Angling Arts

Calling After Water: Dispatches from a Fishing Life

By Dave Karczynski

Lyon’s Press, 2024

208 pages

Over the last century English literature faculties at American universities have played a major role in shaping angling writing. A long, fine line connects Henry van Dyke, Bliss Perry and Odell Shepard, through Norman Maclean and Ted Leeson, to Henry Hughes, Christopher Camuto and Chris Dombrowski. And then there’s Nick Lyons. An English prof born in Brooklyn who taught at Hunter College in Manhattan, he did more to advance the cause of fly angling literature as a writer, editor, publisher and advocate since the seventeenth century when a young John Cotton accepted an invitation from his venerable mentor Izaak Walton to complete The Compleat Angler.

Dave Karczynski joins this esteemed company of piscatorial scholars on the merits of his third book, Calling After Water. A member of the English department at the University of Michigan, he began writing essays for angling magazines before publishing a couple of instructional books: From Lure to Fly, which introduces bait-cast and spin anglers to fly fishing,and Smallmouth: Modern Fly-Fishing Methods, Tactics and Techniques. Subtitled Dispatches from a Fishing Life, hislatest offering is his first memoir. And it’s a dandy.

The collection reads like autobiographical stories rather than informative essays and are arranged in a loose chronological order.Karczynski’s literary intent is self-evident. He has been fishing for as long as he’s been writing–and it shows. His chapter headings are often inspired by music and literary titles (ie. Into the Mystic, In Patagonia, Mad Men, Kings of the Road, Now I Lay Me). He sometimes uses nouns as verbs such as ‘hexed’ (known as anthimeria in academic discourse). He routinely acknowledges literary figures as companions on the water. He invents his own phrases such as ‘hatch hands’ which refers to anxiously fumbling and bumbling with rod and reel during an insect hatch (known as neologisms). Finally, he reveals a keen sense of humour, often at his own vulnerable expense.

Karczynski’s stories trace narrative trajectories that impart more than practical information about how, when and where to fish. Rather, his focus is on why we fish. Philosophy and metaphysics usurp methods and techniques. Answering Izaak Walton’s observation, he balances action with contemplation, recreational practice with reflection. Consequently, readers respond to his stories as both fly anglers and readers of literature.

The literary quality Karczynski imparts to his writing sets it apart from conventional ‘hook and bullet’ outdoor sports journalism. His heightened language seeks out fresh and vibrant expression because how he says something is as important as what he says. The commonplace becomes uncommon, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

I could quote innumerable passages to illustrate my point, but I’ll limit myself to selections from three paragraphs from ‘Cloud, Castle Creek’ where he describes the river’s colour as ‘melted sugar just before it starts to burn.’ His senses are acute as he observes, ‘I can tell this is going to be one of those days when you remember not just the fishing but the in-between spaces, too, the shadows of clouds rippling over spruce, the nods of wildflowers as bees launch off, the sharp whiffs of juniper in the breeze. He casts to a riffle, ‘where the river . . . makes a sound like a melting piano.’ He catches a trout of ‘pale gold trending to silver, with tiny red spots, like drops of wet blood.’ Finally, he is ‘reminded of how strange and magical fly fishing can appear, to pull perfect glittering confections of life from a few inches of crystal-clear water.’

Karczynski’s piscatorial tastes are enthusiastically catholic, encompassing multiple species of trout and salmon, in addition to steelhead, pike, muskie, black bass, walley, char, grayling, carp and mahseer. The nineteen stories spanning fifteen years are bookended between two of the most intimate pieces. The opening is an Origin chronicle that casts backward to how he came to fly fishing from spin fishing in his mid-twenties. The conclusion casts forward to how his fishing life will change as he crosses the threshold of forty, marries and faces the daunting prospect of fatherhood. He contemplates the many ‘firsts’ awaiting his daughter: ‘The ones she won’t see coming and can’t expect, wonders beyond what her mother and father could ever imagine, bright shapes in bright sun, swimming round and round, waiting for her reach.’

A trio of Patagonia stories begins with a luxury, all-inclusive junket facilitated through corporate connections. On the evidence of angling books published over the past few years, it seems as if American writers are obligated to include paeans that end up sounding like variations on the theme of piscine splendor. I, for one, would like to see a moratorium placed on quid-pro-quo reportage about this Last Good Place. Am I going too far by suggesting that this obsession is approaching a form of piscatorial colonialism?

Conversely, I much prefer Karczynski’s no-frills, backcountry, ‘tent and tarp’ dispatch and the final Patagonia tale which acts as a springboard as he channels his Nick Adams by purchasing a modest streamside property in Northern Michigan. When, unable to sleep one night on the east slope of the Andes, a ‘few yards from what might be the best brook trout river in the world,’ he realizes that intimate knowledge of familiar, resident waters is is better for the soul than casting a line on far-flung, exotic waters as a tourist.

As a Canadian, I especially enjoyed a pair of stories–one with his brother, one with friends–about fishing in Northern Ontario. Although this part of Canada has remained a popular destination for both American and Canadian anglers for more than a century, few contemporary American writers find this unchartered country a worthy subject these days. A pity, this.

Karczynski ventures to Alaska a couple of times and, not surprisingly, is rewarded with ‘Stupid Good fishing.’ Then there’s the road trip he takes with a friend from Michigan to Labrador to fish for ‘big humpback brook trout.’ Think of Jack Kerouac meeting Lee Wulff. He also travels to the Himalayas in search of the mystical Mahseer.

The stories that resonate deepest with me feature the places in which Karczynski is most passionately invested emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually. His two trips to Poland, his ancestral homeland and the ‘forging’ ground of native brown trout, are lovely. Similarly, I’m moved by his three stories about fishing for various species in Michigan, rich in both fly angling and literary angling traditions. Equally touching his is return to Wisconsin for his beloved smallmouth bass, which leads him to conclude, ‘When it comes to bassin’, there’s more joy than a philosopher can count.’  

Michigan has produced its share of celebrated angling writers, from Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane to Robert Traver and Jerry Dennis. It also inspired much of Hemingway’s best writing about rivers and fishing. Karczynski honours the legacy of ‘the sweet, unpredictable, virtuosic music of fishing’ with singular craft, elegance and grace. Which is to say, I await his next book with keen anticipation. Meanwhile, I’m recommending Calling After Water to all my closest fly angling buddies, all of whom are avid readers.

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

River Songs: Moments of Wild Wonder in Fly Fishing

by Steve Duda

Mountaineers Books, 2024

192 pages

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.

The Power of Positive Fishing

By Michael J. Tougias & Adam Gamble

Lyons Press, 2023

244 pages

No truer words were ever written about fishing than Izaak Walton’s assertion that the ‘art of angling’ is equal parts contemplation and action. The contemplative element of fishing accounts for the rich tradition of literature that flourished after publication of The Compleat Angler in 1653. Moreover, fishing has proven itself unique among a wide field of sports writing by lending itself to the examination of the complexities, complications and contradictions of the human predicament.

One of the most recent additions in this long, varied narrative tradition is The Power of Positive Fishing. Subtitled A Story of Friendship and the Quest for Happiness, it is co-written by Michael J. Tougias and Adam Gamble, both of whom are successful authors based in New England. Tougias has written a couple of previous books—There’s a Porcupine in My Outhouse and The Waters Between Us—of special interest to readers of angling literature.

The memoir begins more than twenty-five years earlier when Tougias, an author of maritime, travel and adventure books, was looking for a distributor after his publisher closed its doors. Gamble, a writer of children’s stories who also operated a small regional publishing company on Cape Cod came, to the rescue. Many writers since Walton have acknowledged the sympathetic connection between the art of angling and the art of writing, but few have explored the topic as comprehensively as Tougias and Gamble. Anglers who write about fishing when not engaged in the practice will find the observations fascinating.

Their friendship didn’t develop, however, until they discovered their shared love of fishing. In fact, it is sight fishing for striped bass and bluefish in the shallows off Cape Cod, first in kayaks and then in Gamble’s 18-foot Scout fishing boat, that provides the glue that not only holds their friendship together but strengthens and deepens it over time. ‘Without the mutual passion for fishing two people as different as Adam and I might not have become friends at all,’ Tougias notes. ‘For Adam and me, fishing was the activity and the ocean was the setting which afforded us the opportunity to exchange ideas, to brainstorm, and get to know the true measure of the other person.’

