“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

Only connect! (E. M. Forster)

The world is getting smaller, we are told. New technologies are bringing what used to be distant, unknown, and unattainable, to our desktops and telephones; we can communicate instantly with people on different continents, sharing documents, photos, texts, songs, whatever. Even, God help us, Tweets.

Our world here in Austin has also grown smaller, but in a very different sense. It sometimes seems that hardly a week goes by without some unsuspected connection revealing itself, much to our surprise and pleasure.

For example, Heather mentioned in a previous post how in 2005, at the Sustainable Food Center’s Sunset Valley farmers’ market, she suddenly realized that the man at the Thunder Heart Bison stand, from whom she’d been buying bison meat for several years, was Hugh Fitzsimons, whose grandparents lived across the street from her grandparents in San Antonio, and with whom she’d attended St. Luke’s Episcopal School in San Antonio.

And this: many years ago, during one of my early midlife crises, I decided that I’d had enough of the word trade and quit my job at the Texas State Historical Association to try my hand as an artist. I rented a studio at a complex on Guadalupe Street between 17th and 18th Streets, moved in my easel and drafting table and paints and brushes and pencils, and waited for inspiration to strike. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Eventually, I came to my senses and went back to the TSHA, hat in hand, and managed to get back on the payroll, and my life returned to what passes for normal around here. But several years ago Heather met a fellow rower, Kevin Barry, and his wife Barbara; we had long since become good friends with them when we learned, quite by chance, that Kevin, a newspaper publisher by trade, had once owned a studio complex in Austin. On Guadalupe Street. Between 17th and 18th Streets.

Here’s another one: last year we met the young novelist Philipp Meyer and his wife Alex at the Austin home of our friend Jim Magnuson, the head of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. We very much enjoyed chatting with Philipp, the author of American Rust and a Dobie Paisano Fellow, and some time later he invited us to a party at Paisano Ranch. Then we found out that he had been asked to write a feature for Texas Monthly on Hog School at Madroño Ranch; that article appears in the magazine’s August issue.

Then there’s this: last May we met Elizabeth Burnett, who works in development for Williams College, and she asked about other Williams alumni in Austin. I mentioned the novelist Amanda Eyre Ward, whom I’d met several years ago, and Elizabeth gasped: it turned out that she and Amanda were not only classmates at Williams, but fellow graduates of the M.F.A. writing program at the University of Montana.

Shortly after we met Elizabeth, our friend Becca Cody suggested that her friend Juli Berwald, a freelance science writer in Austin, might be an excellent candidate for a residency at Madroño Ranch. We corresponded with Juli, and among her references was (of course) Amanda Eyre Ward. Another connection! Juli suggested her friend Julia Clarke, a paleontology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as another potential resident; after corresponding with Julia, we quickly agreed that she was a slam dunk, but it wasn’t until we finally met her in person that we determined that she and I are both graduates of the Branson School in Ross, California. Last month Juli and Julia spent a couple of weeks at Madroño Ranch, and, acting on a suggestion by Elizabeth Burnett, we’re going to host a gathering of local Williams and Amherst alumni on August 10 at which Amanda will discuss her new book, Close Your Eyes, with Juli serving as the M.C.

Here’s the best one, though. Six years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Rita, Lucy Nazro, the head of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, asked us if we’d be willing to put up a young man named Tom Mehaffy, a student at Monsignor Kelly High School in Beaumont, who’d been displaced by the storm. Of course we agreed—you just don’t say no to Lucy Nazro—and so for several days we had the pleasure of hosting an extremely pleasant and polite young man.

Flash forward to one night several months ago, when we ran into our pal Tink Pinkard and his wife Leah with Jeremy and Alison Barnwell at Fabi and Rosi, one of our favorite Austin restaurants. That night Tink introduced us to Elizabeth Winslow, who co-owns Farmhouse Delivery, a cooperative CSA here in Austin, and who, coincidentally, also happened to be dining at Fabi and Rosi. (Tink works for Farmhouse Delivery when he’s not out fishing or hunting.)

We had been hoping to get to know Elizabeth better, especially since our older daughter started working at Farmhouse Delivery a few weeks ago, and had finally managed to make a date for her to come over and have a drink at our house in Austin last week. Then we got an apologetic email from her saying that she’d have to reschedule, due to an unexpected visit from her father and younger brother.

