I remember when my wife handed me the phone like it was yesterday.
“It’s John Gierach,” she said.
I’d known John casually for years. We’d kicked around some of the same book signing events, attended trade shows and such, and my late mentor, Charlie Meyers of the Denver Post had made a personal introduction early on. But I’d be lying to you if I were to say I answered that call as anything other than a big fan.
I’d been reading John’s books for years, ever since Uncle Fred brought a dog-eared copy of Trout Bum to our family gathering at the opening of the trout season in Baldwin, Michigan. Fred felt obliged to share this special book with a group of men who’d been fishing as a matter of almost religious obligation for decades.
“This writing is special,” Fred said. “This guy ‘gets it’ better than anyone else I’ve ever read.”
The others thumbed through the pages, nodded and passed the book around. I was the one who picked it up off the table after dinner and tucked it in my pocket, hoping that nobody else would really notice.
Flash forward some 27 years, and there I stood on my deck, talking on the phone with Gierach himself. He had a problem that needed fixing. Fly Rod & Reel (which I considered the “literary conscience” of fly fishing at the time and still do), where he and artist Bob White had contributed a collaborative column for decades, was sadly closing shop.
But he and Bob weren’t done, and they needed a new home.
He wondered if TROUT magazine would be willing to pick up the package and run with it.
What in the hell do you think I was going to say? Of course! Manna from Heaven. Let’s roll, I said.
And that’s how I came to be the editor of the Gierach-White “Convergence” column that has graced, even elevated, the pages of TROUT magazine since 2017.
Making my job easy
Now, I’ve always felt kind of squishy when it comes to wearing the title of “editor” when it came to Gierach’s stories.
When this first started out, I just read along like everyone else, and my main job was taking out some of the more colorful language that he wrote in order to make the pieces suitable for TU’s PG-rated magazine. I missed an F-bomb once, and we ran it for 150,000 TROUT subscribers to read. I think I just got caught up in the flow of the story and let it slide (as did the other editors working on the magazine), but I was thankfully forgiven for that whiff, and we all moved on.
Over time, I did start to interject myself a bit more, and I think I saved John on a few grammatical slights. For example, I once changed “clamored” to “clambered” when John was describing climbing around rocks in a river. I was really proud of that one. Our editor-at-large, Erin Block, would also pick up minor nits here and there, and we’d polish what was an already brilliant diamond of a story. John was the consummate pro, and the truth is, anything we did as an editorial team was only window dressing, at most.
To wit, I can also tell you that editing a magazine is often like herding cats when it comes to working with writers, artists and photographers on production deadlines. Without fail, Gierach was always early; always ahead of the deadlines, sometimes by months. And we allotted 3,000 words of space for the Gierach columns. When John would submit a story, he always stuck the landing. I mean, some stories would come in at 2,994 words and others 3,002. How he pulled that off and went from a captivating intro to tying everything up with a bow and hit the mark within a sentence or less… that was nothing short of wizardry. Anyone who has ever endeavored to edit a magazine or any other printed product for that matter will understand how that was like having Tom Brady run an offense in a two-minute drill.
John did, very much believe in the mission TU and the role the magazine plays in conveying that mission.
As such, he and I would meet up for lunch every now and then to talk about themes for issues we had planned, and he pointed a lot of his pieces in those directions. He was a good collaborator.
Friends made on the water
And he became a good friend.
But you’re not really that good of friends, in my mind, until you go fly fishing together. And even though John and I lived within a hundred miles or so in Colorado, a few years ago, I felt obliged to invite him to stay and fish with me and some other friends at our family cabin in Baldwin, Michigan—ironically where that dog-eared copy of Trout Bum was passed around years earlier. I’ll be darned if he didn’t accept and ride across Lake Michigan on a ferry boat with Mike Dvorak to spend a few days fishing there.
You can only imagine the feeling of satisfaction I had when Uncle Fred came over for dinner that first night and I got to introduce him to John Gierach in person. That was one of the most rewarding moments in my life, because way back then, I was the wet-nosed young wannabe writer who loved to fly fish, and now I was the editor of America’s largest-circulation fly-fishing magazine introducing those same family members to the world’s most prolific fly-fishing storyteller.
Best of all, Gierach deemed it worthy to stay at our place and fish on our little stretch of river.
It was… perfect. Nirvana. Closing of the circle of life (or at least fly fishing).
It’s not all about the fishing
But, alas, nothing is ever perfect. I somehow managed to get Gierach skunked during the few days he spent there. In fact, I might be the ONLY person Gierach ever visited to make a story, where he basically came up empty. In three days! He caught a few fingerlings, but not “Boris” the giant brown trout I’d scouted and desperately wanted him to catch.
I would have been totally humiliated and felt like that was a wasted opportunity, but for the last evening when everyone else hit the river and John suggested he and I stay behind. We pulled up two rocking chairs, brewed some coffee and spent two hours talking about writing, editing and such. That was a life-changing experience that indeed made it all come home.
As it turned out, John went on to write a fantastic story for TROUT nonetheless, titled “Baldwin” that we ran in the spring 2023 issue. Bob White, who couldn’t make the trip, created a beautiful painting he called “Spring Peepers” that shows John sitting on a log looking downstream from my favorite stretch of the Baldwin, admiring the sunset through the trees. Or maybe he was thinking “why in the heck did Deeter bring me here?” Doesn’t matter, I loved it just the same, and the original painting now proudly hangs on my wall at home in Colorado.
Gierach kept cranking out the columns for a couple more years. Of course, we’d traded emails and phone calls and plotted out what we wanted to do next. I emailed him about bamboo fly rods on a certain Tuesday, and he wrote back the next day. It was such a pleasure to work with him… and to be friends.
A legend lost yet forever treasured
And the next week, I got another email from Bob White saying that John was gone. Apparently, it was his heart. John wasn’t a spring chicken by any means, but it was still too soon and a shock. In my mind, the world had just lost one of the last “everyman” storytellers the fly-fishing world had ever known.
But had we?
As it turns out, John, true to form, was way ahead of us, and he had left a small handful of essays in the poke. His wife, Susan, encouraged us to run them because she felt John would have wanted people to read them. So, over the past year or so, we ran all but one.
We saved this last one, he titled “Cleaning Up,” for the March issue of TROUT magazine, not so much because of its title and how John had a knack for wrapping things up in clean fashion, rather, because in this story, John brought things home to Colorado and the springtime BWO hatches.
This story was and is Gierach’s homecoming.
It’s about missed opportunities and anticipation, hopes and such.
Yet, in the end, it’s about finding that sacred bite, and those special moments that make most of us so enamored with this crazy endeavor of fly fishing we care so much about it in the first place.
I hope you like it. I think it’s one of the best pieces Gierach ever wrote. And I hope it makes you realize what a treasure John Gierach was for the world of fly fishing.
Fly fishing is nothing short of magic and amazing. And so was John.