The memoir is built on an epistolary structure of alternating chapters. Readers are placed in the privileged position of eavesdropping on close friends sharing an open, candid conversation ranging over professional and personal matters. When they first met, each enjoyed secure jobs with stable incomes and happy suburban families with two children. Life was good; but it did not last. Eventually their worlds were ravaged by the tempestuous seas of divorce, financial insolvency and addiction. Tougias and Gamble demonstrate admirable courage tackling their problems head-on while exposing their painful wounds. It becomes evident that both writers not only view fishing as a metaphor for life, but view life as a metaphor for fishing.

Thanks in no small part to the friendship they sustained through ‘the power of positive fishing’ they eventually find safe harbour in terms of professional success and personal contentment. Most anglers would agree that success on the water—as in life—increase with confidence and optimism. After all, angling is all about hope, which can be extended to life experiences generally.

Nonetheless, life’s challenges and hardships have taught this old angling curmudgeon that there isn’t a golden key that magically opens the door to a happy, fulfilling life. Consequently, I’ll leave it to readers to discover for themselves what the power of positive fishing is all about. Although I was engaged in the life struggles Tougias and Gamble surmounted with humour and grace, I found their prescriptive inspirational ideas about ‘manifesting’ success through optimism less than persuasive. (I must add that Tourgias lost me completely when he offered banal dating advice for middle-aged lonely hearts.)

My skepticism, however, did not erode my pleasure in reading the memoir. Tougias and Gamble are both accomplished authors who write evocatively about fishing, whether in a boat in the ‘thin water’ off Cape Cod, or while on angling adventures in the Bahamas or Florida in pursuit of a wide range of game fish.

Gamble’s chapters about burial at sea, ‘Sleeping with the Fishes,’ and his epilogue, ‘Seeing the Light,’ are alone worth the price of the book. Whether the form of fishing he practices with Tougia is compulsive, obsessive or addictive, I agree with him when he reflects: ‘I like to think of a day of fishing as a spiritual retreat of sorts. Removed from the regular rhythms of family and work, immersed in the overwhelming beauty of outer nature, connecting with friends or family, and involved in an activity where the regular flow of time often seems to cease, my spirit always feels refreshed and renewed.’

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

The River You Touch
by Chris Dombrowski
Milkweed Editions
321 pages
 
I knew I was in for a rewarding literary adventure when I came across a question in the Preface to Chris Dombrowski’s The River You Touch: ‘What does a mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene?’ This isn’t the kind of question Trout Bum scribes ask; it’s a query poets ponder.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Dombrowski was a poet before he wrote his first fishing book—Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker and the World’s Most Elusive Fish—which cast angling biography from a new mold. It stands to reason, then, that his second offering would expand the conventions of the memoir. The closest angling memoir to The River You Touch I know of is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, written by Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy, not to mention an ardent fly fisherman, who views the universe through the eyes of wild trout.

Before leaving the wrong impression that Dombrowski’s memoir is a turgid metaphysical treatise on the meaning of angling, let me backtrack. Tracing the paths of Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane, both of whom have written eloquently about rivers, fish and fishing, Dombrowki left Michigan for Montana ‘in search of wild trout [and] vast systems of unfettered freestone water.’ He acknowledges his debt by writing insightfully and tenderly about Harrison—who was celebrated as a fiction writer, poet, essayist, gourmand and outdoorsman before his death in the spring of 2016—based on a friendship that deepened over time both on and off the water.

After guiding and augmenting his income through odd jobs for more than two decades, Dombrowski made his way to the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, where he now serves as assistant director. All the while, he has lived in Missoula with his schoolteacher wife, Mary, and three children. Each plays a prominent role in the memoir.

The River You Touch is essentially a meditation on place which, in turn, shapes character and defines personality. The place in question is the Columbia watershed which Dombrowski comes to know intimately as a sacred ‘covenant’ and which encompasses his home and family, his small-footprint lifestyle and ‘river-hewn’ friends including guides, conservationists and wildlife biologists. All are circumscribed by his love and concern for our beleaguered planet.

With a poet’s sympathetic eye and felicity with words, Dombrowski gives tactile, sensuous expression to Montana in all its manifold colours, tones, textures and moods. This is ‘the grace of landscape’ writ with passion, understanding and appreciation. His insights into the material world often springboard to lofter observations. For example: ‘While I’m stimulated to no apparent end by the sight of rivers, it is their audible reverberations that strike the deepest chords. This must be what a monk feels when he hears the temple bell . . . this is the note the earth is ever sounding, calling me back to my wildest name.’

Like a skilful drift-boat oarsman, Dombrowski navigates variegated currents: courting and marriage; his wife’s pregnancies and his anxiety about fatherhood oscillating between mania and depression; planting roots in a welcoming community boasting eccentric denizens; and balancing subsistence living, including hunting for the table, with environmental activism triggered by an ignominious legacy of rapacious natural resource extraction.

He escorts readers on the state’s famous waters, acknowledging that ‘to learn the language of rivers is the task of many lifetimes.’ Until reading Dombrowski I had never thought of trout as ‘emissaries . . . finger pointing to the river,’ but the notion is appealing. I admire writers who compel me to see what I most cherish in new and fresh ways. This distinguishes vision from looking.

Dombrowski doesn’t spend superfluous words on landing trophy fish, choosing instead to filter his accounts through the lens of lyricism: ‘The inevitable elation that follows catching the year’s first fish is often coupled with instant, distinctly sexual melancholy. Some elan of expectation has been erased, a mystery, something previously imagined, made manifest.’

The River You Touch doesn’t unfold chronologically. Rather it meanders and wanders like a river flowing between past and present, memory and experience. We are introduced to those closest to Dombrowski including the high school English teacher who gave him the copy of A River Runs Through It that inspired him to ‘light out’ for Montana with visions of guiding dancing in his head.

We meet the clients he recalls most affectionately because of their noble character and passion for wild trout. Recollections of those now casting lines on the rivers of Paradise are washed in an elegiac patina devoid of maudlin sentimentality. It’s nearly impossible for anglers to wade rivers during insect hatches without being reminded of mortality’s tenacious grip on time. This awareness colours his account of the death of his friend, Spurgeon, an outdoorsman who ‘maintained a raw relationship with the landscape.’

Although reading water is second nature to Dombrowski, we accompany him as he learns about the flora and fauna that comes from ‘carnal contact with the earth.’ When he joins a friend morel hunting, we get a full description of the fungi (which he calls ‘thumbprints of the gods’) including its role in ‘the dead understory of the forest.’ He tells us how to prepare and cook it and how it tastes in a sauce of butter, cream, shallots, salt and pepper ‘drizzled over charred sockeye’—in a word, ‘heavenly.’

Most of the memoir is set in Montana; however, Dombrowski writes of his return to Michigan to teach at the Interlochen Centre for there Arts before heading back to Big Sky country. His account of befriending Michael Delp—a legendary Michigan poet who’s as ‘crazy’ about nature and fishing as he is poetry—is pure delight. Had William Blake been a fisherman, it’s likely he would have written visionary poetry resembling Delp’s.

Dombrowski presents himself as a self-deprecating, shaggy dog Everyman trying his best to make sense of how he fits into a universe bursting with awe, wonder and mystery. Any reader would feel at ease chatting him up at a coffeeshop counter, in a tavern with a jukebox cycling country ballads or on a riverbank after a long day on the water, with its piscatorial victories and defeats as green and vital as a cutthroat netted and released.

He resists the reflex of cynicism in ‘an epoch of irony’ by unabashedly celebrating hope and doubt, joy and sorrow, while affirming deep, sustained gratitude. Like fishing, this conviction doesn’t come easy but remains essential and necessary. Dombrowski sums it up in sentences that resemble poetry written in prose: ‘We are matter and long to be received by an earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children . . . The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us.’

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

North American release:
Illuminated by Water: Fly Fishing and the Allure of the Natural World
by Malachy Tallack
Pegasus Books
352 pages

UK release:
Illuminated by Water: Nature, Memory and the Delights of a Fishing Life
by Malachy Tallack
Doubleday
272 pages

While anglers might want to debate Sir Izaak’s famous assertion that fishing is an art, most readers agree that the best writing about fly fishing is most certainly an art. Malachy Tallack’s Illuminated by Water justifies the latter claim. Subtitled Fly Fishing and the Allure of the Natural World, it’s one of the most appealing angling memoirs I have ever read—and I’ve enjoyed my share over the last half century.

