All Fishermen Are Liars
By John Gierach. Published by Simon and Schuster, 2014; $24.00, hardbound.
Lefty Kreh is a fisherman who writes, Thomas McGuane is a writer who fishes, and John Gierach seems to split the difference. I don’t know how many books Gierach has written, but Amazon currently lists 21 titles for sale, including his latest, All Fishermen Are Liars. Like all of the Gierach books I’ve read, this one is a collection of essays about fishing trips or general musings about fly-fishing-related topics, such as ditching the work ethic and the personality of fishing rods. Unlike anything I’ve read by Gierach, though, or by anyone else, for that matter, is chapter 1. “A Day at the Office” is an autobiography written in the second person. It’s oddly compelling, but openly schizophrenic. Imagine calling yourself “you” and then writing a dozen pages about him. As a reader, it takes a while to wrap your brain around it. As an experiment in creativity, I give the chapter two thumbs up (it’s among the best in the book), but still, it’s kind of out in left field.
The rest of the book is more normal. Normal for Gierach would be high praise for most fishing writers, but we’ve come to expect better than normal from him. His books Trout Bum and The View from Rat Lake set ridiculously high standards against which the rest of his work will forever be compared. Reading All Fishermen Are Liars is much like driving across Nevada. You catch yourself coming to and wondering where you’ve been for the last 20 minutes. The essays about going to one famous lodge after going to another famous river with yet another famous person are forgettable until you are slapped awake by the unexpected twist of a phrase or turn of a word that Gierach is so good at doing. His earlier works were so twisty, turny, and downright hilarious that you would never dare nod off for fear of missing something.
A few essays do stand out from the rest. My favorite is titled simply “Oregon.” It is the story of how the author and a couple of buddies travel all the way to Oregon (he’s from Colorado) to fish for steelhead, despite the fact that the rivers are in flood and the forecast is for more of the same. Everything about the story is a metaphor of how any kind of fly fishing is hope against hope that somehow you’ll beat the odds. He nails it. Every word seems chosen with care, and every phrase is nuanced. You can tell he truly enjoyed reliving the experience in his narrative, probably even more so than the experience itself.
Another fine essay is “The Mile.” Once again, it is about fighting the odds during winter conditions, this time on the Miracle Mile of the North Platte in Wyoming. The normally crowded banks are nearly devoid of humans for good reason, but that does not stop the author and friends from fishing and camping out. It’s kind of a melancholy introspection, or, if you’re old enough, a retrospection about why we fish, even when the chances of actually catching anything are slim to none. He loses himself in the writing. It’s a piece I look forward to reading again.
The chapter I actually bought the book for was “Tenkara.” I heard it was good, and Gierach does as fine a job as anyone has of describing tenkara, but to my ear the writing is somewhat flat and comes across as almost scripted. My hopes were high, and like much of the book, I expected more from this chapter. If only my best writing could be as good as his worst.
—Ralph Cutter
DamNation
Directed by Ben Knight and Travis Rummel; produced by Matt Stoecker and Travis Rummel; executive producer, Yvon Chouinard for Patagonia productions. Available for download at Vimeo.com for rent ($5.99) or to own ($9.99).
DamNation is a film born from the collective and creative minds of Yvon Chouinard and fish biologist Matt Stoecker, and is about our society’s changing views regarding dams and dammed rivers.
We are evolving from an era when it was nearly a moral imperative to build dams to a time when we’ve come to recognize that many dams have outlived their purpose and even that many dams were constructed that never should have been built in the first place. Dam removal is no longer a radical concept or some fictional event dreamed up by Jim Harrison or Edward Abbey. DamNation sets out to establish decommissioning as a reasonable and logical progression in the life of many of America’s dams.
Stoecker approached Travis Rummel of Felt Soul Media to coproduce this film with him, and for good reason. Felt Soul has earned the highest honors in fishing-related media by producing such video classics as Running Down the Man, Red Gold, and Eastern Rises. Rummel and partner Ben Knight are on top of their game and with DamNation prove that they are still kings of the mountain.
The movie is beautiful. Like Red Gold, it is long on panoramas and silky slow motion, backed by a heart-tugging soundtrack. Also like Red Gold, it follows a predictable formula in which the ebb of slow and retrospective sections is followed by the flow of punchy, fast-paced narratives and clips. If there is fault in this, it is that some of the slow sections are either too slow or too drawn out. An aggressive editor would have knocked the 87-minute documentary back by perhaps 15 minutes, and much of that clip-cutting would have been done at the expense of the Native American nostalgia backed by tedious and somber dirges. Native culture has a hugely important place in the history and future of dams, but the segment is overlong. From my own viewing experience and from listening to comments from others, this is where the attention span of many in the audience was tested. My guess, however, is that for any Native Americans in the room, this part was far too short.
