River Songs: Moments of Wild Wonder in Fly Fishing
by Steve Duda
Mountaineers Books, 2024
192 pages
$24.95 US hardcover
I came to fly fishing by way of books. I started reading literature devoted to the sport three decades before I picked up a fly rod, some twenty years ago. Still, a day seldom passes when I don’t reach for an angling book sitting impatiently on the arm of my reading chair. This daily practice has led me to conclude that, while the turn of the last century (1880-1920) is generally acknowledged as the Golden Age of Fly Fishing—at least in North America—I believe the last forty years can justifiably be celebrated as the Golden Age of Fly-Fishing Literature.
Hardly a year goes by when I don’t read at least a dozen angling books of exceptional quality, some of which will undoubtedly endure as classics. Time alone will determine whether Steve Duda’s debut collection of essays, River Songs, achieves this distinction. All I know is that it’s one of the most pleasurable angling books I’ve read in some time.
Duda, who lives in Seattle, is as much Renaissance man as fly angler. A former editor of The Flyfish Journal and head of Fish Tales at Patagonia, he casts a long, fine line over contemporary fly fishing in America as a reporter, storyteller and writer, not to mention musician. The first thing I want to say about him is that he writes about fly fishing not as a lifestyle, but as a way of life. In contrast to journalists, academics, naturalists, or even guides, who write about the sport, he’s a fly fisherman, first, who writes about the sport to help pay the bills.
Whatever else fly fishing may be, it’s a threshold into magic and mystery, joy and bliss. Many angling writers try to express these ineffable qualities. Only a few, however, have the depth of perception coupled with literary elegance to give imaginative shape to them. This makes the book’s subtitle, ‘Moments of Wild Wonder in Fly Fishing,’ a literal translation of what, like a thick mayfly hatch at dusk, brims so abundantly within its pages.
Duda has been fly fishing for a long time—and it shows. His observations, insights and opinions are steeped in the hardscrabble trials that lead to failure as often as success in lives of dedication, if not devotion. Drawing on his journalistic skills, he offers an informed layman’s appreciation of a range of arts and sciences including history, ecology, archaeology, geology, paleontology, anthropology, biology, ornithology and ichthyology, in addition the history of fly-fishing literature, from Izaak Walton through nineteenth-century English angling scribe Francis Francs to Thomas McGuane and David James Duncan. He draws on his background as a musician to discuss the interesting connection between music and angling, which dates at least as far back as Walton.
What follows are a few fleeting thoughts on a selection of the collection’s fourteen chapters. The book starts on a high note with ‘Ghosts’, a poetic essay in praise of carp, that much-maligned (at least in North America) fish described variously as ‘the fabled basalt bonefish, the wily and elusive Columbia River brownback, the rod-busting desert ditch pig.’
‘Make the Sky Better’ is a bit of a thematic outlier in that it’s a lyrical meditation on the Western Cliff Swallow, a streamside companion that anglers welcome. As a reader who lacks a scientific background, I admire Duda’s research acumen and his ability to describe the natural world in terms that excite my imagination.
In ‘Slide’ Duda seamlessly transitions from recollections of growing up in Detroit and making his first visit to Tiger Stadium to the ‘wonder compounded’ that serves ‘as the lifeblood of that perfect place every angler creates within the heart.’ As a lifelong Detroit sports fan (Red Wings, Pistons and Lions, as well as Tigers) this chapter had special appeal for me.
‘The True Names’ takes Duda to the ‘remote and pristine’ Devils River to hunt Texas-size black bass, both largemouth and smallmouth. Here, as elsewhere, he introduces readers to the native peoples who inhabited the area for millennia before European contact.
Duda exercises his comic muscles in ‘Sir Longballs’ by regaling readers with a tale of getting a tooth pulled while lying helpless on a campsite picnic table, to the intense amusement of his assorted angling buddies. This harrowing event is juxtaposed with a medical ordeal involving an enlarged scrotum. Behind the veil of humour Duda is really examining human mutability and mortality, deep themes that underlie and inform the philosophical side of angling.
In ‘The Gnarlies’ Duda travels to British Columbia’s ‘primordial, raw’ hidden’ Gnarled Islands, ‘a place where names don’t hold and time isn’t measured by a calendar,’ to fish for coho and silver salmon in the company of ‘a gigantic humpback whale.’
A personal note, here: I’m becoming increasingly disconcerted by the fashionable trend in contemporary fly angling literature that aggrandizes exotic wilderness destinations, with their requirements of fat wallets or corporate connections. In ‘Cue the Tango Scene’ Dudas at least offers a fresh perspective on travelling to Patagonia, one of the planet’s last good places. ‘Thousands of miles from home and it feels like I’m in my backyard,’ he confesses. ‘. . . it feels like these are my own rivers.’
‘Hope’ and ‘Burning Pram’ are companion chapters that beat at the heart of River Songs. In the former, Duda acknowledges that anglers cling to hope ‘like a life raft.’ In the latter, he asserts that, while angling is ‘a relentlessly solitary sport,’ it’s also ‘built upon camaraderie in a way few other activities on Earth can match.’
Duda’s strong commitment to environmental causes and deep connection to the American West Coast shine bright in ‘Gather White Stones,’ a powerful examination of dam removal on traditional tribal grounds adjacent to the Klamath River in Northern California.
River Songs is a handsome blend of text and image. Striking woodblock prints by Seattle-based artist and photographer Matthew Delorme head each chapter which, in turn, are separated by brief impressionistic vignettes or interpretive interludes known as River Songs. The book’s structure reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s debut story collection, In Our Time, which is anchored by ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ I doubt this is accidental.
It’s often said that angling is a metaphor for life. Duda will have none of this. Conversely, he articulates, in an eloquent, rough-edged voice all his own, a compelling argument that fly fishing is an integral part life; not separate and apart, but one and the same. To practice fly fishing the right way, he insists, a person must live the right way, despite the persistence of sweepers and deadfalls that impede the way. Anyone who questions this metaphysic has but one happy option. Take a long, slow, satisfying dram of River Songs—and enjoy. Sláinte.
This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.