Tallack has fished most of his life, first on secluded locks as a boy growing up on the remote Shetland archipelago, and later on streams and rivers after relocating to the Scottish midlands. However, it’s his gifts as an author—including two works of non-fiction and, most recently, a novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World—and a songwriter with four albums to his credit that shape his memoir. As an author he has learned how to tell an engaging story through plot, character and setting. And as a songwriter he has learned how to distill complex experiences, emotions and philosophical concerns to their essence.

Tallack’s literary background makes Illuminated by Water as much a creative response to books about fly angling as about the practice of fishing. In the process he initiates a series of conversations or dialogues with fellow authors who write compellingly and movingly, eloquently and memorably about fly angling. He demonstrates his insights and sympathies when he contends that Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It is not about fly fishing—as do most anglers—but a meditation on beauty. I agree with his assessment.

Tallack is a perceptive and judicious reader. As a result his memoir fits comfortably alongside the work of the literary angling writers he references including Jim Harrison, W.D. Wetherwell, Ted Leeson, Negley Farson and Harry Middleton, in addition to nature writers Aldo Leopold, Gary Snyder, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Annie Dillard and fellow Scot Nan Shepherd.

Even when not mentioned directly, the whispers of writers evoked through the coordinates of time and place can be heard by attentive readers. For example, Tallack is obviously casting in the shadow of beloved poet Norman MacCaig and Andrew Greig (author of At the Loch of the Green Corrie and The Return of John Macnab), avid anglers both, when he fishes the sequestered locks of Assynt, in the northwestern Highlands.

In his introduction Tallack distinguishes between two types of angling books: those concerned with How and those concerned with Why. Like most angling books with literary aspirations, it’s clear where his memoir lands. ‘Why is the question that matters most to me, the one to which I keep returning, again and again,’ he writes.

He delineates his approach, which is more discursive than doctrinaire, by stating that his book is ‘an attempt to trace [rise rings], to follow them outwards and see where they go. It is an attempt to grasp some of that meaning and significance.’ As such, ‘it is about beauty, about hope, and about how freedom is sought and sometimes found.’ In other words, it’s neither instructional manual nor angling travelogue.

However fly fishing is regarded—whether sport, hobby, recreation, pastime, obsession or calling—Tallack insists it addresses ethical and aesthetic matters. This imbues Illuminated by Water with a quietly reflective quality in keeping with the meditative tradition represented in the West by such foundational works as A Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle and The Compleat Angler. Appropriately, his memoir’s structure embodies the graceful rhythm of forward and backward casts, as chapters alternate between contemplation and action (which Walton identified as the source of angling’s virtue).

The ‘action’ chapters chronicle fishing adventures, past and present, which he often shares with his brother Rory. Although he makes brief excursions to Canada and New Zealand, Tallack remains unfazed by the lure of exotic locales. Instead he finds solace fishing the ‘home waters’ of Shetland and Scotland.

His perspective is unique in a couple of ways. First, while Scotland is celebrated for its legendary salmon, which remain the domain of patrician wealth and privilege, he casts a plebeian line toward ‘brown trout more often than any other species.’ Second, while he has been fishing still freshwater locks since childhood, we accompany him through his apprenticeship on moving freshwater streams and rivers as an experienced angler in his thirties who gamely confronts the challenge of adapting to new techniques and methods.

The ‘contemplative’ chapters explore a range of topics including: the policy and practice of catch and release; the global distribution of brown and rainbow trout through resource management initiatives; the dangers of introducing stocked hatchery fish to wild native fisheries; the role size and quantity play in calibrating angling success; the influence of social class in the history of angling in Great Britain and how it differs from other places including North America; the reasons there are more female fly anglers in North America than in Great Britain and Europe.

Although I’m familiar with these topics, I learned new things from Tallack. Like all good storytellers or musical tale-spinners, he neither preaches nor proselytizes. He’s not interested in winning arguments or attracting converts. Rather his pleasingly conversational tone and pace are as warm as they are causal. Although Illuminated by Water can be read as an introduction to fly angling, it’s not limited to beginners—far from it. It should appeal to experienced anglers who want to dig deeper into the things that make fly fishing so intriguing and fulfilling.

For me, the best parts of his memoir are when Tallack puts on his ruminatingcap and speculates about the ineffable things that veer away from the practical and quantifiable toward the mystery and wonder that separate fly fishing and from such activities as tournament casting and competitive fishing in which bag limits determine success or failure.

With the exception of wading a familiar river and casting to finicky trout, nothing gives me more pleasure than sitting bank side and sharing a dram of malt whisky with my angling companions while wrestling with mysteries contained within our revolving planet. After reading his charming memoir I would like to extend an invitation to Malachy Tallack to join us whenever he can, for my companions and I concur wholeheartedly when he observes, ‘Angling can make the world feel bigger, richer and more complex.’

Scotland inhabits a special place in my heart and imagination. I have spent untold happy hours studying its history, art, music, literature, malt whisky, angling legacy and Celtic spiritual tradition. I have visited my ancestral home twice, travelling its length and breadth. However, I have never fished its burns, rivers or lochs. Because of the common complaints that stalk old age, I have little hope of casting fur and feather on its hallowed waters for the trout I cherish. This awareness had carried with it the sting of loss and regret, since soothed by the balm of Illuminated by Water.

Tallack was one of six finalists shortlisted for the prestigious £1,000 Richard Jefferies Award for the best nature-writing published and nominated in 2022.

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

Reading the Water
by Mark Hume
Greystone Books
276 pages

The worst blasphemy routinely hurled at fly fishing is reducing it to a sport, hobby or pastime. But don’t take my word for it. Instead, consider Mark Hume’s Reading the Water. Subtitled Fly fishing, Fatherhood and Finding Strength in Nature, it’s not so much an angling memoir as an account of life lessons learned through the wisdom of fly fishing. Admittedly this might sound highfalutin to anglers who doubt Hume’s claims. All I can say is: read the book and then judge.

Hume was born in British Columbia, the middle of five sons of English immigrants who were practicing Christadelphians (a sect disavowing selected Christian orthodoxy). His parents met during the Second World War when his mother was a member of the Women’s Land Army and his father was interned as a conscientious objector. They married after the war and moved to Western Canada.

Following his father’s example, Hume has lived most of his life in British Columbia as a journalist on some of Canada’s most respected newspapers. The province has produced numerous angling writers of merit including English-born Roderick Haig-Brown. I believe Hume—who has written four angling books built on environmental themes including River of the Angry Moon and Trout School—is the rightful heir to Haig-Brown. Hume’s knowledge of angling and ecology is extensive; however, it’s the eloquence and grace of his prose that inspires comparison to the writer he honours as ‘The Master.’ To prove my point I quote a lengthy passage that demonstrates Hume’s narrative gifts while capturing the essence of Reading the Water:

When I became a father I knew I would guide Emma and Claire along riverbanks, show them how to wade on rocks worn smooth by fluvial erosion, teach them how to read the water and how to cast with elegance. Those lessons of technique would be relatively easy to give, but I didn’t know if a love of fishing, which had fallen to me as a kind of natural inheritance, could be taught. I thought it important to try, however, because fly fishing for me had become a way of navigating life, and I wanted that for them too. Through an absorbing involvement in nature, fly fishing fosters resilience and inner strength. It can help make a person whole. I felt my daughters should know that, though I wasn’t aware at the beginning of our journey how much teaching them to fish would help me; how I would draw strength from them too.

Hume’s ‘bond’ with fishing was forged when he was seven years old on a mountain stream where he ‘found trout that seemed to be always waiting for me.’ Thereafter he ‘never stopped searching in water, not just for hidden fish but for answers, for emotional renewal and strength.’ Years later, after his daughters were born, he was confident that the knowledge he had learned through ‘the intricacies, rituals and poetry’ of fly fishing could be shared with others.

Like all good teachers who eventually realize they have learned as much from their students as they have taught, Hume fulfilled the role of mentor by holding onto the belief that, ‘fly fishing is an intensely observational way of experiencing the world and, in that sense, is a spiritual experience.’ Like Norman Maclean in his sacramental A River Runs Through It, Hume observes that the ‘powerful connection’ between faith and water is a form of ‘reverence for the virtues of nature’ that awakens ‘an awareness of what it means to fit in to the universe.’ Casting a fly rod is ‘a state of grace’ that instills in anglers an appreciation ‘that there is something wonderful, magical, revelatory about drawing fish into light’.

