The Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide
By Tom Rosenbauer. Published by the Lyons Press, 2017; $24.95, softbound.
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose you want to write a book about everything — not about everything there is, fortunately, because by adding something to everything, everything would change, and you’d have to keep starting over, to infinity. But suppose you want to write a book about everything involved in a particular subject, with the added qualification that you’ll be explaining everything to someone assumed to know nothing — or rather, nothing about that subject.
That’s the daunting task that Tom Rosenbauer has taken on not just once, but three times, first in 1983 and then again in 2007 and 2017, for the complicated and diverse subject of fly fishing. Everything does change, of course, even in a sport with long and enduring traditions, and there have been good reasons for revising and updating The Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide in consecutive editions, including the increased rate of change exemplified in the gap between recent revisions. A long article could be written about changes in the sport over the past 35 years by comparing the contents, both written and graphic, of the three editions.
The principal changes that Rosenbauer himself mentions for this edition tell a lot about the present state of the sport, because they reflect what he believes needs to be added to “everything” at the present moment. Among “techniques that have become more widespread in the past ten years,” he highlights “competition or tactical nymphing” and “fishing with very large streamers.”
The first of these has emerged from a development — competition fly fishing — that many anglers, and not just stuffy traditionalists, deprecate as an incursion into the sport of an element of our culture from which fly fishing has always been a refuge. But as angling methods that can be adopted or shunned, these nymphing techniques are now indeed an established part of everything about fly fishing as it is currently practiced. And that it is now possible to fish very large streamers reflects the quite extensive changes in rod design and use (including the increasing prevalence of two-handed rods) and in synthetic fly-tying materials that have made possible big flies that don’t cast like a wet hen.
Other changes that reverberate in different ways with the state of American culture at the present moment are the addition of “a much needed chapter on conservation and giving back to the resource” and “more images of young people and women.” It used to be possible for fly fishers of every stripe to agree on the obligation to act as stewards of the nation’s natural resources, but we now need to be reminded of it. And of course, as Rosenbauer says, “Fly fishing has gone way beyond the bastion of old men smoking pipes and drinking scotch.” The “energy and innovation this new demographic has brought to it,” he believes, has inaugurated “truly the most exciting period this sport has ever known.”
If you’ve ever tried to explain anything about fly fishing to someone who knows nothing about it, and most fly fishers have, you know how difficult it can be. (An old neighbor, an immigrant from Hungary, told me that when he was in the army there, if they wanted fish, they just used a hand grenade.) Rosenbauer understands that simply knowing what he’s talking about isn’t enough and that simply writing well about what he knows (itself something that is too rare) isn’t enough, either. He is a devoted student of the rhetoric of explanation — of techniques for making complex things clear for those new to such understandings.
The effort should serve as an example for anyone faced with the task of explaining something — let alone everything — to those interested in any aspect of the sport. As he puts it in the introduction:
In the nearly fifty years that I’ve been involved in the fly-fishing business, I’ve always listened carefully to novices, both in my years as a fly-fishing instructor and afterward. Producing and hosting a TV show on introductory fly fishing, building an online learning center, and thousands of questions for my podcast have bolstered my sense of what kind of information today’s fly fishers need. And I’ve studied how-to books on photography, cross-country skiing, kayaking, and even books on macroeconomics or foreign policy, for ideas on how to present a complex process to the uninitiated. When I find someone who can explain in an elegant way a topic unfamiliar to me, I’ll go back and study his or her approach again and again. So if you’re new to fly fishing, I’m thinking of you.
He’s also thinking of “the reasonably proficient fly fisher,” who can use the book as a reference, and indeed, there are things such as the diagrams for tying angling knots that I find useful to have on the self, since whatever proficiency I might be able to claim doesn’t include knot tying — I am both a klutz and someone deficient in spatial imagination.
So what is “everything” as laid out with such exemplary clarity here? The fifteen chapters begin by covering basic definitions of terms and gear, dealing with how fly fishing is done (and how it differs from what most novices may already know, spin fishing), rods and line sizes, lines and reels, gear and accessories, and leaders and knots. That’s all pretty rudimentary. But then comes an exposition of fly-casting technique, one of the most difficult subjects to explain via the written (or spoken) word, followed by a discussion of flies and the naturals they imitate, as well as fly selection, topics about which whole libraries exist. How to fish streams and still waters, how to fish for steelhead and salmon, and saltwater fly fishing all get covered, as do striking, playing, and landing fish, care of tackle and gear, and finally, stream etiquette (yay!) and conservation, along with “giving back” via such organizations as Project Healing Waters.
The breadth of material that Rosenbauer covers here is really something. One of the paradoxes of writing about everything, though, is that doing so inevitably entails choices involving not just what to foreground and background, but what to include and therefore what to exclude. Because the intended audience principally is newbies, the long and engrossing history of the sport and the compelling interest of its literature get little emphasis — you don’t need to know about Dame Juliana Berners or Izaak Walton’s milkmaids in order to learn how to cast. And Rosenbauer apparently thinks newbies don’t need to know how to tie a Bimini Twist, since he says it’s beyond the scope of the book, although I’ve heard of individuals who even use Biminis in their panfish leaders.
