the great revenge letters of all time. Maclean's novella was eventually released by the University of Chicago Press and also received a Pulitzer nomination.

I don't mean to compare myself with these writers, except in our shared familiarity with rejection. In 1999, when my family was living in Tokyo, I finished a draft of a novel set in the Florida Keys, where I'd survived the Reagan years by working as a dockmaster, fishing guide, and tropical fish collector. (See my story about going back to the Keys in Fly Fisherman's Seasonable Angler anthology.)

Over the next decade, the manuscript was rejected by many, many agents and publishing houses, although there were a few tantalizingly close calls. During that time I revised the manuscript from beginning to end and found homes for some of my short stories in both literary magazines and outdoor publications, such as Gray's Sporting Journal.

By 2011, I'd given up on the Keys project and started a new novel, set in Shanghai. And then, on a whim, I submitted it to the 2012 New Rivers Press Electronic Book Series Competition. Yesterday, editor Ryan Christiansen e-mailed that it had won.

When in Mongolia . . .

The January 11 New York Times Travel Section mentions Mongolia (and our partner, Nomadic Journeys) in The 46 Places to Go in 2013. Writer Justin Bergman observes that "the untouched countryside remains the main reason to go" and notes "there are new attractions in the capital, too: Last year, the Government Palace was opened to visitors for the first time, giving tourists a glimpse of young Mongolian democracy in action."

For a haunting look at what happened before the 1990 Democratic Revolution, I recommend a visit to Ulaanbaatar's  Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution. It's an unassuming, two-story wooden structure with a collection of posters, photographs, and bullet-riddled skulls that will remind you to be grateful for the present work-in-progress, no matter what your country of origin.

Looking Back on the Season

This past season in Mongolia was a memorable one for many reasons. We again were lucky enough to enjoy a veritable parade of skilled anglers and photographers, including Lax-A's Árni Baldursson, Per Jobs of FishYourDream.com, John and Anna Riggs (you can see her photos of Bermuda in the December 2011 issue of This Is Fly), Worldcast's Gordon Hight, and Rasmus Ovesen and Klaus Pedersen, who have teamed up for stories in many publications in Europe and North America, including Chasing Silver.

Tasmania's Greg French was back on a self-guided trip, bringing me a copy of his estimable Frog Call, which is criminally hard to find in North America.

Also had the rare pleasure of guiding two old friends. How old? We first flyfished together as teenagers, in Yellowstone National Park, when the Summer Olympics were in Montreal and Gerald Ford was President of the United States.

News from New Rivers Press

My contributor's copy of American Fiction, vol. 12, arrived on Aruba after Thanksgiving. I've been dipping into its contents in no particular order, and am in awe of Vedran Husic's "Deathwinked,"  set in wartime Mostar, while the main character in Dika Lam's prize-winning story, "The Polar Bear Swim," produces one of my favorite lines of the past year: "Why do they get to ask all the stupid questions?"

The collection was edited by Kristen Tsetsi, Bayard Godsave, and Bruce Pratt, with Josip Novakovich serving as the prize judge. The publisher is New Rivers Press, which recently named the manuscript of my Florida Keys novel as one of the finalists in their Electronic Book Series.

Taimen Release on Video

Because I feel justifiably protective of each and every taimen in the river, I don't always take the time to shoot photos or video with my own cameras, preferring to get the fish back on their way as soon as possible. But we were lucky enough to watch angler Ryan Wilcox and guide Fabian Mendez release this 50-incher on an overcast day in mid-September, just before lunch. 

The taimen had two lampreys, which are native to this watershed, on its pectoral fin. (If you look closely, you can see the scar that remained after the lampreys' removal.)

Conserving Taimen

North American anglers have a long history of trying to save the fish they love. Think Delaware shad, Columbia steelhead, Yellowstone cutthroats. Think Trout Unlimited, the Federation of Fly Fishers, and Patagonia’s World Trout Initiative—which has recently joined a fledgling conservation movement in the fight to preserve Mongolia’s most charismatic salmonid: the taimen.