I quote generously to rebut anglers who view fly fishing as nothing more than one of any number of ways to catch fish. Equal parts spiritual autobiography and ethical treatise, Reading the Water follows a long tradition from Dame Juliana, through Sir Izaak, to Haig-Brown. As such Hume portrays fly fishing as a path towards awareness of both inner self and outer world with its concomitant responsibilities and obligations:

In my short lifetime I have seen great rivers dammed, entire forests clearcut, species pushed to the verge of extinction and the planet compromised to the point of becoming threatening. And yet, there on the water, reaching down to touch cold-blooded fish, I have always found hope. As my daughters awakened and began to see the Earth changing, I knew they would need that kind of connection to nature if they were going to have faith that the planet could be saved—and restored.

Reading the Water begins as a shaggy Huckleberry Finn adventure tale chronicling Hume’s introduction to various wood scenes and riverscapes that accommodated his piscatorial apprenticeship from catching trout barehanded, through bait with bobber and spin casting, to fly fishing, as his family moved from the fertile Okanagan Valley to the high plains outside of Edmonton and back to the lush majesty of Vancouver Island. ‘I came to believe as if by osmosis that fishing was my calling . . . I searched for mystery in water.’

During adolescence Hume immersed himself in ‘the world of fly fishing’ celebrated in the books of Haig-Brown, who was still fishing and writing from the banks of the Campbell River before its fishery was depleted—something the famous writer and conservationist did not anticipate. Still Haig-Brown’s many volumes ‘shaped my life and later helped shape the lives of my daughters,’ Hume confirms:

. . . I came to appreciate that fly fishing is more than a hobby; I began to realize that it is a spiritual apprehension, central to the lives of its followers. I knew I had to learn how to fly fish if I was to join that community, if I was to fish in a way that honoured the water and the fish . . . You either have this in your soul or you don’t. It is not taught but is awakened. And once aroused, it became a formative force in my life.

After receiving a fly rod for his sixteenth birthday, Hume fished through his teens for trout, steelhead and salmon among other sports species, before abandoning the activity during his twenties as he travelled about, advancing his career on various newspapers. He married and divorced in quick succession before marrying Maggie, a fellow journalist with a deep love of nature. Despite how good life was with his wife and daughters, Hume was stalked by ‘a distant, unfathomable feeling of despair.’ However, he found solace when he started teaching his daughters, born four years a part, ‘to read the water, to know the natural world.’

The annual family camping trips provided settings for fly fishing instruction. When each of the girls were big enough to manage a nine-foot rod, the initiation commenced. ‘A gifted fly rod is a wonderful thing to have, because a fly rod is as much a talisman as it is a tool,’ Hume observes. ‘When you fish with it, you fish with the love of whoever gave it to you. It becomes infused with memories . . . .’

Angling literature boasts many fine accounts of the piscatorial dynamic between fathers and sons. There are far fewer examples of stories and books celebrating fathers and daughters, which makes Reading the Water as unique as it is exceptional. Readers come to know Emma and Claire as individuals as they acquire not only the methods and techniques, but the ecological aesthetic informing fly fishing. Both learn well from their father, eventually becoming accomplished anglers who cast in time to their own individual rhythms. Following their dad’s example, they attain a ‘higher level of understanding’ after falling under the spell of tying their own flies.

Much has been made of fly fishing’s therapeutic qualities—and deservedly so. Various recovery programs confirm how military veterans and first responders, as well as cancer survivors, benefit from its healing powers. Less acknowledged, however, are the restorative powers of fly fishing in coping with less violent forms of trauma including such common experiences as loss, sorrow and remorse. After all, grief is grief.

Hume discovered that casting a fly line was an efficacious way of dealing with the emotional challenge of his parents’ divorce, including the isolation of his mother and the estrangement of his father. He spent many years in search of surrogate father figures who he found through fly fishing including Haig-Brown and Father Charles Brandt, a trained ornithologist and former Trappist monk who was ordained as a hermit priest while living a half century on the Oyster River. More recently fly fishing played a significant role in Hume’s recovery from prostate cancer.

Although I have read most of Hume’s books and some of his newspaper articles, we have never met. Still, while reading his memoir, I felt like we were sharing the same stretch of holy water, not because of the activity but because of how we view it as a spiritual practice. Although religious sustenance ‘for some is revealed in a bible . . . for others it lies in the cast fly, or in the eye of a fish cradled in their hands,’ Hume offers. ‘In such moments it is possible to experience a meditative state, to reenter the natural world, to understand again how the earth dreams. And that is worth knowing, worth teaching.’

To declare his assertion of faith, Hume has given fly anglers and non-fly anglers alike Reading the Water so they might make up their own minds. All I can say is: Amen.

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

Headwaters
by Dylan Tomine
Patagonia Books
256 pages

Call me a crank with a tender tummy, but destination angling memoirs make me queasy. It’s not because I lack a bulging bank account or connections with gear manufacturers and tackle retailers. Nor is it my lack of media credentials to fulfill a tacit quid-pro-quo contract of complementary travel, accommodation and angling access in return for glowing advertorial reportage aimed at anglers with deep pockets. After all, the monetization and commercialization of angling has been around for a while. Still, the thought of the last wild game fisheries becoming celebrity playgrounds for the rich and famous saddens me beyond words.

My squeamishness is not limited to ethics, honed over four decades as a newspaperman when so-called ‘freebies’ and chequebook journalism were condemned. I simply have no interest in tourist accounts that exploit cliches and stereotypes, punctuated with a few obsequious details in the name of local colour. I don’t need to have preconceptions confirmed by cursory observations in the field. After all, when an angling scribe gains exclusive access to a desirable fishing destination—invariably located in one of the few remaining wild places on our beleaguered planet—a reader usually gets what he expects: spectacular fishing amidst spectacular scenery, complete with obligatory rustic inconvenience serving as humorous foil, charmingly eccentric guides and, last but not least, delicious local cuisine and beverages served after an unforgettable day on waters that have never seen an artificial fly.

Despite these reservations, there are a few writers who circumvent the globe in search of angling adventure and exotica who I find irresistible, for two essential reasons. First, they pierce the superficial and obvious with insight, sympathy and precision, guiding a reader to what D. H. Lawrence called ‘the spirit of place’. Second, they write beautifully, what Hemingway termed ‘grace under pressure.’ Some of the writers I have in mind include Thomas McGuane (The Longest Silence), Philip Caputo (In the Shadows of the Morning), David Profumo (The Lightning Thread) and Charles Rangeley-Wilson (Somewhere Else and The Accidental Angler).

To this select company I would add Dylan Tomine on the strength of his accomplished sophomore memoir Headwaters. Subtitled The Adventures, Obsession and Evolution of a Fly Fisherman, it follows his earlier memoir, Closer to the Ground: An Outdoor Family’s Year on the Water, in the Woods and at the Table. He was born, raised and continues to reside in the American Pacific Northwest while devoting his life to outdoor pursuits. Formerly a fly fishing guide, he’s a conservation advocate and trustee with The Wild Steelhead Coalition, a documentary film producer (Artifishal, DamNation and Chrome) and a freelance writer (The Flyfish Journal, Fly Fisherman, Fish & Fly, Wild on the Fly, Adventure Journal, The Drake and New York Times).

Comprised for the most part of previously published magazine articles and arranged chronologically, Headwaters boasts a rich brocade of narrative threads: one chronicles angling adventures in far-flung places including the Russian Arctic, Argentine Patagonia, Christmas Island, Outer Banks, Japan, Cuba, Alaska and British Columbia; the other traces experiences closer to home, where his angling ‘affliction’ began in childhood on the Skykomish River and has been sustained through adulthood. For as he writes, ‘Fishing was never a sport, a pastime or hobby. It was, and continues to be, who I am.’

A self-confessed ‘steelhead bum,’ Tomine also fishes with equal enthusiasm for various freshwater game fish including trout, salmon and bass, in addition to numerous saltwater species. Tying these narrative threads together are sundry illustrations of pencil drawings by Frances B. Ashforth and brief diary entries tracing his growth from obsessive and fanatical angler to conscientious and enlightened angler as he introduces his son and daughter to the activity that has shaped, and continues to define, their father. These are not gratuitous character sketches to flesh out the memoir, but rather reveal the quality and nature of the person casting the fly rod, thus enriching and enhancing a reader’s appreciation of Headwaters.

