The Whole Spam Brothers Thing

The whole Spam Brothers thing started when my good friend, Bill Howarth, gave me a Spam baseball cap. At the time I was cooking the Blasphemous Breakfast, one of the traditional meals we eat when we are camping and fishing.

The Blasphemous Breakfast is fried Spam on a bagel with mustard and hot sauce. It gets you right with the world.

Bill interrupted the food preparations (I was probably opening the can and sliding the meat out - a tricky operation) to present me with the gift. He had another hat for himself and we took to wearing them on the rivers and streams we fished.

About a year later we were fishing the McCloud River in Northern California. We stopped for lunch, which meant we dropped the tailgate of Bill’s truck and reheated a kick-ass chili he had made the night before. Parked next to us was a fly fisherman from San Francisco, nattily dressed, eating yogurt and fruit. Graciously we offered him some of the chili (this was before the popularity of the Atkins diet) and graciously he refused.

To set the scene a bit more finely, we had been camping for five days and we were carrying a bit of bark on us. We noticed that the other fisherman was staring at us. Unable to rein in his curiosity he finally asked, "What's the significance of the hats?"

"The hats?" Bill asked, "I guess we're the Spam Brothers."

And that's the genesis of the Spam Brothers. Included in this not so august group are my son, Justin, and another great friend, Guy Williams.

Later, I wrote a story entitled "The Spam Brothers" that was printed in Gray's Sporting Journal. The story follows the exploits of four fly fishers who live in Montana, a reunion when one of their number returns 60 pounds heavier after having played the accordion on a cruise ship.

You can read that story by choosing this link: The Spam Brothers