In late 1972, Guy de la Valdène, the French count-turned-tarpon-fishing-addict, tried for days over the phone to coax his friend, the writer and poet Richard Brautigan, into taking part in a movie he was making about tarpon fishing in Key West. Brautigan continually declined his invitation.
Brautigan was then five years removed from the publication of his first, and most popular, book, Trout Fishing in America, but he and his work were still very much a part of the cultural vanguard. Trout Fishing in America is often described as a novel, and I guess it does fit that description in that it is a work of fiction. But some of the other traditional guideposts that we expect in a novel—a plot is what I’m really talking about here—are nowhere to be found. As the title suggests, the book is ostensibly about fishing for trout, a sport and a pastime that Brautigan was very fond of. And it is indeed a book about fishing in another sense—the narrator and all of the other characters within are angling for answers and for meaning, for ways to survive in a country where the frontier and the wilderness are in retreat against an attack from rampant commercialization. But through its metaphors, vignettes, language head-fakes, playfulness, and surreality, it becomes much more than that. Brautigan was once described by a reviewer as “a Thoreau who cannot keep a straight face.” His book is considered to be the connective tissue that binds the Beats and the hippies, and it sold two million copies. He palled around with Allen Ginsburg and Gary Snyder in San Francisco, not far from his home in Bolinas, California. Once, when the Beatles visited San Francisco, John Lennon made a side trip to meet him.
Brautigan was tall and quiet, and he dressed in a style that could be described as hippie-frontiersman, often donning a broad-brimmed hat over his long, stringy blonde hair. He frequently twisted locks of that hair in his fingers and also worried the tips of his Wyatt Earp–like handlebar mustache, as if always in a state of deep contemplation. “He was a sweet, generous and entirely odd person,” says Thomas McGuane, who was his friend. “Otherworldly, really.”
Though Valdène could not, at least initially, convince Brautigan to be in his movie, he did manage to get him to come down to Key West for a spell in the spring of 1973, to hang out with him, McGuane, Jim Harrison, and Russell Chatham, who were in the midst of their run as the Merry Pranksters of the tarpon world.
Brautigan loved to fly fish, but he loved to do it in his own simple way, standing in the same spot in a mountain stream for hours on end and catching six-inch brook trout. He had never fished for tarpon and had pretty much predetermined that the big rods, big fish, and big action wouldn’t appeal to him. Valdène dearly wanted Brautigan in the film, but he didn’t push him after he arrived in Key West, and instead resorted to gentle persuasion. “Just come out in the boat with me,” he told Brautigan. “I just want you to see this.” That method worked. Brautigan went out and, though he didn’t fish, he seemed impressed with the incredible setting—the cerulean sky, the emerald green water, and the giant, ancient fish. He signed on for a few more trips onto the water.
One evening after returning from one of those excursions, Brautigan turned to Valdène and said, “You know, if you want me in your movie, I’m going to have to jump a tarpon.”
The next morning, Valdène poled through a basin as Brautigan stood in the middle of the boat, sporting a huge, childlike smile across his face. Valdène spotted some tarpon cruising slowly, half a mile or so away, and pushed after them. When he reached the fish, he put the pole down and picked up a rod and made a cast. One of the fish ate the fly, and Valdène handed the rod to Brautigan. “The fish went nuts,” says Valdène. It surged violently, leapt completely out of the water three times, and then came off. Brautigan held the now lifeless rod in his hand, staring out over the still frothy water, then let loose a long howl. The entire episode had lasted maybe ten seconds. Brautigan handed the rod back to Valdène and sat down in the boat and didn’t utter a word for an hour.
Later that evening, back at their rental house, Valdène and Brautigan shared a joint. Valdène then asked—for the last time, he’d determined—if he could interview Brautigan for the film. Brautigan finally said yes.
