A BAR BATHROOM IN KREMMLING, COLORADO

I have spent a lot of time in bathrooms over these thirty-seven years and figured I had experienced everything they have to offer. Bubble baths with books, shower beers, the Perfect Shit. During COVID, the bathroom was an escape hatch where I could lock the door and zone out, steal a fleeting moment away from the endless nightmare of getting my daughter through remotely learned first grade. This past Saturday, though, I spent a few short minutes scrubbing blood from my hands in a bar bathroom in Kremmling, and it was by far my favorite bathroom experience ever.

To tell the story entirely, I must start on Friday, September 30, 2022. It was the eve of opening day for antelope season, and my hunting buddy Jeff and I spent the afternoon driving up to his family cabin in Kremmling, CO. The jaunt was full of hopeful chatter about what might happen the following day, or maybe the morning after: would I finally get one this season? I had spent the last five years of my life trying to find some success at big game hunting and always came up empty-handed. Hunting public land is a damn tricky thing to figure out on your own in your thirties. With no old-timer to show you the ropes, it's a whole lot of guesswork that becomes a tad more educated every new season. You seem to asymptote towards the goal, always getting closer but never attaining it. I get a few days per tag, and if I fail, all I can do is hope for better luck next year. It's strange to have a hobby that I cannot spend every day practicing until it is mastered, but that's just the nature of this peculiar pastime, and I have accepted it. Jeff and I usually have a strong positive attitude on these drives, sanguine even. Friday’s conversation felt a little different, though, and Jeff was surer than ever that this time I would actually get the chance to pull the trigger.

We arrived at the cabin and proceeded to get fucked up. Actually, we started drinking as soon as the tires of the Land Cruiser we call HAEUG hit dirt roads, a good five miles from the cabin itself. It was a great night; we got hammered and stoned while the rain drenched our shoes and the golden aspens that surround the little A-frame, chain-smoking and passing the phone back and forth to blare our favorite songs through a blue-tooth speaker. “This is your year, Bryan, I know it," Jeff kept saying, to which I would reply, “Man, I really hope so." I kept my responses simple to try and not jynx it, drinking hard to settle the nerves and so I could later say that even if I failed, at least we had a good time, right? That’s usually what happens, anyway, and I love it no matter the outcome. So far, it was just hunting-as-usual, Big Jeff and the B Man style. But the next day would break the mold.

I awoke at 1:30 AM with a raging headache in the La-Z-Boy in the living room. Jeff was sawing logs on the second, identical La-Z-Boy next to me. His parents own the cabin, and like true best friends, they have identical everything from the La-Z-Boys to their matching Toyota Highlanders. Kinda like Jeff and me, actually, and I couldn't help but think about this as I got up to pound a few glasses of water and pills of Ibuprophen. I shuffled groggily to bed up on the second level, now with Jeff’s mom on my mind. She is sick with cancer and might die from it sooner than later, dissolving that long-standing best-buds club of two. One day the same will happen to Jeff and me, my brain reminded me… but tomorrow, we should both be alive, and we would be hunting, so I pushed the thought away and tried to get some rest.

It didn't work. I was too excited to sleep. I crawled out of bed ten minutes before my alarm was set to annoy me conscious at 5:50.

After some quick coffee, bananas, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, we made our way to the truck. I went through my mental checklist:

-       Orange vest, CHECK.

-       Loaded gun, CHECK.

-       Quiet voice, CHECK

Forgetting these three things has fucked me over in the past, which is full of enough dumb-fuck hunting mistakes to fill a goddamn encyclopedia of how not to hunt, but we won’t get into that here. The point is that, at least on this day, I wouldn’t be making these blunders again. We got into the car and made our way to a vast swath of public land where we have seen lots of antelope in the past and where Jeff shot one last year. Jeff repeated again for the millionth time, "this is your year, Bryan.”

“I really fucking hope so.”

The roads in our hunting area were garbage thanks to the previous night’s rain which was so magical under the blurred amber glow of whiskey and weed. Good thing Jeff is a fantastic driver with a dope-ass truck; otherwise, we would have never made it out as far as we needed to find animals. The easy-to-drive main roads were, as usual, being trolled by other hunters and totally avoided by wild game. We, however, were trudging through the shit, sliding around in thick sticky mud, conquering trenched-out trails, and venturing further and further into nowhere. It was just us and HAEUG out there; us and HAEUG vs The Trail. Eventually, we found a handsome hilltop where we could sit and glass for antelope. We climbed up, and I had hardly sat my hungover ass down when Jeff pointed excitedly, binos up to his face, and exclaimed “THERE THEY ARE.” He found a small cluster of antelope on the sage-spotted ridge across from us, a mile away. Good thing Jeff has a sharp eye for animals. Good thing Jeff is and has and does a lot of things.

