Trout and Hunter Thompson's Freak Power Uprising

Last year an old acquaintance of mine — a self-described radical lefty and a fine saltwater fly fisher — was regaling me on the virtues of Hunter Thompson’s run for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado in the early 1970s. This morning the Village Voice features Lucian K. Truscott IV’s account of trout fishing in northern New Mexico and Colorado in 1972, a story that ends with a critique of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and reminds us of how “filling the action void” had a whole different meaning forty years ago.
“I’d like to think he’s still there, or at least in that stretch of stream, between the cliffs where the mesas come together, defying every effort to remove him, proud and fat, with a girth you couldn’t circle with both hands.”