As we wait for book publishers to resume printing new works at prepandemic levels, we’ll use this issue’s Paper Hatch column to highlight two types of books that should have interest for California’s fly fishers: out of print fishing guidebooks, and books, mostly still in print, that focus on the Golden State’s natural history.
Do It Yourself
By Michael Checchio
How here’s an artifact from the Stone Age. A self-published fishing book from before the era of eBooks and Amazon’s Kindle Store. Fly-Fishing California’s North Yuba River, by Ed Klingelhofer (Salmo Press, 1993), brings more intelligence and enthusiasm to the task than most vanity projects. But then, there’s something to be said for the things we do only when passion strikes.
This slim paperback is an easy-tofollow guide to an easy-to-fish trout stream that flows through the heart of California’s touristy Gold County. Like Highway 49, which parallels the river for most of its forty miles in Sierra County, the book brings the reader up close to a lot of good fishing, pointing out the likeliest pocket water and riffles, just in case you missed the innumerable roadside pullouts. The guidebook pretty much hits all the honey spots on the main stem and on nine principle tributary creeks, starting at Shenanigan Flat below the Highway 49 bridge and continuing upstream all the way to the headwaters atop Yuba Pass. And it’s everything a good guidebook should be: what flies to use (Buzz Hackle), hazards to avoid (poison oak, bears), where to camp or lodge (lots of choices), and nearby establishments for food and drink (plenty). The author seems intimate with every bend in the river, and his guidebook would be of benefit to beginner and seasoned angler alike. In addition to 13 hand-drawn maps showing access to choice water, the book is also illustrated with a dozen charming brush-and-ink sketches made by the artist Robert Else. And it seems to bring more wit to its pages than most. Here’s the author on gold dredgers: “I’ve never met a wealthy miner; the guy who sells gold pans is doing fine.”
Clearly, the book was a labor of love. The first edition sold well enough to justify Son of Fly-Fishing California’s North Yuba River, a 22-page addendum and update. There’s a nice blurb from Tom McGuane on the back: “I admired your North Yuba book, and enjoyed your affection for the place, and depth of knowledge.”
Not everyone was as appreciative. Angry anglers wrote to complain that the book called too much attention to a river that gets too easily hammered. “Before sitting down to write we had pondered those same questions,” said the author in his update. Would publicity bring too much pressure to bear on a fragile ecological resource? “We hedged the bet by ordering a limited print run (like this one) and marketing the book almost entirely through vendors in Nevada and Sierra Counties, thereby shrinking the market while boosting the local economy.”
Contrast that with how the game is played today. Of the six million books in the US Kindle Store, the overwhelming majority are self-published. Sixty-eight percent of those authors sell fewer than two books per month. And only two thousand Kindle authors earn $25,000 or more annually.
Those sobering statistics come fromThe Death of the Artist: How Creators Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt, 2020.) His book is an autopsy on how the digital economy threatens the livelihood and creative work of writers, musicians, and visual artists. “Art is shaped by money, by the material arrangements under which it is produced,” Deresiewicz writes. “When those shift, art shifts.” Silicon Valley’s boosters claim there’s never been a better time to be a creative artist and get your work before the public. Artists tell another story. Yes, it’s easier now to produce and post work online. But most of it sinks like a stone. That’s because millions of so-called “artists” are doing it, and getting noticed and paid for it is almost impossible.
If the past is a foreign country, the present feels like a no-man’s land. But at least no one is starved for information anymore. Everyone’s sounding the horn of plenty. Fly anglers can get all the information they want from innumerable fishing websites in the blogosphere. That’s why it can be fun seeking out some of the old guidebooks of varied quality and idiosyncratic character that came from a time when authors and anglers alike had to do a lot more bushwhacking.
California Steelhead, by Jim Freeman (Chronicle Books, 1971, 1984) was my introduction to the sport as practiced in the Golden State. It was the ugliest book I’d ever seen. I read it religiously. It got me onto every steelhead river in California. I don’t know what happened to my original copy. Maybe I donated it to the poor. More likely, I wore it out.