Tomine gained my respect by acknowledging that his globe-trotting adventures came in part by virtue of his being a fly fishing ambassador for Patagonia. His incredulous response to good fortune, not to mention modesty and self-deprecating humour, made it easy for me to accompany him on his travels as he eloquently examines the good, the bad and the ugly. Likewise I eagerly succumbed to his intoxicating prose:

Why, as several friends have asked, would anyone want to travel so far to fish a huge river in a place famous for wind, for fish that aren’t necessarily any bigger or more numerous than you find somewhere closer to home.

Why, indeed? Any angler worthy of the title would applaud his answer:

Maybe it’s because the Rio Santa Cruz is an adventure unlike any other in fly fishing, with an opportunity to pioneer a section of river that’s hardly been fished, in a breathtakingly isolated setting. There are literally hundreds of runs and pools on this river that remain untouched, and it would take a lifetime to fish and name them all. Or it could be the fish themselves, a unique run of introduced wild Atlantic steelhead that are just now in the process of evolving and filling their niche.

Considering my reservations about travelogue angling memoirs, it should come as no surprise that the essays I most admire are ones devoted to Tomine’s home waters, which reside in his heart, if not his soul, because they are native grounds to dramatically declining populations of wild steelhead. The intimacy and deep affection with which he describes these waters and their native fish is matched by the passion, knowledge and eloquence with which he defends them against ‘the same old man-can-do-better-than-Mother Nature hubris.’

His anger is palpable when he deplores the arrogance and vanity that fuels ‘the mistaken idea that we (can) somehow, in the face of all our habitat destruction, engineer our way to abundant trout and salmon.’ As our endangered planet suffers the consequences of climate change, extreme weather, over-fishing, mismanaged fish stocking, toxic salmon farming, migration of invasive species and construction of dams, Headwaters becomes essential reading for all who cast pole or rod, a reminder that angling is an imaginative act, an ethical practice, an imperative of conscience, an obligation of stewardship. As such, his first-hand account, accumulated over many years, is a compelling companion to Tucker Malarkey’s Stronghold, which examines the Pacific Rim wild salmon fishery.

When an angling writer turns his pen (or keyboard) to the possible extinction of wild native fish, a solemn patina is unavoidable. Tomine is no exception as his memoir deepens and grows richer, sadder and more poignant, approaching requiem, if not eulogy—a remembrance of things as they once were and are unlikely to be again.

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

The Magic of Fishing
By John Moorwood
Great Northern Books
238 pages

As a newspaperman for four decades, I shared many a pint with colleagues who waxed poetic about writing books—you know, something they would toss off during idle hours in the unspecified future. Seems copious libation makes writers of us all. While most never got around to it, a few did, with mixed results. Many anglers cast comparable dreams of turning memorable fish into memorable words.

In the preface of The Magic of Fishing, English writer John Moorwood confides that he had always wanted to write a book to ‘celebrate my lifelong passion for fishing.’ He didn’t get around to it for many years because of ‘other priorities, like sleeping.’ We’ve all been there. However, count me as one of many readers delighted that he finally put pen to paper (or sat down at the keyboard).

The Magic of Fishing is aptly titled, for as Moorwood explains: ‘Magic is one of the few words that does justice to the sheer joy of one of the Earth’s most popular and ancient pastimes.’ Few anglers determined ‘to lose oneself in the landscape’ and ‘connect with something hidden and unpredictable’ would disagree.

The memoir echoes with the cadences of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The first part is a portrait of the angler as a young man, equal parts coming-of-age story and angling apprenticeship chronicle.

Fishing stories are often built on a foundation of nostalgia. Moorwood is no exception. As a young lad he was fortunate to have a mentor to serve as guide, instructor, confidante and companion. He acknowledges his good fortune in the person of his kind, patient, loving grandfather who was wise enough to extend his teachings beyond the how, when and where to include the more elusive whys and wherefores. A reader can feel the deep affection shared between the generations in the following passage: ‘Everything was glowing with an early evening radiance, including Granddad’s face as he handed me a packet of hooks before returning to his basket to light his pipe.’

Moorwood also understands that sympathy is the line that binds angling friendships. While fishing is by nature a solitary, private activity, it’s enriched through fellowship with other like-minded people. He invites readers to join in the camaraderie and congeniality offered by a couple of fishing organizations: first, the Dronfield Woodhouse Sports and Social Club in his birthplace of Sheffield; later, the Woking and District Angling Association after he moved south to work in Surrey.

The second part of this charming ‘ode to angling’ follows the author as he negotiates the vicissitudes of carving out a career (with its inevitable ups and downs, successes and setbacks) while becoming a husband (twice over) and a father. Fate arrives as an unexpected guest to many anglers. It so happens a couple of periods of unplanned unemployment not only rekindled Moorwood’s love of fishing, they gave him time to reflect upon and to record his experiences on the water, spanning nearly half a century.

Readers accompany Moorwood as he fishes numerous rivers, lakes and reservoirs including the River Trent as a youth and the River Wey as an adult. Although I’m not keen on fishing competitions of any kind, my bias didn’t prevent me from pulling for him as he competes in ‘match fishing’ and develops a taste for ’specimen hunting.’

I remained at his side with every cast as he observes: ‘Fishing always inspires hope — a lovely, uncertain yet wishful belief that today might just be the day. And while I have no doubt that golfers, rugby fans and keen flower arrangers can wake up and pray for a perfect sequence of events, I’m less sure they can touch the all-consuming anticipation of a young angler.’ The only thing I might add is that any angler devoted to the recreation is forever young.

The Magic of Fishing should appeal to anyone bitten by the piscatorial bug, irrespective of age, background or experience. Moorwood reminds me of the sleepless nights I suffered as a child as I eagerly anticipated a morning on the water (or, being Canadian, on the ice with a hockey stick instead of a rod). Although I’ve never visited England, I identify with his experience because the emotions and feelings he evokes transcend time and place, geography and landscape.

Similarly it didn’t matter that I’m a committed fly angler who fishes primarily for trout, steelhead and bass, while Moorwood is a bait fisherman who fishes primarily for ‘course fish.’ Although I’m an uncompromising purist when it comes to single malt whisky—neat or, when necessary to enhance its essentials, a drop of spring water—when it comes to fishing I believe purity is not only overrated but a divisive encumbrance. For example, while I was thrilled when my eldest son, Dylan, retired his spinning rod for a fly rod, I urged him to fish whenever and wherever he could, with many different anglers regardless of gear or tackle, as a means of learning as much about the ways of water, fish and angling as possible. So it didn’t surprise me that I would connect sympathetically with Moorwood because he was able to articulate the essentials that define the practice of fishing with such clarity, lucidity and precision.

A Sheffield-born communications director who lives in Surrey, Moorwood is not a prose stylist in the narrative current of fellow Brits Chris Yates (a writer he admires), Luke Jennings or Charles Rangeley-Wilson. His approach is more prosaic than literary, in keeping with his professional background. This isn’t a value judgment, just an observation.

Fishing in all its myriad forms and methods is not an escape, as many non-anglers mistakenly assume. Rather it offers a means of engaging with life. The mystery of water, fish and angling provide a pathway to the more inscrutable mysteries of life. Moorwood writes affectionately of extended family, encompassing grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses and children, as he does about friends, colleagues and angling companions, both peers and elders. He celebrates the joy and happiness that blossom from the seedbed of love.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.’ This certainly applies to stories about fishing. This truth is based on the fact that sooner or later all anglers, even those who pledge allegiance to catch-and-release, confront death through the very act of fishing. Accordingly Moorwood mourns the loss that accompanies separation and death with deep feeling and eloquence.

What I appreciate most about The Magic of Fishing is its implicit understanding that fishing provides the solace and the space (emotional, mental, spiritual) necessary to coming to terms with grief, one life’s great challenges. Like the finest angling literature, the memoir is rubbed with a soft elegiac gloss that persists without overwhelming. At one point he confides ‘fishing saved me.’ I know from personal experience that this gift can be true.

I’m reluctant to end on a sour note. Still, while I was pleased Moorwood visited Ontario, my home for most of my seventy-plus years, I can assure readers there are no ‘snow-capped mountains’ in the province, as he attests. I suspect he observed the Niagara Escarpment when he fished the Beaver River. Also, while steelhead are indeed ‘a hard-fighting cousin of the brown trout,’ it might have been more helpful for British readers to know they are migratory rainbow trout.

This book review was written originally for Classic Angling, Great Britain’s premium fishing journal.

A person doesn’t have to peer through the lens of hindsight to see it was inevitable that Wesley Bates and I would work together—someday. Call it fate or destiny, luck or fortune or even synchronicity, one thing is clear: it was neither coincidence nor accident that Casting into Mystery came into being. That’s my story and I’m confident Wes agrees.

