Angling Arts

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.

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.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
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.

This is as close as I can come to being
salmon, the river’s silver soul

& as the white spray rises round me
I know what it is to be

the object of the fisherman’s desire,
the subject of the artist’s flying brush

— “Canoeing the Rapids,” a poem in Earth Day in Leith Churchyard, a collection of poems in Search of Tom Thomson by Bernadette Rule

A paradox runs through the history of fly fishing in Canada.

Roderick Haig-Brown is undoubtedly the country’s most famous fly fisherman—at least among those who cast fur and feather. Although revered in the international fly fishing community as one of the recreational sport’s great literary figures, his reputation among general readers in the country to which he immigrated from England in 1931 faded after his death in 1976. This is true despite his oeuvre extending beyond works on fly fishing (1).

On the flip side of the cultural coin, Tom Thomson is one of Canada’s most famous artists—if not its most famous artist (2). He is also the country’s most notorious artist due to the intricate web of mystery surrounding his premature death at the age of 39 (3). Forever associated with the Group of Seven, he died three years before Canada’s legendary artistic collective officially formed in 1920. Although revered as the Group’s elder brother in the national consciousness, Thomson remains scarcely known outside of Canada, except by gallery and museum curators, art historians and cognoscenti (4).

Like Vincent van Gogh, Thomson was all but obscure when he died under suspicious circumstances in July 1917 while paddling on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park. Despite selling a handful of paintings during his lifetime, his reputation gained momentum steadily over the last century (5). He is now celebrated as one of Canada’s most accomplished and influential artists across a wide range of disciplines. His fame and celebrity extend beyond the borders of visual art. He reigns as a folk legend, heroic artist, mythic cultural figure and icon of Canadian identity (6).

Artistic achievement aside, Thomson is generally regarded as an accomplished fisherman and canoeist. Although he fished with live bait and hard lures, as was customary at the time, there is historical evidence that he caught fish on artificial flies. By virtue of his unparalleled stature as an artist, he is ipso facto Canada’s most famous fly angler—at least outside the circle of recognition of fly anglers. As we shall see, there are tantalizing suggestions among early biographers that he tied his own flies, perhaps even to match the hatch years before it became common practice in North America.

Thomson is the spiritual guide of the Canadian ‘wilderness tradition’ (7). He and the younger painters who comprised the original Group of Seven canoed and fished during sketching trips into the Canadian Shield. In so doing, they paddled into the very heart of the Canadian soul. This tradition extends back to early European contact with indigenous peoples. It encompasses the exploration of the country and exploitation of its natural resources through westward expansion and frontier colonization. It bridges English and French, Hudson’s Bay traders and coureurs de bois, and includes Grey Owl, an English-born con artist and publicity hound named Archibald Stansfeld Belaney who reinvented himself as a First Nations man (false), conservation pioneer (true) and nature writer (true). There is speculation—cultural wish fulfillment without proof—that Thomson and Grey Owl crossed paths—or paddles—at some point in their lives.

Fishing played a significant role in shaping Thomson, both the man and the artist. Like the narrator in A River Runs Through It, he grew up in a fishing household. He fished before he painted. Early biographers paint a picture of a man who lived to fish as much as he lived to paint. He first visited Algonquin Park, before he had any inkling of himself as a serious artist, to fish as much as sketch. He fished until the day he died. He carried his love of, and devotion to, fishing to the grave—wherever that might be located.

Biographers paint Thomson as a shy, reserved introvert who preferred his own company to the company of others. The solitary ritual of fishing served his temperament, reflected his personality and most assuredly defined his artistic practice. I believe his art would have been much different had he not been a passionate and dedicated fisherman.

Although not known as an especially literary artist (few of his letters have survived), biographers agree Thomson’s favourite books were Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. His final five decisive years—grounded on his visits to Algonquin Park, the greatest single factor determining the arc of his maturity as an artist—reflect the contemplative philosophies espoused by both writers.

Painting with Fur & Feather

As both a fisherman who paints and a painter who fishes, Thomson shared much in common with American artist Winslow Homer (8). Born in 1836, Homer first visited the Adirondacks to fly fish and paint in 1870. He was 34, about Thomson’s age when he first visited Algonquin Park. Homer continued visiting upstate New York regularly until his death in 1910. Fishing generally, and fly fishing specifically, became an enduring theme and subject—making him one of the most accomplished angling artists in the history of the recreational sport.

As part of the generation that preceded Thomson’s, Homer was a Realist who was primarily a figurative painter influenced by the French Barbizon School. In contrast, Thomson was essentially a landscape painter influenced by French post-impressionism, Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts movement and northern European symbolism. Despite differences in influence, both developed distinctive, highly personal styles after beginning careers as commercial artists. Both were notoriously reticent about their art. And both painted en plein air before working up canvases in the studio—Thomson in Toronto and Homer in New York City.

In Nothing If Not Critical, the late Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes—himself a fly angler and author of A Jerk on One End—wrote insightfully about Homer and his influence on American sporting art:

. . . one sees his echoes on half the magazine racks of America. Just as John James Audubon becomes, by dilution, the common duck stamp, so one detects the vestiges of Homer’s watercolours in every outdoor-magazine cover that has a dead whitetail dropped over a log or a largemouth bass. . . Homer was not, of course, the first sporting artist in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, and he brought to it both intense observation and a sense of identification with the landscape—just at the cultural moment when religious Wilderness of the nineteenth century, the church of nature, was shifting into the secular Outdoors, the theatre of manly enjoyment. (9)

Change a few words and these observations about Homer apply equally to Thomson (10).

