Fly Rod & Reel

“Fly-fishing literature” seems too small a fish to fillet into parts; worse yet, the cuts are often ragged. The cheap way to do this would be to call one genre “lyrical,” suggesting pirouettes, poetry and fiction, and the other “didactic,” usually too stiff and weighty a word. Even if these terms applied at all, the problem with reviewing collections of short works is that many contain pieces of both kinds. So let’s do this:

PROFOUND RIVER RESEMBLES NO other contemporary American novel that includes fly-fishing in a significant way. It’s all at once a remarkably researched historical fiction based on one of our sport’s earliest, most revered and controversial figures; a deceptively delicate story of grace and humor and grit; a meditation filled with religious ritual but suffused with more humanism than dogma . . . and a how-to still relevant to anglers today.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Joan Wulff first had an impact on my life when, as a teenager, I tightly gripped the cork of my father’s fly rod and made my first cast. Fly-fishing was to become an obsession, and at that moment I, like many female anglers, was indebted to Wulff for making fly-fishing both accessible to and acceptable for women.

Tarpon. if that word brings up images that make you tremble, then Pat Ford’s photos in this tome may provoke a petit mal. A reader who’s never yet caught one may think again, “I just have to this lifetime”; and then, after poring over author Andy Mill’s instructions, believe they could hook and land a silver king, maybe. And yet…

A reviewer of tarpon media who hasn’t done so himself (yet) must admit a gross gap in angling experience, by way of adding “for what it’s worth” to praise, criticism or inchoate mewling sounds. Multiple confessions of this fact may initiate bitter spiritual journeys, as in “What kind of SOB was I, last incarnation, to be denied a tarpon this time around?” In my case, I will admit unhappily, the hours spent with A Passion for Tarpon answered that question: I was Vlad, the Impaler.

So you’re sean shanahan—semi-starving artist, former private investigator, a hard-core fly fisher still emotionally entangled with that ex-wife you left behind when you moved to Bridger, Montana. You’re minding your business, such as it is, hanging on to hope and a paintbrush when—per the jacket blurb of The Royal Wulff Murders— “Delta siren Velvet Lafayette” stops by. She’s sultry a la Spade, wears lipstick the color of blood, and wants to hire you to—what else?—fish the Madison River for as long as it takes to catch trout with fins notched by her late father, by way of finding the riffle where he wanted his ashes spread. She’ll pay you a grand for this service, half down, and—shame on you for hoping—maybe a romantic bonus, TBA.

It’s a tradition for good reason: reviews of new John Gierach collections begin by acknowledging his terrific popularity—a truly iconic status built by fans from scratch, even if Gierach might remind us it was Nick Lyons who first made his scratchings available to us. These tributes are a pleasure to write partly because it’s obvious that “iconic status” isn’t what Gierach is after. If you’re bold enough, or a little deluded, you may try to craft a phrase of praise as clean as those Gierach applies to a Bob White painting, some diner’s excellent blueberry pancake blue-plate breakfast, or an 11-inch cutthroat he seduces from some tricky small stream lie in a moment of golden light. (And if, by chance, such a preamble appears in this magazine, the man at the keys will admit, again, that Gierach has been one of FR&R’s own for decades—an obligatory FYI fair warning that, issued by a person of low morals, might also serve as a boast.)

John D. Voelker AND Ernest Hemingway painted the waters of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula onto this country’s literary maps—forever, unless secessionist “Yoopers” harboring pre-Civil-War grudges triumph someday. Faint chance . . . but no revolution will steal names like Frenchman’s Pond and rivers Escanaba, Two-Hearted and Fox from a country of mind American fly-fishing readers consider our own.

Reviews of: Atlantic Salmon Magic and The Dry Fly Gospel.

Why an article about the Adams? Because I recently rediscovered the Adams as a lifesaver during what could otherwise have been a very frustrating day.

A few weeks ago, my friends Mike Clark and John Gierach invited me to fish some trout ponds not far from Boulder, Colorado that had been stocked with some rainbow/steelhead hybrids several years ago. We’ve fished these ponds several times over the past few years and knew the trout were large, very strong, extremely fast and would eagerly rise to midges. It was mid-April, so we assumed that midges would be the order of the day. I packed fly boxes loaded with midge adult, emerger and larva patterns in all the colors that had been successful in the past.