The Christmas Moon

It's the last--and the smallest--of the full moons of 2013. It's called the Cold Moon, or the Long Night Moon, appearing so close to the Winter Solstice. But I will call it the Christmas Moon.

That doesn't mean this picture is accurate for this year. No, Santa will fly his sleigh under a full moon on Christmas Eve only about every nineteen years. This year he'll be out in the light of a waning gibbous moon. But we can save this picture and use it in 2015--there will be a full moon on December 25 that year.

But this one fits. One could almost imagine it's the night of the full moon in December, 2013, and the world is calm and peaceful and bright, and excitedly anticipating the celebration of the birth of Light.

Solstice Count Down: 5

It's 3 PM. The day since sunrise is seven hours and fifteen minutes old. One hour and two minutes until sunset. I get a text. Regular rides won't work today; I need to pick up one of the boys at school. Before I climb in the truck I look down to the river. The weather has been slightly warmer, but the river is still iced over.

It's 3:10 PM. At the school I look back southwest over the town. The sun is going down almost due south. It still has a few degrees of southern shift to go.

It's 3:20. We get home.

It's 4 PM. I go outside for the sunset. It's the color of summer.

Only 5 days until the solstice.

"Judgment Day" by Ellis Parker Butler

Saint Peter stood at Heaven's gate,

All souls' claims to adjudicate,

Saying to some souls, "Enter in!"

"Go to Hell," to others, "you are steeped in sin."

When up from earth, with a great hubbub,

Came all the members of the Tuscarora Club.

The angel Gabriel, peering out,

Said, "What the devil is this noise about?"

"Gabe," said Peter, "There's always lots of noise

At any get-together of the Tuscarora boys --

Those are anglers and they all tell lies

About the trout that got away, their fierceness and their size --

They want to enter Heaven, for our brooks are full of trout,

But I won't have any liars, and I'll keep the whole gang out;

No liars enter Heaven, and I'll most distinctly tell

The whole danged Tuscarora Club, it has to go to Hell."

Then, at a little distance from the precious pearly gate,

The Tuscarora fellows paused to talk and cogitate;

One Barr said this, one Barr said that, McAlpin had his say,

But foxy Charley Roberts said, "This is the only way."

"You'd best leave this to me," he said. "Just let me handle Pete

and in a trice we'll be inside upon the golden street;

I'll show him that he's one of us, because he used to be,

Himself, a brother fisher, in the Sea of Galilee--

And I move you, Mr. President, we make the poor old dub

An honorary member of the Tuscarora Club."

"Agreed! Agreed!" the members cried, but Manny Barr said, "Wait!

Amend it thus: 'PROVIDED -- that he didn't fish with bait.'"

Saint Peter saw them coming but his face was hard and stern,

He had formed his resolution from which he would not turn.

Not even Roberts' palaver would ever change him so

He'd send the Tuscarorans anywhere but down below.

But now upon his countenance there came a look of pain,

He stepped from foot to foot, and then from foot to foot again.

He hailed a new-come resident, who near the portal stood,

A goodly Christian gentleman, whose name was Hubert Wood.

He said to him, "Come here, my friend, and tend awhile this gate--

Just take my place for half an hour -- I've got to urinate."

With that Saint Peter hustled off. The gate-keeper pro tem

Observed the Tuscarorans and he waved his hand at them.

"Come in! come in!" he shouted, for he was an angler, too,

And he knew that anglers, as a whole, were earth's most harmless crew.

So all the Tuscarorans got to heaven, thanks to Wood,

And the Secretary's last report says, "Fishing there is good."

"Judgment Day" by Ellis Parker Butler, 1869-1937.

THIS IS FLY, december - january 2014

This is good. This is Fly

Correction: Getting the Nymphs Straight

A few posts ago I mislabeled this picture.

I said it was "The Nymph of the Stream" by Edward John Poynter. Wrong.

This is "The Nymph of the Stream."

Just wanted to clear that up.