It is inconceivable that Thomson was less enthusiastic about fishing than Homer. In contrast to his American counterpart, however, he painted few angling pictures (11). One notable exception is The Fisherman (12). The late Toronto painter Harold Town dismisses the painting—in Tom Thomson: The Silence and the Shore, co-written with David Silcox—because of the awkwardness of the figure. He was not a fly fisherman. While Thomson was a clumsy figurative painter at best, this particular figure clearly portrays a fly angler in the process of playing a sizeable fish—perhaps a giant brook trout for which Algonquin Park is celebrated—by elevating the rod above his head to maintain a tight line after it is hooked.

Celebrated Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye observed in The Bush Garden, his groundbreaking study of the Canadian imagination, that Thomson’s ‘sense of design [was] derived from the trail and the canoe’ (13). I contend that his sense of colour was derived, in part, from fish he caught in Algonquin Park. The deep richness that defines his paintings is drawn from the vermiculations and haloed spots of wild brook trout. Moreover, I suspect that many of the places he depicted in paintings resulted not from sketching expeditions, but from fishing outings. He painted where he fished as much as, or even more than, he fished where he painted.

Fishing even played a role in the mystery surrounding Thomson’s death. He was reportedly going fishing on the day he disappeared. The importance of fishing to him is indisputable. Most of the extant photographs of the artist connect him to fishing in one way or another. Long before catch-and-release became an ethical imperative, Thomson is often pictured with heavy strings of fish including brook trout and lake trout. But determining whether he cast fur and feather in addition to bait and hard lures has proven less conclusive—despite compelling historical evidence.

A Skeptic in Every Creel

Award-winning Canadian journalist and prolific author Roy MacGregor is the leading skeptic to cast doubt on Thomson’s being a fly angler—at least occasionally (14). Born in Whitney and raised in Huntsville in the immediate vicinity of Algonquin Park, he spent his youth, and has spent his summer vacations as an adult, in the area, which he knows intimately. His father worked in the park and, over the years, he interviewed many old-timers who knew Thomson, or were contemporaries. On the strength of his writing about the artist, spanning speculative fiction, critical commentary and journalism, he is acknowledged as an authority. His opinions carry weight. However, when it comes to Thomson being a fly fisherman, he proves less reliable.

In Northern Light, his highly speculative and controversial study of the artist, MacGregor does not assert that Thomson did not fish with flies. Rather he implies the artist did not fly fish on the basis of anecdotal knowledge of Algonquin Park and a superficial understanding of the recreational sport.

MacGregor seems torn in regard to Thomson’s abilities as an angler and canoeist. Early on he describes a young Thomson as ‘a fine fisherman’ (15). However, he later reports that some park locals ‘openly disparaged [Thomson’s] skills with paddle and fishing rod’ (16). His opinion remains ambivalent: ‘My own sense is that he was just fine as a woodsman and, by comparison with others moving about Algonquin Park in those years with canoe and backpack, he was an excellent swimmer’ (17). Opinion in the park concerning Thomson’s skills as an outdoorsman was divided, warranting close scrutiny. On the face of it, men who lived and worked in the park should have been in a position to assess Thomson’s woodcraft. But this assertion is not as definitive as it might sound.

Given the time and place, it is easy to imagine Thomson being viewed by park residents as an outsider, an interloper. Although rural born and bred, he would have been dismissed as a city slicker from Toronto, an effete artist whose unconventional work ethic prompted suspicion. To tough, untamed, poorly educated, unsophisticated, labourers—whether loggers, miners, rangers, guides, forest-fire fighters, trappers, hunters, hotel operators or even poachers—his artistic temperament and habits would have been ridiculed. The fact that he was a tall, handsome bachelor would have made him attractive to women living in the park and vacationing. Hard-working men who feared him as a threat would have happily painted a target on the artist’s back. (18)

Thomson’s abilities as an angler and canoeist were complicated by the fact that the legend of the Artist as Master Woodsman was embellished by friends and champions soon after his death (19). In Northern Light MacGregor observes that Thomson has been a subject of ‘romancing . . . some justified, some strained, that continues to this day’ (20). This is true. The myth-making machinery of transforming the artist into a cultural hero was initiated during the First World War, a time of political turbulence and societal transition when Canada was developing a nascent True North Strong and Free national identity. The question of why Thomson did not serve in the war, as had other Group of Seven members, remains shrouded in contradiction which complicates how he is viewed.

However, it is McGregor’s romanticization of fly fishing that entangles his interpretative leader in wind knots. He begins by referencing a famous photo of Thomson—reproduced on his book’s cover—that misidentifies a spoon, likely made by the artist, as an artificial fly (21). He implies that this redundant editorial error somehow proves that Thomson was not a fly fisherman. Of course, it proves nothing of the kind; only that the artist sometimes used spoons, which is not in dispute.

McGregor affirms ‘anyone who has done much fishing in this part of the country’ (22) would recognize the terminal tackle as a spoon. Of course, this knowledge is not confined to those who fish in the park. It would be clear to any angler who ever tossed spoons manufactured by Len Thompson and Williams, not to mention Eppinger’s Dardevle, among others.

MacGregor’s inference that Thomson was not a fly fisherman is expressed in a mere three sentences:

Fly fishing, with its artistic swirls and its own poetic language, is much more esoteric than simply dropping a weighted, triple-hooked, metal lure off the back of a boat or canoe and hauling it about the deep waters in hopes of a strike. Fly fishing, however, which lends itself magnificently to the cowslip-shouldered streams of Britain and the wide, shallow rivers of Atlantic Canada, is largely a futile exercise. The small hooks of flies that must be tossed back and forth would become hopelessly tangled in the tangle of vegetation that encroaches on Algonquin waterways and surrounds the deep lakes where lake trout hide (23).

