My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Scott Waldie (who unfortunately passed away a few years ago) gave us a fine gift in his three Travers Corners books. The last, The Final Chapters,” continues the stories of the characters in fictional Travers Corners, Montana.

There is nothing new or startling about these stories, either in content or execution. One of the things I like about these stories is the lack of pretentiousness—what you see is what you get: good old fashioned storytelling. These stories aren’t about big issues. The author isn’t trying to make a point. These are stories about regular people doing regular things as they live their lives in a small corner of the world.

Fly fishing is an integral part of nearly every story. The main character, Jud, is a river boat builder. He also guides and fishes on the local waters, known for their large trout.

Waldie’s storytelling skills are just right, with a turn of phrase here and there to add just enough something extra to a story that makes a connection with a reader. He brings the reader into the story, making them wish they were a part of the story, or, rather, part of the town and lives of the characters in the story.

These stories are about friends and how people get along in a small (albeit idealized) town. Things usually work out well for the characters, but when they don’t you are there pulling for them.

These are “feel good” stories, but they aren’t sappy. They are easy reads, and each chapter is a self-contained story, although they are all about the same place and same people. You could easily open the book to a random chapter and read it without missing a thing.

When you’re tired of your heavy reading, and need a light pick-me-up read, make sure you have all three of the Travers Corners books on hand.

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I have a quest. The quest involves answering several related questions. I won’t list them all, but the following two questions should give an idea as to the basic gist of them:

• Do fish suffer when they are caught using standard fly fishing techniques?
• Is angling cruel?

I have explored these types of questions in at least four posts on my blog (see links to them at the bottom of this post). And, frankly, I’ve been a bit disappointed at the lack of response. It seems like it is a topic that fly anglers do not want to discuss. I guess I can’t really blame them, who wants to think about their possible cruelty?

Over the years, the discussion has usually hinged on the aspect of whether or not fish feel pain. Various experiments have been carried out, and, depending on where one stands on the issue, various conclusions have been reached. One thing everyone seems to agree on is that “we” are right and “they” are wrong.

Which perfectly illustrates how the issue has been exacerbated through an “Us” versus “Them” mentality. Much of the writing produced in the debate has come from a person who is passionate about one side or the other, typically either someone from the angling community or someone from an animal rights group.

This is as good as spot as any to address two important, and quite different, terms: animal rights and animal welfare. Many groups espousing animal rights believe that animals have equal rights with humans (and in some extreme cases, an animal’s “rights” trump a human’s). The most well known group in favor of animal rights is PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Animal welfare advocates believe that animals can have benefits to humans, but that the animal should be treated as humanely as possible, give the situation. One of the biggest groups supporting animal welfare is AVMA (American Veterinary Medical Association). These two groups are often at odds with each other.

Many anglers hear the words “animal welfare” and mistakenly think “animal rights” and begin bashing the views of those speaking on behalf of the welfare of animals. In a research paper from 2007 titled “Animal welfare perspectives on recreational angling” by Steven J. Cooke and Lynne U. Sneddon, they state that “informed anglers and fisheries managers can adopt practices to improve the welfare of angled fish.” They do not advocate the eradication of catch and release, but rather suggest that certain methods be observed to reduce potential pain and suffering. Many animal welfare groups are not against recreational angling.

One of the things most often missing in the debate is clear (to the lay person), reasoned (data, not emotion) and unbiased information concerning the issue. Enter Dr. Braithwaite and her book, Do Fish Feel Pain?

To illustrate a point made above, this is from the first paragraph of the preface, in which Braithwaite describes reactions from an Op-Ed piece she published in the Los Angeles Times regarding fish pain:

After the article appeared, the newspaper and I received letters and emails. These were of two sorts. Some told me that I was persecuting anglers by spreading untruths and myths—wasn’t it clear to everyone that fish don’t feel pain? But the others wanted to know why I bothered to investigate the question—wasn’t it clear to everyone that fish do feel pain?

This is an interesting reaction, in which it is clear to pretty much everyone, except for those who are most worried about the potential for scientific results to change their recreational lifestyle, that fish feel pain.

But that wasn’t her point. Rather than tell you about her point, I’ll let her speak for herself.

I had a certain amount of sympathy with both camps. I could identify with those who believed I was threatening the angling community. That was not my intention, but there had been a great deal of inaccurate information written about research on pain in fish so it was understandable that some people were being defensive. On the other hand, how were the others to know that no scientific analysis of even the basics of fish pain had been conducted before the turn of this century?

Those polarized reactions, which also played out on various websites, prompted me to wonder whether there was need for a fuller account of the science behind the fish pain debate. The result is this book.

My goal in writing this book has been to provide the background to promote informed discussion. Like other animal welfare debates, constructively arguing about fish welfare requires that we understand the issues, that we review evidence and discuss this appropriately. In the book, I examine what we know so far about pain in fish, and whether it is meaningful to discuss fish welfare at all. After reading this book, I hope you will be in a position to make up your own mind. I have no axe to grind—I choose to eat fish and I experiment on them, but while I have been fishing in the past, I am not an active angler though I have many friends and colleagues who are.

This is a difficult topic to cover, and one that will take great skill to do it justice. Having spent much time on my own reading, and trying to write, about the topic, I know that it is more than just the science behind pain. There are at least three branches of inquiry involved when tackling the topic: science, psychology and philosophy. Braithwaite also realizes this when she says, “As the book began to take shape, it became clear that the fish pain debate probes questions about science, welfare and ethics.”

