I never met John Gierach, but I feel like I know him as well as you can know anyone from their books and he had many. In 2020 I wrote a column in this publication about how I wanted to savor his most recent book, at the time, “Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers,” because you never know when it will be the last either because of desire, business or even the business of passing on. At some point a book would be his last. For whatever reason.
In 2023, I took a similar, casual pace through “All the Time in the World.” It was his last. Gierach passed away last week at 78 and I mourned a man I had never met as we often do.
In the fly fishing world, he was the steady voice of a mentor. The Trout Bum who lived the life before it became a trendy, marketable thing to share on YouTube or memorialize in a tattoo.
Gierach wrote about the same things in his over 20 books, but, like fishing itself, was never redundant and I never tired of him. Some essays took a long time for me to read because I’d simply drop the book and stare at the wall, so deep in thought about presenting a dry fly, holding a trout or sitting in the truck for the weather to clear that I didn’t see the wall. His words put me in my own truck during a downpour. My buddy Kurt and I sat soaked in our leaky waders in my Dodge Dakota after three and a half hours driving and another two of fishing. Kurt packed a lunch of two hot dogs in buns wrapped in tinfoil and a container of egg salad, started the truck and turned on the seat warmers that baked in the smell of sweat, hot dog and egg.
That memory is over a decade old, but whenever Gierach wrote about rain, storms or even trucks I thought about that day. Seven hours of driving for six hours of fishing. We managed two trout each of over 18 inches on 6-weight fly rods. Through his stories, Gierach had a way of putting you back in the driver’s seat of your own memories. That’s not easy to do.
Gierach was one of those links to the days anglers dream about. He knew anglers who fished California’s coastal rivers and caught hundreds of steelhead annually and brought home 40-pound, fly-caught chinook in their trunks. He talked about truly knowing a river and not just about trout extraction. Though he traveled, he never looked down at the local creek and never sounded tired or bored.
The best writers transcend their genre and Gierach was no exception. It wasn’t just about fishing. It was about how to write and it’s not hyperbole to say he provided insight in how to live. He wouldn’t have had the following he did without it. He wouldn’t have sold so many books if he was about a body count of trout or an extensive list of slams. A guy who allows his ego to punch the words for print.
“Be honest and don’t worry about how a story makes you look,” he once said in an interview. “A common flaw of most bad writing is self-aggrandizement on the part of the writer.”
He only leveraged his experience fishing and his skill writing enough to continue to do both.
His steady, consistent, reliable attitude will be greatly missed. Thankfully he left all fly fishing anglers with volumes of his memories which will evoke our own.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports and Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
