Learning To Fly

"Learning to Fly will hook and reel you in like a favorite song. Rip's fish stories of halcyon days on five Montana creeks are highlighted with references to great songs - 131 of them - that bring back fond memories for the reader, too. The book's final message, 'A Note on the Water,' is important to everyone who loves clean, cold water, wild trout, and the organizations that protect and preserve them for future generations. After all, our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

- Craig Mathews, originator of the Sparkle Dun

One August day. Five small creeks on a working ranch outside Manhattan, Montana. A man in his sixties named Grant rides a mule between them and fishes them in order - a bad knee, three grown sons, thirty years on this water, and a brown trout he has been failing to catch for a decade.

By late afternoon she is on his line. He knows exactly what he means to do with her.

That is Part One. Part Two is seven short essays on the water itself: how the Gallatin Valley became a hole four thousand feet deep, and why that makes a spring creek run fifty degrees in February; who came to this ground and in what order, and what happened to the people who were here first; how Dutch barley farmers recruited by a malting company in 1893 accidentally built the finest hundred yards of dry-fly water in the county; how a water right written in 1891 still decides which creek runs and which one goes dry; and the exact, orderly sequence by which a creek dies. The last essay is about the ones coming back.

Two of the five creeks are on Montana's impaired waters list and under a federal restoration program. A Note on Sources says plainly where every claim came from - USGS, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, state water-rights records, the Lewis and Clark journals, an 1855 treaty, a peer-reviewed restoration study - and which questions remain open.

And threaded through all of it: one hundred and thirty-one rock and roll songs are hidden in the prose, footnoted at the foot of the page, annotated at the back, and sequenced as a playlist that runs about as long as the day the book describes. How many hooks, lines and singles will you catch? None is fine - the day stands on its own. Catch a few, and a second book opens underneath the first.

Second edition, revised and expanded. This jacketed hardcover runs 236 pages, illustrated with seven fly plates and a map of the five creeks, with one hundred and thirty-one page-foot footnotes and a Note on Sources.

For readers of Norman Maclean, Thomas McGuane and Ted Leeson - and for anyone with a piece of water they keep going back to.

Rip Gerber is a singer-songwriter and recording artist. His short fiction has appeared in First Thrills, the International Thriller Writers anthology edited by Lee Child, and his thrillers Pharma and Killervirus are published by Random House/Heyne; Pharma was a bestseller in Germany. He fishes Montana, Tennessee and California when he can.