I am looking forward to the continued reading, exploring and writing about this new book. From what I have read so far (the preface and chapter 1), I believe Dr. Braithwaite when she says she has no axe to grind. I believe this book could be a great asset to the serious inquirer.

I will probably post updates for each chapter or two (there are seven chapters in the book, containing 184 pages).

The book is published by Oxford University Press. The bulletin from Oxford Press says it’s available May 20. However, Amazon is selling copies (I don’t know if they are shipping yet).

Full disclosure: I received a free review copy, although I do not know the author and am in no way affiliated with Oxford University Press or any of its designees.

http://scarles.org/blog/cutthroat-stalker/1173/fish-pain-here-we-go-again/
http://scarles.org/blog/cutthroat-stalker/1186/hooking-things-survey/
http://scarles.org/blog/cutthroat-stalker/1246/css-double-dog-dare-why-not-birdermen/
http://scarles.org/blog/cutthroat-stalker/2120/gotta-again/

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dry Fly Gospel
By Terry Coffey

Book Review

This is a quirky book filled with 12 short stories that catch one off guard. At least they caught me off guard. Granted, with the title it bears and a cover with a picture of a nun holding a fly rod and a wicker creel at her feet, it does lead one to believe that what comes under the cover won’t going to be your typical fishing yarns.

There are twelve stories, and they aren’t all about fly fishing (however, I think fly fishing makes an appearance in most of them). I believe each of these stories has been previously published, many of them in print form.

This slim volume of 92 pages is self-published. There are several errors that occur throughout the book, most of them are the things an editor would pick up. That’s one of the problems of self-publishing—it’s sometimes hard to catch your own errors, especially the larger the piece.

The title story, and first in the book, “Dry Fly Gospel,” starts like this:

“The following excerpts are taken from fragments of what many scholars believe is a fishing journal kept by John, who was the son of Zebedee and favorite disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The story, at first glance, may strike a certain type of reader as a bit sacrilegious: Jesus as a fly fishing instructor and early practitioner of catch and release. However, I think Coffey maintains enough reverence for the sacred so that those who might instinctively shy away from such a story, will not take offense.

The second story, “The Jar of Worms,” features Cyrus, one of the 12 disciples, who tells the story in first person. He becomes enraged when Judas Iscariot, a bait fisherman (this made me crack up), interrupts a story being told by the Master, about dry fly fishing. Cyrus is upset because Jesus invites the bait fishing Judas to join them, Cyrus leaves Jesus, and Judas eventually fills his vacated spot, becoming one of the 12. Of course, Cyrus can’t help firing off a few parting comments about watching out for Iscariot since bait fishermen can’t be trusted.

The book contains a story about a medieval nun who believes she might have the opportunity to work on the Shroud of Turin, only to end up trying to decide if she wants to stay at the convent and remain a nun. One of the stories is about a Vietnam vet who meets Freud at a veterans’ hospital and ends up fishing with Freud, Shakespeare and Hemingway. Another story tells of a woman trying to come to terms with her cancer during a fly fishing excursion.

There is a story of a man in Peru who falls off his mountainside potato farm. One about a solo hike to a pond with a possible huge fish, or possibly a UFO incident. Another about a person who died and became a tree. And a couple of others.

I found most of the earlier stories to be more compelling reading and the last few were a bit, well, almost silly? There were enough interesting stories that I would recommend the book to anyone looking for something a bit eclectic.

The price, $12.95 plus shipping (about $16 total for me), seems a bit pricey for what you get. There is a Kindle edition for $4.95 that seems just about right. (Even if you don’t own a Kindle, you can get the Kindle reader for free so you can purchase books like this and read it on your computer.)

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sometime within the past ten years or so I became interested in native fish. I have nothing against any species, I just like to see fish that are “supposed” to be in a watershed, in that watershed, not some other species occupying that water. This desire to find native species in their native range has taken my fishing buddy and me to some out-of-the-way little creeks—we’re talking about places in the middle of the desert 100 miles from the nearest town. Creeks whose widths are measured in inches, not feet. But it doesn’t seem to matter where we go, how far away from “civilization” we get, we still come across water stocked with non-native species. Many of these places were stocked long before motorized travel was possible. And I’ve wondered what possessed people to stock fish in such places.

Anders Halverson’s new book, An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World, answers that question for me. In a fascinating look at the social and political maneuverings of the late nineteenth century through the present, Anders’ meticulous research lays bare some interesting tidbits of the stocking policies of the United States.

One such gem is that the government was worried about the strength of the nation’s men: that they had “notoriously less hardihood and endurance than the generation which preceded [their:] own” (George Perkins Marsh, congressman and diplomat from the mid-1800’s). This description was given in a report by Marsh under the auspices of the Legislature of Vermont on the Artificial Propagation of Fish. He further stated that “the sports of the chase” (angling being one of them) was a way to increase the hardiness of the Americans. At this time, many waterways were already seeing a decline in fish numbers and the artificial propagation of fish was seen as a way to increase those numbers. With the urge to increase the robustness of its men, and the decline fish population the underpinnings were there for the introduction of non-native species.