General readers, impressed with McGregor’s credentials, might well find his description of fly fishing credible. Fly anglers not so much; they would find his piscatorial idyll less persuasive. While MacGregor’s familiarity with the area and general knowledge of fishing are incontestable, his appreciation of fly fishing is superficial at best, relying on a string of cliches. For example, he seems unaware that early American and Canadian streamer flies, designed to look like swimming baitfish, were tied for trolling on lakes as well as stripping through deep pools in streams and rivers.

MacGregor acknowledges the grace and rhythm, some might even say the poetry, associated with casting a fly rod. However, he is describing one classic component—casting a dry fly with a floating line upstream at rising trout on a river which has become a popular stereotype. He ignores wet flies, bead-head nymphs and streamers that are cast across and downstream.

Fly fishing has not always been as ethical as purists would like. Some fly anglers in Thomson’s day would have had no qualms about combining artificial flies with live bait. For instance, in Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” Nick Adams uses grasshoppers on his fly rig. On a personal note, in the 1950s and 60s a friend’s father routinely placed the fins of the first brook trout he caught on the hooks of his flies to tip the scales of success. I doubt Thomson would have been averse to such practices—especially in an age of catch-and-eat.

Waxing poetic about trout and salmon fishing, MacGregor overlooks that fly anglers target less-revered species including bass, pike, muskie, walleye, even panfish and carp, not to mention a host of salt-water species. They also cast flies on sinking tip or full-sinking lines with tungsten split-shot, from canoes, kayaks, drift boats and john boats, not to mention such classic regional adaptations as Adirondack, Au Sable, MacKenzie boats, in addition to motorized boats.

MacGregor insists that the small hooks used in fly dressings would get entangled in Algonquin Park’s dense vegetation. Granted fly anglers use small hooks. But they also use large, nasty looking hooks for streamers designed for monster gamefish, both fresh and saltwater.

Thomson might have rigged up two or more flies by attaching dropper flies. This practice is prohibited in regulated catch-and-release areas where single, barbless hooks are mandatory, but is permitted in Algonquin Park to this day.

All fly anglers know the frustration of getting hung up on vegetation, not to mention swimming and flying critters and pieces of anatomy. Ouch! But this annoying eventuality is not confined to Algonquin Park. Vermont’s Battenkill, to name but one American river, is as densely overgrown as any river in the park.

MacGregor concludes with a thumb-nail film review of A River Runs Through It. ‘Had Norman Maclean been writing about trolling, rather than fly fishing . . . it’s doubtful that he would ever have found a publisher—and unimaginable that Robert Redford and Brad Pitt would have turned the book into a classic movie’ (24). His appreciation of the film is as shallow as his portrait of fly fishing. He seems unaware that legendary editor Charles Elliott at Alfred A. Knopf, among a host of other editors, rejected the novella before the University of Chicago Press agreed to publish its first work of fiction in 1976. It gained appreciative readers through word of mouth rather than through publishing-house advertising and promotion. Its release escaped the notice of many prominent reviewers and was misunderstood and under-appreciated by others.

Fact is, the film is a classic not because it celebrates fly fishing—recognizing that its scenes on the river are glorious. Rather it reflects many of the qualities that distinguish the elegiac novella, a compelling portrait of a multi-generational family at a time of transition as the wild frontier was becoming settled. It is a coming-of-age story built on timeless, universal themes: family and home, innocence and experience, rural and urban, devotion and obsession, love and desire, life and death, joy and sorrow, faith and despair, loss and grief.

Equal parts spiritual autobiography and wilderness prayer, it is an artistic paradox. While it is arguably the most eloquent fictional expression of fly fishing in world literature, it has as much to do with the contemplative recreation as Moby Dick has to do with whaling or The Old Man and the Sea has to do with bottom fishing by hand for blue marlin. Entertaining as it is, the film is not as rich as the novella, a blend of metaphysical reflection, high plains pastoral, novel of rural manners and Shakespearean tragedy in pioneer dress.

Two Photos Worth a Thousand Words

BEFORE reviewing documentary and archival material that supports Thomson being an occasional fly fisherman, at the very least, consideration must be given to a couple of photos reprinted in Northern Light.

The first is a photo depicting a well-dressed woman holding a fishing rod and a string of fish (25). MacGregor argues persuasively that the woman was long mistaken for Winnifred (Winnie) Trainor, the woman some people believe to have been the artist’s fiancée. He fails to identify the mystery woman, who remains unknown to this day. Interestingly MacGregor does not consider what the mystery woman is holding in her left hand—a bamboo fly rod. He obfuscates further by not properly identifying the object, passing it off generically as a ‘fishing pole.’ Presumably someone as knowledgeable about fishing as MacGregor would not only acknowledge the difference between a fishing pole and a fly rod, he would know that it is a faux pas in fly angling circles to call a fly rod a fishing pole.

Although I have no idea of the woman’s identity, I cannot resist pondering who she was and what her relationship was to the photographer. Is it possible the woman caught the fish, with Thomson acting as guide? This is unlikely, however, considering women did not fly fish in significant numbers until after the First World War, by which time the artist was deceased. (Despite a few notable exceptions in the history of the contemplative sport—including the shadowy figure of Dame Juliana Berners in the fifteenth century and Maine’s Cornelia ‘Fly Rod’ Crosby in the nineteenth century—women were long considered bad luck on streams and rivers, as they were on ships at sea.) The more probable explanation is that the photo was a good-natured ruse, a trophy shot for a holiday album. I believe the fish were caught by the owner of the fly rod and the man holding the camera: Tom Thomson (26).