In the movie scene, Valdène appears clean-cut, wearing white jeans with a short-sleeved polo tucked into them, his medium-length dark hair combed in a part. He is sitting in a chair. Brautigan is wearing a long-sleeved shirt printed with a mix of light blues and whites, like a sky dappled with cumulus clouds. He rocks gently back and forth in a hammock. He is still a decade away from the raging alcoholism that would consume him all the way to the point when he would, as a final act, take his own life with a .44 Magnum.
Looking to the side of the camera, Brautigan describes his experience with the tarpon as “so extraordinary as to, uh, create immediate unreality upon contact.” The clip lasts for about as long as his fight with the tarpon did. But it is my favorite scene in the movie (which would be called Tarpon). “Immediate unreality” is the single best descriptor I’ve ever run across to describe an encounter with a tarpon. It’s fitting, too, that the phrase could also be used to describe what it feels like when an ingested drug hits your system.
Key West has always had an outlaw, anything-can-happen vibe to it. The early Spanish explorers called it “Cayo Hueso,” or “Bone Island,” because when they first landed there, they found the land strewn with human skeletons. Its earliest industries were not the most upstanding ones. Rum running was rampant. Blackbeard was one among many pirates who frequented the island. And because of the treacherous coral reef that surrounds the key, “wrecking”—that is, salvaging the goods from a shipwreck—thrived as a local livelihood and was its own form of angling, as some of the wrecks were caused by locals who lured ships into the unsafe waters with false navigation lights lit on land.
Key West was among the first places in the country that was friendly to gays, and it has always been a refuge for those who didn’t quite fit in on the mainland—the hippies, the dropouts, the anarchists—even after it was connected to it in 1912, when Flagler completed his railroad. In 1982, it seceded from the Union in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion, calling itself the “Conch Republic” and declaring that it would use sand dollars as its official currency. The writer William McKeen once described Key West thusly: “It’s as if God picked up the country at California and shook it, so that all of the loose pieces ended up in the reservoir tip at the country’s southeast edge.” The allusion to the terminus of a condom seems wholly intentional.
With time, the island became a haven for artists, though that didn’t necessarily make it any more genteel. Wallace Stevens was one of the first to take up residence there, spending parts of the winters for most of the 1920s and 1930s, and he used the place as the setting for one of his most famous poems, The Idea of Order at Key West. The poem, as writer Jay Parini interprets it, is about the desperate battle that takes place between neatness and chaos during the creative process. The brilliant Stevens certainly went through some chaos during his years in Key West, much of it self-made. At a cocktail party he hosted, he drunkenly argued with Robert Frost, another poet who spent his winters in Key West at the time. The encounter so enraged Frost that he gossiped about Stevens’s insobriety at a public lecture at the University of Miami a short while later.
And on another night, at yet another cocktail party, Stevens cornered a female partygoer and began to tell her how much he detested the work of Ernest Hemingway and, it had to be said, didn’t much like the character of the man, either. The cornered woman happened to be Ursula, one of Hemingway’s sisters. She told her brother, who by that time was also wintering in Key West and was at the same party, about the episode. Never one to back down from a slight, Hemingway waited outside in the rain for Stevens to leave the party. The ensuing fight was one-sided. Hemingway, then thirty-six, a full two decades younger than Stevens, knocked him to the ground three times. Stevens managed to land one punch—on Hemingway’s jaw—but it didn’t faze Hemingway and, in fact, broke Stevens’s hand. One onlooker described both men as “pretty well lit.”
Hemingway and his pregnant wife, Pauline, had first arrived in Key West on a ship from Havana, on their way back from France. Hemingway had been tipped off about the island by his friend John Dos Passos. The Hemingways only planned on a short stay, but their departure was delayed by car trouble. Hemingway fell in love with the island in short order. He rented houses in the winters during his first three years there, and then the couple was given a house by his wife’s uncle in 1931 (this is the house that is now a museum with all of the famous cats). Hemingway wrote parts of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls while there. He also fished for tarpon around the island and on overnight trips to the nearby Marquesas Islands.