I first met Wes in 2001 after he was appointed artist-in-residence at Joseph Schneider Haus, a historical museum in Kitchener, Ontario. I was an arts reporter on the local newspaper and, because I interviewed him and examined the exhibition that comprised a mid-career overview, I knew something he had no way of perceiving. We were creative trout swimming in parallel currents.

I liked Wes immediately. Warm and self-deprecating, modest and articulate, he talked insightfully not only about his engraving method and process, but about the tradition out of which his practice evolved. Although he is adept with brush and pencil, his reputation rests primarily as a master wood engraver. He revealed none of the hesitancy about inspiration and influence, interpretation and meaning that was fashionable among many of the artists I was writing about at the time.

Of course Wes knew nothing about me. However, I was able to determine from his work and his thoughtful answers to my questions that we shared an interest in many of the same things which reflected compatible sensibilities and tastes, attitudes and values. I was not surprised to learn later that we were carved by common experiences.

Despite the objections of modern critical theory concerning ‘biographical fallacy,’ a lifelong study of the arts has taught me that it’s impossible to separate the artist from the art. I have come to know Wes well enough to assert that his art extends from the man and the experiences that shaped him. Were Wes not the artist he is, there would have been insufficient compost for a creative partnership to grow into companionship and fellowship between us.

We are baby boomers born a year apart. Our hairlines have enjoyed fuller days and we are troubled by some of the same medical maladies including finicky hearts and insomnia. Our politics and social values are sympathetic, leaning progressively to the left.

Our fathers were career public servants—Wes’s dad was a Mountie, my dad a firefighter. We both graduated from small liberal arts universities located in smaller communities—Wes graduated from Mount Allison in Sackville, New Brunswick and I graduated from Trent in Peterborough, Ontario. I, too, lived in New Brunswick while attending graduate school.

Although we have lived in many villages, towns and cities throughout our lives, we have always been drawn to rural and wilderness areas. Born in the Yukon, Wes was raised on the Prairies (including the same town celebrated in Wallace Stegner’s masterwork Wolf Willow). He lived in Hamilton before moving to Clifford, Ontario, in the area of the headwaters of the Saugeen River, where we fly fish for trout and enjoy a dram of malt whisky on the riverbank as eventide falls like a comfortable blanket beneath a frieze of bejeweled stars. I was born in London and worked in Strathroy, St. Thomas, Timmins, Simcoe and Brantford before landing in Waterloo (where I have lived in Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo).

We look back on comparable early jobs. Wes paid the bills as a bartender and I lugged suitcases as a hotel bell hop. Later we toiled in manufacturing settings. We both worked for newspapers—me as a full-time reporter and Wes as a freelance graphic artist and cartoonist before he assumed the risk and uncertainty—not to mention freedom—of balancing a commercial art business with an independent Letterpress studio and gallery. In 1980 he founded West Meadow Press.

On the commercial side, he has completed commissions for mainstream publishers, engraving images for books by such prominent Canadian writers as Stephen Leacock, W.O. Mitchell, Timothy Findley, Stuart McLean, Don McKay and Dan Needles, among others. On the boutique side, he has published limited edition books including broadsides and artists’ books. He also wrote two illustrated books–The Point of the Engraver and In Black & White: A Wood Engraver’s Odyssey–about his career as a wood engraver. Out of the Dark, his latest book of engravings, is published by Porcupine’s Quill which released Casting in the spring of 2002.

Wes and I have both been married twice, our second wives are/were younger and creative—mine a graphic artist and Wes’s wife, Juanita, a songwriter, vocalist and musician. Wes and I love acoustic roots music as listeners and musicians. Wes plays bouzouki in a band and I play guitar as a respite from the world’s troubling vagaries. We even have the same ‘fashion’ sense. Our closets are interchangeable with brushed-cotton shirts in natural colours; pants of denim, corduroy or khaki; and brown loafers.

Wes’s primary artistic expression is visual, even though he is a fine prose writer. Still I relate to what I view as essentially a literary sensibility. The influence of literature runs deep in his work, from European commedia dell’arte to the British rural tradition of writing and visual art.

Wes’s reading is board and deep. Our personal libraries contain similar kinds of books: art history, literature, nature writing, poetry, essay collections and fly fishing memoirs. Many are the very same books. There’s as many books in Wes’s studio as art supplies and engraving tools, along with Challenge Proof printing press, thirty typefaces, Guillotine paper cutter and trim saw (for cutting wood blocks). We collect books with the enthusiasm of schoolboys trading hockey cards.

I believe creative people fall within two camps: early risers and midnight riders. Wes and I are creative nighthawks. I picture him working into the wee hours, wholly in the present. As the world contracts, distractions recede as the edge of darkness lengths.

In my imagination I picture him nestled in his studio behind the storefront galley in a historic two-storey on Clifford’s main street. He’s hunched over the leather engraving pad placed on his cluttered desk. A vintage snake-neck lamp shines directly from overhead. With burin in his left hand, he carves the end-grain of hard maple, establishing a direct connective tissue among creative imagination, optic nerve and dexterous left hand. (He could just as easily be an angler sitting at a vise tying an artificial fly.) Acoustic music is playing softly in the background, offering a semblance of company.

After first meeting, Wes and I remained in contact intermittently through email for about fifteen years. I had purchased one of his engravings of a fly fisherman landing a trout in a pastoral setting combined with an engraving of an artificial fly. And I hoped my interest would spur him to engrave more images based on fly angling themes. He told me he was slowly, painstakingly developing a graphic story combining fly fishing with ecological themes. I was unsure whether fly fishing was a visual trope in a rural tradition or whether it was something in which he actively participated.

At some point I visited Wes and Juanita to write a newspaper profile on her in anticipation of a concert she was giving in Kitchener. However, it wasn’t until 2016 that acquaintanceship grew into friendship.

The previous year I had started a blog about fly fishing and other passions in response to my retirement from four decades of newspaper work. After some time I began fantasizing about publishing a memoir or essay collection. I had a specific format in mind—an organic blend of text and image that would complement one another like current seams in a river. This led naturally to thinking about the possibility of working with Wes.

The seeds of Casting into Mystery were sown when I met up with Wes and Juanita in Waterloo. I had suggested to the co-owner of Princess Cinemas to invite Wes to the screening of Look & See, a documentary on the life, writing and influence of Wendell Berry. Wes had not only engraved images for a number of the celebrated American agrarian writer’s books, he actually appears in the film. He even designed the movie poster.

After the screening we adjourned to a nearby brewery pub. Between sips to wet our whistles, Wes asked if I would consider working together on a book devoted to fly fishing. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He was contemplating the exact creative partnership I had envisioned.

Wes told me he had cast the idea at a couple of other writers without success. Moreover, I was delighted to learn that he was a lapsed fly angler who had taken up the contemplative recreation many years earlier when he and his dad canoed the lakes of interior British Columbia. He confirmed with no small measure of pride that he still possessed the fly rod his parents gave him as a Christmas gift.

Our intent and working method quickly and effortlessly took shape. We agreed our approach would be somewhat unique, resembling two fly anglers in a canoe, paddling together but casting independently from bow and stern. We knew instinctively it was about finding a synchronized creative rhythm. Wes’s engravings would not be conventional illustrations; rather they would comprise a graphic narrative that enhanced and enriched the prose narrative.

Although we worked separately, we cast our sympathetic imaginations into the same creative pool. Most of our informal book talk took place when we got together to toss fur and feather. We fished my home water (tailwater of the Grand River) and Wes’s home water (headwater of the Saugeen).

We exchanged ideas in support of our piscatorial project as we drove together to our river destination, shared stretches of water and toasted the poetry of rivers and the grace of trout over a dram or two or three. We took deep delight in sharing the very experience we were celebrating through word and image in Casting into Mystery.

Wes and I approach fly fishing much as we approach artmaking. We don’t treat the contemplative recreation as a form of aquatic calisthenics. Rather, we take our time, preferring a systematic rather than haphazard technique. Wes fishes through the eyes of an artist, as I fish through the eyes of a writer. Both are aware of the contours of rivers, trees and plants, birds and animals, and clouds swimming high amidst the currents of air.

We share the principle that catching fish isn’t the primary objective. However, just because we are not competitive doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy the sweet joy of catching fish. We do. The more the better. Still, when we wade a river we enter a sanctum sanctorum that inspires us to reflect on the essence of things and to give thanks to our place in the world of nature.

