Or an ode to books and the literature of fly-fishing
Author’s note: This is one essay that nearly defeated
this writer. The examination of literature and themes of human expression as
art and life through fly-fishing opened so many doors from expression, nature,
curiosity, the human condition, the digital age, existentialism, and a hundred
others that I started to get overwhelmed. This could be a book with two dozen
chapters. A tome reflective of the human state of reading and not reading, of
philosophy and the exploration of our humanity, achievements, fears, mortality,
and everything else written down on the dozens of pages and notes I have taken
in the last several months leading up to this actualization of putting pen to
paper. Perhaps it can best be expressed as how it emerged, with interlocking
and woven themes rather than chapters. Rivers flow and lines curve and so may
words, if we are willing to read them. E.H. Summer 2018
When I was growing up, our house on the East Side of
Milwaukee was full of books. Books sat on shelves, cascaded off cocktail
tables, were piled on the floor, and carried in hand from room to room. For
much of my youth my father sat engrossed in books, slowly smoking a pipe.
Social gatherings often were occasions of passionate discussions of ideas and
books, punctuated by booze and smoke. My father’s generation kept their minds
sharp, even if their bodies were not always treated the best. Today sometimes I
think we have come to the opposite problem: our bodies sacred, but our minds
awash in a sea of data bytes, with no punctuation rooted-words to tie it all
together.
As a curious child, I explored ideas with questions…
pestering my parents to no end wanting to know the what, why, and how of
everything. They had a set answer: “Look it up.” The search took place in books
awash in dust and ideas, and often the journey was more important than the
destination or answer, for it took one on diversions both small and large that
opened the mind, and imprinted new thoughts or dimensions of perspective on a
young mind. A transcendental journey away from the mundane.
My father found great wealth in books and was rich in ideas
and knowledge. Indeed, late in his life he was at the home of a relative after
a funeral, and was in an odd mood, as if he had been faced with his own
mortality. One of the guests approached him as he stood alone quiet and
reflective in the living room browsing through the shelves of books. “What are
you doing?” the relative asked. “Looking at the books,” he replied, opening one
briefly.
“Oh I hate books,” said the relative. “They cause dust, and
I am allergic to dust.”
My father turned ever so slowly, and replacing the book
gently and reverently in its slot, said “I would rather have dust in my lungs
than dust on my brain.”
Thus, when it came time for his son to explore the world of
fly-fishing, I naturally turned to books, and turned the first page in a
lifetime journey.
The immortal Arnold Gingrich opened his literary exploration
of the world of fly-fishing writing in ‘The Fishing in Print’ with the words:
“As Sparse Grey Hackle says, some of the best fishing is to
be found not in water but in print. It follows that some of the best fishing
partners are to be found not in life but in literature.”
A book, in its essence is a recording of thoughts and
experiences, points of view and reflections. Stories, our stories… his story
and history. Books allow ideas to be preserved in a timeless way… mirrors and
windows through another’s eyes. They take us places we have never been, they
augment dreams, and widen our world. They allow for exploration of ideas.
Opening a book can be like an open-ended question: joy, fear, anticipation and
validation… mortality and ecstasy captured through mere words on a page. Books
are a lens into a different world, and an examination of the human experience…
the human soul… the human story. Rivers are dividing points and joining points,
moving water and flowing ideas and expressions… mirrors into introspection and
perspective as words are.
When mankind placed pen to paper, and the written language
emerged as a preservation tool, books were lovingly created and copied by hand.
Even after the printing press was invented, cherished volumes were often kept
under lock and key in vaults, so sacred and valued were the words. Libraries
were the intellectual equivalent of treasuries… banks investing in or keeping
knowledge. Words opened minds and that scared institutions such as the church,
which spent much of their time and effort banning them and collecting them to
file out of sight forever. Ideas can be dangerous. For us today they are free
or nearly so. So free that we take them for granted, and don’t read them.
The greatest tribute to anything as far as human history is
concerned is to capture it in art, and the written word, or literature, is one
of the finest forms. It has been said that a picture paints a thousand words,
but I would add that a word conjures a thousand pictures, for the human mind is
not two-dimensional, and words trigger imagination. The finest angling books or
literature are often not entirely about fishing. Indeed, they are about life
seen through our experiences while fishing. The human condition portrayed in
the garden of analogy. William Humphrey wrote one of the greatest stories about
fly-fishing in ‘The Spawning Run.’ It is a story about fishing, but in between
the words are our own foibles laid bare in the bushes of life down by the
river. Thus, the finest books are often not simple how-to or where to go typing,
but viewing life, nature, art and philosophy through fly-fishing. Our little
sport might be unique, for more words have been written about it than any other
sport. Ernest Hemmingway wrote his most simple and essential novel, a single
tale of man and a fish… which was not about fishing, but about life,
existentialism, and the bigger realms. The ideas were as large as the dialog
was simple and child-like. These stories endure and are endless as the rivers.
Ars Longa Vitae Brevis. The writers may be gathering dust, but when we open
their books, we hear their voices. Words are immortal. They give us something
greater to chew on. To taste and reflect on. To live through. A hundred books,
a hundred lives, and one reader living it all.
Yes, and books are there for learning. There on the shelf,
the bookstore, the library or the hearth mantle available and accessible to
all, only for the boldness of curiosity to open the cover and open our
minds. Why boldness? Because sometimes books make us question things… even
ourselves, and critical thinking can be dangerous to the self-assured. I wonder
often if zealots like Halford the dry-fly dogmatic read books with their eyes
tightly closed. We have to be open to ideas and desire to see the world as
other’s see it. That wider view can be frightening or enlightening, depending
on the reader. A closed mind is a closed book. Learning through books is
something we can all do. The history of the sport, and the varied experiences
and perspectives is our education off the water, allowing us to enjoy the
fishing at a greater level when casting in it. Casting our fly into books can
be as rewarding as wetting an actual line.