Though the family resemblance is obvious, this long-lived, slow-growing species boasts a personality more like a shark than a salmon. Taimen are apex predators, opportunistic feeders that occasionally hunt in packs. They’ll readily take rodents or ducklings, along with any fish smaller than themselves, and their voracious attacks on mouse imitations are the stuff of flyfishing dreams. [My stories about taimen appear in the 2008 Expeditions & Guides issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal and the March 2009 Fly Rod & Reel.]

In 2008, six local governments, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Mongolia River Outfitters formed a unique conservation partnership to protect the Onon River, which meanders through the still-unspoiled valley where Chinggis Khan was born. Since then, that partnership can take credit for establishing the world’s first taimen sanctuary and Mongolia’s first taimen-conservation trust fund.

To ensure that released taimen survive to strike again, all angling in the Onon—for any species—is by single barbless hooks. A “pliers program” supplies local residents with tools for crimping barbs and clipping trebles, while an innovative social marketing campaign sponsored by Rare encourages vigilant stewardship.

The campaign manager, Gankhuyag Balbar, is a former mayor of Dadal, one of the region’s larger towns, as well as a former Conservation Fellow at Georgetown University. According to survey results, the number of local anglers who strongly agree that a “taimen should always be put back into the river after it is caught” increased from 36.5 percent to 92.7 percent during the first two years of the campaign.

Bonefish on Aruba?

Over the past few weeks, I've begun to see bonefish in sizes and numbers that I haven't noticed on Aruba before. Part of the reason for this is opportunity. Thanks to a broken bone in my foot, which prevents me from enjoying a morning run, I've been swimming a lot. Back and forth, in long laps, over sand and sea grass. Sometimes I see barracuda, sometimes angelfish, sometimes even the broad shiny slab of a permit. (That was when I started keeping a fly rod in the truck.) The bonefish don't seem to mind a swimmer passing a few feet over their heads, and will occasionally tolerate a short pause for closer observation.

Aruba is the only Caribbean island without a marine park or preserve (see the Aruba Marine Park Foundation's Facebook page). Although offshore areas remain reasonably productive for billfish, wahoo, and tuna, the island's inshore waters suffer from a plague of unregulated netting. And yet, there are still fishable populations of many species. These little bones have been mudding in plain view of the hotels, in schools of 50 or more, and are ambitious enough to take the same flies that the larger ones do.

If we can convince commercial fishermen of the value of protecting nursery areas, and strengthen the conservation ethic in other residents, then someday, perhaps, Aruba's underappreciated bonefish will become as famous as its beaches . . .

You know you're on a happy island when . . .

even the fish out of water are smiling. [Note the dorsal cactus.]

The Season in Pictures

This year's client list featured many talented anglers, including Australia's Philip Clement, Maine's Fred Clough, North American rep of the Lax-A Angling Club, and London's Matt Harris. The photos below are mine, but Matt's album from the river includes some truly spectacular images.

What's the Knock on Lenok?

None, in my opinion. Although some Russian scientists carp about the "damage" they inflict on salmon fry in the lower Amur basin, lenok rise enthusiastically to the dry fly and fight well. Our endemic species is the blunt-nosed lenok, Brachymystax savinovi, better known as the Amur trout. They are less common than the sharp-nosed variety—and grow bigger—so we naturally value them more. In other publications, I've described them as closer to browns than rainbows, but they are really their own fish, with their own habits and personality. Here's a brief video of one during the release. Take a good look at the predatory jaw and the coppery-colored background for those beautiful spots.

"We could not calculate directions between Noord, Aruba and Dadal, Mongolia"

Headed for Mongolia tomorrow so that must mean the earth has traveled completely around the sun again. We've moved since last August, of course, but only a few miles, toward the northern tip of the island.

A few publications on the horizon: a story about marlin and Cabo San Lucas in the September Gray's Sporting Journal, another selected for an anthology from Fly Fisherman magazine, and a brand-new work, set in Shanghai, forthcoming in American Fiction, volume 12.


The anthologized piece is one of my contributions to "The Seasonable Angler," originally published in 2002. It's called "On the Flats," and is about the joys of not catching bonefish.

The Snail's Pace

While trying to find a name for these Aruban land snails (possibly Diplopoma crenulatum), I stumbled across a 1971 article by the late Stephen J. Gould, "The Paleontology and Evolution of Cerion II: Age and Fauna of Indian Shell Middens on Curacao and Aruba." Gould makes a number of interesting observations, including the odd fact that snail shells found in the 4000-year-old middens are larger than any alive today. He guesses, logically enough, that past conditions might have been much wetter (and hence more favorable for land snails) on these now dry islands, but also notes that there was no other evidence for this change in climate.

