Inventing Montana: Dispatches from the Madison Valley

Montana is not a place. It is merely the name of a place, a convenience of language, ambiguously significant. Montana does not even comprise a distinct physiographic region; it specifies only an arbitrary geopolitical construct of the type always betrayed by straight borders on a map, drawn by diplomacy or war.

...

What is called "Montana" arises in part from our exchanges with this living space, one organism to another. Without such transactions, there is geography, but not a place.

...

This book contains, in a sense, my own Montana, which began taking shape over two decades ago when I spent a brief few days here. They came also as an afterthought, at the end of a weeks'-long pilgrimage to the trout-fishing shrines of the West, the kind of expedition most fly anglers make at least once in their lives, partly because it gives on fishing identity a certain credibility, and partly because it would be a shame to die without having a look at some of the loveliest rivers on the continent.

"the region is to fly fishing what the Golden Crescent is to opium production, and does a similarly brisk business."

Aside from the fish, who undoubtedly have their own opinion on the matter, and regardless of whatever it may have been in the more distant past, fishing is now at heart a form of play. I have always assumed this much to be obvious, but judging from the current trajectory of the sport, evidently it is not. Modern angling is uncomfortable with the idea and prefers to regard itself more along the lines of modern medicine, as an acutely specialized body of knowledge dispensed by a priesthood of experts. It tends to operate in the oxygen-depleted atmosphere of high gravitas or, more recently, in the overstimulated public displays of cultivated fanaticism. Those deficient in the requisite intensity - who fail to mount a sufficiently strategic angling campaign, do not whoop in ecstatic wargasm as the battle rages or pump the air with a victory fist at the climactic moment of conquest - are left to marinate in the unpleasant secretions of their own inadequacy."