 A Good Life Wasted
by Dave Ames
Told through the eyes of a longtime Montana fishing guide and itinerant
fishing bum, A Good Life Wasted offers a unique perspective on an implausible
period in the recent history of human civilization. When Dave Ames
started guiding, Rocky Mountain locals rode horses and dug camas roots;
now they’re trading stock options on cell phones. The collision
of stone and computer ages was short-lived, but the deep-rooted themes
of this book remain.
A chronicle and celebration of the fishing-guide life, A Good
Life Wasted is a vicarious pleasure for anyone who has ever wondered, even
once, what it would be like not to have a “real job.” The
book is poignant and spiritual; it’s Blackfoot Indians and copper
miners’ daughters; it’s fiddles and guitars and the fabric
of space; it’s about what happens to wild people when the wilderness
is gone.
From the first chapter—in which Dave Ames recalls bluffing his
way into a job as a fishing guide to the rich and famous (after barely
managing to suppress the overwhelming urge to go postal at the federal
agency where he suffered his first, and only, “real” job
in a cubicle farm)—we’re hooked. We gladly follow Ames
as he describes the rite of tasting clouds of mating midges to better
match the hatch, tells the story of a fabled Blackfoot fishing guide,
and shares his further adventures as a guy with no job, no office,
and no stress. A Good Life Wasted spins a fascinating, compelling web—a
web that entices the deskbound salary slave to make a break for it,
and head west to big sky and fast, cold water, ASAP.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Ames, over the past 15 years, has averaged perhaps 150 days of
fly fishing each year as an outfitter and guide. He spends much of
his time in Montana in pursuit of trout and grayling. He has written
for the Chicago Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sports Afield,
Fin and Feather, and Montana magazine. He has also written the fly-fishing
cult classic, True Love and the Woolly Bugger. He lives in Helena,
Montana
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