Curtis Creek Manifesto Being a Basic Guide to the Art of Fly Fishing on Moving Water
Browse the fishing department of whatsoever chain bookstore and there are enough how-to titles to fill an entire shelf. There's The Everything Fishing Book, Wing Fishing for Dummies, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wing Fishing, Fly Fishing Fabricated Easy. There's The Essential Guide to Fly-Fishing, The Simple Art of Fly-Fishing, and The Ultimate Book of Wing-Fishing. But none have endured—and been cherished—like Sheridan Anderson's Curtis Creek Manifesto. Nearly every fly fisherman has information technology, knows it, or has recommended information technology. Its humour, illustrations, and touches of randomness are unique in the literature of the sport. If a fishing book sells a couple chiliad copies, it'southward considered a success. The Manifesto has sold a quarter of a meg.
And it was clear, from very early, that Anderson could pull information technology off. Even as a kid, he was passionate and creative and curious. Blood brother Mike, three years younger, was into practically everything merely fishing: hiking, biking, baseball, football. "My side of the room was always straightened upward, neat every bit a pivot," Mike recalls. Sheridan'south side was littered with Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, oil paintings, drawings, books on the local flora and fauna. He drew cartoons for the school paper and wrote for the school yearbook. "He had his vise over there and he tied flies, and he had his creel and some other damn things," Mike says. As Sheridan once countered, "Mike was a fastidious little bastard….When he wasn't exterior fielding grounders he could usually be found lying on his bed staring with big dogie-optics at Yvonne DeCarlo or seated thereon rubbing some kind of mysterious goo into his baseball manus."
Despite all his volume and magazine enquiry, Sheridan long felt he was an junior angler. "I am, at best, a poor wing fisherman," he once wrote. "I wanted to exist a master streamsmith with a dry out fly. The Lord of the Rivulets. The Scourge of the Firehole." His uncle, Grant Wooton, was his inspiration, a man who could "see through water as tho [sic] he had sonar, and no one, no i, in over lx years of fishing, ever beat him." With Uncle Grant and Grant'southward son, Jay, the teenage Sheridan fished his way across the Yellowstone Plateau: The Firehole, the Madison, the Gallatin, Grayling Creek, Duck Creek, Cougar Creek.
Anderson was born on September 18, 1936, in the Los Angeles area, and his father—later on a stint in the Army— became a car salesman and moved the Anderson clan, four strong, to Salt Lake Urban center. "My parents were never like Ozzie and Harriet," Mike says. "It wasn't really dysfunctional…well, I approximate it kind of was." Their parents got into frequent spats, fueled by the alcohol that was a part of family life from the showtime. Their relationship was consistently rocky, but they managed to stay together—in honor of the now-tired phrase "for the kids." Recalls Mike, "It was hard to go on the boat going in 1 direction."
When Mike was a junior in high school, he moved to L.A., just Sheridan stayed in the dry Utah climate, having suffered from asthma since early babyhood. He studied fine art at the University of Utah but never finished, and took a few courses at colleges around the W. In his early 20's, always migrating from 1 place to the adjacent, he met climbers whom he eventually followed to Yosemite, and the rockcraft epicenter at Camp 4—men like Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins, Chuck Pratt, Steve Roper, Roger Keckeissen, and Joe Kelsey. Sheridan was never a climber of their caliber, but he was office of their climbing fraternity for nearly two decades.
In the late 1960s, Campsite 4 was full of unruly pioneers, lithe superclimbers who spent their days forging new ascents and their nights partying under the xanthous pines. "We shoplifted to feed ourselves," says Roger Keckeissen, now a flyfishing guide in Livingston, Montana. "We'd hang out in the deli and get java, and when the tourists left, we'd end off their leftover toast and bacon." They hung out on Sentinal Beach, on the Merced, long-haired and naked, tanned and stoned. While the climbers were scouting routes on El Cap's Salathe Wall, on One-half Dome, on Sentinal, Sheridan would fish, beverage, and describe. As Kelsey wrote in The Climbing Cartoons of Sheridan Anderson, published afterward Sheridan'southward decease, "Unflattering caricature was one more obstruction at the end of an arduous epic, only…a returning Stone God could potable beer with Sheridan and be himself." Once, when Chouinard was out climbing a big wall, Sheridan painted his ubiquitous van. "At ane Camp four party, Chuck Pratt was too boozer to stand up, and he passed out on the ground curled up with my gilded retriever," says Kelsey. "The political party went on effectually him, and Sheridan grabbed his pad and sketched them. The caption was, 'I knew there'd exist someone at this political party I could talk to.'"
