A Steelheader’s Way: Principles, Tactics and Techniques, Second Edition
By Lani Waller. Published by Stackpole Books, 2018; $29.95 softbound.
The first edition of Lani Waller’s A Steelheader’s Way was published in 2009, and I reviewed it early that year for California Fly Fisher. I ranked it then, and still do today, as worth a place on the honored shelf next to earlier important steelheading books by Clark Van Fleet, Claude Kreider, Bill MacMillan, and Trey combs. Bear with me as I quote from that review.
Waller, you may remember, was featured in the groundbreaking steelheading videos that Scientific Anglers produced in the 1980s and that he and Miracle Productions updated a couple of years back A Steelheader’s Way distills into prose what the videos put onto the screen, but the book’s two hundred pages of mixed text and terrific Ken Morrish photos go well beyond what even good video can do. Waller’s insights, his wealth of relevant anecdotes, and his intelligent, conversational prose take us beyond mere information or visual record. You come away not simply with a deeper understanding of steelhead, their habitat, and how to take them on a fly, but what goes into becoming a hard-core steelheader.
Two new chapters are the only difference between the original and this second edition. The first, titled “The Hunter’s Eye,” explores Waller’s idea of a quality that sets uncommon anglers apart from the rest of us. “The great anglers find a way to step aside, at least temporarily, from the ordinary cognitive processes of their daily habits, routines and perceptions and ‘reclaim’ or ‘return to’ the psychology and perceptions of a hunter.”
For Waller, seeing with the hunter’s eye involves fully inhabiting the angling moment by “careful and sustained observation that eventually leads to an understanding and awareness of the psychology and habitual behavior of the prey.” He goes a bit off to the woo-woo side by suggesting that doing so lets the hunting angler “connect with the universal force contained in all life,” but I’ll be the last person to deny that some folks seem to be operating on a different level than the rest of us. The chapter concludes with a long anecdote about a successful woman angler that seems to me to fail to enhance Waller’s earlier points. But mystical connection or not, how can we not improve by concentrating on becoming more observant, more persistent, and more focused?
The second new chapter is titled “The Stinger Steelhead Fly,” and while informative, it seems to me a bit unfocused. It begins as a discussion of the nature and advantages of that relatively new fly style: long and sinuous, with soft materials such as marabou, tied on a hookless shank or even on mono or wire, looped at the back to accept a light, short-shanked hook. But the discussion quickly moves away from Stingers to more generalized fly selection, presentation, rod preferences, and an anecdote that has Waller taking a reluctant fish by starting and finishing with a waking fly, never mentioning a Stinger. It’s all good information, but nothing that’s not covered or implied in the book’s other chapters. The handful of Stinger fly images, which conclude the chapter, while gorgeous, could have profited from at least one tying sequence to illustrate, for the novice, at least, how such a fly is put together.
These criticisms clearly take nothing away from the enduring value of the work as a whole. Waller’s perceptive discussions of the fish, tackle, flies, presentation, and strategy, his informative anecdotes, and the excellent photography of Ken Morrish made it a best seller a decade ago. If you’re new to the sport, you’ll want to read this book. If you’ve already read the original edition, the additional information this second edition provides, like the concept of the hunter’s eye, may make it worth buying.
— Larry Kenney
Casting Around the Eastern Sierra
By Mike McKenna. Published by Cast Away Books, 2018; $19.95 softbound.
Mike McKenna’s skill in writing about where to fish is matched only by his sense of humor as reflected in part of his autobiography: “When not writing, Mike can often be found fishing or drinking too much beer while watching sporting events with his wife and two sons.” An award-winning
writer and journalist, McKenna wrote a blog that profiled places to fish in the Mammoth Lakes area of the eastern Sierra. Some of his fishing buddies suggested that he publish his Mammoth Lakes Insider’s Blog posts as a book. He took them up on the suggestion, and that became Casting Around the Eastern Sierra.
The book contains two-page profiles of 15 streams, rivers, and lakes to fish in the spring, 21 in the summer, 14 in the fall, and 6 in the winter. Many of the waters are the same for each season, but with different tips for catching fish in that season. The profiles include many rivers that fly fishers know well, such as Hot, Rush, and Lee Vining Creeks, the East Walker River, the upper Owens, and more. He profiles far more lakes than rivers, including Crowley, Convict, June, and Heenan. Each profile shows McKenna’s skills as a researcher, his connection to the local guiding community, and his refusal to take things too seriously.
In the profile of Heenan Lake, McKenna quotes Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea: “Anyone can be a fisherman in May,” adding that on a cold day in the autumn, to fish Heenan Lake “takes a real diehard, a true fanatic, the kind of angler who feels like trout run through his or her veins A day on Heenan Lake can make an angler feel old There are certainly worse ways to grow old, though.”