Hemingway crossed paths with the poet Elizabeth Bishop in his last year in Key West. Despite not being much of a catch-and-release angler, he was fond of her poem “The Fish,” in which the narrator lands a big fish, “looks into his eyes,” and then decides to let it go. Bishop became friendly with Frost, but she kept her distance from Stevens. She also overlapped with Tennessee Williams, who wrote all or part of Battle of Angels, Night of the Iguana, and The Rose Tattoo while living in Key West in the 1940s and 1950s (the last play was made into a movie and filmed in Key West). Truman Capote also lived in Key West for a spell, renting a two-bedroom trailer with a bamboo roof to work on his novel Unanswered Prayers, which, perhaps fittingly, was never finished.
Thomas McGuane certainly knew of this long literary tradition when he arrived in Key West in 1970. A few years earlier, he had written his first novel, The Sporting Club, while completing a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and it had been published in 1969 to much critical acclaim and sold to Hollywood. But, McGuane says, the bigger reason that he rented a “sleazy house on a canal that looked straight out at Loggerhead Basin” and moved into it with his then-wife (Becky, a direct descendant of Davy Crockett) and their baby son was because of the tarpon.
He’d been to the Keys as a child, fishing with his father, and the place had made an impression on him that he’d been unable to shake. Throughout his teenage years, he says, he read about the great catches of tarpon in the Keys in Field & Stream. “As I was trying to start a career and finish graduate school, I thought that as soon as I had two nickels to rub together, I was going to go down there,” he says. “I wanted to figure out the fishing.”
He first rented a house in 1969, the year of Woodstock, on Summerland Key, then migrated down to Key West the following year. The only tide book available at the time was from Miami, some 160 miles away, so he had to reckon his tides from there. He became friendly with the guide Woody Sexton, and Sexton came over at night and sketched maps of the fishing areas for him. (McGuane even did some off-the-books guiding, taking some of Sexton’s overflow.) In his Willy Roberts wooden skiff, McGuane fished a triangular zone, with Marathon, the Content Keys, and Sugarloaf Key as the three vertices. “It was so wild then,” he says. And uncrowded. There was only a handful of boats on the water, and he knew the owners of them all. He says he pretty much had Loggerhead to himself for five years. “I mostly fished, though, on occasion, I’d feel guilty and try to write,” he says.
That guilt produced some of his finest work. He wrote much of what turned out to be his third novel, 92 in the Shade—which was nominated for a National Book Award—while in Key West. The book is set in the Keys, and the main characters are ones he knew well: fishing guides. The novel opens with a line that feels entirely prescient, perfectly capturing the mood of our current time. Or, perhaps, its sentiment encapsulates every era.
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic…
At the time, McGuane also had a deal with Sports Illustrated to do a certain number of articles every year, under the legendary editors Ray Cave and André Laguerre. “They liked having literary types, and they didn’t care what you did,” says McGuane. “You could do two thousand words on the spotted alewife if you wanted.” Instead, McGuane wrote his first fishing story, about permit, called “The Longest Silence.” “Cave beat me like a Georgia mule,” he says. “I wrote that story over and over. I learned a lot.”
It was all worth it. The story might just be the finest ever written about fly fishing, or fishing in general. McGuane has always treated his angling pieces (the best of which are collected in a book that takes its name from his seminal story) as seriously as he did his novels, which means that we—anglers, readers, and writers—have permission to do the same, though most of us on the writing side have turned out to be mere pale imitators of the master of the form.
So much of McGuane’s writing at the time was influenced by Key West, the place. Tennessee Williams, after reading 92 in the Shade, asked him if he’d lived there all his life. “Key West was run-down, Duval Street was plywood,” says McGuane. “You could live cheaply. It was a hippie Brigadoon. It didn’t feel like America. I was intensely in love with it then.” His enthusiasm for the place, and for its tarpon fishing, drew in some of his friends, who would join him there.