Last year Eccles (from the Turning Over Small Stones blog) and I had a discussion about the terms “Fish and Game” and “Fish and Wildlife” as used in various agencies: Why were the terms “fish” and “game” separate? Shouldn’t it just be Game or Wildlife, as in “Utah Game” or “US Wildlife Service” since fish are a type of game and fish are a type of wildlife? Anders informs us that by the 1870s congress formed the United States Fish Commission to help tackle the problem of declining fish stocks, thus becoming the first governmental agency involved with animal husbandry in the US. At a later time, the “game” and “wildlife” were added as the agency expanded. So, in my mind at least, this solves the mystery.

How the rainbow trout became the darling of the US Fish Commission, and just about every other angling agency in the world, is an interesting tale that Anders starts in San Francisco in 1872 with Livingston Stone looking for spawning salmon. He eventually found the McCloud River and began propagating salmon. By 1879 they were looking for a place on the McCloud to begin propagating trout as well. And they did, with astounding success.

Besides the historical ventures Anders skillfully and delightfully takes the reader on, he also dissects the biology of the stocking programs, covering the hardiness of a stock that is constantly used for breeding to whirling disease. He discusses the loss of native species and the response (or lack of it) of individual state fish and game departments, how some of them have switched from stocking to conservation.

This brings up an interesting problem that many fish and game departments need to tackle: what is their responsibility when sportsmen (who pay for licenses whose money is then possibly used to bankroll conservation and restoration instead of stocking), clamor for more catchable fish?

Through all of these topics Anders uses a reporters zeal for facts (there are approximately 475 sources listed in the bibliography) and detachment, thereby keeping an even keel on reporting the facts and not stepping on a soapbox to expound one particular side over another. Even with this professional detachment, there is a keen sense of understanding and compassion shown for the stories he tells. For, if nothing else (but there is a lot of “else”), the book is full of stories told with the storyteller’s art.

Full Disclosure: I have corresponded with Anders a few times by email. I was one of the first couple of anglers to join his new website (*). And when he said he had a book available to be reviewed, I asked for a copy. I don’t have anything to profit from this review except getting a free book. Which I already have.

Purchase the book (links from Anders’ website).

Check out the “Additional Materials” on Anders’ website.

Here is a review from Dave B at Native Trout Angler.

Another review, this one from Sam Snyder and posted on MidCurrent.

Newspaper piece from ColoradoDaily.com.

Information from Yale University Press (publishers of the book).

* This website is Angler’s Life List and Native Fish Network (ALLNFN). A big congratulations to the site for making it into the March 2010 edition of Outside Magazine’s Editors’ Choice top 51 things to do (“For our inaugural list, we’ve gathered 51 of our favorite things into a rollicking compendium of capital ideas, sublime destinations, brilliant equipment, and more.”). ALLNFN came in at #42!

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ted Leeson has been one of my favorite authors since his first book in 1994, The Habit of Rivers. That book contained essays concerning his trip throughout the western United States mostly fishing for native trout. Since then he has written a fair number of books on flies and fly tying. I rarely buy those types of books, preferring the literary over the practical (let’s not think what that might say about me), but it is his essays that I look forward to reading. Two years after his debut book he edited a volume of essays titled The Gift of Trout. That was a good book, but I was really looking forward to his next volume containing only his work. I had to wait eight years from The Habit of Rivers until publication of Jerusalem Creek, another exceptional book of essays, centered in the Driftless area.

In those first two books, I found Leeson to be a bit more weighty…maybe “academic” is the word I’m looking for. I loved those books, but from what I remember, they seemed to be filled with lots of thought-provoking, introspective pieces. Maybe the word “serious” is what I’m thinking. Seven years after Jerusalem Creek, Leeson published Inventing Montana. This book contains the classic Leeson writing consisting of “academic” language, such as this sentence from Chapter 7, The Most of It: “Given its encumbrance with conditions and qualifications, many people might dismiss the question as invalid or meaningless to begin with.” But, unlike (to my memory at least) his other two volumes of essays, Inventing Montana has a lot more personal feel. I believe one of the reasons it does so is because of the humor he injects into most of the pieces. This is a welcome element to Leeson’s writing that I think makes this book his most reader-friendly volume yet.

His chapter titled, Local Semiotics, contains a side-splitting discussion among his friends when they happened upon the only open campsite, but it hand an ice scraper in the middle of the picnic table. They tossed around their theories on the plausibility of an ice scraper being used to hold a tent site in a Yellowstone campground (for those of you who visit the Park with any regularity, you’ll understand the importance of finding, and then holding, a campsite). Two of the party

“took up the question from a more or less epistemological standpoint: What constitutes value? How do we know value, and wherein does it reside? And for whom? Is value intrinsic.”

And of course, others in the group

“considered the scraper from the perspective of intentionality. Had it been left deliberately or accidentally? Was it a sign of something other than forgetfulness?”

A park ranger happened upon them in the middle of their conundrum, but refused to weigh in one way or the other.

