Entries Tagged as 'People'
Scott & Nix did an excellent interview with fishing artist, book illustrator and fly fisher Flick Ford this week. Flick fly fishes “99 percent of the time,” with most of his days spent in the Delaware River system, Berkshires and northeast coast.
“On average I would say [I fish] about 90-100 days a year, down a bit from when I used to fish 100-150 days a year. Gas, time, money is in shorter supply these days, but no complaints.”
Ford was most recently illustrator of the popular book FISH: 77 Great Fish of North America
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Renowned adrenaline junkie, Jeb Corliss has hurled himself from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Seattle’s Space Needle, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Stratosphere casino in Las Vegas, and even received three years probation after being arrested trying to breach (famously) New York’s Empire State building.
Now, Corliss has set his sites on an even more radical departure: “becoming the first man to jump from a plane and land (alive) without a parachute.”
“‘Everybody has a gift, something they’re good at — and my gift is fear. I can do things with fear. When most people are crippled by fear, on the ground, puking, that’s when I’m at my best,’” reports Bill Gifford of Men’s Journal
Cold precipitation didn’t dampen the spirits of those celebrating the renaming of Colorado’s “Dream Stream” in honor of the late Charlie Meyers on Saturday. Karl Licis writes about the event in The Denver Post: “A steady flow of sportsmen, public-policy makers and regular readers filed past a newly placed kiosk with photos, biographical tidbits and a vintage column by Meyers that celebrated a barefoot fishing boy.”
From Hawaii and Baja to Tasmania and Western Australia to Easter Island and South Africa, Californian surfers Rusty and Greg Long have made a life out chasing the world’s biggest waves. Kitt Doucette of Men’s Journal spends a few days traveling, surfing, and trying to understand what makes these “big-wave hell men” tick.
“Their styles on the water reflect their personalities, with Greg surfing aggressively and competitively, riding deep in the tube and cutting waves to pieces with powerful carves, and Rusty surfing patiently, smoothly flowing between elegant, relaxed turns. Neither brother, though, is about to let the pursuit of a trophy or title get in the way of their good time. ‘Contests are an important part of big-wave surfing,’ Greg says, ‘but the greatest joy for me comes from leaving the first set of footprints on an isolated beach, paddling out into unknown waters, and being the first to ride a wave somewhere.’”
Bay Area sailor, banking heir, and entrepreneur David de Rothschild has built a 60-foot catamaran largely from recycled plastic bottles. In March he decided to sail this environmentally friendly vessel (the Plastiki) across the Pacific to Australia, with the hope of getting people to start thinking more sensibly and critically about our consumptive waste and its long-term impact on the earth and oceans.
Anchored in Christmas Island after 38 continuous days at sea, Jo Royle, the Plastiki’s 30-year-old captain, is interviewed by Sindya Bhanoo of The New York Times about battling the “power of your mind” while at sea, being a woman captain on a boat full of men, and the unique challenges of piloting this vessel:
“The fact that 70 percent of the Plastiki’s buoyancy is created by over 12,000 reclaimed plastic bottles, which lie directly against the flow of water, makes the boat slow and very tricky to maneuver. There were times when you could have been led to believe that we were in fact rowing across the Pacific and not sailing.”
The passing in April of the 100-year-old man whose dams plugged up the Colorado and other majestic western rivers suddenly got plenty of attention this week, from sources as different in scope as the High Country News and the Wall Street Journal.
In The New York Times, Douglas Martin quotes Marc Reisner, who in his 1986 book Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water said Mr. Dominy cultivated Congress “as if he were tending prize-winning orchids.”
Here’s Dominy in an interview with Outside magazine in 1999, talking about the push to build Glen Canyon Dam: “‘Of course we covered up some delightful country: country that was inaccessible, country that would never be visited by very many people, which we turned into one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.’”
But our favorite coverage of Dominy’s legacy came yesterday from NPR’s Elizabeth Arnold, whose three-minute podcast includes the surprising reminder that the Sierra Club supported Glen Canyon in return for the bureau passing up on other damming projects.
After months of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Kevin Pearce, Olympic snowboarding hopeful who was critically injured during a December halfpipe accident in a Park City, Utah, has finally returned home to his family in Norwich, VT.
“Pearce walks without assistance, a little gingerly but sturdily enough to navigate the stairs to the familiar bedroom in the barn. He looks a little different now, too. His hair, after being shaved to one length, has grown back to the top of his ears. He wears bold, dark-rimmed Oakley Frogskin frames with prismlike lenses,” reports John Branch of The New York Times.
“‘There is little use thinking about the past, what could have been, or what may be in the future,’ Simon Pearce, his father, said. ‘He has stayed focused on the present moment. And it feels like it is working.’”
Noted Croatian-American writer Josip Novakovich (April Fool’s Day, Salvation and Other Disasters, and Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust) explores his Hungarian lineage in the latest issue of Nowhere: Travel Stories.
“My great-grandfather died as a lumberjack near Pecs when my grandfather was only three years old. A tree crushed him. Should that count as Hungarian roots? And I was born during the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising. The thing that intrigued me about Hungary, though, was the Soviet enigmatic and anti-charismatic presence. “
Club Of The Waves interviews Southern Californian surf painter and sculptor Phil Roberts about sidewalk art, his unique scientific illustrations, and what he hopes to communicate through his work:
“Figurative in any medium. I’ve always been drawn (pardon the pun) to the human figure and the challenge of capturing personalities since I started doing caricatures in high school. I’ve been very fortunate that my destiny as an artist has always been evident to me.”
The BMX documentary The Birth of Big Air (part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary film series), directed by Jeff Tremaine and produced by Johnny Knoxville–both of Jackass fame, pays tribute to freestyle rider Mat Hoffman (“The Condor”) who has been instrumental for more than 20 years in progressing bike tricks, vertical-ramp riding, and helping to promote Freestyle BMX events worldwide.
At the Tribeca Film Festival, Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times interviews Hoffman, Tremaine, and Knoxville about the origins of their film, Matt’s experimental surgeries, and what it’s like to be knocked unconscious after an enormous jump:
“The first thing I learned, whenever I’m starting to come back to consciousness, is remember to never try to remember anything. All your most impactful and devastating memories come back first. You don’t have all those great memories to balance it out. But I got knocked out in Japan, and I wake up and look over to the side. And my wife is six months pregnant. And I’m like, We’re having a baby?” Mat Hoffman.
