Receiving a kids’ spinning rod when his brother Harry got a fly rod deeply disturbed Steven Meyers.
His father, a competitive rifle shooter and avid outdoorsman, gave his sons fishing rods because he “wanted his boys to do the things he loved.”
So a 4- or 5-year-old Meyers – he can’t remember the exact age – “quietly took” the fly rod and made it his own.
He figured he was the consummate outdoorsman among his siblings while his brother “couldn’t care less.”
That initial theft spawned a love of fly-fishing that took Meyers from his hometown of Bloomfield, N.J., to Durango and many points in between.
Meyers first came to the San Juans in 1974 during graduate school at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology to take large-format black-and-white photographs for his thesis.
He noticed the road between Durango and Ouray marked “scenic route” on a map, and thought it looked interesting.
“I’d never been to this part of the country before,” Meyers said. “I got to the top of Molas Pass and fell in love with the region.”
Meyers wanted to live there someday, so he moved to Denver while working on his thesis and took a job with Sundance Publications.
The publishing company moved its operations to Silverton a year later into an abandoned railroad depot owned by the Silverton Historical Society that had been a recent target of a bombing.
The historical society figured it was less likely to be attacked again with a tenant.
Sundance moved back to Denver because it found it “too hard to run a publishing company in Silverton,” Meyers said.
He didn’t go with the company.
“I realized this was home, and I’d fallen in love with this place,” Meyers said. “Silverton was right in the middle of where I wanted to be, so I stayed.”
Meyers ran a graphic arts darkroom, took fine-art photographs while being represented by the Alonzo Gallery in New York, worked at Sunnyside as an underground electrician, taught ski school at Purgatory and worked with Betsy and Dick Armstrong at the Avalanche Research Facility, among other occupations.
Funding ran out for the Avalanche Research Facility, and the Armstrongs moved to the Denver/Boulder area.
Betsy took a job at Fulcrum Publishing as an associate publisher. The subject of books about “seeing nature” came up in a meeting.
She knew someone who could write one: Meyers.
“I said I’d love to do it,” Meyers said.
While he was writing, Meyers’ wife at the time, Karen Boucher, became ill with leukemia.
She wanted him to keep working on it. Eventually, she passed away, and writing, along with fly-fishing, became part of Meyers’ healing process.
“It was my major way with dealing with grief,” Meyers said. “I fished almost constantly, tied flies incessantly.”
Lime Creek Odyssey came out in 1989.
Meyers moved to Durango during his wife’s illness and stayed there, penning Streamside Reflections and The Nature of Fly Fishing for Thunder Bay Press.
Eventually, publisher Don Luquistin wanted him to write and photograph coffee-table books about fly-fishing.
With the deadline six months away, Meyers realized he couldn’t accomplish both tasks in that time frame.
Luquistin said he could do one or the other, and Myers chose to write.
“It was then that I started thinking of myself more as a writer than a photographer,” Meyers said.
He continued to live in Durango, writing and serving as a guide for Duranglers.
In 2000, Meyers got the opportunity to teach creative writing at Fort Lewis College when Red Bird was asked to be the college’s acting dean and couldn’t teach all of the classes he was scheduled for.
“I loved teaching, and apparently students liked me, so they kept me on,” Meyers said. “Gradually, I fell in love with teaching up there; I consider it my real thing.
“People ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a teacher and then I’m a writer,” he said.
Westwind Press recently released new versions of Meyers’ books Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.
“The best fly-fishing writers their books aren’t really about fly fishing. It’s always connected to larger issues in life,” Meyers said. “It’s about much, much more than fishing – what a meaningful life is, what it’s like to put roots down.”
Above anything else, though, Steven Meyers is a fly-fisherman. It brought him halfway across the country and kept him grounded through a constantly changing definition of his career.
“Part of moving out here was wanting to get back into fly-fishing,” Meyers said. “It’s one of those things few people do halfheartedly.”
kgrabowski@durangoherald.com