The 150-year history of dam building in America is condensed into just a few minutes. Some reviewers, including the Hollywood Reporter at the SXSW Festival, where DamNation was premiered (and where it won the Audience Appreciation Award for documentaries), thought the history was too brief and compressed. I, on the other hand, was amazed at how good this segment was. Before reading the reviews, I felt it was incredibly well done, and after reading the reviews and rewatching the movie, I am hard-pressed to figure out how anyone could have a done a better overall job. The narrator (Knight) might have taken a deep breath between some of the historical events, but overall, it is creative, fast-paced, and accurate. I learned a bunch.
Kudos should also be given to how the film deals with the science behind the negative impact of dams. Topics such as fish passage, sedimentation, hatcheries, and genetic diversity are usually delivered with predictable and boring monotony, but DamNation gets it right and keeps it relevant without bogging down.
The final third of the movie is where it comes to life. California Congressman Tom McClintock makes an ass of himself, Ben and Travis get busted trying to kayak through the Snake River locks, Stoecker’s fantastic underwater videography gets appropriate treatment, cracks get painted on dams, there are lively, cuss-peppered interviews, and of course, dams get blown up all over the place.
DamNation preaches to a choir who will hopefully feel empowered to put dam removal on the table without feeling like whacko extremists or eco-terrorists. This is a well-done and valuable movie. Watch it.
—Ralph Cutter
Classics Revisited
The Spawning Run
By William Humphrey. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1970; available used, both softbound and hardbound.
When I worked in journalism a long time ago, it used to be the custom at my newspaper for reporters and editors to share books on which we were particularly keen. Any new book by Edward Abbey or the latest detective novel from Ross Macdonald was bound to make the rounds. (“Hey, you gotta read this!”) Our tastes in literature were eclectic. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker was as big a hit with us as John D. MacDonald’s series that featured his boat-bum hero Travis McGee. John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens was a sacred text. I was the only fly fisher in the newsroom, but it seemed as if everybody read and admired A River Runs Through It. Naturally, our enthusiasm for great writing also included what was appearing in periodicals. The single most popular magazine story that passed through our hands was Russell Chatham’s “The Great Duck Misunderstanding,” an account of an orgiastic duck feast that for Rabelaisian excess has never been exceeded, even by Anthony Bourdain.
I was the one who introduced the newsroom to The Spawning Run. It was not a review copy sent in by a publisher. Rather, I bought it used after a lengthy search through mail-order catalogues printed by book dealers who specialized in hunting and fishing titles. (This was long before Internet shopping, when Amazon was just a river.) The Spawning Run was not so much a book as a 10,000-word jeu d ’esprit. Originally published in Esquire, this longish essay, set in large type and accompanied by fancy illustrations, had been padded out to 110 pages hardbound, and it carried a rather high sticker price for something that weighed so little. But I got my money’s worth. The Spawning Run was one of the cleverest and most elegant fishing stories ever written.
The author was William Humphrey, a highly regarded Texas novelist, and The Spawning Run was his account of his stay in a fishing hotel in Wales. Humphrey was the kind of writer whose novels always seemed to get good reviews, only to be met with indifference by the reading public. But The Spawning Run sold like scones when it was published in Great Britain back in 1970. It did well because it was, in part, a marvelous and witty send-up of the British class system. But mainly it sold because it was about sex, something the English only pretend to dislike.
The Spawning Run is a meditation on human sexuality disguised as a scientifically detailed examination of the salmon’s fatal instinct to spawn. The story — written as a series of diary extracts — begins in springtime, when Humphrey finds himself in the south of England on business, in the season when rhododendrons along the riverbanks are “murmurous with bees” and trout are rising to swarms of mating mayflies on the nearby Test and Itchen. But he might as well be in Addis Ababa as far as angling goes, because he can’t afford the private fishing fees. Customers in a pub turn a cold shoulder when he mentions trout fishing. Says one: “Trout, is it? Ah well, I wouldn’t know, not being a toff meself.” Nonetheless, Humphrey is delighted to find himself one day in Dorchester, home to Humphrey’s literary hero, Thomas Hardy, who renamed it Casterbridge in his fiction. Humphrey has the good fortune to meet a parking lot attendant who once was the illustrious Hardy’s driver. The man tells Humphrey that Hardy was one of the first townsmen to own an automobile, loved speed, and built some of the finest houses in Dorchester. Somewhat puzzled, Humphrey says to the attendant: “What’s more important, he wrote some of the best novels and some of the most beautiful poems in the language.” The attendant quickly corrects him: “That would be the brother. It’s Mr. Henry Hardy we’re speaking of, the building contractor. Ah, he was a fine man, and it’s a pleasure to talk to you about him.”