A few days later we got another email from Elizabeth with the subject line, “OK, so here is something REALLY crazy!” In it she wrote that last Monday, the day she had planned to come over to our house, as she and her father and brother were driving out to Lake Travis, they were recalling relocating to Austin from their native Beaumont in the wake of Rita. Elizabeth asked her brother, “What was the name of the family you stayed with?” Sure enough, Elizabeth turns out to be Tom Mehaffy’s older sister. What are the odds?

I don’t know what, if anything, all these coincidences and connections mean. Perhaps they’re simply an indication that we move in extremely claustrophobic social circles. But I find them fascinating, and inexplicably enjoyable. One of the persistent complaints about twenty-first-century life is the anonymity, the sense of isolation, of being alone in an enormous crowd. We long for connection, for that sense of being known by someone else; we want to feel that we are part of a community.

That’s the selfish little secret behind much of what we’re doing at Madroño Ranch. We’re obviously not getting rich—not yet, anyway—by offering residencies and raising bison, so people sometimes wonder why we bother. My only answer is that getting rich isn’t the only way to measure success (though we wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to it!). Connection, the sense of belonging to a community of smart, kind, interesting, thoughtful people—people like Hugh and Kevin and Philipp and Amanda and Juli and Julia and Tink and Elizabeth—is its own reward.

What we’re reading
Heather: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Martin: Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

“Oh, it’s all very well to talk,” said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways.

A river, even one as dammed and sluggish as the Colorado in Austin, is a great place to ponder the power of nature, the insignificance of man, and other Very Deep Thoughts. Humans have always loved rivers; our bodies, after all, are 60 to 70 percent water. Rivers connote baptism, cleanness, purity, replenishment, power, life itself. When I stand in or next to running water, I find it impossible not to think about travel, and possibility, and change; the water now passing by me probably began its journey hundreds of miles away, and that journey probably won’t end for more hundreds of miles, in the ocean. Rivers are simultaneously linear and cyclical, a conundrum I find inexplicably pleasing. (And how can a river “empty” into the sea if it’s always full of water?)

When I was a wee lad, my favorite book was The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece of pastoral Edwardian anthropomorphism, featuring Mole, Rat, Badger, and of course the insufferably self-important Toad. Much of the book concerns itself with life along an unnamed river (presumably the Thames, on the banks of which Grahame passed a happy childhood in the village of Cookham in Berkshire), which appealed to me immensely and perhaps helps explain my subsequent fascination with rivers.

Here are some of my personal favorites: the Rio Grande, the Blanco, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Columbia, the Arkansas, the Roaring Fork, and the Frying Pan; the Thames and the Derwent; the Tiber and the Arno, into which I scattered my mother’s ashes many years ago.

But the river that is closest to my heart, both physically and emotionally, is the Colorado—the Texas Colorado, I mean. We Austinites take an inordinate pride in our river, even though it’s much the smaller of the two by that name in the American Southwest. Indeed, the Colorado and its various natural and manmade tributaries and manifestations (Barton Springs, Hornsby Bend, Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, Lake Travis, et al.) are the true center of the city, more than the Capitol or the University of Texas or even Scholz’s.

People engage in all kinds of activities in and on and beside the river: canoeing, kayaking, rowing, jogging, walking, biking, fishing, and picnicking. (And those are just the legal ones!) Even those who don’t spend a lot of time on or near the water (like me) take comfort in knowing that it’s there.

To return to The Wind in the Willows, I’m definitely more Mole than Rat (or at least Mole early in the book, before he’s learned to love the river). I’ve never been much of a swimmer, and Jaws pretty much put me off the ocean for good.

I’ve never been much for water sports, either, but a couple of months ago Heather (who’s a dedicated rower) and our daughters decided to try stand-up paddling, which has become very trendy in Austin. They had a great time, and Heather and Thea have tried to go once a week since then, but until this week I had stubbornly resisted their invitations to join them. Having missed those initial lessons, I knew how frustrated I’d get when Heather and Thea went skimming on ahead of me, standing gracefully on their boards, while I struggled (and occasionally failed) to keep my balance, legs jittering like a sewing machine as my board bobbed helplessly in their wake.

