Wasteland

I AM NOT SCARED OF HEIGHTS. I am not scared of snakes or spiders or the dark. I don’t think I’m scared of death, though, maybe of dying. I have never been scared of bears, quite the opposite, actually. When I was in pre-school, my parents let me roam our little farm, where I spent most of my time beneath a stand of shagbark hickory trees with a family of bears. Not the black bears indigenous to Maine, but a visionary species, endemic only to that thicket of my young mind.

This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts

“It was a wasteland, shimmering with its belts and plains of moonlit sand, blank and mysterious in its shadows, an abode of loneliness. An inexplicable sadness pervaded Adam’s soul. This wasteland and he seemed identical. How strange to feel that he did not want to leave it.” –Zane Grey, Wanderer of the Wasteland Eight years ago, I was staring at a barren sagebrush desert in southeastern Idaho and felt the strange loneliness everyone feels when they leave an old life behind.

I’m getting ready for duck season right now. Part of that entails laying out the gear. It’s something I do every season. But that doesn’t mean I’m one of those type-A organized people with shelves of neatly filed plastic totes, all labeled and alphabetized. Figuring out how to store your gear is a lot like figuring out how to arrange a bookshelf. It says a lot about you, and I’m trying to figure out what my mess of equipment says about me. I’ve made attempts at organization.

Jamie Hand is restless. High tide was supposed to hit a half-hour ago. This means one of two things: The tide charts are wrong, or the flood tide we need to hunt railbirds isn't going to arrive. The birds migrate down the East Coast at the end of every summer, stopping at patches of wild rice. When threatened, they'd rather run than fly, but on a flood tide, there isn't any ground to run on. The birds climb to the ends of the rice stalks and gather on little clumps of dry ground.

A pink cheek, actually closer to red, betrays the trout as a cutthroat. He rises sideways in the run so the color catches the late-October sun with every swallow, blushing the rain-tinted water. I can’t see what is spilling down the bubble line, but this is fall in Montana, so that means a Caddis leading a Blue-Winged Olive on a 5x leash is the cocktail to cast. This is no blanket hatch. The trout is not gulping a dozen bugs with every bite.

Editor’s Note:I first spoke with Flip and prepared this interview forField & Streamto publish earlier this month.You can find loads of great stories there, but what’s also exciting is that F&S is back in print. I just got my hands on the latest issue, and it is worth every penny. Subscribe to F&S today and help keep print alive. Now, on with the interview… Before YouTube and Instagram Reels and streaming shows, there was Flip Pallot’s Walker’s Cay Chronicles.

This is the first edition of a monthly column I’d like to call Wasted Words. In it, you’ll find random observations, suggestions, and recommendations pulled from the Notes app on my iPhone, which is where I jot down most of my ideas. I planned on publishing this at the beginning of December, but you know how these things go. (I’ll do better. I promise.) Mostly, this is stuff I’ve been thinking about, stuff I’ve been listening to, and stuff I’ve seen while traveling the Wasteland.