However, it’s not just the skill with which this book achieves its ends and its comprehensive scope that are noteworthy. It also is noteworthy that it is a book. A lot has changed in the world of media since the original iteration of The Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide in 1983. As Rosenbauer notes, there are “podcasts and thousands of YouTube videos,” and there is “a wealth of written information on blogs and websites available to the novice.” Such resources are “an essential part of anyone’s education today,” he writes. “But it becomes clearer each year that reference books like this satisfy the learning needs of most people. It’s said that young people today read physical books at the same rate as baby boomers. This book will provide a sensible jumping-off point for a sport that is simple in purpose, yet often amazingly — and quite wonderfully — complex in execution.”
That is exactly what it does. The Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide deservedly has become a classic of modern angling literature in the ubiquitous genre of how-to books. Orvis employs a number of people as fly-fishing guides around the world, but as the iterations of this important book have demonstrated over the years, the Orvis fly-fishing guide is Tom Rosenbauer.
— Bud Bynack
The Founding Fish
By John McPhee. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002; $18.00 softbound.
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
By John McPhee. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017; $25.00 softbound.
At age 87, John McPhee deserves his victory lap. For most of his professional life, McPhee has satisfied his inexhaustible curiosity by probing subjects that most journalists overlook. His method has a way of transcending journalism to become literature. At this he has no equal. Most book-length journalism is perishable and ends up absorbed into history books. McPhee’s books have legs. What’s more, they are rereadable. I have read The Pine Barrens at least half a dozen times since its publication way back in 1968. All 32 of his books remain in print, and each began as a long-form feature for the New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Now McPhee has come out with a book that shows his readers how he goes about his business. If you can’t be among the Princeton undergraduates who take McPhee’s class in creative nonfiction, you can read Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. He approaches his stories from odd angles, with lots of digressions, but his narratives rarely fade. His focus is on structure: “Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.”
Draft No. 4 consists of eight chapters on the writer’s craft, previously published as separate essays in the New Yorker. The book is part writing manual, part autobiography, with thoughtful reflections on the writing life, a dash of literary gossip, some shop talk on magazine journalism, and a few wry dissections of his greatest hits.
In Draft No. 4, we have McPhee up-close and intimate, but McPhee appears in all his books, although he keeps himself mainly on the sidelines. And although the subjects of his books are wide ranging, McPhee has a few great themes. One is his examination of work done by interesting, somewhat solitary characters who tend to be masters in a particular field — in that regard, they bear a slight resemblance to the author himself — and these virtuosos can be anyone from a field biologist to a river barge pilot, a museum curator, or a builder of traditional birch bark canoes. These are the kinds of people and subjects that don’t get a lot of examination in the mainstream press. But by deliberately bypassing topical news stories and scoop journalism, McPhee is free to focus on subjects that are timeless. Perhaps McPhee’s greatest theme is his love of nature and the outdoors. Although he is never a partisan or advocate, his books stand as great defenses of the natural world.
His finest books on environmental themes include The Pine Barrens, an exploration of a hidden world tucked away in the New Jersey pine forests; Coming into the Country, a ground-breaking work on Alaska; Encounters with the Archdruid, a profile of a famous conservationist matched against three of his “natural enemies”; a four-volume compendium of books that goes by the title Annals of the Former World, a sort of “biography” of the North American continent as interpreted by geologists, as well as a study of “deep time” (his so-called “rocks book” won the Pulitzer Prize); and The Founding Fish, a book all about shad and shad fishing, which should be of particular interest to readers of this magazine.
The Delaware River is home to a native run of shad, and the author, a native of Princeton, New Jersey, pursues these anadromous fish with rod, dart, and notebook as they arrive on their spring migration. He is obsessed with catching them, eating them, and learning all about their life cycles and behavior. He hangs out with sport and commercial fishermen and every kind of fish biologist and behaviorist he can track down. He makes the science fascinating and leavens it with droll storytelling and lots of personal anecdotes.
The book opens with a two-hour and thirty-five-minute epic struggle by McPhee to net a roe shad weighting four and three-quarter pounds that he caught on a spinning rod using 6-pound-test monofilament from a johnboat anchored just below the fourth pier at Lambertville on the New Jersey side of the Delaware
River. Robert H. Boyle, reviewing the book in the New York Times, allowed that the duration of the fight tells us less about the tenacity of shad than it does about the angler’s ineptitude. Any competent angler, Boyle writes, should figure on taking no more than two minutes per pound to land a fish. I doubt McPhee would disagree with that assessment. As both journalist and angler, McPhee has a tendency to defer to experts, and in this book, he has left his ego back at the dock.