Back in the truck, we were once again slogging our way across the landscape towards our target. As we got close, the herd heard us and started to move. Luckily, they were heading down our side of the mountain. Jeff stepped on the gas, and we met up with them a short way down the trail. Jeff’s excitement was a physical entity in the truck, a third electric amorphous hunting buddy that filled all the empty space of the vehicle. It infected me. It was then that I stopped holding my hopes at arm’s length, and I thought to myself, holy shit, I am actually going to do this. I made up my mind right there that I would make it work. I know that talk is cheap, and I am no believer in “laws” of attraction… but what happened next seems inevitable in retrospect, the events helpless to unfold in any other way simply because I fucking called it. Jeff was right. This was my year, always had been.

We were like a well-oiled machine. Jeff and I were hell-bent on success. We emerged from HAEUG, me grabbing my tripod and Jeff my gun. He handed it to me as I got set up, the same firearm I bought five years previous that had never taken the life of an animal. No need to rack a bullet; Hail Satan, I had finally fucking learned that lesson, and the rifle was already loaded with one in the chamber. Jeff ranged the herd at 180 yards. They were still on the move, but I knew I would not have to take a shot at a running antelope. I don’t know how I knew, but I was sure that one mature critter in the group would stop and look back, check us out, scan for stragglers. Probably from years of watching elk and deer run away from me and mercilessly stamp out all my hopes and dreams under their powerful nimble hooves. I clicked off the safety and waited, watching the does bounce across the hill through my scope, one after another. Finally, two stopped; one I wanted to shoot, and another smaller one right in front of her, blocking my shot. MOVE, I thought at it, willed it, begged it, pleaded with it. PLEASE JUST MOVE. She moved. I took a deep breath, held the crosshairs steady, and slowly squeezed the trigger. My 30-06 has a hell of a kick and is loud as shit even with ear plugs in, which I was not wearing. But when it went off, I barely felt or heard it. All I knew was that instantly she was on the ground, dead where she stood before she realized anything had hit her.

God, I hope I am given a death as fast and unexpected as I gave that animal.

I looked over at Jeff, dumbfounded. He was celebrating with jovial “FUCK YES”’s, which warmed my heart like last night’s peach whiskey. He wanted this as badly for me as I wanted it for myself, and at that second, it was the most obvious thing in the world. We hugged it out, unloaded the gun and stowed it away, said our attaboy’s and thank you’s. Jeff made sure I kept the empty shell that lay warm and inert in the mud, a token to remember this fine day by.

Then I hiked up to see her. My hands moved down on their own to pet her soft, thick coat. I apologized, thanked her, and gently stuffed some grass in her mouth to keep her fed during her journey through the Great Beyond. We happily harvested her gifts with care and drove back to town.

And that, finally, brings us back to the bathroom. We ordered shots, beers, and burgers at the bar, but I figured I ought to go clean up a little. There was nothing I could do about my blood-soaked boots and britches, but in a place like Kremmling, that's nothing anyone hasn't seen before. If anything, some of these folks were jealous upon glimpsing me, hoping to get themselves all bloodied up this weekend, too. In the bathroom, I slowly washed my hands with warm soapy water, watching the blood swirl down the drain, the blood that just hours before had been coursing strongly through a great, beautiful wild beast of the Colorado plains. In the mirror, for the first time in a long time, I saw a guy I was proud of. The words in my mind were simple and on repeat, echoing in an unstoppable loop that drowned out any other bullshit that might have tried to creep in and ruin my day. Words that I don’t get to tell myself very often lately, but when I do, I savor them:

You did it, man. You actually fucking did it.

PRACTICE WITH WORDS

In the interest of not having my writing practice for the day be another fucking cover letter, I will sit here at the computer for a little while and write about some things that have been on my mind. Sometimes tiny ideas pop into my head, and I write them down in the Notes app on my phone. I often don't remember what I even meant when I wrote it, and it takes me a little time to recall what I thought was so important about this idea. It doesn't help that usually, the note is in the form of a one-liner; it makes the whole thing feel like an out-of-context joke that really makes no sense unless the circumstances it arose from are available to me. 

Below are a couple recent ones, along with an attempt to expand a bit on them:

“A good background might be even more special than a good bird.”

When I read this the other day, I was surprised it was in my phone, to begin with. Not only did I not remember what I meant by it, but I had not even remembered writing it. When I noticed it, it was like walking into my living room at 2AM to get a drink of water and finding Bertrand Russell sitting at my kitchen table playing solitaire and smoking a pipe. It was a strong feeling that this does not belong, almost enough to throw me into a youtube rabbit hole researching the Mandella Effect and the possibilities of a human jumping between alternate universes. 

But then it all came back to me, as quickly as the fleeting thought came and left me while I was out photographing birds. Once I remembered where I was when I made this note, its meaning became glaringly obvious: birds are everywhere, good backgrounds are hard to come by. There are plenty of cool birds around to take pictures of most days, but those birds are rarely in a position relative to me that gives the photographs I'm taking of them an excellent background. Telephone wires, tree branches, roads, a dumb, dull blue sky… these things all tend to ruin my pictures. A common bird, however, has never ruined a picture on its own. The most memorable days for me as a bird photographer are when everything looks perfect in the viewfinder there in the field. And that is almost entirely dependent on a glorious background, which I have found in the last couple of years is hands down the most challenging thing to come by out there. Birds will always be beautiful, but backgrounds, unfortunately, will not.

