Joe Bacon, the classical guitarist and artist knew Russell Chatham from his days in Bolinas, and followed Chatham’s career as a painter. Joe gave me two Chatham books to read during this pandemic period, and one of them, Silent Season,was new to me. It’s a collection of pieces by writers who also fished, including several by Chatham himself. Chatham produced the book, illustrated it with his sketches of fishermen and fish. What I have discovered as I read the stories is that these are all old guys now. Not as old as I am, and Chatham, himself, is now deed. Throughout these stories by Tom McGuae, Jack Curtis, and others is a theme: as they grow old, they remember earlier times when the fishing was better, there weren’t as many people on the stream, and they could climb onto difficult locations on streams and the coastal waters.
I have found myself doing the same thing. Curtis remembers fishing with his grandfather, and Chatham ends his last piece gazing at a river. I wrote earlier about sitting under a tree on Deer Creek to get out of the rain, and watching the rain dimple the surface of the creek. Chatham and I could have exchanged places.
I met Chatham at an exhibition of Joe’s paintings here in Marin a few months before Chatham died. He was in his usual bib overalls, white-haired, and seemed preoccupied. Later, Joe told me that Chatham was losing it, dementia was taking hold of him, and his disinterest in any sort of conversation was now regular. He was trying to paint again, was staying at the abandoned Marshall_Hotel on the coast.
His Montana paintings were filled with sadness, shadows deepening, sometimes snow drifted against snow fences, trees black outlines against a winter sky. Fishermen appeared in some of them, indistinct figures.
My latest piece of writing was about the first fly rod I owned, about Henry Gutte and Spanish Creek below Oakland camp where elephant ears hung over the water, shadowing brown trout that began to feed at dusk. I can no longer go through those railroad tunnels to where those elephant ears probably still hang over the water. Like Chatham’s writer/fishermen friends, I can only remember something that happened sixty-five years ago, a lifetime. Chatham was born in 1939, when I was four years old. Unlike me, he lived a life of excess, in fishing, in food, in his wild friends, his disdain for economic certitude. His grandfather, a painter as well, has a whole room to himself at the de Young fine arts museum in San Francisco.
Forty year ago, I bought Chatham’s book, The Angler’s Coast for my son Geoffrey. Chatham tells of himself as a teenager with his father’s friends on the Gualala River and staying at the old Gualala Hotel before it became a trendy bed and breakfast. I stayed at that Hotel with Art Morris. We took my little boat out onto the river and fished for steelhead for half a day without success. Chatham writes about steelhead on the Gualala, and that’s where he ends his book, gazing at the water.
Russell Hill 