On film, he was always suffused with golden light, his wild gray beard like backlit Spanish moss. His voice was gravel in a mason jar of molasses. It was the soundtrack of his particular perspective on freedom—freedom to pursue things of deeper value. Ride with me, he would say. Take a walk with me. We’ll go places. We’ll do things.
It’s difficult to imagine anyone sucking the marrow out of life as thoroughly as did Philip “Flip” Pallot. He was a soldier, banker, wanderer, and fishing guide. And when his ESPN television series, The Walker’s Cay Chronicles, debuted in 1992, he embarked on a rocket ship ride to outdoors celebrity like no one before. He would later cofound Hell’s Bay Boatworks and serve as the first ambassador for Yeti, a company started by two young Texas men he’d taught to fly-cast, Roy and Ryan Seiders. He inspired legions to pursue dreams of a life on the water.
Then he died, on August 26, from complications in surgery.
Though eighty-three, Flip was in the prime of his life—a man with plans, ideas, dreams, schemes, hotel reservations, a full tank of gas, and an unfettered love for his wife, Diane, that would make a teenager blush. His last text to me was a note to describe the procedure he would undergo. He was leaving for a hospital in Georgia the next day. “It’ll be in the rear view mirror,” he wrote, “and I can get on with hunt season.”
Of course, his life was not all sunshine and leaping tarpon. He carried a burden of sorrow over the environmental woes of the Everglades, Florida Bay, and the Florida Keys that weighed on him like wet canvas. He warned of the cascading effects of allowing Florida’s wilds to unravel. But he remained vital and vibrant to the end. An acolyte of hand sharpening knives and shooting a traditional bow, he was nonetheless a ferocious Instagrammer, staying up late into the night to respond to scores of comments from fans. “The natural world is degrading all around us,” he once told me for a Garden & Gun profile of him I wrote in 2017, “and it’s not enough to reach people who already know that. Shortly we’re going to turn all this over to a group of people with few touchstones to the natural world, and who don’t understand what it is that we’ve done such a poor job of protecting. I still value the traditional, old-school ways. But I have to cross the bridge. I can’t sit back and simply refuse to embrace a method of reaching the last bastion of hope for saving this stuff.”
If there ever were a day when Flip Pallot sat back, I’d struggle to believe it.
It’s true that when David DiBenedetto, the editor in chief of this magazine, asked if I wanted to write that Flip profile, I answered him, “Flip Pallot? Is he still a thing?” Somehow, unbelievably, the Pallot mystique had not infiltrated my upbringing.
Then I met him. And as I would learn over the next eight years, he was, indeed, still a thing. He is still a thing. For so many of us, he will always be a thing. He will always be the North Star.