One of those men was Jim Harrison, the poet and writer and a friend of McGuane’s since their shared undergraduate years at Michigan State University. Harrison was a grand, charismatic presence, a puckish man with a great, welcoming, oval face and a left eye that had been blinded by a broken bottle when he was seven. Though he had written two books of poetry, Harrison had not yet published the novellas and novels that would elevate him to literary fame. He had, though, helped McGuane get The Sporting Club published by putting him in contact with an editor at Simon & Schuster.
Russell Chatham was another friend who came down. He had a mane of dark hair and a great promontory of a nose and a generous laugh (and, also, a damaged eye). He lived in Bolinas, California, and knew Brautigan and had met McGuane when he was in the area while doing his graduate school fellowship at Stanford. Chatham was a writer and self-taught painter of large mural landscapes, who later in his life would be recognized for his artistic brilliance. He was a devoted outdoorsman and an accomplished steelhead fisherman who also once held the world record for striped bass on a fly rod. He would later move to Montana, near McGuane’s home, and McGuane, in a story, would memorably describe him as “a man who has ruined his life with sport.”
Guy de la Valdène was born in New York City but spent some of his younger years living in a 17th-century castle in Normandy, as some members of the French aristocracy do (his father was a count and a famous French flying ace). Valdène was sent to the United States before he was a teenager to attend school in Florida. There, he became friends with a fellow student named Gil Drake Jr.
In the late 1950s, Drake’s father opened a lodge in Grand Bahama named Deep Water Cay, which became a premier saltwater flats fishing destination, primarily for bonefish. Valdène and Drake spent months there at a time, fishing, doing odd jobs, and hanging out with all the famous fishermen who came through the lodge, like Joe Brooks and Al McClane. In 1967, one of those famous fishermen—Stu Apte, then a guide—met the young Valdène and asked if he’d like to book him for some tarpon fishing in the Keys. Valdène said yes.
Apte was then in the midst of his ascendance as a well-known saltwater fly fisherman who specialized in tarpon. As a guide, he was “difficult,” as Valdène describes him, a stern taskmaster who yelled at his clients all day long when they didn’t do things exactly as he—in the prime of his life as one of the best tarpon fishermen who ever lived—would have. Valdène at the time was “a mess as a tarpon fisherman,” he says. “I had no idea what I was doing.” Which made Apte yell even more.
One morning in the spring of 1967, Apte and Valdène were fishing a basin in the lower Keys. Valdène remembers it as a particularly appalling day for him with the rod. “I was nervous as hell and was pulling the fly out of every fish’s mouth I saw,” he says. After he missed three relatively easy fish in a row—and endured the verbal lashings—he handed the rod to Apte, who made just a few casts and smugly hooked a tarpon. The fish turned out to be 151 pounds, which broke the world record of 148 pounds, 8 ounces that had been set by Joe Brooks six years earlier (Apte was Brooks’s guide that day). “I’m glad I didn’t catch that fish,” Valdène says now. “It would have been a farce.”
The next year, Valdène asked Woody Sexton if he would guide him. Sexton, an educated, articulate man from the Pacific Northwest who spent five months of the year guiding in the Keys, was wary about breaching etiquette, of “stealing” another guide’s client. So he declined. Valdène, who by this time had begun to publish some pieces of writing, spent 1968 fishing with a handful of different guides, including Cal Cochran and Harry Snow. The next season, with the etiquette statute of limitations apparently passed, Sexton took Valdène on—well, sort of. Valdène was hungry for knowledge and improvement. He wanted to book Sexton for sixty days straight, and he suggested that they both fish, and that he would pay Sexton thirty dollars a day (half the price of the standard guiding wage at the time) and provide lunch. Sexton agreed to the deal, and the two men fished together like this for years.