Happy Birthday, Edvard

It's the birthday of Edvard Munch. You know him as the artist who captured the true essence of how it feels to be iced out and unable to fish in the darkest time of the year.

"The Scream" 1895

Solstice Countdown: 9

Wandered down to the river behind the house. Felt like dusk at 3 PM. Lowering snow clouds--snow on the way. Ice--ice stacked up bank to bank. No fishing at all for awhile. Only 9 short days until the Solstice.

Primordial

Primordial ---- Yellowstone / Grand Tetons from Voortex Productions on Vimeo.

"Cold Wind" by Jim Harrison

I like those old movies where tires and wheels run backwards on
horse-drawn carriages pursued by indians, or Model A's driven by
thugs leaning out windows with tommy guns ablaze. Of late I feel a
cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to
the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosqui-
toes, blackflies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum
and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I'd slide
into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar,
thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at
thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the
birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our
10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall
back into their arms again.

"Cold Wind" by Jim Harrison from In Search of Small Gods. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

Happy Birthday, Jim and Tom 2013

Raise one to these gentlemen and wish them many happy returns.

This write up is from The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the writer who said: "To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime." That's Jim Harrison (books by this author), born in Grayling, Michigan (1937).
He had a couple of major accidents that ended up changing his writing career. When he was seven years old, he was playing with a friend and she accidentally cut him across the face and he went blind in one eye. He felt as though that set him apart from other kids, and he started turning to nature, to the woods and creeks and fields. And then, when he was in his 30s, he hurt his back badly while he was hunting and he was confined to bed. He was an active person, loved to be outdoors, and he didn't know what to do with so much time. His good friend, the novelist Thomas McGuane, suggested he try working on a novel. In 1971, he published Wolf: A False Memoir. His first major success was Legends of the Fall (1979), a collection of three novellas. He's written many more novels and novellas, in addition to several poetry collections. For a long time, he thought of himself as a poet more than anything else, and said about his novels: "They sometimes strike me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life though a few of them approach some of the conditions of poetry."
Harrison's latest poetry book is called Songs of Unreason (2011), and a collection of his novellas, Brown Dog (2013), will be published this month.
Jim Harrison said: "Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know."

And it's the birthday of the writer Thomas McGuane (books by this author), the one who convinced Jim Harrison to write his first novel, born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). As a kid, he wanted to be a scientist who studied fish, but when he was 10 years old, he decided to become a writer instead. He and a friend started to write a novel together, but they disagreed about how to describe a sunset and got in a fistfight and that was the end of that novel. He went to college and flunked out, but by the third college he went to, he shaped up and did a lot of writing and ended up graduating with honors. He had a couple of manuscripts rejected, but he won a scholarship to Stanford, and he finished another novel he was working on, and he gave it to Jim Harrison, who passed it on to a friend with connections to a publishing house. It was accepted, and The Sporting Club came out in 1969. And McGuane has gone on to write 10 novels, two books of short stories, and six books of nonfiction. His most recent novel is Driving on the Rim (2010). He lives on a 3,000-acre ranch in Montana, where he raises cutting horses and runs cattle and writes books.
He said: "Literature is still the source of my greatest excitement. My prayer is that it is irreplaceable. Literature can carry the consciousness of human times and social life better than anything else. Look at the movies of the 1920s, watch the Murrow broadcasts, you can't recognize any of the people. Now, read Fitzgerald — that's it. That is the truth of the times. Somebody has to be committed to the idea of truth."

Maybe You Shouldn't Put Off That Trip To Yellowstone

Yellowstone Lake at West Thumb Geyser Basin 

The BBC has reported on a study done by the University of Utah:

"The supervolcano that lies beneath Yellowstone National Park in the US is far larger than was previously thought, scientists report.

A study shows that the magma chamber is about 2.5 times bigger than earlier estimates suggested.

A team found the cavern stretches for more than 90km (55 miles) and contains 200-600 cubic km of molten rock.

The findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco."

I heard one of the researchers say on the radio that he's pretty sure we'll get plenty of warning as the magma levels rise just before the next eruption. Then again, how much warning do you need for the End of the World?

For the full report, click HERE.

"Affirmation" by Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

"Affirmation" by  Donald Hall, 2002. From Poets.org

Here There Be Monsters...

Remember how people a long time ago were so ignorant and superstitious that they believed in sea monsters? What morons! But, then again, maybe we haven't advanced as far as we thought.

Click for expandable map.

These are all clearly bogus, and seriously, only a moron would believe they were real...except I met this guy once, and he's a real outdoors guy, you know, the kind of guy who ought to know, and he told me that he was over on Lake Chelan once just after ice out and....

Revive, Winter 2013

Thanks to Chi Wulff for tipping us off to this one. See it for yourself HERE.

Oldie But Goodie: "Sipping Dry" Trailer

Magical images of sipping trout.

"Sipping Dry" trailer - by Sharptail Media | Fly Fishing Movie from The Fly Fishing Film Tour on Vimeo.

Solstice Countdown: 15

So when it gets cold, the river begins to freeze up, and the drifting shards of ice make an ethereal, tinkly music as they shuffle by...

And you can see the vapor trail of an F-16 from the base in Spokane whose pilot is in a good mood as he makes his training run (I hope that was an F-16, and not a 737)...

And the ice on Bass Lake makes unearthly Star Wars sound effects as it tightens its grip.

Just 15 more days until the Solstice.

Big R Fly Shop, December 2013

Farm Store Fly Fishing at its best. Check it out HERE.

"The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that he'd "sooner live in hell".

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:
"You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows -- O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May".
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared -- such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; . . . then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm --
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Robert W. Service has been called the "Bard of the Yukon."

Must Be Winter

We're in for a bit of a cold spell. So far we've had it easier than parts of Montana and Idaho. So far.

Good luck to you folks, and in the upper Midwest, too. Must be winter.

• Today

  Dec 4

  Very cold with periods of sun25°Lo 3°

  more

• Thu

  Dec 5

  Partly sunny and very cold18°Lo 3°

• Fri

  Dec 6

  Partly sunny and very cold18°Lo -1°

  more
• Sat

  Dec 7

  Partly sunny and frigid15°Lo 1°

  more

• Sun

  Dec 8

  Bitterly cold with some sun19°Lo 6°

  more

flymage Issue #21 - December 2013

Get a good look at all them rubber-lipped bottom feeders HERE.

Dude, Check This Out: Iceland, the Sugarcubes, and Bjork

Iceland is an amazing place with amazing fishing.

Fly Fishing in Iceland from TT FlyFishing on Vimeo.

And Iceland is the birthplace of Bjork, and Bjork is an amazing person and amazing singer.

She started out with the Sugarcubes in the late Eighties and early Nineties. They were a pretty amazing band in their own right, considering they were and remain today the biggest rock band ever to come out of Iceland.

Here's a sample of their music and of Bjork's amazing work with them, first a demo of Lou Reed's Sweet Jane, and then a song from their 1989 album "Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week!"

Then here is my favorite of Bjork's songs, beginning with the original and including three of the many remixes that have been done. In my humble opinion, an amazing song by an amazing artist.

"A Green Stream" by Wang Wei

Landscape by Wang Hui, Ching Dynasty

I have sailed the River of Yellow Flowers,

Borne by the channel of a green stream,

Rounding ten thousand turns through the mountains

On a journey of less than thirty miles...

Rapids hum over heaped rocks;

But where light grows dim in the thick pines,

The surface of an inlet sways with nut-horns

And weeds are lush along the banks.

...Down in my heart I have always been as pure

As this limpid water is...

Oh, to remain on a broad flat rock

And to cast a fishing-line forever!

Wang Wei, sometimes known as the Poet Buddha, lived from 701 to 761, in the Tang Dynasty.