MacGregor continues casting into a pool of irony concerning another famous photo reprinted in Northern Light which provides visual verification that Thomson fished with a fly rod—at least sometimes. The photo, taken by Lawren Harris, shows the artist (dressed like a lumberjack in a wool toque, wool pants and knee-high moccasins) standing on an outcrop of rock and casting into the rushing water below the dam at Tea Lake (27). Considering his familiarity with fishing in a general sense, MacGregor should recognize that Thomson is holding a fly rod. Moreover, he should recognize that the artist is stripping in line in accordance with fly casting practice.

Most baffling of all, however, is the caption beside the photo—Tom Thomson fly-fishing—which contradicts MacGregor’s textual inference that the artist was not a fly fisherman. One wonders if this is simply an editorial error that escaped the writer’s attention at the proofreading stage or retribution from the fly fishing gods?

Fly Fishing tradition in Algonquin

What is most disconcerting about MacGregor’s inference that Thomson was not a fly fisherman is the archival documentation he either ignores or dismisses. For instance, it is hard to believe he is unfamiliar with John D. Robins’s The Incomplete Anglers—either the original 1943 edition or the 1998 Friends of Algonquin Park second edition reprint.

Robins, an enthusiastic champion of Canadian art, was a close friend of Lawren Harris. His memoir is illustrated by Franklin Carmichael who, like Harris, was a founding member of the Group of Seven. It chronicles a fishing adventure by canoe Robins—an English professor along with Northrop Frye at Victoria College at the University of Toronto—made with his brother Tom. Although Tom fished with live bait exclusively, the author was a devoted fly angler. The memoir’s references to the recreational sport are too numerous to delineate. In an early passage Robins lists the flies he intends to purchase including such classic patterns as Silver Doctor, McGinty, Caddis Drake, Parmachenee Belle, Royal Coachman and red hackle.

‘I was prepared to worship fly fishing with a pure, exclusive devotion and leave the worms behind. I supposed that true angling aristocrats would be puzzled by the mention of worms in connection with fishing. But [brother] Tom swore that he would have nothing to do with flies,’ Robins writes. (28).

The Incomplete Anglers confirms that by the 1940s fly fishing was a well-established tradition in Algonquin Park, practiced long before the Robins brothers’ canoe trip. As we are about to discover through archival and documentary sources, it not only took place in the park when Thomson was there, it was practiced by the artist.

Thomson would have been introduced to fly fishing as an occasional guide when wealthy Americans traveled north to enjoy a Canadian ‘wilderness’ experience. American anglers would have been familiar with the fly angling tradition emerging in Pennsylvania, the Catskills, the Adirondacks and Maine, not to mention salmon fishing in Quebec and New Brunswick.

The summers Thomson spent in the park from 1912 through 1917 overlapped with what is celebrated as the golden age of American fly fishing; when Theodore Gordon was popularizing the sport; when Hiram Leonard and Edward Payne were designing and manufacturing split-cane bamboo rods; when Edward vom Hofe and Charles F. Orvis were setting a high bar for fly reels; when Mary Orvis Marbury was collecting American fly patterns for her seminal book Favourite Flies & Their Histories.

In his 1996 pictorial history Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park: Tom Thomson and Other Mysteries, S. Bernard Shaw refers to Joseph Adams. The pompous English fly angler and columnist for the prestigious sporting magazine The Field visited Algonquin Park in 1910 for the sole purpose of fly fishing. Shaw records: ‘[Adams] hired park ranger Mark Robinson, an excellent man well acquainted with the forest, to guide him on an expedition to the Oxtongue River to fly fish for brook trout . . . He had great success . . . catching trout with his ten-foot cane-built rod and gut [line] casting [a] Silver Doctor and March Brown’ (29). At one point Robinson and his client met up with Tom Salmon, a ‘famed fly-caster’ of the day (30). A mere two years later Thomson made his first trip to the park.

Adams would have come to Algonquin steeped in English fly fishing tradition, including the concept of matching the hatch, as well as the heated debate, raging at the time on both sides of the Atlantic, over the supremacy of dry fly versus wet fly, spearheaded by Frederick Halford and G.E.M. Skues. The origins of matching the hatch extend back to at least 1643 when Gervase Markam recommended catching flies that were hatching and then imitating them. The concept did not gain traction, however, until 1836 when Alfred Ronalds published The Fly Fisher’s Entomology. An aquatic biologist and illustrator, he applied scientific nomenclature to insects of interest to fly anglers and, in the process, established a link between entomology and fly fishing. North American fly anglers had to wait a century until Preston Jennings published A Book of Trout Flies in 1935.

The debate of whether Thomson ever waved a fly rod over wily trout would have been solved had many of his personal belongings not mysteriously disappeared upon his death. A candidate for light-fingered culprit is Shannon Fraser, owner of Mowat Lodge where Thomson routinely stayed and one of a number of locals suspected of either accidentally killing or deliberately murdering the painter. Remnants of fly tying material would have settled the matter. But these—provided they existed—disappeared along with Thomson’s hand-painted dove-grey canoe, pair of paddles (one of which was distinctive) and fishing tackle, not to mention many of his oil sketches on small boards.

Celebrated Fly Fisherman

Although the evidence of Thomson’s being a fly tier is less conclusive, there is intriguing documentation confirming that he tied his own flies based on observation of insects two decades before Jennings published his Book of Trout Flies in 1935, not to mention nearly four decades before Ernest Schwiebert published Matching the Hatch in 1955 or more than half a century before Art Flick published the Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations in 1969.