In the spring of 1969, Sexton told Valdène that there was someone he wanted him to meet, a fellow writer named Thomas McGuane. He thought the two of them would get along. Sexton took Valdène to a small rental house occupied by a tall, prepossessing man with longish dark hair, who was accompanied by his wife and their eight-month-old son. Over a cup of coffee, McGuane told Valdène about the permit story he was working on for Sports Illustrated. Valdène happened to be also working on a magazine piece, a story about fly fishing for billfish for Field & Stream. Months later, after both men had left the Keys for their respective homes, Valdène read “The Longest Silence” and sent McGuane a letter complimenting him on the piece. McGuane responded by inviting Valdène out to his place in Montana that autumn to fish for trout, and a friendship was born.
The next year, Valdène and McGuane got together in Key West, where they were joined by Harrison and Chatham. And that’s when the fun began.
Valdène began renting a house every year for the months of May and June, hosting Harrison and Chatham (McGuane continued to live with his wife and son). They never locked the doors of the house, and they never had any idea of what they would find within it when they got back after a day on the water. “Every night, all hell would break loose,” says Valdène. “It was unbelievable, really.” Usually what they walked into was a revolving door of women, alcohol, marijuana, and mescaline.I If there was no party at the house, they took the show on the road, usually to their favorite bar the Chart Room, which was located inside a Key West hotel. “The whole scene was beyond anything you could imagine,” says Chatham. “Key West was an open town. The authorities, if there were any, didn’t seem to care what went on. It was wild, the fooling around after dark. That’s what it seemed like the town was there for, that misbehaving. Ordinary people never get the chance to act like that.”
The party attracted others. In subsequent years, Jimmy Buffett, still some time away from prominence, came down. He busked on the street in shorts and a T-shirt, making twenty dollars a night, or played for beer at the Chart Room. Hunter S. Thompson also began making annual appearances, roaring into town with his infectious, kinetic energy, and sometimes staying with Buffett. Neither man fished for tarpon (Buffett would later in his life), but they both had a multiplying effect on the nightlife.
At first, McGuane didn’t partake in the partying as much as the others. “I lived there and had a child in school and was involved in the community,” he says. (His wife, Becky, started the Montessori school in Key West that’s still operating today.) “Guy and Russ and Jim were there without their wives. They were like conventioneers. They had a great time. I had just a good enough time to be decent.” McGuane would succumb, though, eventually.
Throughout it all, the four men—McGuane, Valdène, Harrison, and Chatham—stayed true to the fishing. They never missed a fishable day, no matter what had transpired the evening before. McGuane wrote about that time in his story “Southern Salt”:
Closing time left four hours for the sleepy quiet of backyards and old streets before the sun came up, and once the engine of the skiff went down and several waves of sickness were fought back, we again were up and running—lust and booze banked down—off looking for fish in the glare… I remember the special horror of fighting wild tarpon with a bar-life muzziness on my face and my clothes revealing beer stains, cigarette burns, and head-shop perfumes.
Valdène and McGuane, the most serious tarpon anglers of the bunch, had the boats and would take turns fishing with Harrison and Chatham, neither of whom ever really learned how to pole a skiff. The men fished for fun and not for records. There wasn’t much competition for spots on the water—there were only two full-time Key West guides at the time—so the water world was theirs to explore: Garrison Bight, Man and Woman Keys, Archer Keys, the Sisters, the Eccentrics, Mule Key, and basins and banks that had yet to be named. The fishing they experienced was almost implausible. And the discovery and the fishing—all of it, really—felt like an extension of their respective practiced arts. “It was creative work,” says McGuane. “We were kind of inventing it as we went along. The shallow water fishery was really blank paper. That excitement you feel when a piece of writing is going well, that was very much the feeling when things came together on the flats, with the wind and the tides and the fish.”
