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There is a holler high in the hills of East Tennessee, guarded by an ornery old ass named Festus. His bellows shake the walls of the valley night and day as he protects his livestock and property. Donkeys are stubborn and strong-willed guardians; known to fight off all manner of danger to protect their herd. Festus looks over a group of about forty cattle and is warden to a small creek that borders the pastures he roams. A small creek with big trout.
Daybreak on the last day of the March Merkin permit tournament in Key West. The sky is virtually cloudless, the winds light. It’s not what Nathaniel Linville and Ian Slater had in mind. “We like it when it’s tough out,” Linville says. In 2024, he and Slater had won the Gold Cup tarpon tournament in horrific conditions. “Our strength is outlasting and outworking everyone else when it’s like that.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to split western hemlock. Especially a piece with knots and badly twisted grain that is still a bit green. But I have. Our remote Forest Service cabin in southeastern Alaska was pretty well-stocked with stubborn piles of it.
Each winter around the first week of January, Steve hand-delivers the wooden cigar box. Previously filled with premium Nicaraguan Padrons, the box now holds premium hand-tied flies. Steve always comes through for our Penn’s Woods West TU chapter Great Fly Sale fundraiser. Collecting the donated flies for our annual event offers a glimpse into the lives of our local tyers. Most deliver their patterns and prototypes by way of plastic fly boxes and containers to organize them in sets. Six flies for five bucks.
When I picture flyfishing for tarpon, the first thing that comes to mind is the setting. I see turquoise flats stretching to the horizon and then melting into deep blue, all of it rimmed with thick green mangroves. That’s not where I ended up.
I saw the man with the machete first. He was leaning on the fat end of a downed mangrove that was blocking the way upstream. He stood on a branch chopping away, but his efforts had produced only a slight notch in the tree. There were three others waiting in the boat, the youngest resting the butt of an automatic rifle on his knee. Their uniforms gave them away as members of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s National Guard—as notorious as the waters they patrolled. The State Department estimates that 200 metric tons of cocaine makes its way through the country annually, much of it through this vast river system, which extends into Colombia.
Take any Colorado stream-access battle that has taken place this century, and a small, relatively unknown but politically connected nonprofit has likely played a role. The secretive Creekside Coalition has fought for much of the past thirty years to keep stream-access laws in Colorado from becoming anything like those in Montana, where the public is allowed to recreate in its rivers and streams up to the high-water mark