Leeson has spent the last 20 or so years visiting Montana for about a month with a handful of friends. The group is an eclectic bunch, which creates the backdrop for many of the essays. These essays take place in a relatively small area, the Madison Valley. Focusing on such a small area, with a group of close friends, helps bring an intimacy to the book, an almost folksy feel to it. Such as his essay about Ennis.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ennis, Montana, it is the quintessential cow town, with the added feature of being the quintessential fly fishing town as well (which is an odd dichotomy considering the occasional conflict between cattlemen and anglers). He points out that one thing among small towns is the inhabitants’ penchant for waving to passing automobiles. As a motorcyclist, I’ve grown accustomed to waving to other motorcyclists, but there is always a question of which motorcyclists do you wave to: only the ones riding the same type of bike? Ones with helmets? In town? At a stoplight? Leeson analyzes the problems associated with waving when your license plate clearly shows you are an outsider.

“Mindful of how visitors like myself invade the place each summer, I worry that initiating a wave might be perceived as the overeager ingratiations of a tourist on holiday. Such people presume to a familiarity that does not exist and may force a return wave in a kind of extorted intimacy that leaves the other driver feeling he’s been compelled to engage in a nonconsensual act.”

And of course, what would a Leeson book be without soaring paragraphs of magical prose?

“Some years bring as well, however, a season within this season, a smoldering, incandescent stretch of days when the mercury flirts with triple digits and a string of nights not much cooler—the depths of the dog days and the hottest part of the hottest part of the year….in the forge of each day, the sun hammers the landscape to the same hard and brittle sheet of earth.”

For those of you who might have tried Leeson before but didn’t quite get into it, give this one a try. For those who already enjoy Leeson, you’ll love the extra dimensions this book adds to his repertoire.

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by Scott Sadil

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There have been a couple of blog posts by various people (myself included) over the past year or so decrying what has been called either the X-games or extreme fly fishing approach among some of the “new breed” of anglers. Some books and especially DVDs seem to gravitate in that direction. There is plenty of debate as to whether fly fishing can indeed be an extreme sport–how extreme can one get in fly fishing?

But the issue isn’t whether the sport is “extreme,” it’s about the attitude a small segment of anglers brings to the sport–an in-your-face, braggadocio, “Outta my way, we’re gonna stick some pigs today!” mentality they bring to the water. It seems more about domination, about asserting their will over the elements and the fish: it’s about their conquests. (So as not to improperly malign any extreme sport or x-game participant, maybe we should call those with this mentality The Dominators, The Braggadocios, or possibly The Conquistadors.)

Conquests versus relationships. As soon as a fish is caught, isn’t that a conquest? Well, as soon as you “get the girl,” is *that* a conquest? It depends on the attitude of the one doing the getting, and what they want out of the experience–do they want a relationship or a conquest?

Scott Sadil brings us 12 stories about relationships, not conquests. Relationships between people who are dating, married, families, parent and child, teacher and student, faithful and unfaithful, and humans and nature. He seems to know the human condition concerning relationships as one having lived the life he writes about. Yet the characters in the book don’t bring Sadil’s knowledge with them to the stories, rather, they are searching to understand what they know about the experiences they’ve had.

Like Dori Cromwell in “Slate Blue.” She is a poet married to a successful businessman. Her first volume of poetry was published seven years previously, her husband thought that would be an end to any further desires to publish. Unknown to him, she harbored a desire to produce more work to show she wasn’t a one-hit-wonder. This unfulfilled need causes her to feel in a

…state of near numbness, her only feeling of late a gnawing sense of starvation, as if she is living off old toast and dried fruit–enough, maybe, to keep her alive, but she can feel parts of herself grown weak from malnutrition, her mind and heart atrophied at the edges…

Unlike many other fishing books, most of the main characters in these stories are not in, what most of the world considers, “the prime” of their life. These characters are often in their 50s and beyond. Some of them are grandparents. Some of them have been divorced. Most of them lead professional lives. They have experienced life and the relationships, whether flourishing or struggling, that come with a life lived.

One thing refreshing about the book is that these are not your Conquistador’s characters with sleek, toned bodies wildly dashing from one conquest to the next, but rather include the sagging, wrinkled bodies of those making deliberate decisions about what they want in life, such as Elliot Merrick in “Lake Albion,” while trying to court a single, retired gal “who sets his heart racing.”

It feels like a damn cliché: can’t get a fish, can’t get a date. At his age, however, he understands the perils of pressing on either front. He’s a patient man. You have to be.

Sadil is a high school teacher, and teachers and students make frequent appearances in the book. “Modest Perversions” is, I believe, the only non-fishing related story and the main characters are two female teachers and their male principal and their love triangle. This was one of my least favorite stories for reasons I can’t account for–maybe it is a little too soap opera-esque for me.

There is also a story that deals with the relationship, or supposed relationship, that strikes fear in the heart of every male teacher: that between a male teacher and a female student. In “The River Beulah,” Mr. Fairchild takes a job teaching at a high school because of its proximity to a river where he could fly fish “until his dying days.” (In my book, certainly a worthy criterion in choosing the location of one’s employment.) A girl student wants to learn to fish and Mr. Fairchild brings along a boy from school, who fly fishes, to make sure there are no accusations of impropriety. But the accusations are there anyhow. The story deals with how relationships, socioeconomic status and positions of trust must be navigated by newcomers in a small, rural community.