I start with a couple of biographical connections that, while admittedly anecdotal, remain intriguing. First is Alexander Young, the maternal grandfather of Group of Seven founding member A.Y. Jackson. Young was a noted entomologist as well as an avid fly fisherman. His knowledge of insects could have been passed on to Thomson. Even if Thomson and Young never met, Jackson, who like most of the Group fished, might well have informed his creative and angling companion about his grandfather, perhaps while sitting around the campfire after a day’s painting or fishing, glowing pipe in one hand and tin cup of whiskey in the other.

Perhaps more conclusive is a family connection. When Thomson moved to Toronto in 1905 to embark on a career in commercial art, he enjoyed the company of a relative known as ‘Uncle’ William Brodie. Brodie, who might have been a cousin, was a prominent naturalist specializing in entomology. He helped establish the Toronto Entomological Society in 1878 and, from 1903 until his death in 1909, was director of the Biological Department at the Ontario Provincial Museum (later the Royal Ontario Museum). The time Thomson spent outdoors with Brodie nurtured the aspiring painter’s passion for nature. The entomology he learned from Brodie would have served him well fly fishing and tying artificial flies.

Thomson’s early biographers associate the painter with fly fishing. It is perplexing that MacGregor ignores these documentary confirmations. Perhaps he dismisses the biographers as “romancers.” Yet fly fishing was not romanticized when the biographies were written. Not only was the contemplative recreation viewed simply as another way of catching fish, spin casting rods and reels became all the rage following the Second World War.

Ottelyn Addison, in collaboration with Elizabeth Harwood, observes in Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years that, ‘Thomson was a fly fisherman of exceptional skill’ (31). In addition to trolling for lake trout from his canoe, he ‘often cast for speckled trout’ (32). The daughter of Algonquin Park Ranger Mark Robinson (a close friend of Thomson’s who spearheaded the search for the artist after he went missing), Addison was a keen naturalist who spent her early summers in Algonquin Park and returned often as an adult. She bases her book on her father’s diary and she certainly would have recognized the difference between fly angling and fishing with hard lures and live bait.

Addison continues: ‘[Thomson] knew trout have to be down in the cold water in summer; he looked for rocky shelves where they loiter; he studied their habits, observed them feeding’ (33). Fly anglers will recognize this behaviour. She goes on to write that, ‘[Thomson] made his own lures from bits of metal, feathers and beads, watched what the fish were taking and painted his own bugs’ (34). She confirms that Thomson handmade a variety of lures including spoons and plugs, as well as artificial flies, based on observation of the habits of trout. This sounds very much like matching the hatch.

Addison also quotes Park Ranger Tom Wattie recalling that Thomson ‘could cast his line in a perfect figure eight and have the fly land on the water at the exact spot planned’ (35). In addition to being a park ranger who ‘knew [Tom] well’ (36), Wattie was a fisherman who would have been familiar with fly fishing. His description of the artist might resemble purple prose—think of the Brad Pitt character casting long graceful loops in A River Runs Through It (37). But the bamboo rods back in the day tended to be longer and softer—’wimpy’ is a word sometimes used—than they are today which, from my perspective, makes Wattie’s observation even more credible.

Finally, an endnote in The Algonquin Years includes a March 16, 1913 letter from Leonard Mack, a self-described ‘fishing companion’ of Thomson’s who refers to a fishing trip the previous summer: ‘I was under the impression that we took a photo of you fly casting from a rock on Crown Lake but perhaps we used your camera’ (38).

The piscatorial plot began thickening years earlier with Audrey Saunders’s Algonquin Story, originally published in 1946 with subsequent editions printed in 1998 and 2003. Saunders was not an amateur literary dilettante, but a pioneer in both oral history and Canadian Studies who taught in Montreal at both Dawson College and Sir George Williams University (now Concordia).

She refers to the photo of Thomson at Tea Lake Dam (mentioned earlier): ‘Although there is no date to indicate when the photograph of Tom Thomson fly-fishing at the bottom of a lumber dam was taken, there is no doubt that this shows one of his favourite pastimes in the Park. There are many stories of the good fishing to be found near the old dams, and certainly, the intent of concentration expressed both in Tom’s face, and in his stance on that particular occasion, are eloquent of his interest in the art of angling’ (39). It is a stance any fly angler would recognize as his or her own.

Saunders’s book features an archival photo, circa 1911, with a caption ‘Fishing trip in Algonquin Park,’ that shows one of six men (fourth from left) holding two fishing rods, one of which is clearly a fly rod (40).

Even more significant is her assertion: ‘Tom’s skill at fly casting won him the admiration of the guests at Shannon’s [Mowat Lodge]’ (41). She concludes that, ‘[Thomson] made his own flies and bugs, watching to see what insects made the fish rise, and painting his own imitations on the spot’ (42). This sentence closely resembles Addison’s earlier observation. It is difficult to determine whether Addison drew on Saunders’s comment (without attribution) or whether both writers came to similar conclusions independently. Both might well have based their statements on independent primary sources.

However a reader chooses to interpret the observations of these writers, the underlying fact is that Thomson—who fished with natural bait and hard lures when it suited his needs or when conditions dictated—not only made his own hard plugs and spoons, but tied his own flies. The reference to the artist observing insects that made fish rise and then painting pictures of them on the spot—presumably so he could tie flies later to match the hatch—would place him at the forefront of what became one of the most significant developments in fly angling, not only in the twentieth century, but in the long history of the recreational sport.

The fact that Thomson was a fly fisherman when it suited his purposes is incontestable, verified on the basis of archival evidence. By virtue of his stature as Canada’s most famous artist, he is also the country’s most famous fly angler who might well have tied flies to match the hatch before it became common practice in North America (43). Although he is justly celebrated for painting such iconic pictures as Northern River, The Jack Pine and The West Wind, it seems undeniable that a river did run through Tom Thomson.