“Funding is based on strong use; the goal was always to move toward a weaker definition where all are included."

This one took me a minute. Funding of what? Ah yes, wildlife and habitat conservation/restoration. That thing I always talk about and the one subject that returns more blank stares than any other.

Strong use and weak use refer to the use of wildlife resources and include trampling caused by hiking, taking fish and game from the woods via angling and hunting, off-roading, plinking, camping, etc. Strong users would be those who use a lot, especially in a way that they can be charged more and more for their use. Weak users don't do much out in the woods and rarely participate in anything that would result in income generation for natural resource managers. Income is generated for wildlife and habitat protection primarily through fishing licenses, hunting licenses, State Park and National Park passes, and campgrounds. Additionally, there are taxes on hunting equipment that go directly to the cause. Outside of this, there is not a hell of a lot of passive income to fund the protection of our lands and animals. At the end of the day, strong users can be thought of as hunters and anglers, while weak users are those once-a-year hikers that hit the free trail closest as the crow flies to their couch.

Wildlife management has focused almost entirely on increasing strong users. More people hunting and fishing and visiting state parks translates into more money to fund hunting and fishing and state parks. While I am all for more people going outside in theory, I worry that Aldo Leopold was right in that this system builds a relationship between people and the woods that mirrors that of Lenny and that poor rabbit. Aldo says that this kind of funding system that depends on people taking from nature will end in humans fondling the woods to death; selling tickets to the show to try and save it is self-defeating and ignores a couple of essential facts. 

Fact 1: We are all users even if we do not go outside and recreate in the mountains. Being alive inherently means that your existence is causing resources to be pulled out of the earth to sustain that existence. For this reason, we have to widen the definition of a strong user in a way that basically includes everyone so that everyone gets charged to keep the ecosystems we depend on functioning and providing the services we need to survive. I’m pretty sure we already do this with all kinds of shit and that this is just called a “general tax."

Fact 2: All living organisms have an intrinsic right to go on existing. When we only use money from strong users to protect ecosystems, biases creep in. We get organizations who lobby for MORE DEER, MORE ELK instead of just the healthier, diverse ecosystems we really need for the long-term survival of these species and thousands of others. We get hunters protesting the reintroduction of carnivores because it would, in theory, decrease the number of huntable animals on the landscape. We farm fish and dump them into rivers and lakes instead of working out why our bodies of water cannot produce fish in abundance anymore. If we had a more general-purpose way of funding ecosystem management (maybe the previously mentioned “tax” idea), then all living organisms from Steller’s Jays to morel mushrooms would have an equal right to protection. 

When only one group is funding public resources, we run the risk of a short-sighted management policy resulting from catering to a blinkered interest group. I would love to see a wider net be cast to collect money for habitat restoration and wildlife protection. But that would require that people appreciate nature even if they don’t drive out there to experience it themselves. This is a hard pill to swallow. The possibility of getting it done depends entirely on the moral, aesthetic, and scientific education of a group of primates who would preferably not learn. 

 Like Aldo, I am pessimistic.

 “Planets as golf balls”

 What the fuck. No clue. Ok, the last one:

 “I'm just glad I stopped and took the time to understand the length and depth of our almost infinite ignorance."

This was the most obvious one and was one of those "fuck, I shoulda said X” things. I made this note while walking away from another conversation where someone was probing me on what I planned to use my degree for. My response is always that the learning was the point, and I honestly have not given enough thought to how I will monetize my degree. The conversation kind of flopped from there, probably because I was embarrassed and somehow felt irresponsible for not thinking too deeply about the job prospects for a philosophy major in 2022. This question always makes me feel childish about my desire to learn for its own sake. It depresses me that the single goal of gaining new knowledge and grasping what humans have learned since they started writing stuff down and saving it for the future is not the reason most people get a degree.

The history of humans itself is infinitely fascinating. There is no word for how interesting the history of the whole fucking universe is. Our knowledge is flimsy and consistently incorrect. Our world changes as we find new ways to think and talk about it. Being exposed to dozens of theories every semester, comparing and contrasting them, siding with one, and then the next week siding with its critics is what is beneficial about philosophy. No, there are not a lot of jobs that pay for someone to be able to deconstruct and explain Hemple or Quine. But there is so much value in taking on and then rejecting so many viewpoints over a few short years that I don’t really care. I can go fix appliances if I have to. I can be happy doing anything from here on out, and I have philosophic exposure to the infinite amount of ways there are to be human to thank for that. 

This leads to a decent conclusion about why I am wasting time fleshing out these baby ideas when I know no one will read them. It is helpful to me, the only person that really matters around here. These thoughts come and go so quickly, and I barely understand them at the moment they strike me, let alone a couple weeks later when I am scanning my phone for essay ideas. The fact that I could crank out 1500 words in a couple of short, enjoyable hours is proof to the only person I really give a shit about that this is something I enjoy doing for its own sake. And those, I have found, are the kinds of things that are always worth doing.

