12 minute read
In The Salt: Thomas McGuane
BY PETER KAMINSKY
Author and angler Thomas McGuane has left his mark on American literature while championing flats fishery conservation.
Tom McGuane caught his first tarpon in 1951, on Florida’s West Coast, fishing a conventional rig, baited, he thinks, with a squirrel fish. He nailed his biggest tarpon—150 pounds, on a fly—at age 80. When I spoke with him this spring, he was eagerly anticipating the annual tarpon migration past Boca Grande, his winter home for the last 35 years. It is entirely possible, by my rough calculations, that Tom McGuane has fished the subtropical flats of Florida and the Caribbean longer than any sportfisherman...ever.
All through his Michigan boyhood, McGuane and his father trout-fished nearby waters. In the winter, his family frequently traveled to Florida, where he flyfished for tarpon and bonefish and caught redfish and snook with a baitcasting set-up. Like most young anglers of that era, he was an avid reader of the hook and bullet magazines and found enchantment in the work of Al McClane and his generation of writers in the golden age of the Big Three (Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield). “The early fishing writers seemed to fish for everything, so in my dream world, I wanted to fish for everything too,” he recalls. “Back in the 1950s, I liked to travel into Detroit to Paul Young’s fly shop. He pulled in every kind of flyfisherman and, with some luck, maybe I’d get to meet a famous one, like Ted Williams.
There was always talk of Atlantic salmon, bonefish, tarpon. All I wanted to be was a fisherman. Nothing defines my life as much as fishing...probably not even writing.”
Fortunately for the literature of angling, McGuane didn’t have to choose. He has made a good living as a writer, often about fishing. It took a while, though, for him to get on track. His early college years in Michigan can most charitably be described as undistinguished. Then, in 1965, he attended a summer program at Harvard where a literature professor, Gerald Chapman, saw promise in McGuane’s writing. With that encouragement, he went on to earn an MFA at Yale School of Drama and a fellowship at Stanford. He studied there,
McGuane battles a tarpon in Belize. Photo: Dorsey Pictures under Wallace Stegner, a giant of American literature who captured the spirit of life in the West, a subject that McGuane has explored with similar depth and affection. caption
Toward the end of his time at Stanford, he paid a spur-of-the moment visit to the Winston Rod Company in San Francisco where he fell into conversation with the rod makers. “I had a little bit of money left over from my Stanford fellowship and wanted to move to Montana, so I asked, ‘What’s a good place?’” The consensus choice was Livingston, Montana. It had the Yellowstone, America’s greatest free-flowing trout stream, and—importantly, for the cash-strapped McGuane—the rent was cheap.
With a grubstake of $600 remaining from his fellowship, he rented a small place in Livingston for $30 dollars a month. He fished as often as possible and worked at his writing. His first novel, The Sporting Club, was written there and it attracted a movie deal: a true El Dorado for a writer eking out a living through the printed word. The major Hollywood studios have always spent freely in hopes of grabbing onto the next hot thing. Montana had an early moment of hotness.
“I bounced back and forth on screenplays,” he told me. “Even the ones that don’t get made were really good paydays... but it was just sh*t work.” More movie opportunities as well as magazine assignments came knocking after the publication of The Sporting Club: enough for him to swing the $14,500 purchase price of a small ranch in Paradise Valley.
If McGuane had stayed put in Montana and only written about the hunting and fishing there, he would still be recognized as one of America’s most significant outdoor writers. But it is his time in the Florida Keys, during the heady, sybaritic 1960s and 70s that has achieved mythic status.
By way of explaining his lifelong attachment to the Florida Keys and eventual move there, he said, “In college I would read about the winners in the Field & Stream fishing contest. I’d go to the bonefish, tarpon, and permit categories and it would always say ‘Big Pine Key...Big Pine Key.’ Everything was coming from Big Pine. I thought, I gotta get there.”
In 1969 he got there and for the first time, caught a bonefish all on his own: no guide, no veteran flats fisherman to tell him “Bonefish at 11 o’clock, 60 feet.” Much like a major league ballplayer who can recall a pitch that he has hit for a home run, McGuane has never forgotten that fish. “It took me weeks to catch one,” he said. “I remember being on Sugarloaf Key, on an old dirt road on the west side of the island. I was walking along with my fly rod when I stuck my head through the mangroves and saw tailing bonefish! I made a cast and caught one. I was astonished how strong the fish was. It was a big deal to me.”
The fishing scene in the Keys in those years was still governed by the mores of a bygone era—before Gulf Stream jets, thousanddollar flyrods, and stiletto-thin flats skiffs. “There was a certain formality,” he said, speaking about the guide corps of the time. “The idea of a guide in short pants was absolutely out of the question. Typically, they were dressed in a khaki shirt with their name over the pocket. Everyone in the inner sanctum was a Keys native. It was kind of hard to break into.” But McGuane had a disarming and unaffected way about him and the seriousness with which he approached fishing gained him entry into the club, or at least its forbearance. One of the Old School guides, Woody Sexton, who was often booked solid, passed along clients to McGuane who appreciated the extra work and practice, “Maybe two a week, clients that he never hoped to see again, people who were either drunk or couldn’t cast.”
Splitting his time between fishing and writing, McGuane became an accomplished flats fisherman. “Back in those days it was easier. You’d see bonefish on every trip. You’d see permit. You’d see tarpon. We were all do-it-yourselfers. We never fished with guides. You’d have to know how to launch a boat, how to read a tide table, how not to get lost, how to find fish.”
