Sheridan Anderson, I hate I missed him!

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I came across and old magazine entry about the death of a fly fisherman, Sheridan Andreas Mulholland Anderson. I had heard of him years before and even have a copy of the Manifesto. I am always sad in a way when I hear or read about a man I missed meeting that I know I would have liked, especially one that died during my lifetime, especially one who died too soon. Here is an excerpt from the piece I found in Drake Magazine." Just like everyone can remember the first time they met Sheridan, almost everyone can remember the last time they saw him. Joe Kelsey, who was on his way from Berkeley to the canyons of southwest Utah, stopped by to visit Sheridan in Vegas in 1981. “By then, there were all these hot climbers sleeping in their VW buses near Red Rocks,” he says. “They were drinking Perrier and doing yoga. Sheridan came in with a bottle of Jack, and plunked down in a chair, and they were all in awe of him. They knew he was one of the greats.” One of the last times Mike Anderson saw him was at their father’s funeral in February 1983; Sheridan was close to 300 pounds, and didn’t look well. “I hadn’t heard from him in a while, other than that drunken phone call every so often: ‘I miss you, I love you, brother,’” says Mike. “He just didn’t take good care of himself.”

On the evening of March 31, 1984, while he was in Vegas, he suffered an acute attack of emphysema and passed away. Mike spread his ashes in the Golden Trout Wilderness near Lone Pine, where Sheridan had spent many seasons exploring the streams and high mountain lakes of the southern Sierra. It was a place he’d hiked before, where he had found peace and solitude—and even found the elusive golden trout, “a leaping, flashing, dancing, bold ray of living sunlight.” He wrote:

Mount Humphreys was blazing away in the late afternoon sun, looking like a colossal throne against the relentless blue sky. I grinned and started laughing. I’m an eagle (I thought), a big, fat, very thirsty, rollicking eagle who was about to spread his wings and swoop down to Bishop and drink gallons and gallons of cold beer."