As I get older (75 in June), I realize my intentions and my accomplishments are sometimes further apart than I remember them being, and sometimes they actually go in opposite directions. A spiritual person might describe this as a natural process to be embraced as part of the blessed circle of life. I see it as the cost of doing business. I suppose that’s a little cold-blooded, but certainly no less joyful. I guess you do the best you can and for the rest of it - you don’t look back - you just keep moving. I read a joke the other day. How many old guys over 75 does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is it miraculously only takes one,...... but it might take all day......or so. This story I'm doing took a while. I guess it took "all day", but I'm glad I got to it.
A little over two years ago, I took on one last small personal photo/writing project before Deb and Atticus and I left the Northwest United States for the high desert country of Mexico. I took some photographs of some friends of mine - a couple of fly fishermen. Now, a little over two years later, I finally got er done. Not exactly something I’m real proud of as a professional timeline, but my heart’s in the right place. Our move to Mexico from the Pacific Northwest + COVID took every bit of our attention for most of two years, and now that life has started to settle in (post vaccinations), I’ve started to sniff the air looking for options. But for just a moment, I walked into my office to take a quick look back, and I found this shoot from the way back waiting for me in the far back on a small hard drive in a box in a corner in the dark. I took a quick look. Then I looked some more.
For those who choose to wander on Pacific Northwest beaches - if you watch Bob Triggs and Leland Miyawaki in chest waders and heavy rain gear, carry fly rods, and walk across a beach full of mid-size to large slippery saltwater rocks, it’s like trying to watch the wind without feeling it or seeing it in the trees. Their heads don’t even move up or down like they are trying to find a balance point common to all other normal humans who walk, stumble, trip, lurch, and or fall on beach rocks. These guys don’t walk over uneven ground, so much as they simply appear. To get to that point as a person in your own environment, you don’t move over the landscape - you are part of the landscape. They say we should “take only photos and leave only footprints.” It feels like these guys don’t even leave footprints.
I don’t think there’s anything really new to write about Leland or Bob. I've included Bob on a couple of Facebook posts in years past. On Google, we can learn they have been icons of fly fishing and conservation for salmon, steelhead, trout, and sea-run cutthroat in the northwest for decades on end. To them, flyfishing is not a job or a hobby, or a passion. It’s part of who they are. I don’t know how old they are. I think I’m older than both, but close enough, it feels like they’ve been around the NW celebrating and defending the fish since before you and I were born. Truth be told, on the conservation side of the fish, there are scientists and dedicated professionals who put in the work, day in and day out, and that’s a fact. But Bob and Leland - these guys are the poster boys for an attitude and a way of life that’s running out of fish, running out of room, and running out of time.
Deb and I left our life in the Pacific Norwest and moved to Mexico two + years ago, in late May 2019. Just about this time in April of 2019, I called Leland and Bob and suggested maybe we should put the two of them together fishing for one last photoshoot. They agreed, and we set a date to meet at one of the great places in the Northwest - Marrowstone Island, near Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula - a pearl in the Puget Sound Oyster about a two-hour drive and off the map away from Seattle. I knew I was going to need some help getting some of the photos I wanted from a boat, so I gave a shout to my fly-fishing friend Errol Flagor, who can row even with a madman screaming orders that make no sense from the front of the boat, so he joined us for a couple of days. The weather wasn’t the best, but whenever is it or was it in the Pacific Northwest? We wandered around Marrowstone looking for opportunities to shoot and we took advantage of a few. We scouted some locations and I let the guys do what they do when they stand in saltwater and cast for fish.
Along with fishing from the beach, Bob rows a typical Swampscott Dory (circa 1800’s) around the bays and estuaries near Marrowstone. It’s 17 feet of traditional wooden lapstrake, fir planks on oak frames and ribs, clinker-built (copper riveted) construction. It was a wreck when he bought it for a dollar, and he built it back to life over a period of years. Like himself, it will float in inches of water. We took a few images of Bob and Leland in the dory at sunrise looking for cutthroat and working the shoreline around Mystery Bay.
Some years ago, there was a famous photographer/curator name Edward Steichen who put together an exhibit of photographs called The Family of Man. The exhibit was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. He was interviewed about the exhibit and in part of the interview, he was asked what makes a great photograph. He said something to the effect that “When you see a great photograph, you recognize an old friend”. I opened the editing software, and the images of my old friends flooded the screen. I swear to God out of nowhere I was just overcome. So cool to see them. Then I looked some more, and I started to laugh. I was home. Damn, it felt good to go back for a little while. Say hello to some old friends.
As every shooter knows, you never get it totally right. A number of the images I wanted to get, I didn’t get and some of them (the nap on the beach) I simply forgot to take. For some reason, they just didn’t work. There’s no real beginning here, and certainly no real end, and there sure as hell is no heavy-duty moralistic refrain, but I feel a tremendous timelessness in a few of these as well. For instance, the first couple of images of them talking over breakfast at the Farm’s Reach Cafe - that’s a ritual older than time itself. Bob is in his proper place here - holding court over eggs over easy. They “gear up” as fishermen have prepared for the battle for generations - it’s another ritual as old as fishing. The shots of Leland casting have an almost biblical feeling to them - Moses tossing a Miyawaki beach Popper as to call in the fish to prayer. In the portraits on the beach, we find our hero’s at ease with cigars, and they seem to me to be from another place, another time. The shot of Bob in the dory feels like he’s whaling off Nantucket in the 1700’. He’s an old osprey chewing on a cigar, laser scanning the beach looking for lunch. And Marrrrowstone Island remains as it has always remained - a stunning saltwater refuge. It’s just a great comfort to know that in the madness of our times, Marrowstone remains the same and the likes of these guys still stalk the shoreline with style and grace.
Bob and Leland are not alone in their pursuit. Certainly, there are many great fly fishermen who continue to wet a line and search the good search. Real fly fishermen are a breed apart - a part human, a part fish, never fully here, always partly there. A lot of good people out there dedicated to the fish. But in the Northwest, when it comes to the shoreline, we want to watch these two men in particular, as we may have watched athletes like Babe Ruth, Wilma Rudolph, or Tiger Woods, or how we currently watch Tom Brady. The likes of these guys don’t come often and may not come again.
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