Three decades later, biologist Kees van Nooren has found support for Gould's conjecture. By analyzing pollen and spores from deep sediments, he discovered that desert Aruba was once a lush garden with at least seven different species of ferns, and that the departure of fertile soil coincided with the arrival of European colonists.

I used to imagine that, like most humans, I learned quickly but now recognize that illusion. In those days I would have overlooked these snails and the beauty they are capable of, thanks to persistent (slow) motion and a hard shell.

Home from the River

October 6 marked the end of an inspirational season, with excellent conditions for sighting fish and only one day of snow. The biggest taimen measured a very conservative 55 inches, caught by Jim Hickey of Worldcast Anglers on a sculpin pattern.



After 14 hours on the so-called road, the guides and I rolled into Ulaanbataar looking forward to enjoying our first electrically chilled beers in more than a month. Because it was nearly midnight, the first half-dozen restaurants we entered were either already closing up or out of food but, finally, on the west side of Sukhbaatar Square, we found a place with the words "art" and "pub" on it, where the waiter was willing to bring us six plates of french fries and many cold bottles of Altan Gobi and Tiger (the tap for GEM, our favorite Mongolian brew, was sadly dry). Note: If you find yourself in the city at a more reasonable hour, I recommend the steak with roasted peppers at Veranda, the second floor of a restaurant called Silk Road, with a fine view of the monastery of the Choijin Lama.

Country Cookin

Back in the States again for a roadtrip: South to Midwest to Northeast. Have parked ourselves in Ocala, Murfreesboro, and Galesburg so far but the hands-down highlight has been Country Boy's Cookin (no g), exit 121 from Interstate 75 in Unadilla, Georgia. The ribs are moist, tender, with great flavor that only improves with a few shakes of sauce. (I recommend the hot and spicy.) The beans are sweet, the cole slaw is sweet, and the atmosphere is unironic Bassmaster Classic. I wrapped a few leftover ribs in foil and enjoyed them several hours later—truly enjoyed them—despite a motel room with no outside windows and the faint reek of filtered cigarettes.

On your way out of Country Boy's, do not miss the opportunity to buy a bag of freshly boiled peanuts—"the country caviar"—from Hardy Farms across the parking lot.

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

—Carl Sandburg

At Sea

One odd thing about dislocation as a way of life is the whirlpool of memory. Whenever I am tempted to consign the past to a predictable current, like an oarsman on a favorite river, or to a periodic ebb and flow, as comforting as the tides, the gyre returns, spinning.

And so the air is warm as breath again, with the faint hint of frangipani that we loved in Thailand and Malaysia.



And there are geckos here too, but the locals call them pega pega instead of chee chak. Like us, they are not natives to the island, but transplanted foreigners who have taken to their new home.

Our street is named after an obscure French author and alcoholic who did not die soon enough to escape Rimbaud's assessment of him as constitutionally incapable of true "vision."


Here, at least, he intersects with Byron, is only two blocks shy of Victor Hugo, and resides within shouting distance of Shakespeare.


Surely that is consolation, if consolation there might be.


Across the way, our neighbors fly a yellowfin tuna from their windmill and keep noisy parrots on the patio.



Which reminds me both of the Maldives and of my first island home in the Florida Keys, where two of my dearest friends served a nightly highball to their chihuahua.

Happy in Print, If Not on the River

The first week in March is no time for flyfishing in Vermont. Back in Montana, however, some of the year’s best hatches are just beginning, coinciding with the release of Big Sky Journal’s annual flyfishing issue. I have a work of fiction in it called “Happy Is The Man” but I am true-story happy to see my work in the same pool with many writers that I admire, including James Prosek, co-founder of the Yale Angler's Journal, and Yellowstone's Paul Schullery.

Spring Broken?

In the battle for a dwindling reservoir of tourists, Mexico has left the Caribbean high and dry. My family voted with our frequent-flyer miles and the winner was Cancun. (There were no seats available to any other destination.) We’ll rent a car in March and head south along the coast. With a group including one tween, one teen, and my walker-wielding mother, we wanted multiple rooms with at least one on the ground floor.