Through his contacts, Humphrey manages to book a beat on one of the U.K.’s less famous and therefore less expensive salmon rivers, the Teme, and he checks into an old Welsh fishing hotel there, where Bentleys are parked in the auto court and peacocks roam the grounds. The hotel seems to be populated by the cast of a Monty Python sketch. Most are diehard salmon fishermen who have dragged their bored and neglected wives along for the annual vacation at the hotel. There are even some “salmon widows” present, wives whose sportsmen husbands have passed on, but who still vacation at the hotel out of a sense of tradition. The most colorful and garrulous angler among them might be old Admiral Blakey, banging the barometer in the hall and predicting, “They won’t bite tomorrow.”And then there’s Holloway, “good old Holloway,” a feckless angler and “a good sport” who has never once caught a salmon, but who remains eternally cheerful and optimistic, nonetheless.
On their first night at the hotel, Humphrey and his wife are awakened by the screams of a woman being murdered, all night long and at regular intervals. After several more nights of this, the mystery is finally solved: those ungodly sounds are coming from peahens. Humphrey’s wife wonders what that peahen’s mate must be doing to her to make her scream like that. Or not doing, suggests another female guest. The mystery behind “good old Holloway’s” lack of success on his designated beat is also solved. It turns out that while other fishermen are hip-deep in the stream, casting futilely for salmon on an empty river, “good old Holloway” is back at the hotel servicing their wives. The fishermen have been cuckolded by one of their own. These fishermen are like that heroic male salmon who returns from an epic journey at sea, ready and eager to spawn, only to have a one-inch parr — “an impudent little Holloway” — dart in at the critical moment and “discharge his tuppence worth.” Nature can be cruel.
The Spawning Run was a big hit with my colleagues back in the newsroom lo those many years ago. I don’t know what the reaction would be today, where jschool graduates have largely replaced traditional English majors in the modern newsroom. Newspapers have shrunk or done away entirely with their book-review sections, in effect telling their best readers what they really think of them. Maybe the only reaction among today’s journalists would be to attack Humphrey for “made up” scenes, characters, and quotes in what purports to be a work of nonfiction. Journalists make a big deal out of exposing that these days. Which is kind of funny when you consider that your daily newspaper contains more fiction than in all of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, half of a newspaper being advertising, a form of storytelling as fantastic as Greek mythology.
One of the most important lessons I learned as a reporter was that journalists cannot predict the future with any degree of competency, no matter how much they think otherwise. I would have predicted back then that The Spawning Run would find a permanent home in the Hall of Fame and that William Humphrey would be crowned with laurels. But his many fine novels have been neglected, and The Spawning Run has gone out of print. So has Open Season (1986), a collection of the author’s sporting and outdoors adventures. That volume contained both The Spawning Run and another long and equally fine personal essay, also once published as a slim book, called My Moby Dick. That story was about Humphrey’s attempts to catch an exceptionally large trout. And it might be the ultimate story about “the one that got away.”
—Michael Checchio
13-Year-Old Writes Fly-Fishing Book
In what could well be a first for California, a 13-year-old fly fisher has published a book to show beginners how to fly fish. Wren Sakai, a student at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, wrote the 54-page Fly Fishing Through the Eyes of a Beginner, which is intended to provide basic instruction for his fellow kid fly fishers. Chapters include “How to Get Started,” “Casting, Hooking, and Landing a Fish,” “Proper Fishing,” “Understanding the Fish,” Water and Fish Conservation,” and, perhaps most importantly for any youngster, “Have Fun.”
Sakai started fly fishing at age 10, but became more engaged in the sport after attending a summer Fish Camp sponsored by The Fly Shop in Redding. All proceeds will be donated to the shop’s scholarship fund and to California Trout. Available for purchase from CalTrout and the Fly Shop.
—Tom Martens