Perhaps I was addled by the early summer heat, but I finally took the plunge (haha!) on the Fourth of July. Of course the lake was crowded with rowers and canoeists and kayakers and stand-up paddlers, all of whom looked considerably more competent and confident than I. We headed off from the Texas Rowing Center dock and up the river to Red Bud Isle; I paddled out from the dock on my knees, and finally, tentatively, managed to stand up on the board. I fell off a few times, and I never did figure out how to get any speed going—Heather and Thea got up there and back way ahead of me, and on the way back, with the wind hitting me in the face and my arms feeling heavier with every stroke, I felt like I might actually be moving backward (which hardly seemed fair, since I was supposed to be heading downstream). I began to wonder if I would ever actually make it back to the dock on my own, or if they’d have to send a motor launch out to tow me in. When I finally made it back and staggered onto the dock, I tried not to sob openly in relief.

“Are you all right?” Heather asked me.

“Oh, yeah,” I gasped, smiling wanly.

I was, of course, lying. At that moment I wanted to curl up and lie down in an air-conditioned room and never, ever go outside again.

A few days later, however, there I was again, standing knee-deep in the river on the north side of Red Bud Isle, facing Tom Miller Dam, with a fly rod in my sweaty hands. Heather and I had decided to try our hands at fly-fishing without the beneficent guidance of Tink Pinkard. Soon after we set up and started casting I looked over and saw that Heather was taking her rod too far back on her back cast—one of the few observations about anyone’s casting that I’m even halfway competent to make—and, like a dummy, said something about it to her. I regretted opening my mouth even before I’d finished speaking.

She glared at me and said, with some asperity, “Would you like me to tell you what you’re doing wrong too?”

Needless to say, I backed off and shut up. Later she apologized for snapping at me, saying that hearing criticism from men, especially men who were no more competent than she, concerning athletic endeavors was one of her particular bugaboos.

I couldn’t blame her, of course; I probably would have reacted exactly the same way, or worse, had she said something similar to me. But of course she never would; I’m the one afflicted with Male Answer Syndrome, after all.

My faux pas aside, the casting went pretty well, at least for a while, but I had gotten no action on the fly I was using (some kind of tan thing that Tink had given us) and finally decided to switch over to a black woolly bugger. (My friend Bruce, a recent convert to fly-fishing, had been going to Red Bud Isle three nights a week, and said he’d caught several fish on woolly buggers.)

I nipped off the old fly and started to tie on the woolly bugger, but my extremely limited knot-tying skills suddenly deserted me, and I couldn’t for the life of me tuck the end of my leader back through the loop…. I stood there, sweating and cursing silently, for about fifteen minutes, trying to tie that knot, before I gave up, took my rod apart, and went in search of Heather, who’d waded around to the other side of a little point. (Consider the words of Jack Ohman: “If you’ve got short, stubby fingers and wear reading glasses, any relaxation you would normally derive from fly-fishing is completely eliminated when you try to tie on a fly.”) I stood and watched her for a while, looping her fly out with stately, calm casts, and realized that this might be yet another activity at which I might never be as good as she.

On the other hand, I’ve found very little to match the satisfaction to be derived on those rare occasions when it’s all working, when you’re casting beautifully and rhythmically, the rod is loading, the line is singing, the fly is rolling out in a perfect straightening curl. At such golden moments, catching a fish is really beside the point; the esthetics of the experience are paramount, and the rhythm, the Zen calm. You’re in the zone. It may not happen often, but it’s a feeling I want to experience as often as I can. So if you come looking for me over the next few evenings, while Heather’s visiting family in Colorado, you may find me on Red Bud Isle, struggling with knots and trying to unsnarl my line. After all, there are worse ways to spend a punishingly hot summer evening than up to one’s knees in a river.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Josh Wilker, Cardboard Gods: An American Tale

This is a bird-and-bison-intensive kitchen sink of a blog post; even Martin’s most focused editorial ministrations will be of no avail in trying to flush out some kind of narrative thread. To lend it at least an illusion of coherence, I decided to title it “Field notes from Madroño Ranch.”

* * *

Every April the barn swallows and purple martins return to the ranch; the barn swallows tend to congregate at the Lake House, and the purple martins tend to congregate at the Main House. They all inhabit the fabulous mud nests constructed by the swallows: how do they do they build these elegant constructions with no hands? Under one of the eaves of the Main House there are probably sixty or seventy condo units, many currently filled with fledgling martins and swallows. The business of feeding all these babies keeps the parents very, very busy, swooping their great athletic loops in search of insects.