Explore wit and wisdom with Lyons as he stumbles through the
rivers, laugh with Volker, discover the inner humor in Skues, Lose a day with
Negley Farson in ‘Going Fishing,’ explore the north-west with Haig-Brown, Fish
the world around and gain a lens into entomology and history with Schwiebert.
Sit at a table with Ritz and Gingrich at a fishing club with a salon-like
atmosphere where ideas are born and drown in martinis, and fishing is only the
seed for the larger expressions of the mind. Sparse Grey Hackle (Arthur Miller)
wrote a book almost entirely not about fishing… or was it about fishing in the
end? We have to go there to see. We have to feed our mind along with our body.
When we do, we find out why we might have not wanted to fish with Hemingway, or
the development of the Irish wet flies with Kingsmill Moore, what we have
gained and lost in tackle, the joys and losses in the tussle with memorable
fish, discover Yeats and his poetry about fishing and nature, explore the north
woods with Gordon McQuarrie, and even find ourselves feeling so slightly
sheepishly guilty for enjoying these explorations off the stream as much as our
time with rod in hand. There in an essence, was the author’s intent.
Of course, books also have tangibility, a physicality of
touch and feel and smell that is clinically absent in the digital world. Books
are read by the stream, by the fire, in the company of valued friends and pets,
with wines, and exotic cheeses. Books are like tasting a new food. They each
have a flavor as varied as the natural world and the human personality. The
human writer wanting to be more, to exist in a larger sense, and create
something larger out of a simple act. To separate ourselves from the animals
through art and sport. Books have a durability as well. Treasured and saved. A
gift to be given to ourselves again and again, and shared with others.
The digital world of today exists for a nano-second and
moves on. It is designed for short-attention spans, and cultivates and harvests
them. Forums don’t explore ideas like books do, they race through inane
subjects like what is the best five-weight rod?… they are there and gone again.
Books are like a fine wine slowly sipped and enjoyed for its character, its
very uniqueness. Scanning typed data is like drinking 100 thimbles of different
wines with a toothpick. We remember and enjoy nothing. Ten minutes later we are
all back where we started.
Books and ideas are not to be constrained to a formula:
1,500 words with a side bar map and travel tips. Writing by numbers. Books are
the soul of creativity, allowing the author to say what they want, go where
they want to go, without hindrance. We owe a debt of gratitude to editors and
publishers such as Gingrich and Lyons for allowing and championing just that…
even if a book on fly-fishing was not always a good monetary bet.
Literacy can be defined as not just the ability to read, but
the act of reading.
Books are our constant companions too, as are the stories
and ideas. We absorb them and they become part of our experiences on the river.
Rounding the bend on a spring creek, one remembers a passage in ‘Reflections of
Rivers Past’, or wading a big river, find ourselves recalling a dozen passages
of the naked fear when the author discovers that nature and water are in
charge, a force not to be tamed or taken lightly, but respected. The written
words peek out of the attic of our memory when we share the joy of landing a
fish with an author who in that moment, captured the feeling so eloquently. We
remember the words: flow, caress, spray, leap, pull, twist, dive, thunder and
roar, cascade, liquid fear, anticipation, loop, cast, etc. The reels scream,
the rods bend, the fish tussle, the angler is in doubt, the line breaks… the
fish is freed. Then on to the next bend…
Our rod is a mere extension to a foreign realm: an upside
down world where life breathes in water and knows next to nothing about the
air-breathing world above the mirror of the surface. Liken the fly-rod to a
spire on a cathedral creeping closer to god. Hope and mystery dwell in the
nether worlds of heaven and water. We can only touch them for a moment. Words
can take us there, and bring us home safely too. Books and words kindle our
imagination and extend our season as we read of the rivers and fish while snow
falls and the dog sleeps a dreamless sleep like the trout do under the ice on a
dark January evening. We are there too, along with the author. We catch their
fish along with them, triumph along with them, and fail when they do, howling a
barbaric YAWP! echoing across the canyon or valley with our existence,
achievements, fears, and frustrations. Then sit and reflect with print on the
meaning of it all. Why do we fish? Why is this important to us? What about
fly-fishing is so fascinating that we can’t get enough to fill us? The
reflections have been written a thousand times in a thousand different ways,
all worth the quiet to read them. Why did the author labor to record them? Was
it vanity? Was it that he or she felt what many of us do; that fly-fishing is
an art performed in water, but perfected in words?
The debt of gratitude is not just owed to the publishers,
but to the authors themselves. We can thank them for the vicarious pleasures,
for the absorbed learning, for the pure joy, and time filled with ideas by just
reading their books. There is no greater tribute.
A new premium fly-rod made of space age plastics costs over
$800 today. Most used ‘reader’ copy fly-fishing books can be had for under $20.
With the used book availability of the internet, access to beginning a library
has never been better. So for the price of one new fly-rod one probably doesn’t
need anyway, we could purchase 40 books, and have a lifetime of experiences to
enjoy, experiences we might never have without reading the travels of the
authors: examinations of opinions we would never have been exposed to if we
didn’t delve deep into the pages, history we may never have known and
connections we never may have known existed without the words being recorded
and bound.
There is another thing that we often find as an unexpected
bonus by reading books. We discover ourselves.
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