⎯⎯⎯ A Memoir
Sermons
in
Stones
Tales of family, friends, & fly fishing
— from a life lived along moving water.
by David Ammons – 115 pages – Softcover
01
About the Book
Sermons in Stones
is my attempt to put into words a life I have spent trying to get back to.
Eighteen short stories and personal anecdotes from a remote river canyon in the Colorado Rockies — friends, family, fly fishing, and everything that happens in between when you are a man wedged between the rat race and the mountains. The Cache la Poudre River runs through all of it, patient and indifferent and endlessly generous with the lessons it keeps offering to anyone willing to stand in it long enough to listen.
Sermons in Stones is not a fishing book, though there is fishing in it. It is not a family memoir, though family is everywhere. It is a collection of stories from a mountain wilderness carved by a river, written by someone who needed to understand what that place has been trying to tell him his whole life — and who is still, honestly, working it out.
02
What Readers are Saying
03
Inside the Book
1
The Bend
2
Feeling the weight
3
Right as rain
4
Sermons in stones
5
The ROI in poppies
6
Dead or Alive
7
Silent forest
8
A boy and his dog
9
Chief Falling Rock
10
BFW pattern
11
The ghost Herb
12
Public Access
13
The 48th day
14
Likely places
15
The tarn above Agnes
16
Lost and found
17
Leviathan
18
A good spot
05
A Look Inside Sermons in Stones
The Bend
“The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.” ~ Jean Piaget
MY EARLIEST MEMORIES OF THE BEND WERE OF grand childhood adventures. While only a short walk downstream from the cabin, past Uncle Timm’s and through the hay meadow, we nevertheless filled backpacks with matches and fishing knives and food and provisions as if preparing for a multiday trek. Once there, we skipped stones, a challenge in the riffles and rapids of the river. We built rock rings and small fires, debating whether constructing the fire log-cabin style versus tipi style resulted in a quicker burn, to eventually conclude they were about the same. When the fires were lit, we cooked hot dogs on sticks freshly snapped and stripped from willow on the bank and nestled a can of beans between a rock and the flames. We splashed at the water’s edge, and when older and braver, we stripped off our shirts to swim for just as long as we could stand the chilly stream. And we learned to read the water by casting spinners with a Zebco.
As the Cache la Poudre River journeys a meandering 126-miles from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park to its confluence with the South Platte in Greeley, The Bend is just one of a hundred turns that steer the water. The allure of this particular curve is the variety of water offered—the stronger current running deep through the middle, a smooth back eddy where a sandbar emerges in late summer, and large rocks submerged but visible right where the river turns, setting up a stretch of slow, deep flows that eventually flatten to a broad shallow spill before descending around the next corner.
And in each of these, there were fish.
Over time I became skilled at the perfect side-arm cast, able to drop a Panther Martin six inches behind the boulder at the crook of The Bend fifty feet across. I knew exactly how to cast slightly upstream at the edge of the eddy and begin a retrieve before the lure hit the surface to reduce slack. The times I got snagged led to adjustments in my turn of the crank, slowly in swift water then hastening as the current relaxed to keep me off the rocks and sticks below the surface. Keeping the rod tip close to the surface allowed the lure to stay down on an intermittent retrieve along the deep undercuts below the bank on the near side. As I caught fish, I caught the bug. And the fish I caught were trout, with their other-worldly spots and dramatic colors and patterns, creatures that pulled me into a grip of wonderment, and caused that bug to evolve to a lifelong fever.
I also marveled at other wonders. My childhood friend Tom Elliott and I were at The Bend one warm summer evening quietly casting spinners within twenty yards of each other, lost in the trance of a waning sunset glow when something broke my concentration, a movement on the far bank.
“Tom, look!” I called out in a hushed tone.
I nodded towards a massive mule deer standing at the boundary of forest and stream, five velvet-covered tines a side, stout and tawny brown. The three of us stood quietly, the deer’s gaze fixed on us and ours on him. Time slowed. We stopped reeling, our lines went slack, and the Mepps spinners dropped to the gravelly bottom of the river. Nothing in the world was in a hurry at that moment. As the mulie turned to fade back into the woods, his muscles rippled underneath his coat and we stood astonished at the buck’s perfect form ghosting back into the stand of pine and spruce.
“Oh my God!” said Tom. “How long do you think he was standing there?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. But I did know. This was The Bend. He was always there. It was just a matter of whether we looked for him or not.
I learned so much at this remote turn in the river. About nature, about weather, about water. And about fish. Nourished by family lore of outdoor adventures, I would walk alone to The Bend at the edges of day and night. And not just for the fishing. I loved the bats in the late evening after it became too dark to cast, enticing them to chase pebbles I tossed in the air on the walk home. They…
06
About the Author
David Ammons
The river that raised me runs through land my family has held since the early 1900s – a wide, wild stretch of canyon country in northern Colorado with a few cabins that have sheltered generations through summers and winters, storms and wildfires, and everything in between. I grew up spending my summers here, learning the Cache la Poudre the way you only can when a place belongs to your family and your family belongs to it. Now, it remains the place I write from – literally and otherwise.
Sermons in Stones was my first attempt to put that life into words – eighteen stories about family, friends, and fly fishing from a man who has spent most of his adult life trying to get back to the mountains.
I don’t write because I have answers. I write because the Poudre keeps asking questions, and staying quiet about them feels like a waste of a perfectly good river.