Rivers to Remember, by Frank Raymond (Siskiyou Trail Press, 2nd edition, 1992), folds a handy Northwest fishing guide into “tales of experience.” Although, as with many self-published books, its design could use improvement, Raymond’s text is nicely accompanied with a 16-page insert of color photographs “of places and people to remember.” This is a deeply personal book and, as its rear cover notes, “is about much more than Rivers.” A chapter on the McCloud River is followed by, of all things, an RV tour of Steinbeck Country. The Eagle Lake chapter ends with a note letting us know that “Judy and Joe Hiner have retired and are reported to have moved to a home on the North Shore. Their store is also gone, and a new dock has been built.”
Fishing the California Wilderness, by Mike Hayden (Chronicle Books, 1974) takes readers up into the high Sierra and other out-of-the way places for a bit of adventure. Some chapters were originally published in sporting magazines such as Fishing World, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield, and the black-and-white photographs reproduced in the book are better than most. Our adventurers encounter rough weather, inhospitable terrain, and other challenges, but the fishing makes the discomfort worthwhile. And when the trout aren’t biting, there’s lots of scenery to gape at.
Eastern Sierra Fishing Guide for Day Hikers, by John Barbier (n.p., 1998) fills a narrow niche by escorting readers into the backcountry on the leeward side of John Muir’s “Range of Light.” Barbier pushes fly fishing and catch-and-release angling as the preferred method on the many alpine lakes that are within a day’s hike and expresses a fondness for the brookies and golden trout that are plentiful in the high country.
North Tahoe Trout, by Louis Bignami and Dennis Peirce (Biggie Publications, 1984) is a self-published guidebook that went through multiple printings, directing anglers to all the good fishing found in the Truckee and Yuba River drainages. “Lake Tahoe offers lovely scenery. It’s worth the price of a fishing trip to see the dawn tint the Sierra gold.” A unique touch is the final chapter, which lists 10 trips that allow the reader to combine multiple waters and angling techniques within a single day. The front and back covers display a delicate ink print of a rainbow trout taken on the Yuba and reproduced by a traditional Japanese printmaking method known as gyotaku, or “fish rubbing.”
Trout Fishing in North America: Where and When, by J. B. Kitching and B.P. Worcester (Oakleaf Press, 1979), is a “ just the facts, ma’am” guide “to over 1300 good places to fish for trout and Atlantic salmon” in 46 of our United States (did you know they stock rainbow trout in Hawaii?) and a dozen Canadian provinces. The chapter on California gives a good overview of what’s available in our state’s major drainages and lists 50 prime rivers and lakes to visit, with easy directions on how to get there.
None of these books will leave you feeling that you’ve been in the company of major American poets, but as guidebooks, they’re informative and fun, and reflect a time when fly fishing was much less commercialized and one pursued the sport without the need to hire a guide. Sure, some of the information is outdated, but you could still use them to get around. And not one of them requires an an app.
Looking Around
By Richard Anderson
Fly fishing engages us deeply with the natural world, but this engagement is mostly with one aspect of it — the watery environs where fish live. Our rivers and lakes and their fisheries, however, are influenced by the land and the things around them, and that land and those things are often as engaging as the fishing itself. As the years pass, I’ve been finding myself looking more intently at what’s around me as I fish. Here are a few of the books that have helped me see and understand.
For an overarching perspective on California’s varied landscapes, I can’t think of a better volume than Elna Bakker’s
An Island Called California: An Ecological Introduction to Its Natural Communities (University of California Press, 1972, 1984). Bakker’s chapters, each of which covers a specific biological community, begin on the Pacific coast and then move eastward toward the state line. Many of these biological communities hold fishable waters, so if you’re thigh deep in the surf zone, for example, or wading a Central Valley river or a high Sierra lake, having read this book, you’ll have a good feel for why the flora and fauna around you became established in the particular manner that you see.