In 1971, McGuane moved from Summerland to Key West, where his was the first bonafide flats skiff in the local marinas. Key West was a charming and diverse town of conch harvesters, Cuban emigres, big game fishermen, a long-time gay community, musicians, artists, and writers. McGuane was a charter member of a circle of tarpon-besotted anglers that included Guy de Valdene, Steve Huff, Jimmy Buffett, Gil Drake, Russell Chatham, and Jim Harrison. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll were the watchwords of the day...cocktails too.
A sense of what it was like when tarpon obsession met the Margaritaville lifestyle comes through in Christian Odasso and Guy de la Valdene’s film, Tarpon. While it conveys the raucous partying of McGuane and company, what strikes one most about it now is how entranced the anglers were by every aspect of fishing. In contrast to many current flyfishing films with pounding hip-hop and heavy metal music tracks, many of the fishing sequences in Tarpon play without music to compete with the mesmerizing sounds of the wind, of whishing fly line, and the aerobatics and watery explosions of hooked tarpon. Although not-yet-famous Jimmy Buffett provided music for the film, it is the scenes without music that pull you into the angling moment. McGuane’s role in the film is limited (writing assignments took up a lot of his time), but his shoulder length hair, lanky frame, and ready smile stand out.
McGuane partied, sometimes to excess as he has later said, but his writing from that period captures the evolution of flats fishing and the almost Transcendentalist spirit at its core. In his 1969 Sports Illustrated story, “The Longest Silence,” he set forth a counter-intuitive notion of what it is that the fisher seeks. “What is most emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences, the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is toward the kinds of fishing that are never productive, in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting and fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him finally, a condition of utter mortuary boredom.”
Elsewhere, in an essay called “Close to the Bone,” McGuane takes this sentiment further, describing the quest for a moment of timeless connection “...when the serious angler insinuates himself into the luminous subaqueous universe of the bonefish and catches one without benefit of accident, he has in, effect, visited another world, one whose precise cycles and conditions appear so serene. In his imagination, he is emphatic about emptiness, space, and silence.”
The flats fishery that McGuane helped to birth as a young man has suffered the depredations of environmental decline and fishing pressure in the intervening years. Global warming has raised the temperature of the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It threatens to destroy the coral reefs that make up the habitat of permit, bonefish, tarpon, and snook. Agricultural and residential run-off has savaged coastal waters. To confront the threats to fishing, McGuane has been among the most prominent champions of Bonefish & Tarpon Trust whose primary mission is the conservation of this fishery.
Advocacy for BTT by such widely admired anglers as McGuane, Yvon Chouinard, Tom Brokaw, Andy Mill and other public figures, is an important contribution to public awareness of the threat of extinction not only of gamefish, but to the whole web of species that inhabit the ecosystem. Compared to the mountain of data that scientists have produced for commercially important fish such as striped bass and tunas, bonefish and tarpon have hardly been studied. As an example of applying science to flats fish, McGuane points to BTT’s role in the discovery of the permit breeding grounds at Western Dry Rocks (south and west of the Keys), and subsequent legislation that now protects them. Moreover, McGuane says, “BTT has done a great job explaining the financial benefits of shallow water fisheries to local communities. For the Florida Keys they’ve said, ‘Here’s what flats fishing means to you in terms of cold hard cash.’ So instead of having other stakeholders claiming that flats fishing is of no use to local people, BTT challenges that idea by doing the numbers.”
Closer to his Boca Grande home, McGuane has praised BTT’s support of scientific inquiry. “Aaron Adams [BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation] outlined things that we could do to protect the Boca Grande Pass and its huge concentration of breeding tarpon,” he told me while conceding that such proposals might, at this time, be unsellable.
“Boca Grande Pass should be a tarpon refuge,” McGuane said. “Every year, the state of Florida builds another set of ramps and every Saturday morning hundreds of boats pour down the ramps and target these breeding fish. It’s just outrageous!”
I have liked McGuane’s writing since I was managing editor at National Lampoon in the 1970s, when my downstairs neighbor laid a copy of Ninety-Two in the Shade on me. It was a road to-Damascus moment. I had just begun to flyfish. It would soon take over my life. When I read that book, and, shortly afterward, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, I resolved to get out of the druggy frat house life of Lampoon and to make my way as an outdoor writer. I owe those two authors a deep debt.
One of the things that I have found so attractive in McGuane’s work is that right alongside the soul medicine of flyfishing, the communing with nature, the narratives of action that land like karate chops, McGuane’s writing is always anchored in the sometimes confounding, often humorous, behavior of humans, including himself. I was especially tickled by his account of catching a world-record mutton snapper and then eating it, with no apologia to catch-and-release orthodoxy.
“That night, this best of breed was dispatched as follows: deprived of head and innards he was stuffed with shrimp, shallots, buttered breadcrumbs, parsley, tarragon, and mushrooms, then rinsed down the gullet of hungry anglers with gouts of domestic Chablis.”
When I first spoke with McGuane for this story, he was preparing to depart Montana and head to Florida until spring. He shared an insight that I have often thought of ever since.
“I was walking along the West Boulder,” he said. “I always have my rod with me, in case I see a rising fish. I thought ‘Gosh, I have walked this trail for 50 years, looking at these great runs and pools.’ Then, I remembered a line from my old teacher, Wallace Stegner. He was asked, in a contentious way, ‘What’s nature for?’
And he said, ‘What’s nature for? Well, I have an answer for that. It’s not for anything.’”
Peter Kaminsky’s most recent book is The Catch of a Lifetime: Moments of Flyfishing Glory. Coming in 2025, The Zen of Flyfishing.
