(Another post along the lines of my remembrance of Mel. This one appeared as a foreword for Ernest Schwiebert’s two-volume, Nymphs project. If you don’t know much about Ernie, I’d encourage you to read some of his works—both technical and storytelling.)

Before Ernie passed away in late 2005 (has it really been that long?), my father and I met him in Livingston, Montana. We caught up on old times and new, and talked about his upcoming Nymphs books. Before shaking hands and parting, Ernie was kind enough to give my father and me a couple of proofs from the project—insect illustrations, specifically.

Little did we know on that cool August evening that it would be that last time we would see Ernie. It made his parting gift all the more bittersweet the day that we learned of his passing.

As it turned out, Ernie’s son, Erik, took the reins and saw the vast Nymphs work through to posthumous completion. In the process, he asked my father and me to each write a foreword for the two volumes. What follows is mine.

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In eighth grade, I had to write a one-page paper about a person who had significant influence in my life—someone whom I admired greatly. Actually, everyone in my English class had to do the same. A few of my fellow authors picked their parents, others sports heroes, and some, perhaps hoping for a nod of pedagogical approval, chose well-worn historical figures. Me? I picked Ernest Schwiebert.

Growing up in fly fishing, I was introduced to Ernie—both literally and figuratively—when I was quite young. Ernie and my father had been friends since I was a kid, and Ernie’s books held a prominent place in my father’s copious angling library. And, with more than mild encouragement from my father, I was soon paging through those texts.

As a budding artist devoted heavily to Tyrannosaurus rex and similar creatures of Mesozoic stature, Ernie’s intricate full-page plates in Nymphs truly opened my eyes to the illustrative beauty that was possible in the entomological realm. Some of Ernie’s works, through a combination of technical excellence and printing process, appeared nearly photographic to my youthful eyes. For the first time I realized what was really possible as a fly-fishing illustrator. Talk about influence! Ernie had single-handedly challenged and inspired me to pursue a key part of my future creative and professional life. Nymphs (and Trout, as well) was not only an education, it was an example of excellence that has invigorated my visual and technical thoughts to this day.

I even began my early education in “angler’s Latin” with Ernie (and of course, with my father, as well). By paging through Ernie’s books, including a first edition of Nymphs, my pre-high school vocabulary was soon pervaded with words like Ephemerella, Baetis and Gammarus. Not the best words for impressing either girls or bullies, but the trout seemed rather receptive in their own way.

Of course, Ernie was about much more than taxonomic investigations and well-applied tints on paper. Ernie was also a storyteller. Ernie’s many recollections, in Nymphs, as well his dedicated storybooks, really struck a chord with this young reader.

One of Ernie’s stories was a tale of discovery, centered on fishing a damsel hatch on a high-altitude lake in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. He wrote of lonely country, and cowboys, and snowpack and spotted brook trout—all things that are fodder for a child’s imagination. Only few short years after reading that story I was to be with Ernie and his son, Erik, on another high-altitude lake in the same mountain range, fishing the same insect hatch. It was one of the most memorable times of my angling life, and a perfect setting for fathers and sons to bond together over tales of fish won and lost.

I write these words having just returned from a salmon fishing trip to one of Wisconsin’s small coastal rivers. It was a day of piercing blue skies, vibrant fall leaves and crisp breezes wafting across the dunes from nearby Lake Michigan. I’m sure it was a day of which Ernie would have approved. Yes, I think that Ernie might even have written of such a day, of shouldering on a wading jacket and vest, of the unmistakable sounds of a hen fish cutting in the shallows, and of a slab-sided adversary surging against a reel’s loudly protesting drag. The words Ernie would have chosen would be the type that could enthrall a 12-year-old boy. Enough perhaps, to make that boy, shy and with braces, get up in front of his eighth-grade English class and tell them all how an unfamiliar man with an unfamiliar name could have a deep influence on a person’s life….

That influence carries over into this book. In the first edition of Nymphs, Ernie encouraged anglers to go out on their own and fill in the blanks of hatches he could not cover. By doing so, I think that he was also encouraging readers to go out and have their own angling epiphanies, their own connections to art and life, and to live their own stories. With Nymphs (II), I hope that you, like me, find a renewed vigor to do exactly that, and to take a moment and reflect on the life of a man whose influence still spans angling generations.