In his profile of Convict Lake, McKenna captures the flavor of the Opening Day pilgrimage that many make: “Families from ‘down south’ will drive all night so they can make season opening casts at Convict Lake before falling asleep in the back seat. Old buddies will stay up late telling fishing stories by the campfire before stumbling across the sea of empties to the lake at sunrise From dawn to dusk, opening day is always filled with toasts to another great season and to those who can no longer cast with us. There is an old saying that goes ‘fishing is about a lot more than just the fish.’” Sometimes McKenna gets a little carried away in describing high-Sierra fish. “There’s lots of fish in this book,” he writes. “Brown trout as feisty as pro wrestlers; rainbows as rowdy as wild mustangs; cutthroats big enough to be seaworthy; brookies as aggressive as alligators; and golden trout (California’s State Fish) sparkling like stars and forever lingering in anglers’ dreams.”
Each section in the book contains photos, profiles, and newsy tidbits about these bodies of water, all in McKenna’s folksy style, but also the down-to-business detailed information about where and how to fish, history, conservation, and anything else McKenna found relevant for anglers visiting the destination.
In the foreword to the book, Ted Carleton tells how he lured McKenna into moving to Mammoth Lakes and becoming an outdoor writer. “I started a newspaper based in Mammoth Lakes called ‘The Sheet.’ I needed some help. Called a friend in Hailey, Idaho, who was already a couple of beers in and told her of my dilemma. Imagine that. ‘I’ve got a writer right here next to me at the Red E,’ she said, while seated at the infamous Red Elephant, a glorious dive bar since euthanized,” writes Carleton. (If you think there is a beer theme in this book, you are correct.) “She put Mac on the phone. He agreed to bring his wife down to Mammoth on an exploratory road trip to check out the place. They stayed for nearly a decade.”
The book’s photos were created with the help of locals Josh Wray and Mike McCoy. Several of the photos contain (what else?) images of beer at these fishing locations.
For the most part during those early Mammoth writing days, McKenna fished with spinning gear, lures, and bait. That changed one day when a reader, local guide Doug Rodricks, invited him to try fly fishing. “That day I learned a bit about fly fishing, but learned a lot more about the real beauty and joy of fishing in the ‘Range of Light.’ Fishing takes you to places that pull you out of the routine, out of your norm. Places filled with the kind of raw, natural beauty we usually only see in our dreams.”
In addition to the photos of destinations (and beer), Casting Around the Eastern Sierra is illustrated with maps provided by a team headed by Mono Lake Tourism that show landmarks or that lead anglers to fishing locations.
The book also contains a full-page plug for the work of California Trout, the Eastern Sierra Land Trust, Friends of the Inyo, and Trout Unlimited.
McKenna has won awards for his writing from the Outdoor Writers Association of California and the Outdoor
Writers Association of America. His first book, Angling Around Sun Valley, covered some of Idaho’s most famous fly-fishing waters and was selected Best Book of the Year by the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association. For more information and to check out Mike McKenna’s blog, go to http://www.castingaroundamerica.com.
— Tom Martens
Stream of Consciousness
By Michael Checchio
One of the most rejuvenating things about fly fishing is that it takes you out of your own head and into the larger world of nature. And yet for me, fly fishing started deep inside my head. As a boy, I was introduced to bait dunking in pond and ocean. But as a young man, I taught myself to fly fish by turning the pages of books. That’s why whenever anyone asks, I tell them my favorite trout river is the stream of consciousness.
No sport has as rich a life on the printed page as fishing. We have centuries’ worth of angling literature, from straightforward instructional books, to works of remembrance, of fiction, and even of a religious turn of mind. The best of these can stand with the finest writing on any subject — and no matter how many times I return to A River Runs Through It or the angling essays of Thomas McGuane or Russell Chatham, I am held in awe by what exceptionally fine authors can do with language. But it is for the larger truths that fly fishing reveals about our lives and the world around us that I live to read about it.
My introduction to fly fishing came from my first reading of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. That novel seemed to me to have more living in it than most. There is an indelible scene in the book where Jake Barnes stands in a trout river in Spain’s Pyrenees catching fish on a fly rod, although he is using worms as bait. His friend Bill is fishing with artificial flies. Both are catching a fair number of trout. The two companions are enjoying the local red wine and the overall fineness of the day. Few authors wrote as well as Hemingway when it came to describing the freshness in the physical world. I had a powerful urge to join those fishermen on the stream.
Not long after reading that, I chanced upon a novel called Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was by Robert Traver, pen name of John Voelker, a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. It was said the judge could flick a fly rod as judiciously as he wielded a gavel and that he had a particular fondness for brook trout. He sneaked a trout fishing scene into his courtroom story as a mood sweetener. Shortly thereafter, I bought my first fly rod, although I never made it to either Michigan or Spain.
Jim Harrison also lived in Michigan, and he wrote the bulk of his life’s work there. He gave the real-life John Voelker a walk-on in one of his novels, I think it was True North. The judge and the book’s main character meet by chance at a social function and slip away to talk about mayflies and brook trout. I thought that was a nice touch and showed Harrison’s generosity of spirit. There is a lot of drinking, eating, and fishing in any Jim Harrison novel. He had a great lust for life. This is from True North: “It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn’t keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it is standing thigh-deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of your life.”