Sometimes I wonder if I am lying to myself when I tell people that the degree was an end in itself and doesn't need to be a means to career advancement. It's days like today when it becomes wonderfully apparent that I am telling the truth.

LESSONS FROM WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY, HUNTING, AND RANDY

"We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity." – E.O. Wilson.

I was out drinking with my brother this Monday at the Lakewood Grill, chain-smoking and ordering new beers even before the last ones were entirely devoured. While this kind of activity was more regular for me five or six years back, this last Monday was a celebration of my finally graduating from MSU with a degree in philosophy. As we sat and jabber-jawed, a stranger named Randy came over and interjected himself into our conversation. He, like us, obviously had also spent the past hour working on getting thoroughly tuned up. On paper, he was the classic example of the type of person you try to avoid at a bar when you are not in the mood for an argument. An anti-vax, young-earth Biblical literalist who believes that Ron Wyat found the Ark of the Covenant somewhere on mount Arafat and has been suppressed ever since. However, Randy broke the mold by being totally uncaring about whether or not we believed him. He would say, "the earth is six thousand years old," to which my brother and I would cry, "Randy, no! That's such bullshit!" Every time he would just shrug and move on to more fertile conversational territory, and that was that. Soon he would be back on some other insane horse, like how mRNA vaccines change your DNA, but every time the idea lasted no longer than a couple of lively back-and-forths. Both sides would drop it without admitting defeat. Randy was anything but awful and proved that the best lessons are not ones learned in school. They can be found bursting out of every subject, from every angle we look at the world, from the bird park to the Lakewood Grill. Truth is not argued about. It is agreed upon.

Because I am interested in and take the life lessons of 60-year-old organisms seriously, I asked Randy what he has learned about life in all his years living it. His answer also happened to be the three most essential things outdoor hobbies have taught me. These are:

1. Be patient.

2. Don't get too excited.

3. Work is overrated.

My jaw dropped. What excellent advice, and how thoughtful to boil it down so perfectly to three separable subjects that make it easy for a philosophy guy like myself to write about it. Below you will find the best advice I have learned while birding and hunting. Whatever anyone else thinks, my boy Randy totally agrees with me, and that’s all I need.

1. BE PATIENT

Aristotle once said that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. In outdoor pursuits, this is an understatement on both sides. Waiting for your object can be total torture, but the joy felt when it works is pure ecstasy. 

Whether hunting, fishing, or taking pictures of birds, the idea that we should JUST SIT THERE UNTIL AN ANIMAL HAPPENS TO STUMBLE UPON US can be too big a pill to swallow. One glance at a map shows us how much there is to explore. After five minutes of waiting in a meadow, at the side of a creek, or at a blind on the lake, our brains start to kick us in the heart and beg for us to go explore more territory. Any justifications we make to ourselves to wait come off as lazy excuses to not climb the mountain or hike a few more miles off-trail. Nine times out of ten, it does not take long for me to abandon all the advice I have ever heard to the contrary and start hoofing it for greener pastures. Waiting can be just as painful as hiking, and the only pain reliever is covering more ground.

As we become more experienced, there is another medication one can self-administer when the bug to move starts to make our skin crawl with impatience: past successes gained through waiting. Once you have sat in the cold for a few hours, expecting to get skunked and go home empty-handed, only to experience precisely what you wanted to happen at last light, it becomes easier to convince yourself to do it again. In a sense, it hammers into us the truth that we are not in charge of these encounters, and we are just lucky to be around when they do. And it is far better when looking for animals to be a fly on the wall of the room they happen to walk into. No matter how quiet or stealthy we think we are while moving through the woods, most of us might as well be god-fucking-zilla as far wildlife are concerned. You stink, and you're loud, and yes, everyone knows you're there. You aren't fooling anyone.

Sitting still is a skill that needs to be practiced, and the rewards come later as we slowly collect new places to wait and watch. The rewards of having an animal unknowingly walk into your zone instead of the other way around are myriad. So, we should never forget Randy's number one life lesson, straight from his Camel cigarette smoking mouth: Be patient.

2. DON'T GET TOO EXCITED

Nothing can ruin the reward of patience more than blowing it when it happens because of nerves. The buzz we feel when our furry or feathered friends finally walk out into that clearing or fly out onto that perch is indescribable, but that has not stopped outdoors people from endlessly trying to describe it anyway. Whether we are taking pictures or hoping to fill a freezer, that internal earthquake can cause us to forget that there is still a goal to accomplish and very often can be the root of why we fail even when everything else happens perfectly. The deafening roar of my heartbeat can be disorienting, and my adrenaline-fueled movements become clunky and lose all their finesse. I would never say that getting excited in general is a bad idea; I am one of the most excitable dudes on the planet and love to daydream and regularly propose partnership on grand projects with people I barely know. But there is a point, when you are trying to accomplish a goal, that it is something we have to learn to manage so we can complete it and not hurt ourselves. Days when I should have had a perfect shot ended in disappointment when I found out I was not watching the in-camera light meter and overexposed or the death grip on my camera caused the shot to turn out blurry. I've never shot a deer because in the two times I had an opportunity, I became overcome with option paralysis, and they ended up walking away from me before I got the nerve to pull the trigger. Adrenaline and my inability to manage it was the cause of these particular failures, and this is the kind of excitement that we need to keep our eye on.