Father and son relationships are often tenuous. In real life a fly fishing father desires that his son(s) will take up the fly rod and join him on his fishing trips. Sadil explores two such relationships in “Chernobyl, Idaho,” where the older son doesn’t go on any fishing trips and the younger son, Patch, does, but, after a few token casts, is more interested in reading while his father fishes. In “Family Matters,” the same father and son characters appear and the father wonders about how people often feel compelled to do things with those they care about more out of duty to the person than love for the activity. Not referring to his sons, he muses,

There’s a reason, I conclude, that these same partnered, go-along individuals will almost always end up putting away their rods at some juncture, leaving the fishing–and all it requires–to the person in the relationship who cared about the sport in the first place. They quit for lack of love.

He then wonders about the desire, or not, that his sons have to fish.

One of the funniest stories is “Twenty Minutes More,” in which the husband wants to fish while he and his wife canoe. The wife finally gives him permission to fish, but he can only fish for a total of 20 minutes, divided up however the husband wants. This struck home for me, as that sounds exactly like something my wife would say.

I related to many of the characters in the stories because I have much in common with many of them or their circumstances since I’m entering middle age, I’m married, I have children, and all except one story prominently features fly fishing. But fishing isn’t the main aspect of the stories, it is usually just part of the action so Sadil can explore themes about relationships. These are not perfect relationships, nor does the character always “get the girl.” These are examined relationships that men or women readers can enjoy.

Sadil writes a tight story, with a good setting, good plots, interesting problems, and great characters with their own quirks and personalities. The stories don’t all end with resolutions neatly wrapped in bows, but often leave the reader to puzzle out for themselves what might happen next, but this is done subtly and doesn’t make the reader feel cheated out of a “proper” ending.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(Note to fly fishers: this is not a fly fishing book, but is set in Wyoming, near Yellowstone. Many of you fish this area, and I thought might be interested in a book about the area.)
This is a memoir that, while reading, I was hoping wasn’t one of those “adorned” memoirs, you know, fictionalized autobiographies. The book is now ten years old and I don’t think there has been any “revelations” about the improprieties of the author in the telling of his life.

Why was I concerned about this? It is such a heartachingly good read, that it just seemed too good to be true. Most of the essays in the book were written at least 30 years after they took place. Spragg does such an excellent job of looking into the thoughts and feelings of his eleven year old self, and those thoughts and feelings are so deep, lucid and emotion-laden, that it is easy to imagine they are fictionalized. But, keeping in mind that a memoir is an examination of one’s life after the fact, one can see that it is easy to project an adult’s interpretation on events from childhood.

This book is an excellent example of writing about the American West and how it so recently was, and in some places still is. Spragg’s family moved to Wyoming to run a dude ranch and eleven year old Mark was expected to be part of the business. In his words:

When I was a boy my father had horses, over a hundred of them. He believed that horses were to use and that boys were nothing if not used…. I went to work for him when I was eleven. I was paid thirty dollars a month, had my own bed in the bunkhouse, and three large, plain meals each day. (p 1)
…It was my daily job to remind our horses of the union of man and horse, to gather them, halter them, grain them, doctor them, handle them, ride them, to ride the younger ones again and again until they became convinced that I was part of them and other men a part of me. They were my father’s horses. I was my father’s son. (p5)

It was this belief about boys working put to practice that gives Spragg the stories he has to tell, the stories of being a boy among men and growing to manhood himself.

Horses became an integral part of his life and character:

I was a boy and I believed in the sightedness of horses. I believed that to have a horse between my legs, to extend my pulse and blood and energy to theirs, enhanced my vision. Made of me a seer. I believed them to be the dappled, sorrel, roan, bay, black pupils in the eyes of God. (p7)

I think that walking is different from riding. I am connected to the earth differently, more aware of the strike of my bones against the land, more aware of the surface. My breath comes sharp and strong. I think that when I am walking it is as though I am speaking each word of myself to the mountain’s ear. Aloud. I like the sensation. I also like being on a horse. When I am mounted it feels as though I must draw my breath through half a tone of animal to fill my lungs. My breath comes fuller, hotter; the breathing expanded, drowsy, and meditative. When I am older I will think of the difference between walking and riding to be the difference between prayer and the effect of prayer.(p36)

The book deals with the how raw and brutal nature can be and the men who live on the land. It shows that masculinity isn’t just about the way men behave, but that the reason they behave in certain ways is because there is no other way. When he was 13, wile out hunting elk with a ranch hand in his forties, John, Spragg has to be a man. As they are skinning the elk, John cuts his arm to the bone. They are on horses miles from home. They aren’t just hunting, but getting food for the winter. It is Spragg’s responsibility to bandage the man and continue skinning the elk. They spend the night and butcher the elk in the morning. During the night, as Spragg is awake, he takes the knife that skinned the elk and John, and hones the blade as he has seen John do it, reflecting on the sound it makes:

It is the sound John makes with the knife. It is the sound of flesh slippery against flesh. The sound of a man’s arms working against his sides in the sun. A shirtless man bent into his work, Loading hay. An old sound. The sound that n animal makes at the end of a day. A sigh. Again and again. Metronimic. I pause. There is always a pause. I bring the blade away from the stone, examine it, reverse the stone and spit again. (pp50-51)

He continues working the blade, then

I hold it to the light. I think of it in the sun: the small curved white reflection it casts; a thing become so polished that it mirrors the heat of the sun, and if held steadily to the dry, bent underfluff of the grasses it could ignite a fire simply by throwing the curve of that reflected heat. It feels hot and right in my hand. (p51)

Life in the American West is not always easy. The book is unapologetic in its rawness of life, death and work. Spragg’s father guides hunters. For grizzlies. They bait bears into an area so the hunters can shoot them. They use old, dying horses as bait. When the horse, Socks, 15 year old Spragg has ridden for two years gets cut with a wire and his leg is gangrenous, his father asks him to take the horse out to the grizzly blind and shoot him to use him as bait.