Just there was not a hint of sadism in him; he liked to tease, but he was never mean-spirited. There was a certain gentleness behind his earthy sense of humor and roguish impression. He was never shy about poking fun at the self-serious athletes in Army camp iv, never afraid to pick up on the foible of a starchy, serious climber and make light of it. Royal Robbins was often the butt of Sheridan'south doodles, represented every bit a shining Superman or wearing his trademark spectacles and English driving cap. Robbins wrote in a tribute to Sheridan: "He was one of the primary chroniclers of the vanities and pretensions of many stars of that period. Sheridan had a double talent: the ability to read character, and the skill to return it with precise, satirical strokes." Some of his cartoons were obscene, some were touching, just all were spot-on. If anyone—climber, fisherman, friend—took himself likewise seriously, he was open fodder.
And perpetually artistic. He drew for Rise, Mount, and Mount Gazette, coming up with characters similar Sir Jack Long-Gland, Lord Bonehead, Hamish McPiton and the dreaded snake, Bullshitmaster. The idea for the Curtis Creek Manifesto first took root when Sheridan was living at Camp 4, climbing and, equally he wrote, "supplying a half-dozen fellow pirates with fresh trout." He continues, "Lazing over Crimson Mountain Burgandy [sic] and sloe-eyed maids by the crystalline pools of the Merced, I was often admonished to harness my expertise for posterity in order to maintain my unorthodoxy in a more lavish way."
While he spent summers in Yosemite, he wintered in Reno, in Bishop, in San Francisco. "He was very much of the San Francisco crowd, " says Frank Amato, the eventual publisher of the Manifesto. "He really captured the mindset of that time and place." When so-fledgling photographer Ed Cooper was looking for a place to hire in 1967, equally the Summertime of Honey was peaking into pot and bellbottoms and beads, he moved in with Sheridan. It was a random union, simply the pair got along and soon moved into a bigger flat almost Gold Gate Park in the Richmond Commune. Dubbed the sixth Avenue Delicatessen and Commune, there was plenty room for darkrooms, easels, and girlfriends. "When I lived with him, I had a girlfriend—now my wife—and he married a woman named Leslie Fairbairn, just he'd already been married before—to another Lesley (this one with an l-e-y ending) who had two kids," Cooper says. "I think his mental attitude toward women was kind of archaic." Neither matrimony lasted more than a yr or two, possibly considering Sheridan claimed that "spousal relationship was an access of failure."
Cooper fondly remembers Sheridan's incredible talent, merely also how heavily Sheridan was hitting the bottle, and how he once admitted to him, "From the first drink I ever had, I knew this was what I wanted to practise." Sheridan seemed to need the prod of liquor—iii parts water, i part whiskey—to go artistic juices flowing, and once wrote, "Oft in the execution of his artistic and literary pursuits, Mr. Anderson is wont to utilize spirits to prime and sustain his muse…Historians believe that a similar formula was used to return the aboriginal Celts fearless in battle." When Cooper moved to Mendocino with his new bride, Sheridan and Leslie came to visit; Sheridan promptly drank all the alcohol in the firm, left in his pick-upwardly, and stayed out most of the night. The "terminal binge," as Cooper put it, was a little as well much, and he lost bear on presently after.
During 1 of his Bay Area stints, Sheridan finally started cartoon The Curtis Creek Manifesto while making a pocket-size amount of coin by painting signs for urban center businesses. It was a process. Sheridan after joked, "It took me three seasons to dope out the teaching methods, employing live guinea pigs, all of whom knew nil and who now catch fish." In 1976, Joe Kelsey lived with him in a tiny, pie slice–shaped apartment on Potrero Hill. "It was a mess," he says. "And Sheridan would go in these diets—one basin of oatmeal a mean solar day for a week. On the eighth day, I'd come domicile and he'd be shit-faced, and we'd go become a huge Mexican dinner in the Mission." His work patterns followed in much the same mode: Sometimes Kelsey would come home from his editing task in Berkeley and Sheridan would have big drawings hung on the walls. And sometimes… zip. "I tried to help him, merely fishing wasn't my affair," says Kelsey. "I know he was out talking to people at the Golden Gate Park casting ponds and wandering around fly shops."