Early excitement can also cause us to hope too much for a particular ending to the story and makes us believe that if we get skunked while fishing or birding, the whole endeavor is a failure. We cannot control the feelings that bubble up, but we can control how we act somewhat when they happen. Every time we head out into the woods, there are any number of outcomes that could manifest, including but not limited to physical death or becoming permanently mangled by a cougar. Not taking an animal or a good photo home is far from the worst possible things that could happen. Getting excited too early often means that the outcome we prefer is the only one we can think about. We can have blinders to the dangers that could harm us, the auxiliary lessons we can learn, and the joys we can experience that have nothing to do with the primary objective. A closed-off favorite trail is an opportunity to take a new one. Some other asshole glassing from your knob just means you get to go find a better spot and stave off the boringness of glassing for a couple more hours. There's a lot more to being out in the woods besides what you went out there to do. We should always be looking for something new to learn from that great teacher named The Wild.

3. WORK IS OVERRATED

Goddamn straight, Randy. Next rounds on me for that one, bud. Work is the chain we willingly wear, hoping that the one who owns it is merciful and ethical enough to know that he is required to feed us and water us every day. Usually, our new masters are only interested in taking care of us from the reference point of the bare minimum of what is required by the state. The employed run calculus on how much freedom they are willing to sacrifice for stability, while the employer's mathematics are constantly trying to find ways to minimize the stability they are expected to offer per hour of work. It is a fundamentally one-sided system here in America, and the only referee involved has been entirely captured by people of a particular team. I'm sure anyone can guess which team that is.

Planning a hunting trip makes it depressingly obvious how fucked up our lives have become because of the work system here in the US. A two-week trip, the length of a proper elk hunting expedition, and is in most cases all anyone has time for throughout the year. Never mind the almost infinite amount of shit worth experiencing on planet Earth and the fact that we've only got one go-around to pack it in. Never mind the horrid worldviews that fester when people are not encouraged to travel outside their hometown and meet new people from different parts of the world. Our benevolent employers have graciously offered us 14 days off to do whatever we like as long as the other 350 are spent following their orders, and we are supposed to be grateful. 

The saddest thing about all of this is that anyone that reads this will know it's all bullshit. We all know it sucks, yet we perpetuate it every day. I wish we could develop a healthier relationship with our vocations and understand that we are not just the things that help us make money. It's nice that some of us have skills that are marketable (I sure wish I had one), but it is a mistake to identify ourselves with these things. Not that I believe there is someone underneath your physical self you need to uncover to "discover" who you are. No, that illusion is total horse shit, and if you believe that I suggest you give up that wild goose chase today while you still can. Change is what we should be looking for and exposing ourselves to new experiences morphs us into creatures we never thought possible. It is surprising how quickly we go from struggling to understand a new concept to being somewhat proficient in it if we do not give up. I wish more people had the time and ability to spend months out of the year just experiencing some new things, to have the chance to pick up some new toys and figure out how to use 'em. I know that's what Randy would want from us. Randy knows that you are not alone in hating your job and that you should not take it so seriously.

To conclude, let's just suffice to say that EO Wilson's quote at the top of this essay applies to us people as we look at animals and us people as we look at people. At first blush, I would not have guessed I would learn anything from Randy or that our particular conversation would be all that enjoyable. I'm sure Randy felt the same about my brother and me with our screaming and visible revulsion to many of his ideas. But we let the conversation go wherever it wanted, kept an open mind, tried to really embrace diversity in all forms, including those of the creationist anti-vaxxer or loud-mouth libtard. In other words: sit and wait, don't get too excited, and good things happen. 

Also, fuck work.

dry

Once upon a time, I was an alcoholic. I don't still claim to be, and now I prefer the term "ex-drunk." People didn't like to hear that in AA, which is partly why I quit going to meetings a few months into my sobriety. The way I see it my addictive personality happened to momentarily latch on to alcohol, just as it had many other less destructive hobbies and compulsions over the years. Probably because as a brewer I had easy access to large quantities of it, and rarely did I have to break out the wallet to support the habit. Getting fucked up all the time felt more acceptable when everyone around me could keep up, and it didn't seem to have an impact on my bank account. The path of least resistance, it seems, is a slippery slope.