Endnotes & Footnotes

1. Roderick Haig-Brown was a prolific author who published twenty-eight books in many genres. His subjects spanned fly fishing, nature, conservation, history, geography, rural matters, literature, biography, legal affairs, education, biographical essay, adult novels and works for young readers. Selected volumes include: fly angling classics (A Primer of Fly Fishing, A River Never Sleeps, The Western Angler, Bright Waters, Bright Fish and four-volume The Seasons of a Fisherman); animal stories (Panther and Return to the River); novels (Timber and On the Highest Hill); essay collections (Measure of the Year and Writings & Reflections). Haig-Brown won a Governor’s General Award, Canada’s longest continuous literary award, for Saltwater Summer, one of three angling memoirs to win the award in the non-fiction category including The Incomplete Anglers by John D. Robins and Lines on the Water: A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramichi by David Adams Richards.
2. Unless otherwise indicated the opinions expressed in this essay are mine, developed over 30 years as a professional arts writer who reviewed exhibitions, read and reviewed books, interviewed artists, curators and art historians and wrote about Tom Thomson, in addition to lecturing on the artist at universities, museums, art galleries and fly fishing clubs. My opinions have been shaped by many books (including exhibition catalogues) on Thomson. The artist has been written about more than to any other single Canadian artist irrespective of creative discipline. Selected works include A Treasury of Tom Thomson, The Art of Tom Thomson, The Best of Tom Thomson, Tom Thomson: Trees, Tom Thomson: The Last Spring, Northern Lights: Masterpieces from Tom Thomson & The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero by Joan Murray; Tom Thomson (volume 2 in the Gallery Canadian Art series) by R. H. Hubbard; Canadian Art: The Tom Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario by Jeremy Adamson and Katerina Atanassova, et al.; Tom Thomson: An Introduction to His Life and Art by David P. Silcox; Tom Thomson: The Silence and The Storm by David P. Silcox and Harold Town (1977, revised and updated 2017); Inventing Tom Thomson by Sherrill E. Grace; Tom Thomson: Artist of the North by Wayne Larsen; The Real Mystery of Tom Thomson: His Art and His Life by Richard Weiser; Tom Thomson by William Holmes (Vancouver Art Gallery); The Group of Seven ReImagined edited by Karen Schauber; Thomson, edited by Dennis Reid and published in conjunction a a major retrospective exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario, coordinated by Charles C. Hill. Many books about the Group of Seven incorporate a consideration of Thomson including The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson by David P. Silcox; A Like Vision: The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson by Ian Dejardin and Sarah Milroy; The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation by Charles C. Hill; The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson: An Introduction by Anne Newlands; Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven by Ross King; and Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art edited by John O’Brien and Peter White.
3. The suspicious circumstances surrounding Tom Thomson’s death remains Canada’s most celebrated and enduring mystery. It has laid the foundation for a publishing cottage industry including The Tom Thomson Mystery by William Little; Who Killed Tom Thomson? by John Little; Algonquin Elegy: Tom Thomson’s Last Spring by Neil J. Lehto; Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him by Roy MacGregor; Tom Thomson: The Life and Mysterious Death of the Famous Canadian Painter by Jim Poling Sr.; The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction by Gregory Klages. The best place for a reader to start an investigation into Thomson’s death is the website Death on a Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy, maintained as part of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project sponsored by University of Victoria, the Université de Sherbrooke and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. The mystery begins with the how, when, where and why, not to mention who, of Thomson’s death, whether deliberate or accidental murder, manslaughter, foul play, misadventure or accident. One theory has Tom falling out of his canoe and striking his head while standing astern and urinating. But, like riseforms on a placid lake, the mystery expands outward to encompass where his corpse is buried (in the family plot in Leith cemetery, outside of Owen Sound, Ontario or in an unmarked grave in Algonquin Park where he was initially buried) and where his hand-painted, dove-grey canoe, paddles and fishing tackle disappeared after his body was recovered, not to mention many small oil sketches.
4. In recent years a couple of exhibitions have heightened the international profile and reputation of The Group of Seven and, by extension, Tom Thomson. In 2013 England’s Dulwich Picture Gallery organized Painting in Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. In 2016 popular American comedian/actor/banjoist/art collector Steve Martin curated The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Despite these exhibitions Thomson and the Group remain relatively unknown outside of Canada, which is especially ironic considering their importance to the history and development of Canadian culture.
5. There were occasional exceptions. In 1913 the Ontario government purchased Northern Lake for $250, obviously a large sum at the time. Thomson’s developmental arc as a painter was short and meteoric, paralleling the five years he spent making regular trips to Algonquin Park from 1912 until his death. Most of the fifty canvases and four hundred oil sketches known to exist were completed during this period. His practice was to work up full-scale paintings in his small studio shack in Toronto during winter months. His years visiting the park not only accounted for his most concentrated period of fishing, it was likely when he started fly fishing.