I of those shops, just off 3rd and Market, happened to be where Glenn Brackett was working for Winston Fly Rods—and one solar day Sheridan just walked in and wanted feedback on his cartoon concept. "He looked like he'd just fallen out of the gutter," Brackett says. "And that never changed. He always seemed a flake ragged." What started equally a short conversation turned into a close, yearlong human relationship, spiked with Sheridan's productive spells and sporadic vanishings, filled with talk of tackle and rivers and philosophy. "He'd bring in his galleys and idea sheets and pieces, and we'd review it with him," Brackett says. "He is the graphic symbol in that book, although it goes unnamed." When Winston moved to Twin Bridges, Montana in 1976, the two lost impact.
After finishing about 15 pages of The Curtis Creek Manifesto, Anderson sent them—and his vision—upwardly to Frank Amato in Milwaukie, Oregon. "He looked like the perfect ringer for Long John Silver," says Amato. "He was this big guy and he sort of talked with a growl." Amato liked what he saw and The Curtis Creek Manifesto, published in 1978, turned out to be a cult archetype, a requisite primer, and i of the publisher'south meridian v sellers—out of 300-odd titles. "Other than Isaak Walton, he's probably the single American who got more people line-fishing than anyone else," Amato says.
All this time, and, in fact, all his life, he stayed in sporadic touch with friends and family unit in messages and postcards with (sometimes) random flair and (sometimes) plain lewdness. His buddy Joe Kelsey received a postcard addressed to "Captain K and His Traveling Circus and Canine Striking Squad." His brother, Mike, received a wedding announcement—on a postcard—that read, "Leslie and I are getting spliced at eleven A.M. this A.M. … Don't send money (we're knocking over the 1st National at 11:45)."
"I'm sure they went all the manner through the postal system with every postal employee proverb to themselves, 'what in the hell is in this thing?'" says Amato. Sometimes he wrote about conspiracies that held not a shred of truth; sometimes, he sketched naked women crawling with their fly rods; sometimes, he simply took artistic liberties with Goofy and Mickey.
Just similar everyone can recollect the beginning fourth dimension they met Sheridan, most anybody can remember the terminal time they saw him. Joe Kelsey, who was on his way from Berkeley to the canyons of southwest Utah, stopped past to visit Sheridan in Vegas in 1981. "By and then, at that place were all these hot climbers sleeping in their VW buses near Ruddy Rocks," he says. "They were drinking Perrier and doing yoga. Sheridan came in with a bottle of Jack, and plunked down in a chair, and they were all in awe of him. They knew he was i of the greats." One of the last times Mike Anderson saw him was at their begetter's funeral in Feb 1983; Sheridan was close to 300 pounds, and didn't await well. "I hadn't heard from him in a while, other than that drunken phone call every then frequently: 'I miss you lot, I love you, brother,'" says Mike. "He only didn't take good intendance of himself."
On the evening of March 31, 1984, while he was in Vegas, he suffered an acute attack of emphysema and passed away. Mike spread his ashes in the Golden Trout Wilderness near Lone Pino, where Sheridan had spent many seasons exploring the streams and high mount lakes of the southern Sierra. It was a identify he'd hiked earlier, where he had establish peace and confinement—and even constitute the elusive golden trout, "a leaping, flashing, dancing, assuming ray of living sunlight." He wrote:
Mount Humphreys was blazing abroad in the late afternoon lord's day, looking like a jumbo throne confronting the relentless blue sky. I grinned and started laughing. I'thou an eagle (I thought), a big, fat, very thirsty, rollicking eagle who was about to spread his wings and dive downwardly to Bishop and drink gallons and gallons of cold beer.
Source: https://midcurrent.com/books/master-of-the-manifesto/
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