Figuring out my current fixation and whether or not it's beneficial to me (example: fly-fishing vs. cigarettes) is so much more important to me than beating myself up forever over one in particular. It's something I need always to be aware of and keep tabs on; left unchecked, even the most benign of addictions have the potential to leave me broke and homeless. Diving head-first into a new fascination is something I am known for, but I try not to immediately define myself by it or get too disappointed if I lose interest. I am not surprised by the relapse rate among alcoholics, and I think a lot of it has to do with them continuing to call themselves one even when all of the symptoms of being a booze hound have faded. I am no longer an alcoholic just like I am no longer a home-brewer.

Many would have alcoholics believe that the next drink is a wolf waiting at the door. I would suggest that it’s just another drink that we don’t need.

After one awful day in December, I finally snapped out of it. Turns out this often talked about "moment of clarity" is real and something profound. It isn't so much a realization that you have a drinking problem; by this point you know you have one and have already tried cutting back, or at least thought about it or made an empty promise to a loved one that you would. It's more about finally recognizing all of the damage this habit has done to your life. At this moment the full weight of the situation hits you like a ton of bricks. The veil drops, and somehow you are unable to continue lying to yourself and everyone around you. It becomes painfully obvious that no, everything's not OK, and in fact, there is a huge mess that needs to be cleaned up. Hopefully, at this point the addicted person has a "better now than never" instead of a "fuck it, I'm in too deep" attitude. The former has always been more my style, and luckily that's what I went with; today it has been two years and six months since I quit my brewing job and vowed never to drink again.

Quitting didn't seem like it would be all that hard. My initial plan was to become a hermit. If I cut off all contact with everyone and everything that triggered my desire to get hammered I figured I would be fine. What I hadn't planned on was having to fill the Grand Canyon-sized hole of extra time that had suddenly appeared in my life. No more 60-hour-a-week job, no more getting a beer with my friends, no more killing time sipping whiskey and chain-smoking on the patio. Holy shit was I ever bored.

Enter: fly-tying. I had picked up fly-fishing two seasons before. That season leading up to my going dry I had made a real go at it, fishing more regularly and reading book after book about the finer points of angling with a fly. My days on the river were some of the only times you could find me without a beer in my hand. This was not because I didn't want to drink, but because I was lazy and beer is heavy to carry. Recently I had been considering taking up tying and even scored a box of old fly tying stuff for a song off of craigslist. The gentleman that sold it to me didn't seem to know what he had, that or he was too close or distant from the poor old guy that previously owned it and couldn't stand to see it anymore. Except for the dull scissors and five-dollar vise, I still use the old, worn tools that originally came with the kit, and my deer hair sedges get their wings off the same aging patch of deerskin that was used to tie my first dry fly.

Up until then, I had yet to get into the box, but with all of this new-found free time on my hands and a sober mind that needed distracting, I tore into it like some punk kid into another child's birthday presents. My first attempts were horrible, nightmare-inducing creatures. They were abominations. Size 4 caddis pupae, parachutes with soft hackle wings. I didn't know a good dry fly hackle from a CDC, but I was in deep. I would spend hours at the vise, burning through instructionals, tying every pattern I could with the wrong materials on the wrong hooks and loving every second of it. It's a good thing that at first I didn't care about doing everything correctly, you get more practice in when you aren't too worried about the particulars.

When you are a serial hobbyist, you love and savor those first hundred or so hours of being a newb. Being a bonafide beginner only lasts so long, and at that beautiful, long-awaited moment when the new obsession evolves into a useful skill, a little more magic gets sucked from the world; the lingo has mostly been learned, and the new thing isn't so mysterious anymore. This pastime that I had imagined lonely, weather-worn old fly-fishers doing while puffing on pipes and muttering to themselves in dark dens has since been made equal in my mind to arts and crafts for grown men.

That January I fished the Arkansas coming out of Pueblo Reservoir for the first time. I was just getting acquainted with the wonders of tailwater in a state with a never-ending fishing season, and I had an Altoids box packed with my pitiful attempts at the classics. To my surprise, the fish were rising, and even more shockingly they were taking my flies as if they were the ones I bought in the fly shop. One sixteen inch rainbow took my wonky size 12 parachute, and another slurped what can only be described as Frankenstein's Caddis. Both flies fell apart after one fish, but they were my flies, and I had never felt such a feeling of accomplishment. I had just rearranged my entire life and given up everything I had devoted myself to professionally, but it wasn’t until these fish looked up and sipped those flies that I was officially reborn.

I don’t need any of those fuckers, I thought to myself, in reference no-one and everyone at the same time.

That day I fished the Arkansas, a novice in both fly-fishing and tying, sober as the day I entered this world, and feeling as new. I imagined my previous obsession floating away down the river, disappearing into the mist rising from the surface, out of sight and out of mind. Something else had taken its place.

My name is Bryan, and I am obsessed with trout and the bugs that they eat.

Spring/Time

As spring finally starts to show its face around here, I am overwhelmed with a feeling that I am continually missing out on some adventurous, beautiful, inspiring happenings that are going on out there in the woods. The noise from the street is like a baby crying, and I’m the new dad helpless to stop it. Sometimes I lie awake at night, editing a mental list of all of the places I want to go, knowing that my weekends until mid-August are all planned out, and some trips aren’t going to make the cut. No matter how many times I run the numbers, they just don’t add up, just like they didn’t last year or the year before that. 