I stare at the reddish brown mound seventy-five yards in front of me. I have killed Socks in good place. Close to the timber that borders the meadow. A bear will safe in his approach. …And then I remember that I should have cut a window in his gut. Sawed through the hair and opened him to decay. A sore that coyotes and ravens can worry. A place that will help him rot. My father will be disappointed….I wonder suddenly why I am not crying. I think a boy would cry. I think maybe I have begun to be a man. I feel only quietly blunt, and desperate. (pp107-08)

Spragg’s early life was not without a woman’s influence. In speaking about a photograph of his mother standing next to Mark and, his brother who have a stringer of fish hanging between them, he says:

My mother has brought us to the river to further our instruction. It has never occurred to us to wonder why she knows how to fish. She is our mother. She teaches us how to manage in the world. We watch her smooth hands grip the rod’s cork above the reel. We watch the rhythm of her arms paying out the line in arcs over the river, working into the length of her cast. We follow the last presentation of line and breathe out as the fly settles on the river’s surface. If she were not our mother we would be struck by her beauty. We would argue to stand close to her. We would become nervous at the scent of her clean, sun-warmed skin. We would not have learned to fish. (pp240-41)

Spragg has a way of not finishing narratives, but rather focusing on the feeling and emotions of the piece to let each essay carry it to its conclusion. Because it isn’t necessarily the storyline that he is writing about, it is the inner experience. With all the masculinity of the book, there are plenty of times for tenderness as well. His mother had a hard time having children. She had a daughter a year before Mark was born. But the girl only lived a few months. He reflects on having an older sister:

I think about my sister when my mind is quiet; almost always when I am watching water. I see my sister as an encyclopedia of feminine advice. I see my sister as a doorway to the second half of the world. I wish I could call her name and have her turn her face to me and smile. (p27)

This book is a collection of essays, most of which, I believe, were previously published individually. The first three quarters or so of the essays are about his childhood, and for me are the most compelling and strongest of the book. The remaining several essays are about his adult life, and while excellently written, didn’t have the emotional impact on me as the others.

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My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read lots of stories where the characters lead lives far removed from my own experiences. They have problems I have never had and probably never will. Yet I empathized with them at some level. How does an author make me empathize with a character?

One way is by creating characters that have traits and behaviors that the reader admires or relates to. Even when a character has weaknesses or problems, if the reader admires some of their traits, they will cheer for them to succeed, forgive them when they make mistakes and cry for them when things turn sour.

Andy, the main character in the book Northwest of Normal, has few traits I found admirable. In fact, I can only think of one: he loves the place he lives, Ipsyniho, Oregon, a bohemian, backwoods town.

After a major setback with his girlfriend, who marries his best friend, Andy runs away from something he should have taken care of with these two, which sets the stage for his return after 14 months so that he can resolve this problem. But somehow the place and people he loves have dramatically changed. And more importantly, he doesn’t have the guts to face his problems in a reasonable manner.

The author makes the attempt to have Andy seem like he’s really struggling to do what’s right, but he just comes across to me as a whining, irresponsible juvenile (even though he’s in his 30’s, I think). I just never really got to the point that I cared much about Andy or whether he solved his problems or not.

By page 60 I’d come up with a list of potential themes I thought the book might explore over the remaining pages:

• relationships
• friendship
• betrayal
• family
• place
• growing up
• facing consequences

These are some pretty big themes, and for a book of only 234 pages, it would be hard to adequately cover all of them in sufficient depth to do each theme justice. More about that in a minute.

As Andy works through problems related to these themes, since he doesn’t really have any traits I found admirable, I just can’t “cheer,” “forgive” or “cry” over his choices. I just want to give him a dope slap and tell him to grow up. I understand that sometimes an author actually creates a character like this and that is an acceptable way to portray a character. But then there has to be something in the rest of the book where the character changes, or events are such that you understand why the author created such a character.

But the anticlimax just seemed too rushed to really resolve this problem with the main character. Sure he “changed,” but more in a manner that it seemed he changed because the author needed to wrap things up. I especially found the resolutions to the problems relating to the themes to be rushed. Once the climax was reached, the resolutions to Andy’s problems seemed to come in rapid succession based on a checklist the author had: “OK, Andy has this problem, let’s take care of it in these 6 pages. Done. Next problem in the following 8 pages. Check.” and so on until he covered them all. It was dissatisfying to me.

The best thing the book probably has going for it is its portrayal of the guide’s life, some aspects of steelheading and life in parts of Oregon. Since I have no experience with any of those three things, I can only assume that Larison does an adequate job of portraying these aspects since he has personal experience in all three areas. I especially thought he did a great job with the psyche and lingo of guides and their clients.

Another aspect of the writing that bothered me was that it seemed at times that the characters participated in events, as if this were an informational piece about what a place or people might be like. However, events alone don’t make a story. How those events affect the characters and how the characters react to them and how the reader reacts to the characters are all important considerations as well. And those connections just didn’t happen for me.

