Richard Donnelly

Editor's note: For backstory to enrich your reading of "Barnwood Slam", please read "Barnwood" published here on MidCurrent a few weeks ago.  We shucked our waders and stowed rods. I asked Howard about the business end of barnwood. We just left behind an unnamed creek with big trout. You need a reason to do that, or at least a reason to feel better. He...

My neighbor retired last month. This is his fourth or fifth retirement. Then he goes back to the office. Such things are increasingly common. People stop working, and there’s nothing to do. Howard is lucky. A devoted fly angler, after each retirement he waded the rivers of SE Minnesota to his heart's content. But with each retirement he made the same...

I heard a key scratch in the lock. The door swung open to reveal a maid, the hotel manager, and a Mexican policeman. It occurred to me I should have tipped the maid. That’s in hindsight. But all lessons are learned in hindsight. The manager shouted something incomprehensible and I barely had time to grab my rod tube. I didn’t test my Spanish. I...

I had tried for roosterfish on my own, and caught one. “You were lucky,” my pal, Greg Flores said. I was unfazed. They all say that. Tomorrow I had the benefit of the expert. Heading north from Cabo San Lucas, Greg would drive me in his Jeep looking for places where the surf flattened and created “pools”, or lingering shallows. This is where you...

“Just bring a tee shirt and fly rod.” Greg Flores had called from his suite at the Las Palmas Hotel. “These roosterfish are monsters. I see their backs during my morning jog. They look like pigs rooting for corncobs.” You can tell Greg grew up in the Midwest. His father is Mexican, though, and with his flawless Spanish and green-eyed charm he...

I disapprove of drinking. But not saloons, oddly enough. Coming off the water on a 90-degree day there’s nothing like a cold one. Even if it’s just Coca-Cola. That first gulp, poured into an ice-filled pint glass, has the same effect as a shot of whiskey. You shiver all over. Every small town has a bar. Sometimes two. In Wisconsin’s Plum City you...

After parking at the bridge and fighting deer flies, buckthorn, stinging nettles, and summer humidity, I stepped from chin-high foxtail into the creek. Or rather fell, throwing my rod to keep it from breaking. I didn't get mad. Far from it. Laughing, I had what every trout angler dreams about: A hot lead on a forgotten creek. “I don’t fish anymore,...

The best trout fishing occurs, as everyone knows, deep in the night. Or a week before opener. Or two miles upstream. I could continue, but it's easier to sum it up like this: The best fishing occurs when you're not there. This came to me as we broke down our fly rods one August evening deep in the Kinnickinnic Valley of Western Wisconsin. We hurried in the...

In bluff country one stumbles on isolated taverns sitting there for no good reason. These are typically at the intersection of bridge and creek. The wading fly angler, bug-bedeviled and leg-tired, finds himself drawn to a battered Pabst Blue Ribbon sign the way a brown trout rises to a well-presented light Cahill. Johnny Cash on the jukebox? There’s the...

One day I up and moved to the Midwest’s Driftless Region, which is blue ribbon trout country. I’m not bragging. And I don’t expect an award. Well, maybe I do. I talked my wife into moving from a city of four million to a town of four thousand. There ought to be some kind of award for that. Driftless is a silly name, I know. Someone ought to change it...