Becoming an outdoorsman awakes a sincere appreciation and understanding of the importance and necessity of seasons. This constant awareness of the timeliness of it all, the fact that certain things in the wild only happen at a particular time and not at others is mind-opening, and you really start to understand the meaning of being one with nature. But it can also become a source of anxiety. For instance, there is a particular time window during the summer when most trout that live in Colorado will take almost any hopper imitation that you cast at it. You toss it, they bite it, you release or bonk the fucker on the head and repeat. But the angler who happens to let his non-fishing life get too busy during this time is an angler who you should be scared to be driving behind. It’s likely he spends more time at the wheel staring at bodies of water trying to catch a glimpse of a fish than watching the road on which he is traveling. He knows that he is missing it, and even worse, it won’t be like this again for another twelve long months. 

One hard left could end it all.

My first warm spring day on the stream this year, when the snow had melted, but one final storm was almost certainly on the way, was more emotional than usual. I was walking up the short trail to a good spot on the Poudre with my fancy-pants Patagucci waders pulled halfway down and no jacket on, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds of spring, and out of nowhere I just started tearing up. Trying and failing to pull myself together and tie a fly on, I just sat down on the bank of one of my favorite rivers, loving that I even had a list of favorite rivers in the first place, just being a part of the scenery. A few short years ago I could barely remember the name of the Platte, and now here I was, sobbing like a baby because I had been looking forward to this moment for so long. You won’t catch me crying in Cheesman Canyon in the middle of September after I have spent months fishing three or four times a week. No, at the end of the season I am more apt to be cursing the fish for not biting instead of just being thankful that we (me and the fish) are here at the same place at the same time.

Pure joy with no strings attached is hard to come by in this world, but in fishing and family, I find it in excess. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when you love something this much, that first trip out of the year can be as joyful and heart-breaking as seeing an old friend after years of separation. And just as in my relationships with my friends and family, I will sometimes contemplate and extrapolate my lack of free time in the summer to the bitter end, when we are all eventually separated by death. No more fishing trips to plan, no warm embraces, no more flies to tie.

There's just not enough damn time for any of it.

i caught a bass on a fiesta amigo

There is a special place in hell for whoever writes the rules. Boring, nitpicking little fuckers, like a dad at a slumber party telling everyone to keep it down. That line is too heavy, this rod is too light. This fly must be tied as such and fished in this particular manner, or a fish will never eat it. What are you, stupid? Granted, flies for specific occasions are needed, and a fly-fisher needs to be sneaky, capable of casting a fly accurately, and aware of which bugs the trout are into at the moment. It just appears that it isn't long after these necessary skills are acquired before everything gets tossed into the air, and we are all left guessing. This is why, when people usually split off into team Imitative or Suggestive concerning fly choice, I've chosen to keep my ass firmly planted in the KISS camp.The Fiesta Amigo, my all-occasions wet fly, is a direct result of this.

Tied on 2x strong nymph hooks, the Fiesta Amigo can be swung, sunk, or even floated if they are small enough and I use Gink. The bodies I make from SLF Spikey Squirrel Dubbing, with a soft hackle hen feather wrapped around the neck. Some I dub thicker than others. There's also one with a peacock body and grizzly hackle; not pure Amigo but close enough to be named one and competent enough to get it's own full line in the wet fly box. I tie it in 8 colors and 6 sizes, but I usually use the olive, peacock or brown ones in size 16 or 18. This fly is my admittedly-hyperbolic middle finger to the ultra-realistic flies and all of the assumptions about how much a trout really thinks before he eats that go with them.

I got the idea after reading David Hughes' book Wet Flies. In it, he recommends as an experiment tying one simple wet fly in multiple sizes and colors and then matching the hatch at the river with the closest color and size combo. My brain took this as a challenge, and not long after reading the book I had created the Fiesta Amigo and vowed to fish them exclusively for a full season. I lasted until ice-off, about two months, before tying up a big batch of drys, but in that time and the months since I have learned that:

1. Bug colors are mostly pretty similar.

2. Size matters.

3. Presentation, particularly on the first cast, matters most.

There is a lot of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence out there showing that I know how to catch a fish, some of it stored in the form of photographs, but mostly I just talk a lot about fly-fishing. The point is that I don't think the proof is compelling enough to hold up in a court of law. If you genuinely believe that I know what I am doing and ever ask me how to do it, furthermore, it is tantamount to asking me where the songs I write come from. "I don't know, I'm still figuring it out" is probably the correct response. Instead, you will get a bombardment of sometimes romantic, sometimes technical, but never complete, thoughts. Some of it would make sense, the majority would be jargon and most likely accompanied by a few lies to add some spice if I felt like I was losing you. This all happens with the best intentions, and I am trying to be helpful. There is nothing I love more than getting a friend onto a fish. Still, I am doubtful anyone was ever a better angler after hearing me fumble through Bryan's 150,000 Vague, Enigmatic Fishin' Tips. For some reason, it always comes off sounding simple, even though I am not sufficiently dim-witted or new enough to the sport to think that this is the case.