It is enough to be wholly in the present, embraced as we are in the tender arms of mystery, for which we feel profound gratitude.

I don’t know whether writing and engraving share qualities with fly fishing or whether fly fishing shares qualities with writing and engraving. I suspect it’s a creative river that flows both ways, like the river in The Diviners, Margaret Laurence’s last novel. This I know. Writing has taught me to be a better and more appreciative fly angler, as fly angling has taught me to be a better and more appreciative writer. I won’t speak for Wes; but I bet my cherished Sweetgrass bamboo fly rod he acknowledges the same about fly angling and engraving.

Those who would like to read more about Wesley Bates can check out Carving Towards the Light, an essay I first wrote in 2001 and revised for my blog in 2017.

To my way of thinking, and imagining, the canoe is intimately connected to my deep love of fresh water—streams, rivers and lakes—and fly fishing. When fishing large rivers or lakes, a canoe is a fly anglers best companion—with apologies to kayaks, float tubes and inflatable pontoons.

The canoe has paddled its way into the Canadian heart, imagination and psyche. I cannot imagine the Great White North sans canoe. Its deep roots penetrate the cultural, recreational, spiritual and mythic bedrock of the country and, consequently, remain a central element of history and geography, heritage and legacy, character and identity. It is not an exaggeration to refer to this vast country as Land of the Canoe.

The canoe is more than an effective means of transportation—a harmonious blend of form and function, design and craft, beauty and utility—ideally adapted to the landscape. It played a critical role in nation building by shaping the country through exploration and settlement, trade and commerce, war and recreation, sport and art.

It links First Nations people with European pioneers. Once a means of survival, it is now a tool of pleasure and relaxation, adventure and solitude. In extreme whitewater forms, it is an adrenaline rush of high emotion that sends heartbeats and metabolisms racing—infectious and obsessive, if not addictive.

Those who glance at a map of southwestern Ontario might conclude, erroneously, that Waterloo Region neither hears nor heeds the call of either the canoe or the fly rod. Situated equidistantly between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, the region appears landlocked and water starved.

A closer look reveals a different topography. As the Psalmist writes, its cup runneth over. The historic, heritage Grand River—my home water—has a watershed boasting myriad navigable tributaries and reservoirs. The Conestogo River joins the Grand at the village of Conestogo just north of Waterloo. The Eramosa River joins the Speed River in Guelph. The Speed River joins the Grand in Cambridge. The Nith River and Whiteman’s Creek join the Grand in Paris.

The Grand River Conservation Authority owns and manages no fewer than seven dams and reservoirs including: Shand Dam (built 1942), Luther Dam (1952), Conestoga Dam (1958), Laurel Dam (1968), Shade’s Mill Dam (1973), Woolwich Dam (1974) and Guelph Dam (1976)

Then there are the many rivers no more than a couple hours’ drive from my home in Waterloo: Maitland, Saugeen (main as well as Beatty and Rocky), Bighead, Nottawasaga, Beaver, Sydenham, Credit, Humber, Avon, Ausable and Thames, not to mention their numerous tributaries. Southwestern Ontario might not be Algonquin Park, Kawartha Lakes, Muskoka, Haliburton, Algoma or North of Superior, but it is far from an arid wasteland—for both canoeist and fly angler.

Waterloo Region and surrounding area have outfitting rentals and retailers, tackle stores, fly shops, guides, instructors, manufacturers of custom canoes and personal flotation devices (which used to be called lifejackets) and clubs, not to mention writers and artists associated with all things canoe and and fly fishing. For a number of years the region has played host to the KW Canoe Symposium, an annual celebration of the canoe. Princess Cinemas, the region’s premiere independent cinema, has presented for a number of years both the annual Paddling Film Festival and International Fly Fishing Film Festival.

Canoeing and fly fishing are two of the most intimate ways of learning about the character and personality, texture and tone, mood and atmosphere of a lake or a river. When it is not possible to be on the water, an armchair can be a place of understanding and appreciation so long as the angler or canoeist sitting in the chair has a book in hand–and perhaps a dram of malt whisky within reach. I have come to know the Grand River through paddle and fly rod. I have also learned about my home water through books spanning a wide range of subjects, expressed through prose, poetry and image. Following are four books that have meant the most to me, in addition to books about other places that speak to me with singular eloquence.

The Grand River

Because of my deep affection for the Grand River I am especially fond of The Grand River, a book of text and image produced by the brother-and-sister creative partnership of artist Gerard Brender à Brandis and writer Marianne Brandis, both of whom live in Stratford, Ontario.

Designated a Canadian Heritage River in 1984, the Grand courses through three hundred kilometres of southwestern Ontario from Luther Marsh in the highlands of Dufferin County, to Port Maitland on the north shore of Lake Erie. The river connects some of the province’s most alluring ecosystems, from the Elora Gorge to one of the country’s few Carolinian forests.

The river has also played a vital role in the area’s history, extending back 11,000 years to when indigenous people settled along its banks, through colonization by European missionaries, religious outcasts, refugees, military, disinherited farmers in search of land, labourers in search of jobs and settlers in search of homes. Formed when the last glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago, the Grand continues as a significant player in a post-industrial, multinational and transglobal landscape that supports a million residents in 40 municipalities.

Subtitled Dundalk to Lake Erie, The Grand River celebrates the waterway’s many moods, textures and colours. The creative travelogue is anchored by fifty-eight highly stylized wood engravings, accompanied by a series of short, meditative essays.

Marianne Brandis ruminates on the notion of riverness before exploring the river’s geography, history and ecology. She recalls some of the influential people who set down roots in the watershed, and examines various preservation and remediation strategies. Her narrative is a fusion of convergences, connections and conversations between history and geography, country and city, agriculture and industry, recreation and labour.

Gerard Brender à Brandis’s images combine numerous portraits of the river with images of flora and historical architecture, from the covered bridge at West Montrose and William Lyon Mackenzie King’s childhood home at Woodside in Kitchener, to the Alexander Graham Bell Homestead in Brantford.

The river portraits are self-explanatory, reflected through their titles: A Shining Ribbon of Water, Bankside, Fields Sloping to the River, The River Silenced by Winter, Spring Thaw Luther Marsh, Lake Belwood, Eroded Rocks Near Fergus, Elora Gorge, Near Inverhaugh, Remnants of a Bridge and Grand River at Doon, among others. I have canoed and fly fished at many of these locales.

Although the images are representational, serving as historical documentation, the engraver’s concerns are not restricted to verisimilitude. He carves his images in his cottage studio from en plein air sketches. The process of transformation from drawing to engraving entails innumerable aesthetic decisions. No line is left to chance. The prints are meticulously detailed, even delicate, revealing what I can best describe as an old-world pastoral sensibility. While static, many convey a sense of movement, whether flowing water, rustling leaves or clouds in breezy skies.

While turning the pages of The Grand River readers accompany brother and sister, artist and writer, on a leisurely journey through the seasons from the Grand’s headwaters to its mouth. Past and present meet at the river, representing the flow of time, the life cycle of those who lived along its banks and the timelessness of art and story.

THE GRAND RIVER WATERSHED

Subtitled A Folk Ecology, The Grand River Watershed is a collection of ecologically based poetry written by Karen Houle, a philosophy professor at the University of Guelph. She has published two previous poetry collections, Ballast (1995) and During (2000).

Following in a tradition that includes such eco-poets as American Gary Snyder and fellow Canadian Don McKay, Karen Houle transcends the languages of science (geology, entomology, anthropology, archeology, biology, ecology, botany) and humanities (geography, history, philosophy, journalism) to offer a rich postmodern poetry that celebrates the relationship between natural history and metamorphosis, ecology and transformation.

Those who think they already know the Grand by walking its riverside trails, canoeing its aquatic paths or casting fur and feather at its species of gamefish will be delightfully surprised to see with new vision through Karen Houle’s mysterious poetic lens.

Her poems are not always easy and accessible; they remind us of the adventure of exploration. Her Grand River is a complex web of relationships, of which humanity is but one of many pieces in a dynamic puzzle of animate and inanimate pieces.

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All aquatic ecosystems have their secrets. I believe rivers are the most reticent and taciturn of all, which contribute to their engaging intrigue. Unlocking their secrets takes time, determination and effort, whether walking, wading or paddling or any combination of the three. Fly fishing is simply the most direct, most immediate key.

Learning about the Grand River—which I consider my home water even while preferring other headwater trout rivers–has been a work in progress, sometimes frustrating, at other times rewarding, not always satisfying but always pleasurable.