You can also read An Island Called California, as I did, by jumping to the chapters that most interest you, although you may find yourself heading to the index occasionally to define concepts that were introduced early in the book, such as “edaphic” and “mesophytic.” But even with words such as these, Bakker’s writing is not at all intimidating; it flows easily and describes clearly. This is a book well worth packing if you’re intending to fish new terrain in California and want to understand the biological community around you. And it deserves a spot on your bookshelf if you’re simply curious about our island of a state.
Bakker is not shy about noting the environmental changes being wrought by our species, but change, as the old saying goes, is the only constant of which we can be certain. Laura Cunningham’s astonishing book, A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday, 2010), describes through prose and her extraordinary artwork the ways in which California’s landscapes and ecology have changed over time, in particular since settlement by Europeans and Americans. Trent Pridemore, in his review of this book in our November/December 2011 issue, noted that Cunningham “offers a comprehensive look at what gave early California its reputation as one of the most abundant regions on earth.” The book is also a work of passion by someone who, in the best possible and most intense sense, gives a shit. Others have clearly noticed this passion and the talent that it drives: copies of this sadly out-of-print book are now selling for hundreds of dollars online. Fingers are crossed that someday it goes back in print.
Trent, in his review, wished Cunningham’s book had dealt more with coastal and inland conifer forest communities. Although I share Trent’s preference, Cunningham’s achievement is stellar as it is. Fortunately, we do not lack in books about conifers, a type of tree that has attracted me since I was a child living on the west slope of the Sierra amid incense cedars, sugar pines, white firs, and others. It’s not at all surprising that as an adult, I’ve chosen to live in a coniferous forest, but what I find especially nice is that California has more species of native conifers than any other state in our nation. And they are found in the same places as trout.
To understand the natural history of these trees, I rely on Ronald M. Lanner’s The Conifers of California (Cachuma Press, 1999). Although of coffee-table quality in its design, photography, and artwork (including impressive watercolor illustrations by Eugene O. Murman), this is a serious work by a professor emeritus of forestry. In addition to the natural history of each type of confer in our state, Lanner provides a map of that tree’s geographical distribution and notes ways to identify it from a distance, or while standing beneath it, or from needles and cones in the hand. The Conifers of California is a book that is both a pleasure to look at and has value in the field.
Speaking of field guides, one of the problems with works such as Lanner’s is that it is of a size and weight that makes it difficult to bring along while hiking or fishing. Publishers have long noted this problem and over time have developed field guides that are both light in weight and of dimensions that fit easily into a pocket or pack or fishing vest. Two of the best for the Sierra Nevada are written and illustrated by John Muir Laws and published through the auspices of the California Academy of Sciences: The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada (Heyday, 2007), and Sierra Birds: A Hiker’s Guide (Heyday, 1998). Laws also has a “Hiker’s Guide” for Sierra wildflowers, but I have not yet bought a copy.
About Laws’s Sierra Field Guide, Lisa Cutter wrote in our November/December 2014 issue, “It is such a wonderful guide because it not only describes the many different species of fish we pursue, it also has almost every other natural thing you are ever likely to encounter during a trip in the Sierra. The book describes the plants, fungi, animals, and even constellations. It is comprehensive, fun, and easy to use.”
Laws’s Sierra Birds is likewise easy to use. Pages are color coded for a prominent color of a bird, so if you spot a bird that has elements of yellow, you turn to the yellow-tabbed pages, and voilà, there it is. But this book doesn’t do much more than allow you to identify a bird and its general habitat. To understand its distribution and habits, as well as current status with regard to population health, I turn to Birds of the Sierra Nevada: Their Natural History, Status, and Distribution, by Edward C. Beatty and Edward R. Pandolfino (University of California Press, 2013). It’s pretty much the latest word in print about the birds in the region where I mostly fish, and its primary audience is bird-watchers. While I don’t (yet) share that level of enthusiasm, I enjoy knowing what’s in the air and the trees around me and having some understanding of why they’re there.
Understanding why they’re there is a guiding principle for fly fishers with regard to fish and what they feed on, and we can gain both knowledge and pleasure, perhaps even wisdom, if we extend this principle up from the water to the rest of the world that surrounds us. It’s all one, and we’re in the middle.
