Howard Waldrop Fishing by Dave Myers

When Howard taught at Clarion West, he’d tell students that they would only learn to write by writing, a lesson he also applied to fishing. We ended his first stint with two days of fly fishing on the nearby Cedar and Snoqualmie Rivers. Howard later wrote he had found Oz, prompting him in 1995 to move to the Oso General Store on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, about an hour north of Seattle.

I already knew how to tie flies and cast a line, and even catch trout, but Howard showed me how to fish. We fished year-round, every few weeks if possible, sometimes twice a week, depending on work and weather and whether fish were running. Mostly we explored the S rivers: the Stilly just outside his door, and the adjacent watershed’s Sauk and Skagit Rivers, home to all five species of Pacific salmon, as well as steelhead, cutthroat, Dolly Varden and whitefish. We fished in sun, rain and snow, unless the rivers were blown out or closed (as they all too frequently were, prompting Howard to note this place wasn’t even Kansas). We caught and released all but two fish, and we had many wonderful Howard and Dave fishless days.

Howard went fishing any day I showed up. We’d seek out new water or drive from one favorite spot to the next, along the way listening to rock and roll tapes and trading stories and jokes. His were funnier. He talked fondly of fishing with Chad Oliver in Colorado and New Mexico and Texas. We travelled with the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges and Scrooge McDuck. While joking about Calvin & Hobbes, he said, “What we’re doing when fly fishing is transmogrifying the fly into a fish, know-what-I-mean?” One day while listening to the Austin based group, The Gourds, sing about a song and dance and “a little seltzer down your pants,” Howard said that’s from the Chuckles the Clown episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and proceeded to describe the plot and all the jokes.

We’d cast through the best hour of fishing at dusk, then return to Oso, where he would bee-line to the mailbox. Then a quick dinner of ramen or chili mac or rice flavored with fried gizzards from the Quickie-Mart in Darrington. One night, I introduced him to the first season of South Park, which we frequently had to rewind because we were laughing so hard.

We fished like this for over seven years, until he moved back to Texas. The last time we fished together (and maybe the very last time he fished) was in Austin’s Town (Lady Bird) Lake in 2019. His health was declining and he was having trouble walking, but he could cast well and the tight coils in his line hand were something I could never master. We caught no fish, and agreed it was a perfectly fine day of fishing.

So long old pal.

—Dave Myers

For more, see our obituary of Waldrop.