For me it all began with a River Runs Through It. Watching the movie on VHS turned into reading the book turned into buying 5 different copies turned into half my vocabulary when fishing with my friends. I even did my Senior Project in high school on the history of fly-fishing which took me all the way back to 1653 and Walton's "The Compleat Angler". Literature and fly-fishing have always been soldered together for me.
My love for fly-fishing literature helped to create a habit of purchasing and stacking up a collection of mostly unread books. When I was a teenager, before anyone had heard of Amazon, I was ordering books on the subject from the far corners of the internet on sites I don't even remember. Browning, Duncan, Gierach - Got em all. And I actually read some of the Gierach. Then I hit an age where going to shows, meeting girls and reading Kerouac and Bukowski seemed more appealing. The fish would always be there.
Now at 33, I find myself more and more returning to the person I was when I was 17. The fringe details of our culture seem less intriguing and nothing seems to get the pulse rate going like the action (or even the thought) of stepping into the unexplored and hurling a clump of feathers into the drift. I hope that this pattern also leads to wiping the dust off the old collection of books and finally giving them the attention they've earned.