One morning during Harrison’s first year in Key West, McGuane took him out and poled him around. Harrison had never hooked a tarpon, and had been making a mess of himself on the boat. (“A hilarious clusterfuck,” as Chatham describes it.) Valdène was poling Chatham around nearby. McGuane spotted some fish and told Harrison to cast. “Jim made the cast, but it was a horrible one,” says Chatham. “The wind caught his fly and it sailed over the back of the tarpon.” But there happened to be another tarpon right behind the intended target, and that fish ate the fly and took off. “Jim was terrified,” says McGuane. “His knees started buckling and he actually sat down in the middle of the boat and said he couldn’t go through with it. I told him I was going to beat the shit out of him if he didn’t.”
Harrison stood back up and fought the fish—a small one, around fifty pounds—for a while, until he had it ten feet or so from the boat. And then the hook pulled free. “We called that a Palm Beach release,” says Chatham.
Later that night, when McGuane, Valdène, and Chatham walked into the Chart Room, they spotted Harrison sitting at the bar holding court, surrounded by a group of admirers who were hanging on his every word. He had a cigarette in his hand and was using it to emphasize his points, pausing his monologue every once in a while to take a dramatic drag. “He was lecturing people like he was some expert on tarpon fishing, telling them how to cast, how to hook them, and how they should really try the Palm Beach release,” says Chatham. “It was vintage Harrison.”
In 1972, Valdène invited his sister’s boyfriend, a Parisian filmmaker named Christian Odasso, to join the group in Key West and do some tarpon fishing. Odasso immediately fell in love—with the place, the dramatic fish, the light on the water. He told Valdène they should make a movie.
The next year, Odasso came to Key West with a French film crew in tow. For three weeks, camera crews in boats followed Valdène and Gil Drake and Woody Sexton around on the water. They shot scenes from Duval Street of the buskers, the hippies, and the general cultural diaspora of the town back then. Jimmy Buffett did the sound track, recording it all in one day in a studio in Nashville. Brautigan had his cameo, of course. McGuane and Harrison had brief ones, too. They, along with the other anglers, all give off an Easy Rider vibe in the movie, sporting bandanas and cut-off jeans and yards of facial hair. In one scene, three guides—Drake, Sexton, and Steve Huff—are interviewed. They are far more clean-cut than the anglers, the only facial hair among them being Huff’s neat mustache, which had not yet gone white.
The stars of the movie, though, are the tarpon. The movie features what is still some of the best footage of jumping tarpon, complete with the audible gill flutters and the spectacular crashing flops back into the water. The film is loosely plotted. What we see is a funky town and an incredible fishery, and there’s a sense that the world is a good-hearted place. One scene, however, throws that notion into question. It was shot on a party boat, and the small sharks caught by the people on the boat are brutally and senselessly clubbed to death, a stark contrast to the ethereal beauty of the tarpon shots.
At the end of that tarpon season, Valdène and Odasso took the raw footage to a famous editing house in Paris. Jacques Cousteau and Orson Welles were editing films there at the same time. The soft-core pornography film Emmanuelle was being finished there, as well. In September of 1973, Valdène and Odasso had completed Tarpon, and they showed it a few times to some small groups in the Keys. Valdène then set out to try to sell it. He shopped it around for a year and a half, getting meetings with the presidents of ABC, CBS, and NBC. No one bit. “It was too hippie-ish for the big networks,” says Valdène. He did sell it in Japan, but for a very small sum of money, nothing close to the hundreds of thousands it cost to shoot and edit it. Valdène eventually gave up and put the film, stored in metal canisters, in a barn in Normandy.
Here and there, though, there were whispers among those deep in the fishing world about the film. A few bootlegged copies floated around the country, and it achieved a cult status. I watched what must have been a copy of a copy with a friend in the 1990s. The picture jumped every couple of minutes, and the sound was tinny. I remember feeling giddy the entire way through, regardless.
