How David Coggins Found His Way

IN HIS COLLEGE YEARS, IN HIS COLLEGE YEARS, David Coggins took to the road trip like a true believer. He made serious choices on these trips. What should we listen to on the drive from Minneapolis to Maine? The CD player demanded and rewarded decisiveness. “You didn’t have all the music that ever existed on your iPhone,” Coggins reminds us. He favored “sensitive art school” fare like R.E.M., The Cure, The Smiths and The Great Gatsby as a multidisc audiobook, which he sometimes listened to out of order. The vehicle was a beloved Saab 9.3, which he ultimately traded for a fishing rod.

Coggins found his callings—fly-fishing and writing—on those road trips. As he put it in one of his books: “Back then everything felt new, and I loved those road trips—the landscape, the water, the trout, the dive bars, the sense of freedom. Discovering the world comes easy when you’re young and don’t mind sleeping in motels where the television is chained to the wall.”

Coggins is still a lover and practitioner of the long-haul drive. “All my favorite driving is around Montana and Idaho and Colorado,” he says. “It’s lovely out there. But I also like western North Dakota. It’s very, very empty, and all of a sudden everything falls away and you’re in the Badlands, ideally as the sun goes down. Most people in my life think I’m crazy. They’re probably right. But I think of a long day on the road as a day to myself in a big place.”

The 49-year-old has turned his enthusiasms for fishing and wandering into a formidable career, building a reputation for writing about angling in a style that balances amateur excitement and an old hand’s humility. His acclaimed books carry simple, to-the-point titles: The Optimist, his memoirish debut, and The Believer, telling tales of far-flung locales like Norway, Scotland, Wyoming and Argentina. He posts regularly on his Substack blog, The Contender. (“On the most basic level,” he says, “I’m partial to declarative titles. They’re simple, straightforward, and, I hope, memorable.”)

Meanwhile, he’s also become something of a men’s style maven, collaborating with brands like Drakes and J. Crew. (A boot project with Viberg carried the Coggins-esque name The Outsider.) He’s emerged as the rare present-day personality who can comment knowledgeably on his chosen field, fly-fishing, but also deliver solid tips on good whiskey and which tie to wear with certain shoes.

As pursuits, writing and fishing both favor the prepared, but also carry no guarantees of success. “You have to be self-contained, observant, prepared to get lucky, but open to failure,” he says. “Angling lends itself to storytelling, probably too easily. You set out, hope to succeed, and often you don’t.” What’s perceived as luck and what’s failure changes over time. “It’s odd,” he says, “because you’re trying to seek out a narrative in real time. I’m not sure that’s always a good thing. Sometimes you should just let it all happen and see what it means later, but you don’t always have that luxury.”

Behind it all lies Coggins’s belief that you have to get out there. ”If you don’t make the time and the effort to get to Patagonia or Norway, nobody is going to do it for you,” he says. Unpredictability is part of the joy of the chase. “Every trip, I see something I haven’t seen before. Even guides, who are on the water hundreds of days a year, see things for the first time. Remember, when you’re fishing, it’s not just about the act itself—you’re in the natural world, usually in a beautiful setting, hopefully out of reception. That’s always a good place to be.

When it comes to angling, I do consider myself an optimist, though that sense of optimism is certainly tested. If there’s a theme that ties writing and fishing together it’s that I think it’s good to get out into the world, to be curious, to be open-minded, to have some convictions, and hopefully, to catch some fish.”