Tom and the Fat Boys
Over coffee one day during the spring of 1969, Woody Sexton introduced me to his friend Tom McGuane. At the time, Tom; his wife, Becky; and their young son, Thomas, were living on Summerland Key. Tom, a tall, handsome writer in his late 20s, was fishing the Loggerhead Basin from inside a 16-foot Roberts skiff powered by a 33-hp Evinrude engine and steered by a tiller. That winter he wrote his first piece for Sports Illustrated magazine, “The Longest Silence,” maybe the best article ever written on flats fishing. After reading it that summer, I sent him a congratulatory letter, and he responded by inviting me to join him that fall on his ranch outside Livingston, Montana, for a week of trout fishing. To this day I am surprised I made the trip, because it has never been my habit to accept sporting invitations from people I don’t know well. In this case, and in retrospect, I am grateful that I did. We have been close friends ever since.
When the enthusiasm of an angler toward the wonder, order and harmony of nature takes precedence over the numbers and size of his catch — and if it is the angler’s choice to mostly fish alone — the experience develops into a form of meditation. It was clear from the Sports Illustrated article that Tom was in full harmony with the natural environment he was describing. Whether it was sunlight transitioning over sandbars, the diligence of shorebirds feeding or the collective terror of a school of mullet, he treated the everyday instances of nature with the same thoughtfulness with which he treated the pursuit of fish. To this day Tom hunts and fishes for the pleasure of being in the field or on the water, usually by himself with his thoughts and observations, which he considers evenly with the action at hand. In the case of “The Longest Silence,” it was catching a permit on fly.
On my first trip west, Tom took me to all the lovely, tranquil spring creeks around Livingston and Bozeman, and of course to the Yellowstone River, where late one afternoon he caught two 5-pound brown trout on consecutive casts. It was a big deal. They were “wall” fish and treated as such.
Coming from salt water, I considered a 5-pound anything to be a fish you ate or released. As
