Robert Demott

“West Yellowstone is as friendly a little hamlet as you will find anywhere. Fishing is its very life and livelihood; it is the language which everyone understands, the foremost topic of conversation.” ~ Howard  Back, The Waters of Yellowstone with Rod and Fly (1938) The cultural, environmental, and tactical landscape of Western American fly fishing...

“...fishing is mostly a conduit to the outer world of natural phenomena and the inner world of the self.” – Marcelo Gleiser, The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything (2016) As I wrote this review in 2020, in the year of living dangerously, the coronavirus pandemic has swept across the...

A Worthy Fish-Lit Pilgrimage “…fishing and reading go together.” —Brian Murphy, The Angler’s Companion: The Lore of Fishing (1978) I am a sucker for visiting geographic places upon which books and paintings are based, and I’ve made a quirky hobby of gauging representational relationships—often more complex and fraught than they first...

My dad shot the head off a turkey with a rifle from 150 feet at the Montour Run Sportsman’s Club turkey shoot raffle in 1956. About an hour and a half later, he stubbed out a Winston, set down a pony bottle of Duquesne beer on a picnic table, picked up a .22, and shot a bat out of the air as it circled the bulb of a nearby streetlight. My dad could shoot...

Leave it to the French to coin a nifty phrase for dusk: entre chien et loup, “between the dog and the wolf,” the transition zone between day and night, between furry family pet Fido and dagger-toothed predator. It’s my handsdown absolute favorite time to be on the river. A sense of mystery hangs over the whole scene. As the sun lowers toward the...

Afternoon of another waning year, with dusk coming early and deepening fast, my love and I trimmed front porch greens, hung cheery lights and gaily striped ribbons, put up our share of bright bows and lacy tinsel, draped our Christmas tree with shiny doo-dads stored in our attic since last time, all the while caroling giddily as we decked our halls in...

“The creation of Planet Trout is, by many accounts, a great success story, and by many other accounts, an unmitigated ecological disaster. And it has, by any account, caused big changes in the  American West.” —Paul Schullery, Cowboy Trout: Western Fly Fishing,  As If It Mattered (2006) I Float Trip Every summer morning a squadron of bully SUVs...

Part II (read Part I) In The Sporting Road, Jim Fergus says outdoor sporting pursuits proves we are just “great big kids.” I see his point, though I never thought Peter Pan was a suitable role model. But indeed going outside started for me at a very young age, so perhaps a residue of youthfulness has always attached itself to my sporting pursuits. I...

Part I “When a man’s stories are remembered, then he is immortal.”—Daniel Wallace, Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions Reach a certain age—in my case 70—and it is natural to want to sum up and make a reckoning of accounts. In tracing the background of the sporting part of my life—the part with fly rods and double barrel shotguns—I am...

HERMAN MELVILLE, a writer who knew well how things can go wrong on the water, said it best in his Mississippi River novel, The Confidence Man: “Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool.” Melville wasn’t talking about fishermen, but he may as well have been. What are we fly...