Fly Fishing Spain on MidCurrent: "Monte Perdido"

April 24, 2006 By: Marshall Cutchin

Charles Kuralt, the inveterate American travel journalist, once said: “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” Traveling fly fishers have all experienced what I’ll call the Star Trek Transporter Effect: you spend weeks trying to gather your thoughts about an upcoming trip, then suddenly you are rematerialized in some far-flung place where everything is at least partly different than you imagined. We don’t, if the truth be told, spend enough time getting to where we are going.
We didn’t cross paths with Norm Zeigler’s Rivers of Shadow, Rivers of Sun, which came out in 2004, until last year. But it immediately reminded us of Negley Farson’s 1942 classic Going Fishing: part autobiography, part ethnography, and part travelogue, as much about the getting there as the ultimate arrival. This week’s excerpt, “Monte Perdido,” reveals the end-story of Zeigler’s experiments in Pyrenean gorge fishing.