McPhee spends time in the company of various fishing wizards and offbeat characters who enjoy doing things such as making their own shad darts, as well as “masters” of the fly rod such as his neighbor Jim Merritt, who vastly prefers the Delaware’s rainbow trout over McPhee’s beloved shad, but who still builds the author a nice Winston fly rod from a blank. McPhee calls Merritt his “ichthyotherapist” or “fishing shrink” and has him read his shad book in progress. (I knew Merritt when we both worked at a daily newspaper in southern New Jersey. Alas, that was before I took up fly fishing. I might be a decent fly caster today if I had gotten him to teach me.) McPhee also enjoys feasting on shad whenever he gets the chance to tuck into one. He is no believer in catch-and-release fishing, insisting that the only moral justification for hooking a fish is to eat it. McPhee’s book ends with an appendix of shad recipes. Shad indeed are quite tasty, if you don’t mind navigating your fork around the 600-plus bones found in each fish. McPhee has the patience for that sort of thing.
American shad are native to our Atlantic seaboard, but have been successfully transplanted to the West Coast. They arrived in California in 1871, thanks to Seth Green, a New York fish commissioner, who McPhee tells us “could cast a dry fly a hundred feet.” Green traveled by train over the Sierra Nevada nursing four milk cans full of baby shad that he had taken from the Hudson River. He emptied his cargo into the Sacramento River somewhere in the Carquinez Strait. Here is the scene Green encountered when he got there, as described by McPhee.
There was something alarming about thousands of millions of cubic yards of the Sierra Nevada being flushed off the mountains by giant nozzles working for gold. The ocean was brown at the Golden Gate. Enough material was going into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal. Washed down rock, gravel, sand and mud choked the American River. The American and the Yuba were tributaries of the Sacramento River. The mining detritus had raised the Sacramento seven feet.
And yet these broadcast spawners flourished. California fly fishers continue to catch the descendants of these Hudson River shad not only in the Sacramento and its tributaries, but in rivers such as the Russian, Eel, Klamath, and Trinity. The shad gradually worked their way north, and today, the world’s largest shad run is found not on the East Coast, but in the Columbia River.
However, it is the native East Coast runs that remain McPhee’s primary focus. Mixing the anecdotal with the historical, McPhee shows how crucial shad runs were to commerce in the colonial period and in the early years of our republic. John Wilkes Booth, after assassinating Abraham Lincoln, escaped across the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers aided by a shad fisherman. And a bit of dubious folklore comes down to us that has the spring shad run on the Schuylkill River arriving in time to save George Washington’s starving troops at Valley Forge. Thus the title The Founding Fish.
McPhee’s shad book is bound to his other books through many of his recurring themes and preoccupations: our relationship with nature, our perceptions of wilderness, and the tensions between conservation and development. But what stands out for me — and this is true of all of his books — is the author’s basic decency, his zest for being at large in the world, and a sense of a shared humanity. A month ago, I had the pleasure of rereading The Pine Barrens, McPhee’s calm and expert portrait of a little-known part of New Jersey called “the barrens” and of that forested region’s often misunderstood inhabitants, who are called Pineys. By immersing himself in the unique subculture of a largely rural and to this day still largely uninhabited portion of southern New Jersey, McPhee was able to craft not only a classic of literature, but a masterpiece of human compassion for a people and a place that could have been lost to development. Thanks in part to his book and to the many conservationists who were inspired by what he wrote, 1.1 million acres of the pine barrens were set aside as the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve to preserve the ecology of that unique place. That was the one that didn’t get away.
— Michael Checchio
Kayak Fly Fishing: Everything You Need to Know to Start Catching Fish
By Ben Duchesney. Published by Stackpole Books, 2017; $29.95 softbound.
About a decade ago, I bought a kayak, in part because when I’m on a lake, I like being close to the water’s surface and in part because it’s an interesting way to exercise out of doors, which is sort of what one does when one lives in Truckee. I did not buy it to fish from. It’s a sleek 16-foot sea kayak with a cockpit to sit inside, fast and a joy to paddle, even when the wind is gusting the length of Donner Lake.
But still, I am an angler, and I like fishing still waters, and I have room in my garage for more stuff. The temptation to buy another watercraft exists. If I succumb, Ben Duchesney’s book, Kayak Fly Fishing, will help me choose wisely.
He suggests, for example, that before you focus on the boat you want, figure out what you need, because what you need will largely define “which boat is exactly right for you.” The primary decision is between a sit-on-top or a sit-inside kayak, a subject of much contention among kayaking anglers. (Duchesney tends to prefer sit-on-tops, in large part because he likes to stand in his kayak to spot fish and cast.) He covers the design characteristics that tend to work best for ponds, lakes, rivers, inshore saltwater, and the ocean. Key variables are length, width, and keel. He also provides advice on fly tackle, because casting to, fighting, and landing fish from a kayak have considerations that differ from those of a wading angler. Electronics are discussed, as is safety gear (personal flotation devices PFDs — are a must). And the book is chock full of tips based on the long experience of Duchesney and friends with different types of kayaks on different types of water.
I have two small concerns about Kayak Fly Fishing. First, the book’s focus is on East Coast waters. It’s not clear if California’s waters and conditions may require different solutions. Second, several complex paddle strokes are described only with text and, for me, are difficult to visualize. In sum, though, this book will be certainly useful when buying a kayak and when fishing from it afterwards.
— Richard Anderson