Nearly three and a half decades after the completion of the movie, Valdène’s sister called him one day and told him she’d come across the film canisters in the barn. She wondered if he wanted them. Valdène had the canisters sent to a film house, and there it was discovered that though the film had been exposed to the heat and cold for more than thirty years, it was mostly intact. Valdène decided that he wouldn’t try to sell it again, and instead gave it to his niece to do with it whatever she pleased. She had it remastered as a DVD and released the film, officially, in 2008. Fishing geeks like me gobbled it up.
There was another movie filmed partly in Key West during that era, this one a year after Tarpon. It was McGuane’s movie, the film adaptation of his novel 92 in the Shade (some of which was shot in England). McGuane had signed on as the writer and director of the movie, which attracted a notable list of actors and actresses—Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Margot Kidder, Elizabeth Ashley, Burgess Meredith, and Harry Dean Stanton. It was during the filming of the movie that McGuane finally joined in on the fun that his friends had been having in Key West, and he went all in. “Buffett and I were running the streets,” says McGuane. “I was probably tired of working all the time and being left out, so I really blew it out for a few years.” McGuane wouldn’t write another novel for five more years. Instead, he focused on writing more scripts for Hollywood and partaking in that scene, which was, decidedly, in the fast lane. During this period of time, he earned the nickname “Captain Berserko.”
During the filming of 92 in the Shade, a sort of musical chairs took place among couples. The affairs turned into marriages. Peter Fonda would eventually marry McGuane’s first wife, Becky. McGuane married Margot Kidder. After he and Kidder were divorced three years later, McGuane married Laurie Buffett, Jimmy’s sister (to whom he is still married). McGuane lasted only a few more years in Key West after the movie, and then he left, pretty much for good. He quit drinking and drugs, cold turkey, in 1981. “My issues with those substances were always more behavioral than addictive,” he says.
Brautigan had stopped visiting Key West by then, too. He fell out of touch with the rest of the men, save for the occasional incomprehensible, late-night drunken phone call. In October 1984, he was found dead in his home in Bolinas, of a self-inflicted gunshot. He was forty-nine.
That left Valdène, Harrison, and Chatham, who kept making the annual pilgrimage to Key West, even without McGuane, the man whom Valdène had called “our leader.” They collectively became known as the “Fat Boys.” They only had four good eyes among them, but they maintained a nearly bottomless appetite for fishing and fun.
By the late 1970s, though, the setting had begun to change. Gone was the Key West as Valdène had first discovered it, “sultry, magnificent, and suspicious,” with the hippies and the loads of pot and the acoustic guitars. In their place: Cubans in dark sunglasses and cocaine and guns. The young, carefree hippie women had been supplanted by hardened professionals. (Valdène says a Madame once asked the Fat Boys if they wanted to be “testers” for women she was planning on bringing down from Miami.) T-shirt shops sprung up on Duval Street, and cruise ships did daily dumps of T-shirt customers onto the shores of the island. In 1977, Buffett released the song that would become his anthem, Margaritaville, which crystalized the notion that Key West was a drunken tourist destination.
Valdène, Harrison, and Chatham still went out fishing on any clement day, no matter what, but it all began to get a little sloppy. The wild nights began to leak into the daytime. They sometimes drank Cuba libres while on the water. One day, some fishermen spotted Valdène’s skiff drifting out to the ocean, unmoored and seemingly unmanned. When the fishermen approached the boat to investigate, they found Valdène, Harrison, and Chatham dead drunk, passed out asleep in the bottom. “It became a real fucking mess,” says Valdène.
The coup de grâce came in 1982, when Harrison, flush with some money he’d made from his work (McGuane had returned Harrison’s earlier favor and helped him get published), showed up in Key West with a quarter ounce of cocaine. The trio finally ran out of it a few weeks into their trip. “And we looked at each other and said, ‘If we ever do this again, we are going to fucking die,’ ” says Chatham. After that season, they all went their separate ways. And that was that.