I also noticed in a few spots where it seemed the characters were a little unnatural, in fact a bit didactic, as if certain background information was needed by the reader so the author provided it in the form of one of the characters speaking about it.

Pot makes a frequent appearance in the book. By about page 100 I made this note: “I’m not sure of the purpose of all the pot. If it was left out of the story, would it change the story?” In other words, I was wondering what the point of all the pot smoking was for. Come to find out, it is an important part of the plot. As a side note, there is a group called NORML: The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. I’m wondering if there was a deliberate play on words with the title since Oregon does have rich history with marijuana.

I’m always a bit leery of writing negative reviews for fear of wondering if I know what the heck I’m talking about. And this book gave me extra pause for a couple of reasons. One is that Larison teaches writing at Oregon State University. One would certainly think that a university writing teacher would have the skills to pull off a novel. And another concern was that the back cover of the book contains praise from the following three people: David James Duncan (I’m a big fan), Tom Bie (editor of The Drake fly fishing mag) and Ted Leeson (I’m a huge fan of his writing) who says that this is a “…skillfully told story…” A bit of disclosure: Ted Leeson teaches English at Oregon State University.

Who in the world am I to disagree with these fly fishing and writing luminaries? That’s the thing about reviews, everybody’s experience is different. In the end, I can just give my impressions. Each person has to make their own choice as to whether they will read the book.

For those of you who are steelheaders, guides or anglers who frequent Oregon’s Willamette area, you will probably like this book more than those who don’t fit at least one of those categories. If your fiction tastes are simple—you like quick, easy reads with simple characters and plot—you might like this too.

A last note: Being Larison’s first novel, I’m hoping that he continues to write fly fishing fiction and continues to improve because I do think he has some potential to be a much better fiction author. I think removing some of the themes could have helped solve some of the main problems I had with the book (or making it longer to do each theme justice).

The idea behind the series is to show a river and its surroundings from the point of view of an angler, but with no human presence within the field of view.  I believe the film crew set up the camera on a tripod, pressed record, then let it run—no panning, zooming, etc. Something between 7 minutes to 10 minutes About a dozen different locations are captured along the river in this manner.

This is a really nice, quick fix for those of you suffering the winter doldrums and would like to see a river in its spring, summer or autumn glory.

These are not sit and watch movies. I tried that when I first got the DVD. It didn’t work (the DVD worked, but it didn’t work to just sit and watch). I became restless after the image was static for about four minutes. I went ahead and stuck it out until the scene changed. I did this for the first 30 or so minutes of the 72 minute DVD. I then scanned through each of the remaining scenes watching about the first one minute or so of each scene to see what it looked like.

The other way of using the DVD is playing it in the background while working on something else, maybe tying flies or just sitting back relaxing with a book or something that allows you to glance up every now and again for the visual aspect. It is nice having the soothing water sounds in the background (more about that later).

I chose The Gallatin because I have never fished it and thought I would get a good idea of what the river was like from the DVD. I saw a dozen different views of the river, so it did give me an idea of the river, but I don’t know how complete a view. It was not enough to make me say, :Gee, I really need to fish there!” Just more of a, “Oh, that’s what it looks like.”

I’m not sure how the DVD would affect me if I had fished the Gallatin before. I imagine it might be nicer to see views of places I love to fish, possibly getting me excited to fish there again. Other than viewing the first little bit of each scene, I really didn’t find myself looking at it when I’ve played it in the background. The longer winter lasts, maybe the more I’ll look at it too.

This DVD can be broken into two elements: audio and video. Duh!

Audio

The only audio is the sound of the river (there may be some brief additional sounds on some tracks, but they would be incidental). I would imagine that many people who would like this DVD would mainly enjoy the river sounds.

Acoustic ecology looks into the relationship between sounds within nature and the effects on humans. Biomusic looks at the musical sounds among and between species. We know that sounds and music impact humans. Many soundscapes are created to help relieve stress or in the meditation process.

If this aspect of the water sounds is the main thing you are looking for, you might want to try CDs made specifically for that purpose because the Rivers In Motion series has the same sound for the entire 7-10 minute segment, which could get a little repetitive.

Instead, you can find such tracks from Nature Sounds or Rhapsody. A fun, free website is Sound Sleeping where you can mix your own nature sounds (including the following water sounds: creek, ocean and rain) and let them play in the background. Sound Sculpture also has some online sounds that you can manipulate.

Free Sound Effects Download thousands of free sound effects from PartnersInRhyme.com then mix your own soothing tracks. You can also buy higher quality sounds from that site.

Video

The video aspect is interesting because the camera is static—it just sits there. The water is moving, but the camera doesn’t for the entire 7-10 minutes of each scene location. I’m not sure what I think about this. When I first viewed it, I was hoping to have some pan or zoom shots so I could see potential holes better, or maybe some fish finning in the riffles. But it never moved until the next scene.

When I played the DVD again, while doing something else, I really didn’t find myself compelled to look at the video very often—there really wasn’t very much to see to make me want to look.

To really get me to look at the video aspect, there would have to be some camera movement, more frequent location changes, or some pictures that I was interested in (such as pictures I had taken on my trips).

You could accomplish the last idea by easily setting your computer to show a slideshow of all your fishing pictures or burning all of those pictures/videos to a DVD and running them on the TV. Even better would be to run the audio you downloaded/bought from the above sites and play/burn them at the same time to create a personalized experience.