The swallows have constructed one nest on a tin light fixture on the ceiling of the breezeway outside the Main House front door. Every summer I have to train myself not to turn that light on when I head to the garage or down to the Chicken Palace at night, since it panics the nest’s inhabitants. This year’s fledglings will probably be gone by the time you read this; they’ve already learned to fly from and return to the nest, and their three bulky adolescent bodies fill the sturdy little construction to overflowing. Last week, a little late putting the chickens up in the evening, I headed down to the Palace with a flashlight and thought to look up at our nesting guests. Both of the parents were draped across the top, like a too-big feathery lid on a small pot, protecting their babies from night dangers and getting a little rest after chasing mosquitoes all day for their wide-mouthed brood. I know anthropomorphism is out of fashion, but it was a sweet, intimate scene.

* * *

As we near the end of the bison calving season, we’ve had eight calves on the ground so far and are hoping for two more. Unfortunately, one calf has died, and we don’t know why. Robert and Tito (who’s working at the ranch until the beginning of the second summer session at UT) noticed something unusual about the calf’s head after it was born but couldn’t get close enough to see what the anomaly was, and it died within a week of its birth. When we went to the spot where it died, to see if we could find any clues as to the cause of death, nothing was left except for some pelvic bones, a couple of vertebrae, and one tiny hoof. The scavengers had done their job quickly and efficiently.

The other calves seem to be thriving, despite the drought. Like almost all babies, they’re awfully cute: biscuit-colored and about fifty to sixty pounds at birth. That sounds big until you see them milling around the pickup with the grownups at cube-feeding time, a ritual that seems particularly important now that there’s so little grass. We saw one little guy come out of the melee with a very bloody nose, perhaps from a well-placed kick from a larger relative (even bison have their pecking order). It was a pathetic sight, but he seemed to recover by the following day.

Bison will eat just about any vegetable matter in a drought, unlike their more finicky bovine cousins. Our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison told me recently that their herd has been eating a lot of mesquite beans and cactus. I’m not sure what ours are eating to keep themselves going; I hope it’s cedar, at least as an hors d’oeuvre.

* * *

We’ve had a steady stream of guests and residents at the ranch recently, several of whom have been enthusiastic bird-watchers, which is a real boon for me. One morning our friend Brian Miller and I went out to see who we could find flitting around. Brian, admitting that he prefers his birds to be showy, particularly hoped to see some painted buntings. It was very windy, which made for a quiet morning, bird-wise, although we got some impressive clattering from a pair of belted kingfishers and an unusually good goggle at a golden-cheeked warbler. As we stood on a little bluff above a creek whose banks are crowded with sycamores, I saw Brian peer at something through his binoculars. It was an indigo bunting so blue—ranging from mountain gentian blue at the head to almost turquoise around the tail—that Brian thought at first that it was a piece of plastic stuck up in the tree. Too blue to be true—sounds like a country song! We definitely got our show.

* * *

The cows we think are still pregnant have that fully stuffed look, especially when they’re lying down. The mama who lost her calf now has her yearling nosing at her udder again, so all the mature cows are feeling pretty protective—one of the several things that worried us about releasing the new bull into the herd. We brought him onto the ranch almost a month ago, and he’s been acclimating in the retention pen, a high-fenced area that incorporates about thirty acres. T. D., the incumbent bull, has been hanging out by the retention pen gate for weeks, rolling and kicking dust through the fence at the newcomer and then settling his great bulk where the new guy could see him. The cows have been checking him out as well. Bubba and Dixie, the llamas, who are full-time residents of the pens, looked down their long noses at the hulking arrival and kept their distance.

We’d been speculating about what would happen when we finally let the new bull (whom we’ve tentatively named T. A.) out, which we did last Sunday afternoon. He and T. D. are about the same size, but T. A. seems to be taller at the hump, with a bigger head, although he’s slimmer than T. D., who’s built like a tank. We envisioned a clash of titans and worried about blood and guts and trampled calves and crazed mama bison and ripped-up fencing; I prudently planted myself on the roof of my car (see photo above), in case things really got out of hand.

Turns out we needn’t have worried. T. D. was nowhere in sight when we opened the gate, and the first thing T. A. did after moseying out of the pen was to wander over to some nearby cedar and sycamore saplings and maul them with his horns, just to show them who was boss. Then he set off up the hill, leaving us to follow helplessly in the pickup, wondering how long it would take him to break through the wimpy fencing that separates us from our neighbors. After he abruptly veered off the road and into the underbrush (how can something that big just vanish?), we headed back down for a brief break from the scorching dry heat.