That said, there is one piece of advice I have for anyone looking to up their game: make your own Fiesta Amigo box, or something similar, and fish them and only them for an extended period. At the very least, your presentation will improve, which is more than enough reason by itself to give it a shot. You also start to get this feeling that in most cases, when a trout refuses your fly, it's not the fly's fault. As I said, the majority of the bugs you pull out of the water will be size 16-22 and, you know, brownish green. More likely the fish didn't see it or wasn't hungry, in my opinion. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

By now it should be clear what exactly a Fiesta Amigo is and why I use it so much, and this past season during runoff I wanted to see how well this baby did on those warm-water species. Runoff seemed to go on forever in Colorado this year. Clear Creek was too high for after work fishing trips for most of the summer. I wanted to die. During the worst of it, when every river everywhere was a raging milkshake, I frequented a group of ponds up in Longmont that had been closed since the flood but had recently reopened for fishing. At least that's what Geoff (or something), a shirtless stoner that randomly attached himself to us, told my friend Ryan and I when we showed up the first time to fish them. We didn't question him. He was pleasant to hang out with and had good weed, and he even made a trip down to the convenience store to pick up some sodas for us three. He was the kind of guy that shows up to the lake with his conventional rod and reel, but fishes whatever lures he finds in the mud without worrying about it. I guess he picks his fishing buddies the same way he chooses his tackle. Most days going fishing you run into a weirdo, but you don't usually make a short-term buddy out of them.

Ryan is also a spin-caster, but the more sophisticated kind with a tackle box full of all sorts of jiggly, jangly doo-dads. I know our kind aren't supposed to mix, but he's one of the best fishing buddies a guy can ask for. Ryan always shows up on time and doesn't complain about the weather or how early it is. He's got the bug as bad as I do, he just uses a different stick and reel to satiate the monkey. Sometimes he will use one of my extra fly rods, and sometimes he will even catch a fish with it. Ryan is not a picky man. It seems that he will try to catch anything that swims on any gear as long as it gets him outside and on the water. We met a long time ago when I was still in the beer biz and he's one of the only guys that stayed in touch with me when I quit drinking. I'm lucky to know him.

The ponds were a blast. Ryan cranked in a few nice 16-18 inch largemouths on a giant red plastic worm. I was concentrating on the panfish, or at least that's what I was telling people. Here they are larger than you usually find, and I could not drop a Fiesta Amigo into the water without having one take it. I must have caught thirty that day. The problem is that I could see bass holding at the bank, and every time I cast to them, some dumb bluegill would dart over and take the fly before the bass even had a chance to look at it. I wanted a bass, specifically a largemouth on an Amigo, but, you know, I was “focused” on the panfish.

So, that’s how it went most of the day. I would get bored of catching bluegill, swap over to a different fly, get frustrated from the lack of action, then switch back to the Amigos and the non-stop panfish bite. I did manage to land a perch while I was at it. All the while, Ryan was catching nice bass on a regular basis, and ultimately I got fucking sick of it and decided to get down to business. Changing flies was not an option. Time to find the right bass.

I found him at the north end of the third pond on the trail. Hanging out all by his lonesome self with no bluegill in sight, this bass was the one. I tied on a size 10 Amigo, the brown one with gray soft hackle, not the brown one with mottled ginger and red thread. This was probably going to be the most comfortable cast I could ask for as a fly-fisher on a pond with no boat, clear of brush and with plenty of room for a real back cast. My first shot went unnoticed. On the second I gave the fly a quick twitch as it sank down into the strike zone. I assumed the flick of the tail indicated a take. The weight felt on the rod after making my set confirmed my suspicion. Don't fuck this up now, I thought. Yes, this is ultimately meaningless, but I'm proving a point, goddamnit.

The fish came to the net fairly easily. Not the biggest fish in the world, but a chubby fourteen inches. Largemouth bass, size 10 Fiesta Amigo lodged in his jaw. Mission accomplished. Posed him for the hero shot, then back into the pond he went. The whole time I had a strong case of the I-Told-Ya-So's, although I'm not sure who it was directed at. Probably just the same Them I am always referring to in my protest songs. The people writing the rules, keeping the people down, telling me I can't smoke weed in Elevenmile. No, no-one ever told me it wasn't possible to do what I just did, but it just feels implied when I walk into a fly shop or login to Instagram. Fancy, expensive gear must be replaced by newer, fancier, more expensive gear. The simple rarely gets the buzz it deserves, and when it gets the job done, I feel like I am in on something that most people are missing. And on a split-cane rod, nonetheless. I am thirty-two going on seventy.

Fly-fishing is full of opportunities for full-on decision paralysis. For me, I'm going to choose my partners because we get along, spots because there's fish, and flies because they work. Everything else counts as rules for rule's sake, and we all now know how I feel about that shit.