What went wrong

the world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions

Nessmuk weighed about a hundred and five pounds and had tuberculosis and paddled a canoe that weighed ten and a half. His real name was George Washington Sears, which is almost too American to be real, like a character Brautigan would have invented and then killed off in a paragraph about a trout stream that was actually a metaphor for the postal service. Nessmuk wrote his first book in 1884 and in it he said something that I think about every time I open Instagram, which is often, which is a problem. He said we do not go to the woods to rough it. We go to smooth it.

There is a genre of fishing content on Instagram that has perfected the golden hour. You know it when you see it. Drone footage. A dog on the bow of a skiff. Redfish that are always copper. Light that is always amber and backlit and the water is always shin-deep and the whole production is so beautiful it makes you want to throw your phone into the Indian River, which would be fitting, because the Indian River is filthy and so is your screen time report.

These accounts run a hundred thousand followers or better. The dog never moves. The fish are always lit like they’re auditioning for a Patagonia catalog. Every frame looks like a beer commercial directed by Terrence Malick. And somewhere behind the camera is a guy who has figured out that the fastest route between a fly rod and a following is to make loneliness look expensive.

I don’t hate these guys. I want to make that clear.

I just think Nessmuk would be confused by them. Kephart too. Horace Kephart was a librarian who drank himself half to death and then walked into the Great Smoky Mountains with an axe and a blanket and came back sober with a book. He wrote that it is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need to be perfectly happy. His whole deal was reduction. Strip it down. Carry less. Need less. The man had opinions about mosquitoes that ran three paragraphs long and they were funnier than most podcasts.

I was a photographer in the outdoor industry for 15 years, which means I was carrying too much gear, which Nessmuk and Kephart would have frowned upon, and I left carrying even more, most of it emotional. For a long time it was good. I shot assignments in the Everglades and the Keys and along the marshes of Louisiana and I was young enough to believe that the quality of the work would sustain the career.

Here is what I learned instead. The outdoor industry does not want quality. The outdoor industry wants volume. The outdoor industry wants fifteen deliverables by Thursday and a reel that performs and a carousel that converts and a story that drives traffic to the landing page where the wading boots are on sale for Presidents’ Day, and if you could tag the boots in the photo, that would be great, and also could the angler be smiling because the last angler wasn’t smiling and it tested poorly.

Harrison said the danger of civilization is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

I pissed away several good years on nonsense. I just did it on a skiff.

In late 2015, early 2016, I started one of the first fly fishing podcasts. Fly Fishing After Dark. Ten thousand monthly listeners, which was a real number back then, back before every guide and shop owner and rod builder and fly tier had a podcast, back when the form still felt like talking to a friend instead of performing for a demographic. The premise of FFAD was simple and it was this: nobody cares about your fly pattern. They care about the morning. They care about the coffee that was too hot and the ramp that was too dark and the buddy who told the same story about the same fish for the fourth time and how everybody laughed anyway because the story wasn’t the point. The story was never the point. The being there was the point.

McGuane understood this better than anyone alive. He wrote that the best angling is always a respite from burden. He also wrote that angling is extremely time consuming, and that this is sort of the whole point, which is so perfect a sentence about fishing that it makes me angry I didn’t write it myself. McGuane fished permit in the Keys when the Keys still had a sustainable permit population and a few bars where you could get into real trouble, and he wrote about both with a precision that made you feel the line tighten and the marriage strain in the same paragraph. He treated his fishing essays with the same seriousness as his novels, and that was the permission slip for the rest of us. If McGuane says you can write about bonefish like it matters, then it matters.

Except now it doesn’t matter, or it matters differently, or it matters in a way that has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with reach.

I want to talk about this carefully because I’m not trying to get into a fight on the internet, which is a sentence I am aware sounds like the opening line of every internet fight. But listen. The outdoor industry used to be built by people who went outside and then came back and wrote about it or painted it or photographed it and the work was the product. Nessmuk went to the Adirondacks in a canoe that weighed less than a Labrador and he wrote about it for Forest and Stream, which eventually became Field and Stream. Kephart went to the Smokies and the writing was the thing. Roosevelt went to the Badlands as a broken man and came back with a philosophy. He wrote that there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness. And then he spent the rest of his life trying anyway, which is basically what all of us are doing, except now we’re doing it in sixty-second increments with a royalty-free soundtrack and a swipe-up link.

Hemingway wrote a story called “Big Two-Hearted River” about a kid named Nick Adams who comes home from a war and goes fishing alone in Michigan and never once mentions the war. The entire story is about making camp and catching trout and the war is underneath everything like water under ice. You can feel it. Hemingway was twenty-five when he wrote it and he did it in a Paris cafe with a map of northern Michigan pinned to the wall. He stripped the thing down to nothing. No drama. No revelation. No high-fives on the bow of a skiff. Just a man in a river, and the river was enough.