6. Thomson casts a long, double-haul shadow across arts and culture in Canada encompassing visual art, prose narrative (novel and mystery), memoir, critical commentary, cultural history, poetry, music (classical, operatic, jazz, electronica, rock and acoustic), theatre, dance and cinema (documentary and feature film). He has inspired more artists and influenced more cross-disciplinary works than any other single artist in any single creative field. It is beyond the scope of this essay to document the many ways Thomson has exerted an impact on the generations of Canadian artists who followed him, whether adopting, adapting or challenging his vision. Rather, the following is a selective list of artists in other disciplines who have in one way or another responded to Thomson—the man, the artist and the art. He has inspired numerous songs: ‘Tom Thomson’s Mandolin’ by singer/songwriter Mae Moore; ‘Three Pistols’ by the Canadian rockers The Tragically Hip. He has also provided inspiration—along with the Group of Seven—for full-scale albums: Turpentine Wind, an acoustic/electronica song cycle written, produced and performed by Kurt Swinghammer; Northern Shore by The Skydiggers, a folk-rock band; Sonic Palette, a suite of song and instrumental music written and performed by the Algonquin Ensemble, a folk/classical string ensemble; Music Inspired by the Group of 7 (not forgetting Tom Thomson), a suite commissioned by the National Art Gallery of Canada in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Group of Seven written and performed by The Rheostatics, a popular Toronto folk-rock band since disbanded; Walking in the Footsteps, a song suite celebrating Thomson and the Group of Seven written and performed by folksinger Ian Tamblyn. Thomson also left his mark on literature including: Earth Day in Leith Churchyard, a poetry collection devoted to the artist by Bernadette Rule; Tom Thomson’s Last Bonfire, a mystery by Geoff Taylor; Tom Thomson’s Last Paddle, a mystery for young readers by Larry McCloskey; The Missing Skull, a mystery by John Wilson; Tom Thomson: My Last Spring, a fictionalized diary by Tim Bouma; The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson, a graphic novel by engraver George A. Walker. Other writers have titled books in tribute to Thomson including: Tom Thomson in Purgatory, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poetry collection by Troy Jollimore, a Canadian-born philosophy professor at California State University; Tom Thomson and Other Poems, a selected works including poems about Thomson by George Whipple; Tom Thomson’s Shack, a collection of short meditative narratives by Harold Renisch. Thomson’s reach extends to the performing arts to embrace Northern River, a one-man folk operetta written and performed by acoustic musician David Archibald; Songs in the Key of Tom, a folk musical written and performed by David Sereda and later expanded into The Woods Are Burning with poet Anne Michaels and blues artist Ken Whiteley; The Threshold of Magic, a one-man show of song and music created and performed by Jeffery Bastien; Colours in the Storm, a folk musical by playwright Jim Betts; Group of Seven Nutcracker, an adaptation of The Nutcracker created and produced by Toronto-based Ballet Jorgen; The Far Shore, a feature fictionalized biopic film by visual artist/filmmaker Joyce Wieland; Dark Pines, a TV documentary investigating Thomson’s death directed by David Viasbord; West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson, a documentary on the artist’s life and art produced by White Pines Pictures.
7. Although the term ‘Canadian wilderness tradition’ is mine, interested readers can get a sense of the concept by referring to these selected literary anthologies: Treasures of Place: Three Centuries of Nature Writing in Canada edited by Wayne Grady; Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing edited by David R. Boyd; Marked by the Wild: An Anthology of Literature Shaped by the Canadian Wilderness edited by Bruce Littlejohn and Jon Pearce; Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems edited by Nancy Holmes. Margaret Atwood’s Survival, a groundbreaking thematic study of Canadian Literature influenced by the teaching and writings of Northrop Frye, is one of many critical studies that explore the relationship between Canadian literature and wilderness. Strange Things, Atwood’s study of the imaginative mystique of the Northern Wilderness, picks up where Survival leaves off. Other seminal critical studies that explore similar thematic geography include: Canada and Idea of North by Sherrill E. Grace; Butterfly on Rock by D. G. Jones; Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction by Laurence Ricou; Harsh and Lonely Land: The Major Canadian Poets & The Making of a Canadian Tradition by Tom Marshall; The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction by Margot Northey; The Northern Imagination: A Study of Northern Canadian Literature by Allison Mitcham. There are many others.
8. Of the academic studies devoted to Winslow Homer, the two I found most helpful in terms of the intersection of man, artist and fly angler are: Winslow Homer: Art and Angler, by Patricia Junker and Sarah Burns, with contributions by William H. Gerdis, Paul Schullery, Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and David Tatham, published in conjunction with the exhibition, Casting a Spell: Winslow Homer, Artist and Angler, co-organized by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and Amos Carter Museum, Fort Worth, 2002; Winslow Homer in the Adirondacks, by David Tatham, published by Syracuse University Press, 1996.
9. Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 107.
10. In addition to the similarities between Thomson and Homer, there are similarities between Adirondack State Park (constituted in 1892) and Algonquin Provincial Park (established in 1893), including their shared history of logging, hunting, fishing and trapping, and recreational tourism in an era of expanding urbanization and industrialization when people sought refuge in a quasi-religious “wilderness” experience. Interestingly, another painter associated with the Adirondacks, Rockwell Kent, knew and influenced Lawren Harris, one of Thomson’s closest creative companions. Although Homer was far more famous in his lifetime than Thomson, the latter continued to play a much larger role in Canadian arts and culture today than Homer ever did in American arts and culture.
11. Thomson painted a blurry, unspecified figure of fisherman in Little Cauchon Lake (circa. spring 1916). It is impossible to determine whether the figure was intended to be a fly angler. He also painted Autumn, Three Trout (circa. fall 1916).