None of us has been there before, but the so-called Riviera Maya is second-home to rafts of expats, and hence numerous opportunities for villa rental. I contacted several online agents. One of them—Janice Spate—actually called me at home to talk potential properties. I could tell from her area code that she lives in British Columbia but I didn’t ask for her story.

There are many fine and expensive possibilities on the Yucatan coast but we did not choose any of them, opting instead for a three-bedroom Akumal condo through an outfit named Cancun Steve.

Steve’s website is goofily charming, one of those artifacts of the Internet that disarm and discomfort simultaneously, complete with mouse-over magic tricks. I was curious enough to request his story, and here are the answers I received.

Q: Are you a one-man operation?

A: we have a team. a girl up in New York. 4 of us here in Cancun.

Q: Is your name really Steve?

A: my name is Steve

Q: Do you live in Cancun, or somewhere else?

A: I reside in Cancun

Q: Has the economic downturn affected business as much as it has in the Caribbean, where flights were cut 15%?

A: the recession has effected us all friend

Catch and release in the home of the Khan

Many globetrotting anglers release all their fish as a matter of course. But acceptance of this conservation ethic varies significantly by country and culture. In Switzerland, for example, voluntarily releasing a legal-sized fish can leave you liable for prosecution. And in nearly all Asian nations (with the possible exception of Japan) catch-and-cook is the order of the day.

Thanks to an unusual coalition, however, catch-and-release has established its first stronghold in the land of Genghis Khan. Mongolia’s lakes and rivers provide habitat for many rare and unusual species, but the taimen, an extremely large and long-lived member of the salmon family, is the country’s most prized gamefish.



In April 2008, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) announced that local governments along a 200-mile stretch of an Amur River tributary have established the Asian continent’s first taimen sanctuary. Developed in cooperation with Montana-based Mongolia River Outfitters (my employer for the past three seasons), the agreement seeks not only to conserve taimen, but to protect an entire watershed. The new regulations allow international anglers to flyfish with single, barbless hooks, but restrict riverbank development and prohibit the use of motorboats.

Of Taimen and the River

Fly Rod and Reel’s Adventure issue (March 2009) includes my feature on Mongolia with photos from that country’s first taimen sanctuary. The piece hasn’t been posted to the magazine’s website yet, so look for a copy on the newsstand. Here’s how it opens:

If you’ve seen the pictures, then you might already be lost. The angler kneeling in bewildered devotion, smiling with an awkward joy, behind a fish so impossibly large that two hands provide an insufficient cradle. Because as soon as you can imagine it, the dream begins. Your boots in that unfettered river, your eyes blinking in the boreal sun, your hands reaching into cool water, your arms bearing that implausible weight. It’s a wonderful dream, infused with just the right blend of beauty and impracticality, and alternately enhanced and encumbered by facts. Because like Paris in the spring, a taimen’s heart-rending strike exists in a specific time and a far-off place, a location so remote that the experience requires (for most people) a week’s leave and a month’s salary.

Winter and Its Malcontents

Today’s New York Times included an editorial about snowmobiles in Yellowstone, a situation that, over the years, has devolved from a clash of interests into a cloud of exhaust. And yet, despite the years of wrangling (some legal, some illegitimate), Yellowstone remains one of the most beautiful and complicated places in the world. Here’s what I wrote about it in 2005 (originally published in Carve magazine, a supplement to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle).



A Quiet Weekend in Yellowstone: Old Faithful Without Snowmobiles

If I’d known that the shutter was frozen, then I wouldn’t have bothered with the camera. But there was my 7-year-old daughter, Marina, in a bright pink parka, skiing beneath a brilliant blue sky, while Old Faithful boiled and billowed, white steam over white snow. And I wouldn’t have bothered occluding my eyes with any sort of lens—telephoto or not—as two gray wolves sidestepped a shaggy herd of bison, moving with an uncanny blend of speed, grace, and nonchalance.