Valdène went back to Palm Beach and, later, to a quail plantation outside Tallahassee. Every decade or so, he has produced a new little gem of a book. He continues to fish for tarpon, but not in the Keys. McGuane lives most of the year in a beautiful, unpretentious ranch house on a trout stream in Montana. He has remained productive, publishing more novels, as well as collections of short stories and nonfiction.II He still fishes for tarpon every year, mainly in Boca Grande, where he owns a house. Harrison would escape back home to Michigan, and then to Arizona and Montana, producing along the way the novels and novellas, including Legends of the Fall, that brought him critical acclaim and fame. In March 2016, at the age of seventy-eight, Harrison died, his heart finally succumbing to the punishment of decades of hard drinking and smoking and overeating. When his heart stopped, he was in the midst of writing a poem. Left on his desk was a piece of paper. On it was the unfinished poem and a streaked line made by the pen in his hand as he collapsed. Chatham moved to Montana, and then back to California. By the 1990s, he’d finally received the deserved recognition for his epic landscape murals of the Rocky Mountain West, which were collected by the likes of Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford. Declining health and finances made his final years difficult. He never fished for tarpon again after turning fifty. He died in November 2019, in a nursing facility at the age of eighty.
In the immediate years after the four men left Key West, they stayed in touch. When they saw or talked to each other, they reminisced about how lucky they were to partake in that spectacular fishing and to imbibe in the pleasures of Key West at the time, and to emerge from it all somewhat intact. But time and work and life moved on, and in the subsequent decades, they started to fall out of contact, except for McGuane and Harrison, who wrote letters to each other every week for fifty years. “I feel an empty channel with his passing,” says McGuane. “He was breathtakingly intelligent.”
“The tarpon fishing is what brought us to Key West,” says Valdène. “The women and the partying came later and that was all part of the fun. But it was the tarpon fishing that kept us there.”
Perhaps tarpon fishing with a fly rod attracted these artists because of a basic artistic premise—that yearning to understand, to express and reveal something that defied any easy description. That “immediate unreality.”
Perhaps tarpon fishing with a fly rod was the perfect representation of Stevens’s artistic conflict between neatness (the perfect knots, the perfect cast) and chaos (the bedlam of the hookup and the fight). Maybe the fishing itself—explosive, beautiful, and tremendously difficult—was the art form, that struggle against limitations that, as Kurt Vonnegut once put it, “is what you respond to in a work of art.”
Much art came out of this period of these men’s lives. McGuane wrote his novel about fishing guides and his nonfiction fishing stories. “There’s a part of fishing that’s kind of like looking into a fire, a place where a sort of alpha wave activity can go on where creative ideas can begin,” he says. Harrison used angling as a metaphor in much of his writing, and also used it as a form of respite when he needed a break from his work and his hard-living ways. “Fishing makes us less the hostages to the horrors of making a living,” he would say, many years after Key West. Chatham wrote a few books about fishing, and his western landscapes incorporated elements of the vastness and wildness of the Key West sky and flats. And Valdène—though less prolific and less well-known than his contemporaries—has produced some beautiful writing, which include some pieces about his time in Key West.
I think now of the artists who moved into the SoHo neighborhood in New York City in the latter half of the 20th century. In that former industrial wasteland, in those cheap, high-ceilinged lofts, artists lived together and created and showed their work. They made SoHo hip. And once that was established by the artists, then the more commercial and competitive and richer set came in, following the artists’ wake—the high-end boutique and chain stores, the lawyers, the hedge funders. And they made the neighborhood theirs.
Because of who they were becoming as artists, because of their look and their joy and their creativity, McGuane, Harrison, Chatham, Brautigan, and Valdène brought a sense of cool to fly fishing for tarpon.
And then the world-record chasers—commercial, competitive, and rich—entered the scene and descended upon the little Florida town of Homosassa, making the sport theirs.
I. Some of the early Keys fishing guides freelanced as late-night weed smugglers, using their intimate knowledge of the backcountry to avoid detection by the authorities while delivering bales of marijuana, which were known as “square groupers” in the local vernacular.
II. McGuane is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame.