“Not Just Anybody’s Saint Vrain”

A Saturday in September finds Louis Cahill at The Stone Cup Café in Lyons, Colorado, to meet up with a man who has “the stride of an experienced hiker who sets a pace and covers his allotted miles without complaint, his eye fixed on a distant peak. That peak, at this moment, being the coffee pot.”

This, the background for an essay painting a portrait (in word and pixel), of a man among whose words many of us have found a like soul, John Gierach. Cahill leads us through his discovery of Gierach’s writing (which leads him to become a “trout bum” too), to meeting him at a trade show, to fishing together on the Saint Vrain, which has become a universal measuring stick for homewaters. With honest prose, Cahill reminds us why, in his own words, “a life spent on a small stream is not a small life.”