HOOKED!
John Nichols’ fishing tale is part autobiography, part allegory and all about an enduring love of northern NM
John Nichols’ latest book — “The Annual Big Arsenal Fishing Contest!” — is the most recent example of why he is a New Mexico literary treasure.
Nichols is best-known as the author of the 1974 classic novel “The Milagro Beanfield War.”
His new novella is about middle-age male bonding, about the love of fly fishing and about the love of New Mexico. In essence, loving life.
The contest in the title is an at times friendly, at times cutthroat, trout fishing competition among buddies Yuri Stone, an intellectual and outdoors writer from New York City, Bubba Baxter,a bigger-than-Texas macho man and writer from Lubbock and the unnamed narrator, a writer/outdoorsman from Taos who tells this tall tale.
By the end, the novel shifts from a boisterous story to an allegory with tragic overtones.
“I intended it as an allegory against the horrendous nature of capitalist competition, the globalized world we live in, where basically we’re destroying the planet in every way possible,” the author said.
The three buddies fish year after year in an actual area named Big Arsenic Springs. It is in the Wild River segment of the Rio Grande above Questa.
Here is a brief description of the official contest’s location, which courses from Little Arsenic Springs to Big Arsenic: “It was a section defined by dark boulders, some boulders higher than a man, gardens of boulders. Shallow channels and gushing waters slalomed around the boulders. The boulders framed and populated a variety of pools, back eddies, shallow riffles and frothy waterfalls.”
Nichols has fished up and down the river for about 40 years, from Pilar to the Wild River section.
“I’ve had more fun on that river than any other place in my life,” he said.
Yuri and Baxter are composites of real people Nichols has known.
“I’ve had adventures on the Rio Grande with a handful of dear friends very much like the characters in the novel,” he said. “The camaraderie is one way of loving each other. So I tried to make that as vivid as I could in the story.”
Nichols jokingly called “Milagro Beanfield War” “my albatross.”
“You should be grateful if they hang even one albatross around your neck,” he said. It was later made into a feature film.
Among his other novels are “American Blood” (1987), about violence in America, and “The Sterile Cuckoo” (1965), a coming-of-age comedy-drama, also a film.
Nichols has written works of nonfiction, including the trilogy “If Mountains Die,” “The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn” and “On the Mesa.”
The 76-year-old Nichols has written 20 books and has worked as a screenwriter.