I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.