On John Gierach: Trout Bum of the Cosmos

John Gierach died a year ago today, and I guess it’s taken me this long to wrap my mind around some sort of eulogy for him, and for all of the books that he was supposed to write that we’ll never read.

I have absolutely no idea where I was physically, mentally, or spiritually when I first heard of John Gierach, but I can tell you exactly where I was when I heard the horrible news that he had passed away. My dad and I had punched an elk tag on October 1, 2024, and on October 3, I was in the kitchen, probably stuffing trim meat into the grinder.

That was a rough week for folks that care about stuff. We got to elk camp a few days early to scout and to make sure that the elk hadn’t moved off of the ag. They hadn’t, but I remember cooking dinner on the two-burner Coleman and compulsively checking the news, since we had service and that was a bad habit I had at the time.

Fuck! Kris Kristofferson died!

I told Dad and we agreed that it was terrible news. Dad suggested that Kris was married to someone famous. Barbra Streisand? I’m not sure, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. All I could think about was that Willie is the only one left now, and that Kris’ verse opened one of my favorite songs of all time.

Everyone claims to want to be a Trout Bum, but very few — statistically, almost nobody — are willing to actually make the sacrifices that it takes to be an authentic example of one in the way that he was. It makes sense. It’s an insane way to live, when viewed through the lens of today’s 8-5, five-day-a-week paradigm.

Of course, it’s only insane if you’re watching dollars and cents. Living the other way, working the best years of your life away in the hopes that you can buy them back when you retire, was the actual insane proposition to Gierach.

Like myself, he also loved rock and roll and good blues music, and, coming of age in the cultural explosion of the 1960s, it’s fair to say he could rightly be considered the archetype of the pervasive Deadhead fly fisherman. As a musician in a previous life, long ago… this small thread woven through his books added another element of authenticity to his persona, one more detail that proved to attentive readers that he truly knew what was up.

Beyond the appeal of his timeless descriptions of all aspects of the sport (… sport?) and his brilliant and perfectly universal sense of humor, there might be one additional reason for his success, and acclaim:

In a world of phonies, he was the genuine article.

Not one to just coin the term and pen observations about the trout bum, he was the Trout Bum; the archetype, the one who codified the philosophy of the lifestyle that everyone (overtly or otherwise) wishes they could have.

So, with the loss of John Gierach, the world not only loses a brilliant advocate for the outdoors and one of the most entertaining writers who ever lived, but also a beacon of inspiration and a sense of adventure that’s so often pushed to the back burner in today’s world.

A cult leader to millions of true believers, and I am one of them.

I’m sitting on a hillside in Del Mar, California with my laptop as I write these concluding thoughts.

As I said, it’s taken me a long time to come up with any sort of tribute to the Patron Saint of Fly Fishers, and it’s been equally frustrating trying to come up with a satisfying conclusion to this somewhat meandering tribute that both pays accurate respects to the man and his legacy, and sums up my own personal affinity for the man’s writing.

On the somewhat unenjoyable drive down the 15, I listened to At The Grave of the Unknown Fisherman, narrated (like many other Gierach audiobooks) by the most excellent David Collaci.

From my comfortable vantage point on the deck outdoors, I look out over the endless expanse of blue reaching out past the horizon and see a few fishermen in waders braving the surf; I note the degree of FOMO that I am experiencing, brought upon by the wild tales of adventure and misadventure that I listened to on the way down.

In the recent past and for the time being, I cannot fish as freely as I used to, or as often as I’d like. This comes with living in a desert, and I’ll crudely paraphrase Tom McGuane here, too — when I want to fish but can’t, I’ll reach for a Gierach book. They’ve gotten me through some real dry spells, in all senses of the phrase.

My thoughts in this moment, looking out over the Pacific, are a reflection of the impact of reading and re-reading a dozen of John Gierach’s books over the last year, and are perhaps the most fitting way I can think of to quantify the impact he’s had on my way of thinking:

This situation, and most others, would be improved with the addition of a fly rod.