No Do-Overs in Paradise: Journeys Through Wild Places and Inner Landscapes is a book by photographer Stephen Collector, with an introduction by Terry McDonell, 2026. Here are some of my favorite lessons learned from the book and from Collector in general.
Telling of an old fisherman taking his last trip to Alaska by himself, "I was stunned to see the gregarious mask he'd worn during dinner at the lodge the previous night fall from his face. I knew all too well how he felt. As he boarded the jon boat, he smiled weakly and reluctantly waved goodbye. If the reason for my lifelong obsession with fishing then so be it. If it was from a paternal void left by my father, I'd learned from my father's omission. It wasn't important anymore. My son's generous gift had gotten me to Alaska, and Pop, though he'd never know it, had picked up the tab."
The endless horizon of the prairie in winter furnishes a refuge for me. On the lonely dirt roads that stitch Colorado and Nebraska together, I have carried a camera and a shotgun, hunting something neither could recapture
What was once a vast sea of grass, teaming with wildlife, is now a mono culture of agribusiness. Westward expansion and farm-filled livelihoods have reshaped the prairie. Derelict homesteads display the history of the family farm, etched on the land like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath.
The fields were ablaze with orange. Dan Lahren, a former bird-hunting guide in Montana, firmly believed that upland birds differentiate color and that blaze orange alarmed them.
It's widely known that bird hunting is a walking proposition. It's simple. The more weary miles you cover, the higher the percentage of making game. It doesn't' hurt to have a dog with boundless prey instinct. We'd started a little before daybreak and put in some serious legwork. I'd fallen into a midday pattern with my spaniel. Once I'd break for lunch, she'd briefly defer her prey instinct to wolf down her breakfast. As I sat on the truck's tailgate, eating an apple, Finley lay in the pickup's shade. We were both tired. Listening to Mark Orton's moody soundtrack to the film Nebraska, my earlier euphoria gave way to melancholy.
The boundless expanse of the land, coupled with the somber presence of the derelict, decaying farm buildings evoked a bewildering sense of loss.
On Denver sporting writers in the newspapers, "When I first embraced fly-fishing in the mid-1970s, the major outdoor writers for the two major Denver papers were Bill Logan of the Rocky Mountain News, and Bob Saile of the Denver Post. I read their weekly columns religiously." I read them religiously as well, together with Charlie Meyers and a few short-term columnists who tried to fill their big shoes.