But most of  us would never take the time to actually do this. For us, and for those who need a quick fix for the winter blues, there’s Dry Fly Media’s “Rivers In Motion” series.

rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is the reason I wrote the “Braggarts R Us” post.

Foreward by Terry McDonell:

“Charles Gaines is a handsome man…The perfect cast has been his forever and he is a confident man… [he is:] so deeply eccentric and graceful in his fishing life as to pass from time to time in to…‘the trance of instinct.’”

“The literature of fishing is flush these days with middle-aged white guys, most of whom are a little too quick to mention the time they enjoyed a drink with Charles Gaines… They’ve all been to a great lodge somewhere… but Gaines has been to all of them.”

“With all appropriate respect for Izaak Walton and the great Roderick Haig-Brown, this is the book Merriwether Lewis would have written about fishing if he were a better writer and as good a fisherman as Gaines, which he most certainly was not… [I]f you fish and read on a level of sophistication above dynamiting gar, Gaines is your man…”

“This is an outlaw book in so many ways.”

“He’s trying to teach you something: fishing’s inner game. Study hard.”

I’m not sure of McDonell’s goal in writing this foreword, but I should have gone with my first instincts and stopped right there. If Gaines had any say in the publishing of the foreword, and he allowed this brown-nosing, gushing effluent to be written about him, then my worst fears about the man are realized.

While reading this book, I couldn’t help but think this was the most self-centered, name-dropping, snobbish book I had ever read. Now, after letting the book sit so I could gather my thoughts and write a rational review, I reread the foreword and realize that I might have been influenced in my first reading by this foreword. This bragging by proxy just put a sour taste in my mouth I couldn’t rid myself of, no matter how much I spit.

Things started off with Gaines talking about fishing with his father at a lake his father owned in Alabama. Gaines was 15 and they were catching bluegill. He talks about that struggle a father and teenage son can have with each other. But then he starts naming lodges and countries he’s fished. It’s beyond me why he has to mention that he has visited 20+ lodges (he names ten of them) and 11 countries, all in one paragraph, and the next paragraph tells us he has developed a “lifetime appreciation” for guides.

This tells me that he has an affinity for the “privileged” aspects of fishing. I’m not sure why, but this living the highlife isn’t something I’m interested in reading about. I guess because those aren’t things I’m interested in doing. So I evaluated myself to see if maybe it was just jealousy, but that’s not it because I’ve never felt the need, or even the slightest inkling, to visit exotic locales, stay in lodges or have a guide. I could probably afford some of that, so it’s not because I lack the means, just the interest.

The book is written for a different audience than the one I represent.

Part of the reason for so many lodges and guides is Gaines had an early desire to fish “the next valley over” as the nomadic wanderer. What was he searching for in that next valley? “… it was really dreams I was after. My dreams then all had big fish in them. They had me solving difficult angling problems and beating odds on far-off waters, and living the life of Riley while I was at it.”

So, there it is in a nutshell-”living the life of Riley.” I’m not sure where Gaines’ money comes from, but apparently he is well-off enough to spend his time in pursuit of fish.

Sometimes this comes across as arrogance. With a guide in a drift boat on the Bighorn River he complains, “The river is covered upstream and down with drift boats… Among them, moreover, is a flotilla of ten to fifteen little single-man pontoon boats, horrible little sky-blue, high-tech cheapos that belong in a pond at Disneyland with kids in them fishing and hollering and drifting inexpertly all over AJ’s [the guide:] precious Bighorn.”

Apparently only expensive boats with “experts” in them should be on “AJ’s rivers.” The poor man who can’t have afford a drift boat can’t be on the river and enjoy the same fishing opportunities. And apparently only those on pontoon boats holler and are inexpert.

But he wants it both ways-he wants his affluent lifestyle, but he wants us to think he is the common man:

“On the bank we drink a tin cup or two of bourbon…” p 28

“We pour some whisky into tin cups…” p. 32

“… drink vino tinto out of tin cups…” p 42.

Sometimes I got the feeling that he was trying to out machismo Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway.

Another thing from the quote is that he likes “big fish” and to “beat odds,” which means he likes to compete. He’s about numbers. Many fisherman are. I’m not interested in big fish. So this was a problem for me as well. He also fishes a lot of saltwater. Again, I’m not interested in saltwater species.

Gaines admits to being obsessed with fishing in his 30s to an unhealthy degree, sacrificing most things in pursuit of fish, including his marriage. He writes of his excesses in drink and drugs. By his 50s he begins to mellow, which is noted in the third section of the book, “Round Third.” He “comes home,” patches things up where necessary, and settles down. Probably the better part of the book for me.

Gaines writing style is fine, and delightful in some spots, such as when he says that “Fishing is casting a petition into the unknown, and the eternal wonder of it is that almost anything can be down there ready to bite: your heart’s desire; your worst fear; even something big enough to pull you overboard and catch you.”

I did like his title piece.

The foreword, then too many nods to that feeling of being privileged, and writing with a macho attitude and about topics I’m not interested in, just didn’t do it for me. The guy may be a great guy and fun to fish with, but this book just didn’t do it for me. I didn’t feel he made the case for his “progress” of the subtitle.

I recommend this book to those who like (or like to read about) fishing for big fish with “important” people at the best lodges with the best guides.

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