SIMMS is travelling with Pig Farm Ink on the Farmageddon 2018 Tour. An update from the Taos, New Mexico stop:
A favorite trait of the Pig Farm across the nation is the people who get involved in it. They are the builders of community and almost always unsung as they beat a slightly out of tune drum to the groove of getting outside. Against cell phones, the internet, and video games it’s an uphill slog and they always turn out to be interesting, and fun folks fighting a good fight.
One of these folks is a fellow we met up with at the start of the Rocky Mountain Tour in Taos New Mexico. His name is Spencer Siem and he’s got a very cool story. We finally got a chance to fish and help him build his community through Iron Fly. (Picture Iron Chef meets fly tying and getting the spectators at the bar participating but with more adult beverages and laughing).
Farmer Spencer is a fly fishing guide and Atlantic Salmon tier that years ago sent one of his clients across the world in search of stolen endangered bird pelts from the natural history museum. The story is recently chronicled in a hot book called The Feather Thief. It’s books like this that get fly fishing in front of folks that might never give it the time of day. Check out the book and the interview below.
Mere male peacockery and one-upmanship and Warholian “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” taken to the ultimate, self- and all areas-destructive, crazy extreme. The Feather Thief is a very readable little book that, I sense, a fair few “top” British flytyers are currently pretending they’re not aware of at the the moment – you know, the old close ranks, we don’t talk about HIM, pretend it isn’t happening sorta thing….
I remember using a signature on a British Fly Forum back in the still-comparatively innocent Noughties, which was both studiously much-ignored and discreetly highly disapproved of by some – these lines, about the wounded Fisher King in ancient Celtic Arthurian legend, from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (1922).
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
It’s not just flies only fit for framing, fellas……….