Fishing Past and Present
Contents
I've never been as careful with the past as I should be. Its fragility is so carelessly shattered and irreparable. Three years documenting my fishing in Italy in the Val Trebbia and the Val d'Aveto, the Dora Baltea and a few times the fabled rivers of Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) in the mid 70's were lost by a dear friend to whom I had entrusted the photos when we moved to South Africa for a year. I have no idea what happened to the South African photos, but I did little fishing down there anyway. Finally, I can't locate a single photograph from Norway, but it was a lousy week for fishing on the Guala anyway. Norway has many other charms.
Most painfully, there are no photos of my first fish, a large mouth bass caught off the dock at my grandfather's house on Orchard Lake, Michigan, with a fifteen foot bamboo pole and a lively night crawler. It must have been two pounds, or at least it always will be in my memory. I was five at the time. Nor are their any extant photographs of the two adolescent years spent fly fishing Wyoming and Montana, Particularly missing is the 23 inch cutthroat I took in Yellowstone Lake the first time I ever fished with a fly. I swear it took a western bumblebee.
Well, here's a portion of what's left, independent of the gossamer threads that bind us to what once was.
<Tierra del Fuego, Rio Grande 1977,1984>
<Grand Cascacapedia, Gaspe 1979-1986,2000,2001>