That was 1924. A hundred years later, if Nick Adams went fishing in Michigan, he’d have a GoPro chest mount and a TikTok strategy and a coupon code for ten percent off a wading jacket and someone in the comments would tell him his backcast sucked.

I’m being unfair. I know I’m being unfair. The people making content right now are doing what the market rewards and I did the same thing for years. I photographed products I didn’t care about. I made images that were technically correct and spiritually vacant. I took the check because the check was the point and the point was feeding my kids, and I can’t stand here or sit here or wherever I am with this keyboard and pretend I was above it. I wasn’t. I was in it. I was one of the people drowning the thing I loved in commerce, and I knew it, and I kept doing it, and one morning I woke up and the thing I loved had turned into a thing I resented, and the resentment had turned into a kind of low-grade spiritual nausea that no amount of golden hour could fix.

So I left. Not loudly. I just stopped returning emails.

Harrison wrote somewhere, I think in Off to the Side, that the world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions, and that’s why he ran to the woods. I didn’t run to the woods. I ran to a desk job that paid better, which is less romantic but equally effective if what you’re trying to escape is the sinking feeling that you’ve turned your vocation into a transaction.

Here is what I want to say, and I want to say it without hedging, which is hard for me.

The outdoor industry has become an industry of aspiration rather than participation. The content is no longer made for the person standing in the river. It is made for the person who wants to look like the person standing in the river. The gear reviews are not helping someone choose a rod. They are helping someone choose an identity. And I understand why. Identity is marketable. Aspiration converts. The angler waist-deep at dawn with nobody watching and no camera and no hashtag is not a useful consumer demographic because that person already has what they need, which is the river and the temporary silence from his bitch wife and whatever’s left of the morning.

You can’t sell a man what he already owns. So you sell to the man who wants to own it but hasn’t gone outside yet.

Brautigan wrote an entire book called Trout Fishing in America that had almost nothing to do with trout fishing. The trout fishing was a lens. A way of looking at everything else. The book is about America and failure and beauty and the distance between what you hoped for and what you got, and the trout are in there, underneath, in the cold water, doing their own thing regardless of what you think about it.

I think that’s what the industry has forgotten. The trout don’t care. The river doesn’t care. The marsh and the flat and the timber and the ridgeline and the morning and the weather don’t care whether you have a following or a brand deal or a signature series rod with your name on the blank. Nessmuk knew this. He was dying of tuberculosis and he paddled a canoe that modern ultralight guys would consider dangerously small and he wrote sentences that are still in print a hundred and forty years later. Kephart knew this. He was a drunk who found God in the Smokies, or at least found sobriety, which in some cases amounts to the same thing. Roosevelt knew this. He buried his wife and his mother on the same day and went to the Badlands and punched cattle until the grief became something he could carry.

These men didn’t have audiences. They had experiences. And then they wrote about the experiences, and the writing was so good that it created audiences, which is the correct order of operations, and we have reversed it entirely.

Now the audience comes first. Then the content. Then, if there’s time and it performs, maybe something resembling experience.

I didn’t come back to anything. I never left. I left the industry, which is a word I’ve come to hate because it turns rivers into content calendars and sunrises into brand assets, but the outdoors never went anywhere and neither did I. What I did was start writing. Fiction, specifically. Short stories about fishing, wild places and Florida and the kind of people who live close to the water because they can’t figure out how to live anywhere else. McGuane is still publishing in the New Yorker at eighty-six and Harrison wrote poems about rivers and dogs and bourbon until the week he died and Brautigan, God rest his weird beautiful soul, wrote a book about trout fishing that was really about everything else, and these men made me believe that the work was worth doing even when nobody was paying for it. Especially when nobody was paying for it. Nobody in the outdoor world remembers my name. Best thing that could have happened. No reputation to protect. No audience to feed. Just the work, and if someone sees enough value in it to invest, so be it.

I never stopped making photos, and I never plan to. But only for the work that matters to me. The people. The landscapes. The light on a hull at five-thirty in the morning when nobody’s awake. Not product shots. Not lifestyle content. Not deliverables. Images. The kind Kephart might have taken if he’d had a camera and wasn’t busy writing three paragraphs about a mosquito’s drinking habits.

The pendulum swings. The guys I talk to, the ones who’ve been at this for twenty or thirty years, they’re tired. Not of fishing. Never of fishing. They’re tired of the performance. They’re tired of the feed. They want to read something that takes twenty minutes and stays with them for a week. They want to feel the way they felt the first time they read McGuane or Harrison or Hemingway and realized that someone had taken this slow, boring, obsessive, glorious thing they loved and made it mean something beyond itself.

That hunger is still there. It never left. It just got buried under volume and velocity and the relentless, exhausting pressure to produce, produce, produce, until the thing you were producing had no relationship to the thing that made you want to produce in the first place.

Dalva is asleep at my feet.
A north wind keeps my mind off fishing.
I have nowhere to be.