An hour or so later, we found him near the top and managed to direct him back down the hill and into the creek, where the cows finally spotted him. T. D. was lurking in the underbrush above the creek and, to our surprise, made no move to confront him. The new guy kept his tail up and hooked as the cows investigated him, although judging by his sniff-and-grin, chop-licking expression he was clearly pleased to be in the midst of so much shapely feminine flesh.

When T. D. finally emerged, it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a showdown: T. A. had so intimidated him that T. D. wouldn’t even meet his gaze. Each time the new guy approached, tail up, T. D. walked away. Each time T. A. pawed the dust or rolled, T. D. turned his back. We were all a little embarrassed for him. But breeding season is coming up: maybe the fight is yet to come.

* * *

For Martin’s birthday last Saturday, we engaged the expertise of Tink Pinkard, fly-fishing guide and teacher extraordinaire. With unflagging patience, he coaxed us into finally feeling the load of the line as it unfurled over our heads and allowed us to imagine that we were starting to get it. On Sunday morning we quit the creekside to putter around the lake in Tink’s doughty (and slightly leaky) johnboat. We actually caught a number of sunfish and a nice little bass, but mostly we caught sight of what a really beautiful cast looks like. Watching Tink with a rod in his hand was like watching a particularly eloquent sign-language speaker when you only know the alphabet; his movements were powerful, fluent, efficient. I want to talk like that.

Now I have another outlet, beyond bird-watching and rowing, for my capacity to hyper-focus. I was hoping that fly-fishing and bird-watching would be less mutually exclusive than rowing and bird-watching, but, alas, my hopes were dashed. Each time I allowed a passing bird to distract me in mid-cast, my line snarled, wrapping around itself, the rod, and, occasionally, me. I briefly worried that I might get so tangled that I would end up casting myself out of the boat and into the water. Many long-time Madroñoites have caught glimpses of The Thing, the enormous… what? fish? dinosaur? that occasionally rises from the murky depths of the lake, so I’m determined to stay focused on the casting. At least until the green kingfisher reported by one of the residents shows up again.

What we’re reading
Heather: Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
Martin: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (still!)

… doubt not, therefore, sir, that angling is an art, and an art worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it?

Inspired by the recent Freshwater Fly-Fishing School at Madroño Ranch, I’ve been rereading Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler: or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers, first published in 1653. Despite that rather daunting subtitle, and a certain tendency toward the pedantic (it is basically a conversion story, in which Piscator convinces his new friend Venator of the superiority of fishing to hunting), it is a charming and gentle book, of interest to anglers and non-anglers alike. (I’ve interspersed some of my favorite quotations from it above and below.)

Thomas McGuane, in his introduction to the 1995 Ecco Press edition of The Compleat Angler, compares Walton to Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes, and to Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne, but finds Walton a more serene and comforting companion than either. “Even in the seventeenth century, there was the need of a handbook for those who would overcome their alienation from nature,” notes McGuane, adding that “learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and awe can be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us—that is, less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch fish.”

Freshwater Fly-Fishing School, held on May 13–15, was the third in a series of ethical hunting and fishing events at Madroño Ranch, all put on by our friend Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due supper club. (We had Deer School in December and Hog School in March.) It was, like its predecessors, a thoroughgoing success, and we hope to offer many more such schools in the future.

Give me your hand; from this time forward I will be your master, and teach you as much of this art as I am able; and will, as you desire me, tell you somewhat of the nature of most of the fish that we are to angle for; and I am sure I both can and will tell you more than any common Angler yet knows.

The idea behind these schools is to bring eight paying guests out to the ranch for a three-day weekend, during which they receive instruction from Jesse and his buddy Tink Pinkard, a former fly-fishing and hunting guide in Montana, in basic hunting or fishing techniques and processing, butchering, and cooking the animals they kill or catch.

Not incidentally, they (and we) also enjoy a series of incredible meals prepared by Jesse’s “camp chef,” the amazing Morgan Angelone. (Her Friday night bison burgers have become a tradition, and Saturday’s dinner is always a multicourse feast featuring various preparations of whatever animal is the weekend’s designated victim, followed by her soon-to-be-world-famous Basque cake.)