That passage has me thinking about the hole that has opened in our national literature with the passing of Jim Harrison. For me, he had been our greatest living writer. After Harrison died, I wondered who might fill the void left by the man who wrote Legends of the Fall. Our “indoor writers” can’t get outside their own heads long enough to get into the great outdoors. But there was a time when the world’s greatest novelists felt just as at home in the natural world as they did in the lives and affairs of their fellow human beings. Twain, Melville, Hardy, Conrad, Faulkner . . . they not only wrote better about people and society, they were, it turns out, our greatest nature writers. Their understanding and love for the natural world was real and palpable. And the people in their novels had real problems, not ones that were merely neurotic. Contemporary novelists seem to be sinking deeper into solipsism, shrinking literature down to the narrowness of the self, where once they gave us the immensity of existence.
With every cast, we are reaching for a larger world. Little wonder so many fine writers have taken delight in fishing and found it so restorative. Important poets such as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Kenneth Rexroth, and Richard Hugo knew their way around their fishing tackle. And no poet wrote better about fly fishing than William Butler Yeats, the greatest poet of the last century. He didn’t fish in his adult years and only occasion-
ally with a fly rod during his boyhood. But his memory held, and he really got it right on paper. And the figure of a fly fisherman dropping his casts at dawn into Irish waters provided him with the central and controlling image behind some of his most impressive poems. “The Fisherman” and the “The Tower,” especially, are reflective of our own best moments on the water.
Norman Maclean wrote the best English since Shakespeare. A River Runs Through It has more evangelists than any fishing story ever told. He said that as a writer, his debts were all to poets. Fly fishing is at the center of his powerful family tragedy about lost connections and the patterns and designs in nature that keep loved ones apart and hold them together. The language of the story attains an almost unbelievable richness and power. Sentences and paragraphs touch the sublime, bring us to moments of rapture, and seem to supply the missing parts of our world. They also ask deep metaphysical questions that are hard to answer, but important whether we fish or not.
Another novel where fly fishing is the dominant and organizing principle is The River Why, by David James Duncan, a tale told with great wit and ample poetry that makes philosophical inquiry into the nature of the good life and answers Montaigne’s famous question: How to live?
There are literary as well as genre writers who slip a little fly fishing into their mainstream work and others who write about it professionally for the outdoors columns. Many on-stream and off-stream voices are worth hearing from often, and the best put as much care into the crafting of their sentences as they do into tightening their Clinch Knots.
The fishing essays of Thomas McGuane, a renowned novelist and short story writer, prove there is as much magic in a turn of phrase as there is in a trout rising to a mayfly. We can depend on him always for on-stream eloquence. The fluency and tightly coiled spring in his fish stories allows for a sharp mind and an outlaw spirit to be at large on the water. “If the trout are lost, smash the state,” he says. Many who have read The Longest Silence agree. Jim Harrison declared, “Thomas McGuane writes better about fishing than anyone else in the history of mankind.”
If McGuane has any peer in this realm, it might be his friend, the painter Russell Chatham. Chatham wrote The Angler’s Coast, a book garlanded in prose that casts clear illumination on a redwood fishery that was even then passing out of glory and into elegy.
Another writer of note is Bill Barich, whose insights into fishing for steelhead in the wine country around the Russian River or for trout up in the volcano region by Lassen and Mount Shasta often feature an eccentric fishing companion that he calls Paul Deeds, one of the most colorful characters ever to wet a line. These stories give us as funny and singular a portrait of a true crank (and fly-fishing iconoclast) as we are ever likely to get.
John Gierach is a Coloradoan who set out to become a poet and fiction writer, but instead, by way of “trout journalism” and freelancing, somehow became the man Sports Illustrated called “the Mark Twain of modern-day fly fishing.” His classic Trout Bum introduced an everyman’s voice that cut through a lot of the piety and pretension on the subject.
Roderick Haig-Brown continues to hold fly fishers on a tight drag, although I have never been able to work up much excitement for his books. He was the ultimate upright Canadian (which Pierre Breton once famously defined as “someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe.”) I admire HaigBrown for his conservation work and am sure this provincial magistrate could hold his own at sidebar with Justice Voelker.
Reaching back a bit further in time, readers can sample the homespun style of Ray Bergman, who wrote Trout, a 1938 classic that many still consider the Bible on trout fishing. A quiet and modest fisherman, he advised his fellow anglers to practice patience. His work of general streamside instruction comes out of a long line of both practical and esoteric angling books that provides a sociological record of the sport as it was practiced in North America and in the British Isles, where modern fly fishing originated. This river of words and helpful advice goes all the way back to the seventeenth century and the pure, purling waters of the English countryside, where this whole stream of consciousness began at the very moment Izaak Walton decided to write The Compleat Angler.
The bulk of angling writing, however, is not high literature — far from it. For better or worse, fly fishers read a great deal, and many cherished angling authors would be collecting rejection slips if their stories were on other topics. It’s a niche genre, and fly fishers love to read about what interests them. Henry James said that a novel’s only obligation was that it be interesting. And it might be harder to learn how to fly fish than it is to write.