12. The Fisherman (winter 1916-17) is in the permanent collection of the Edmonton Art Gallery. I have been unable to identify the fly fisherman, if in fact the painting is based on an actual angler. I like to imagine it as a self-portrait: the fly angler as artist and the artist as fly angler.
13. Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto: House of Anansi Press 1971), p. 200.
14. In addition to working as a feature writer and columnist at such major Canadian newspapers as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post and Ottawa Citizen in addition to Maclean’s (Canada’s national magazine), McGregor has written more than fifty books including: A Life in the Bush (a memoir built on an affectionate portrait of his dad), Escape (a search for the soul of Canada), The Weekender (a cottage journal), Canadians (a portrait of a country and its people) and Canoe Country (an exploration into the making of Canada), not to mention Shorelines (reissued as Canoe Lake), a fictional account of the alleged romance between Thomson and Winnie Trainor (a distant relative of MacGregor’s). His most recent non-fiction book is Original Highways: Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada.
15. Roy McGreg, Northern Light (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010), p. 16.
16. Ibid., p. 302.
17. Ibid., 302.
18. The impressions of Tom Thomson expressed here are based on a pair letters written to Darcy Spencer, a former scoutmaster living in Kitchener, Ontario. In the 1970s Spencer exchanged correspondence with Jack Wilkinson, longtime operator Kish-Kaduk Lodge on Cedar Lake, in Algonquin Park. In the letters, which were not made public previously, Wilkinson offers recollections of being a child in the park when the artist was alive. I made aware of the letters in January 2011 when I wrote a story in the Waterloo Region Record in advance of an exhibition, Searching for Tom—Tom Thomson: Man, Myth and Masterworks, organized by THEMUSEUM, in Kitchener, Ontario. An article related to the letters is posted as ‘Epistles from the Grave’ on my blog at www.reidbetweenthelines.ca
19. Some posthumous champions, such as Dr. James MacCallum, a Toronto ophthalmologist and staunch supporter of Thomson and the Group of Seven, had a financial interest in enhancing the artist’s reputation. Others—including family, a few discerning art critics, gallery curators who challenged public sentiment by purchasing paintings and founding members of the Group of Seven—were motivated by either familial love or appreciation for his artistic talent, which was still developing when he died. Members of the Group erected a memorial cairn in honour of their creative companion on Hayhurst Point, overlooking Canoe Lake. The inscription, written by Group founding member J. E. H (Jim) MacDonald, reflects both heartfelt regard and mythologizing zeal: ‘To the memory of Tom Thomson artist, woodsman and guide who was drowned in Canoe Lake July 8th, 1917. He lived humbly but passionately with the wild. It made him brother to all untamed things of nature. It drew him apart and revealed itself wonderfully to him. It sent him out from the woods only to show these revelations through his art and it took him to itself at last. His fellow artists and other friends and admirers join gladly in this tribute to his character and genius . . . .’
20. Ibid., p. 302.
21. Tom Thomson on Canoe Lake. circa 1916 (Archives of Ontario), a photo taken by Maud Varley, wife of Group of Seven founding member Fred Varley. The misidentification of the caption accompanying the photo has been repeated by successive writers, editors and publishers obviously unfamiliar with angling gear.
22. Ibid., p. 302.
23. Ibid., p.302.
24. Ibid., p.302. There is a dearth of critical commentary devoted to Maclean’s fictional autobiography; however, those seeking critical appreciations can do no better than two essays: Wendell Berry’s ‘Style and Grace,’ collected in What Are People For, and Wallace Stegner’s ‘Haunted by Waters: Norman Maclean, collected in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. A more personal insight is offered by his son, John Maclean, in his memoir Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, published by HarperCollins, 2021.
25. The photograph of a woman, wearing a wedding band and holding a stringer of fish in one hand and a bamboo fly rod in the other, long misidentified as Winnifred (Winnie) Trainor taken by Tom Thomson, circa 1916 (National Archives of Canada).
26. Thomson was an avid photographer. While a few of his photos remain extant, he is known to have lost many negatives in a canoe mishap.
27. Photo of Thomson at Tea Lake Dam taken in 1916 by Lawren Harris. (National Archives of Canada). Thoreau MacDonald, son of J.E.H. MacDonald and a fine printmaker and illustrator in his own right, based a later well-known drawing on the photo.
28. John D. Robins. The Incomplete Anglers (Whitney, Ontario: The Friends of Algonquin Park, 1998), p. 8.
29. S. Bernard Shaw, Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park: Tom Thomson and Other Mysteries (Burnstown, Ontario: General Store Publishing House,1996), p. 83.
30. Ibid., p. 83.
31. Ottelyn Addison and Elizabeth Harwood, Tom Thomson: The Algonquin Years (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1969), p. 19.
32. Ibid., p. 20.
33. Ibid., p. 19.
34. Ibid., p. 19.
35. Ibid., p. 19.
36. Ibid., p 19
37. Jason Borger, son of prominent fly angling writer Gary Borger’s son, did almost all of the on-screen fly casting for the actors in the cinematic adaptation of A River Runs Through It.
38. Ibid., p. 88.
39. Audrey Saunders, Algonquin Story, Third Edition (Whitney, Ontario: The Friends of Algonquin Park, 2003), p. 180.
40. Ibid., unnumbered (National Archives of Canada)
41. Ibid., p. 179.
42. Ibid., p. 179.
43. While I stand by my contention that Tom Thomson is Canada’s most famous fly angler, Canada has produced other significant artists, as well as prominent public figures, committed to catching fish with artificial flies. An incomplete list includes: writers Stephen Leacock, W. O. Mitchell, Ethel Wilson, Mordecai Richler, David Adams Richards, Paul Quarrington, Helen Humphrey, David Carpenter, Jake MacDonald, Wayne Curtis and Harry Thurston; playwright Dan Needles; newspapermen Greg Clark, Bruce Hutchison and Charles Lynch; broadcaster/storyteller Stuart McLean; sports writer Stephen Brunt; country songwriter Paul Brant; acoustic musician Chris Coole.