But I didn’t know, so I kept framing and focusing and shooting. Pictures—or, at least, what I thought then were pictures—of my wife Sarah gliding through a forest of lodgepole pines, the powder breaking around her knees. Of my son Dave watching a pair of elk feed along the Little Firehole River, the water gone gold in the dusk. Of a flock of Canada geese silhouetted against a geyser plume. Of a svelte coyote sitting expectantly before our cabin, attracted by the aroma of leftover prime rib.

I have visited Old Faithful, the ersatz metropolis of Yellowstone National Park, many dozens of times over the past four decades—but never in winter, when the venerable Inn is silent and shuttered, the asphalt parking lots shrouded in snow. And though I generally dislike cameras, everything looked so different on this occasion that I didn’t resent the strap around my neck. Too bad I was still using film.

Twenty-five years ago—back when electronic cameras stored their images on floppy disks—you might have found Sarah and me strolling the boardwalks under an August moon, sharing champagne from a bottle. In these more sober times, you’d be more likely to spot us escorting nieces and nephews from the soda fountain to the now-faded Morning Glory Pool, our smiles wilting under the August heat and the relentless crush of vacationers. We are still having fun, still in awe of the geysers’ gush and rumble, but it’s a sweltering sort of pleasure.

On an average summer day, Old Faithful plays host to 20,000 people, qualifying it as the fourth-largest city in the state of Wyoming. In winter, that daily average plummets to a small fraction of the fair-weather horde. There are, after all, only 100 rooms and 34 cabins at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, the only available accommodations. And since the roads are closed to ordinary vehicles, every other would-be geyser gazer must arrive by snowcoach—think of a passenger van with tank treads—or by snowmobile.

During our visit, a few days before Christmas, the number of snowmobiles entering the park was far below the current season’s daily limit of 720. We had heard horror stories of smog and bedlam from past winters, but saw little evidence of either. (We did, however, overhear a hotel employee delivering a stern admonishment to one wayward rider: “Excuse me, sir. Nearly flipping your machine is not funny.”)

The conventional wisdom contends that uncertainty keeps many would-be sled-jockeys away. One federal judge banned unguided snowmobiles, while another overturned the ban. Since a new (and temporary) winter-use plan is the target of at least two competing lawsuits, uncertainty is likely to dominate this season as well.

For skiers like us, any decline in the swarm of snowmobiles is an unmitigated blessing. Dave and Marina skied from our cabin—the one farthest from the main lodge—to breakfast. They skied from breakfast to Geyser Hill. And on our most ambitious day, they skied from the Divide trailhead, along Spring Creek, to the Lone Star Geyser Trail, past the Kepler Cascades, and back to the lodge—more than 8 miles—all without the background roar of internal combustion engines.

Of course, we would have done this trip anyway, even without a judge’s ruling. I understand the appeal and the utility of both two- and four-stroke motors. And I have no illusions of Old Faithful as wilderness, unsullied by human presence. That coyote, for example, pleading for prime rib, did not perfect its shtick in solitude. Since feeding park animals is expressly banned, it had help from a parade of innocents and scofflaws. (The next day, another guest observed the beast astride a snowmobile’s luggage rack, tearing into a lunch cooler.)

For me, the astounding thing about Yellowstone—summer or winter—is the relatively easygoing interplay between the human and the wild. On Geyser Hill, four bison graze within a ski-pole’s length of the boardwalk. Our children watch respectfully, then remove their skis to cross a stretch of bare pavement. Safely past, Marina races from one thermal feature to the next, renaming them with her own fancies—Elephant Head Pool, Bubblegum Creek, Little Frodo Geyser. Just in front of the General Store, closed until June, we spy a wolf track, the paw bigger than my palm.

Back in the cozy lobby of the Snow Lodge, we drink hot chocolate, write postcards, play rummy and cribbage, knowing that the elk and bison and wolves are still out there, that the hot springs continue to bubble and boil. It’s a comfort to know that all of these wonders are just a short ski from our upholstered chairs, that we can enjoy them any time we want, without crowds or congestion.

A few days later, after receiving the condolences of our local photo processor—two full rolls of Fuji Velvia, completely blank—we all agree that winter is the best time to visit Old Faithful. And that we would like to repeat the experience, to begin stockpiling the same store of memories that we have for other seasons in Yellowstone. And that, maybe, just maybe, we might try to capture some of those images—but not on film. In this new year, I resolve to go digital at last.