… this trout looks lovely; it was twenty-two inches when it was taken! and the belly of it looked, some part of it, as yellow as a marigold, and part of it was white as a lily; and yet, methinks, it looks better in this good sauce.

The Saturday night feast at Fly-Fishing School featured fish prepared in a multitude of ways: in soup with aioli croutons, en papilote, grilled whole, fried, grilled “on the halfshell” (unscaled), in breaded cakes… truly, it was an amazing experience; by the time the last piece of Basque cake had been shoveled down, we were sitting on the porch of the Main House at Madroño in stunned silence. Shock and awe, baby.

… he that views the ancient ecclesiastical canons, shall find hunting to be forbidden to churchmen, as being a turbulent, toilsome, perplexing recreation; and shall find angling allowed to clergymen, as being a harmless recreation, a recreation that invites them to contemplation and quietness.

Fly-Fishing School presented a different set of challenges than did Deer School and Hog School. For one thing, the guests weren’t wielding firearms, so while they still ran the risk of wounds from stray hooks and filleting knives, the chances of serious injury or death were minimized, though one guest cut his thumb cleaning a fish, and another scraped his hand on a fall in a creek. (Walton called fishing a “most honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless art,” which I guess is mostly true if you’re not a fish.) For another, while most people have at least a vague grasp of how to shoot a rifle, even if they need coaching in safety and accuracy, fly-fishing requires a set of not necessarily intuitive skills in manipulating rod, reel, and line—not to mention tying flies (Tink devised the “Madroño Ranch caddis,” made entirely from materials sourced at the ranch), hatch-matching, etc. Thus, Jesse and Tink were simultaneously more relaxed than at Deer or Hog School, and more exhausted by the intensive instruction required at Fly-Fishing School.

… you are to know, that as the ill pronunciation or ill accenting of words in a sermon spoils it, so the ill carriage of your line, or not fishing even to a foot in a right place, makes you lose your labour….

And is there really enough water, and fish, at Madroño Ranch to make such an undertaking feasible? Absolutely. But don’t take my word for it; here’s Tink’s assessment: “Madroño Ranch offers one of the most pristine backdrops for fresh water fly-fishing in Texas that I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting…. [I]t offers spring-fed creeks and streams that empty into a beautiful lake loaded with red-breasted sunfish, crappie, red ear sunfish, bluegill, and largemouth bass.”

Just so. The guests also enjoyed phenomenal weather, as a cool front blew in on Saturday morning. The wind didn’t actually do much for the fishing, though the anglers had better luck when they abandoned the lake, which is fairly open and exposed, for the sheltered banks of Wallace Creek. Still, even though I would characterize the fishing as good rather than great, the guests seemed happy just to be out in a beautiful place, in beautiful weather, practicing what was for most of them a new form of fishing.

I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.

Actually, that’s the thing I’ve always loved about fly-fishing: even when you don’t catch any fish, you’ve still spent the day standing in or near a body of water, which is its own reward. And in my admittedly limited experience, the physical movements of fly-fishing are not only beautiful to watch (at least when someone more competent than I is making them), they are almost magically calm-inducing. Indeed, I imagine that casting a fly rod can induce something pretty close to a Zen state, and a day of fly-fishing on which one catches no fish is only slightly less enjoyable than a day of fly-fishing on which one catches many fish.

… this day’s fortune and pleasure, and this night’s company and song, do all make me more and more in love with angling.

I suspect that the beauty of Madroño Ranch, along with Jesse and Tink’s light pedagogical touch and Morgan’s jaw-dropping cooking, would be enough to convert anyone to fly-fishing; my friend and hiking buddy Bruce Bennett didn’t stand a chance. Bruce is a devoted, even fanatical, fisherman, spending virtually every free weekend fishing off the coast of Louisiana, and while he had never been fly-fishing before, he took to it so quickly that Tink threatened to hire him as an instructor for the next Fly-Fishing School. Indeed, Bruce spent most of the weekend in or on the water and “in the zone,” largely oblivious to everything except the arc of his cast and the location of the fish. When he finally, reluctantly, came back to reality, he said, “This has been the greatest weekend of my life.”

Somewhere, I feel sure, old Izaak Walton was nodding and smiling.

What we’re reading
Heather: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Martin: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler: or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not Unworthy the Perusal of Most Anglers