I have a confession to make. While the vast majority of fly fishing books are in one way or another instructional, intended to show how to practice the recreational sport, I have sought, and found, enrichment and enlargement primarily in other types of books. My personal library brims with some of the best technique/method manuals written by some of the most esteemed fly anglers in the last half century, a veritable Who’s Who: Joe Brooks, Ray Bergman, Lefty Kreh, Vincent Marinaro, A. J. McClane and Charles Waterman, among others. Still, in the still quiet hours of contemplation and reflection, I turn to the storytellers, whether they express themselves through creative non-fiction, memoir, short story, novel or poetry. Their names are too many to name here.

Nonetheless, I have been fortunate to find a couple of guides who have written books that have helped me solve some of the Grand’s most guarded secrets. They have not always given me the answers I sought, but they have always pointed me toward the right questions. I am also delighted to call them friends. I cannot imagine any fly angler who wants to enjoy a level of the enjoyment that accompanies success without seeking advice from this pair of Grand River Companions.

Fishing Ontario’s Grand River Country

The second edition of Fishing Ontario’s Grand River Country provides a thumb-nail history of the Heritage river and outlines the Grand River Fisheries Management Plan. Revised, updated and edited by Stephen May, the new volume supersedes the original, published in 1990. The earlier book, written by Liz Leedham with Jim Reid, sold out a number of years ago.

Few authors are better suited to write about the multi-species fishery. A member of KW Flyfishers, Steve May served as both a Stewardship Coordinator in Waterloo Region and as an urban fisheries technician for the Ontario natural resources ministry. He is a former professional guide and instructor with Grand River Troutfitters and remains a contract fly tier for Orvis.

Early in his professional angling career he produced Bob Izumi’s Real Fishing, Canada’s longest running angling television show. He has published articles in Canadian and International fly fishing publications including Canadian Fly Fisher, Fly Fisherman and Fly Fusion.

The book breaks down sections of the river, from its headwaters in Luther Marsh through its mouth on the north shore of Lake Erie, in addition to its tributaries. It serves as an invaluable guide to fishing all gamefish species including hatchery raised brown trout, and native smallmouth and largemouth bass, northern pike, walleye, perch, crappie, channel catfish and carp.
  
The book includes a new hatch chart and more detailed text in recognition of the increase of hatchery raised brown trout in the tailwater and the introduction of browns in the Conestogo River. ‘We weren’t stocking browns in the Conestogo River twenty years ago, walleye have improved in the reservoirs (Belwood and Conestoga lakes) and smallmouth bass have improved in the middle and lower sections of the Grand,’ Steve May confirms.

With a forward by Bob Izumi, the book brims with coloured photographs and includes seven maps detailing public access points and conservation areas.

Fly Fishing the Grand River

The husband-and-wife team of Ian Martin and Jane E. Rutherford share a love of fly fishing with a professional interest in aquatic insects. Fly anglers who fish the Grand River—myself included—are deeply grateful for their co-authorship of Fly Fishing the Grand River. Subtitled The Angler’s Vest Pocket Guide—in the tradition of such books as Art Flick’s Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations and Thomas Ames Jr.’s Hatch Guide for New England Streams—I am happy to call it the ‘Grand River Bug Bible.’

A founding member of KW Flyfishers, Ian Martin is an environmental biology and statistical consultant, while Jane Rutherford is a retired biology professor who taught at Wilfred Laurier University. They live atop a high limestone cliff overlooking the Grand tailwater and enjoy additional piscatorial solace in a modest salmon camp in Quebec.

They spent five years researching insects and other invertebrates in the tailwater’s renowned brown trout fishery in preparation for Fly Fishing the Grand River.

The guide contains comprehensive information about the insects that inhabit the river, concentrating on hatching cycles. It features black, actual-size silhouette drawings (think of Roger Tory Peterson’s field guides to birds), colour photographs, hatch charts, fly tying strategies, bibliography and topographical map. It also offers practical on-river knowledge and advice gleaned from fly fishing the Grand, and many other rivers, for many years.

Fly Fishing the Grand River is a little book with encyclopedic gravitas. It is a must-have guide for anglers who fish southwestern Ontario waters who share insects and hatches with the Grand. The book benefits from the contributions of some of the Grand’s most accomplished fly anglers including Neil Houlding, Ted Shand and Dave Whalley, among others.

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RIVER-PLACES

River-Places is one of Waterloo Region’s most handsome locally produced books about canoes and paddling craft, featuring poems by Bruce Lumsden and serigraphs by David Hunsberger, both of whom live in Waterloo Region. Both have been enthusiastic naturalists and canoeists for many years.

Bruce Lumsden’s poetry is direct and immediate. It is accessible lyric storytelling; a reader does not need an English degree to understand and appreciate it. He welcomes readers on an emblematic canoe trip which is a memory composite of many trips over many years. We join him as he heads north by car and leaves the ‘quite desperation’ of civilized society in the rearview mirror.

Readers accompany the poet and his companions after they hit the water, set up camp and enjoy a meal around the campfire, run rapids and wash out, portage and backpack, eventually returning home refreshed and restored. We share in the daily rituals and camaraderie that give deeper meaning to wilderness travel and exploration. We experience nature through the poet’s experience—from dawn to dusk to dawn, in all weathers. Occasionally he expresses thoughts and feelings that transcend the existential rituals of paddle and canoe.

David Hunsberger’s serigraphs are not inspired by specific poems. Rather the relationship between word and image is developed sympathetically and symbiotically. The highly stylized prints give readers a concentrated, intimate look at nature—its waters and shorelines, trees and plants, rocks and skies, not to mention the play of light and shadow that animates a world alive with wonder and mystery.

Reminiscent of the paintings of Tom Thomson, an obvious mentor to both poet and printmaker, David Hunsberger’s perspective on the landscape comes most often from the stern of a canoe while tracing the shoreline on a river or lake.

the river

A number of Canadian authors have written about rivers, from Hugh MacLennan (The Rivers of Canada) and Roderick Haig-Brown (Pool and Rapid: the Story of a River and A River Never Sleeps) to David Adams Richards (Lines on the Water) and Roy MacGregor (Original Highways). Subtitled Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada, MacGregor’s book includes a chapter on the Grand River titled ‘Return to Splendour’

Whether these works portray a single river or survey numerous rivers, the bodies of water are presented not only as settings, but as characters with personalities and temperaments. One of the most intimate portraits of a river with which I am familiar is Helen Humphreys’s the river (no capitals in title).

Rivers flow through her imagination like arteries through her body. She first waded into the prose of rivers with The Frozen Thames, a collection of vignettes that pays tribute to England’s famous river drawn from events that occurred each time it froze over between 1142 and 1895.

With the river Helen Humphreys paddles—imaginatively speaking—closer to home. For more than a decade she has owned a modest waterfront property on the headwaters of the Napanee River, in eastern Ontario not far from her home in Kingston.

With the eye of a visual artist, the lyric gifts of a poet (she has published four collections), the curiosity of a Victorian naturalist (many of her seven novels feature historical settings in her birthplace of England) and the attention to detail of a biologist, she celebrates the body of water that is closest to her heart and imagination—some readers might go so far as to say her soul.

The book is equal parts natural history, biology, botany, geology, history, anthropology, geography, archeology, meteorology and historical fiction inspired by actual people and events. The literary miscellany incorporates fictional and non-fictional narrative, poetry, archival photographs and illustrations, paintings, drawings, maps, lists, found objects and featured photographs. It brings to mind the kind of minutiae and paraphernalia found in an artist’s notebook. Fly angling historians might draw comparisons to Muriel Foster’s Fishing Diary, compiled and illustrated between 1913-1949, and first published in Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd., in 1980.

This is nature filtered through the lens of culture, where ecology and philosophy intersect with art through poetic description and meditation. the river is a tactile, sensuous book that appeals to the senses, evoking the sights, sounds, smells and even tastes of the river and its immediate environs. Day and night, subsurface and surface, aquatic and terrestrial, flora and fauna meet at the convergence of water, earth and sky.

In her introduction Helen Humphreys asks: ‘How can we know anyone or anything?’ This beautiful book answers her rhetorical question with eloquence and elegance. For, as romantically anachronistic as it might sound, the river is a love letter to a watercourse that is as intimate and welcoming as home and family. It is a reminder that we must never grow weary of, or jaded by, such deep affection for our Good Green Earth and the intricate dynamism of all living things.