I’m probably like many fly fishers in that back when I was getting into the sport, I bought fly-fishing magazines to improve my skills, understand tackle and flies, and figure out where to fish. As I continued to buy and read these magazines, however, I began to realize they provided something else, something equally important, but less utilitarian: they ran articles that brought the reader into the immediacy of the fly-fishing experience and the writer’s thoughts about it. These stories and essays gave me new and deeper perspectives on the sport and added fuel to my passion to get on the water. I can still remember, forty years later, Don Roberts’s piece in Trout magazine about exploring for redband rainbows in Southern Oregon and one by Harry Campbell in Fly Rod and Reel on fly fishing in Michigan. (That I can recall the authors’ names tells you I thought their stories were terrific.) I began to purposefully seek out more of this kind of writing.
It was in Rod and Reel magazine, in 1988, that a glowing review of a literary anthology, David Seybold’s Seasons of the Angler, led me to order the book. “The Vietnam generation’s best writers all seem to be fly fishermen,” declared the magazine’s editor. I don’t recall there being a single dud among its thirty essays, stories, and poems. Two pieces in particular caught my attention because they were set in California, “Blunder Brothers: A Memoir,” in which the actor Rip Torn writes about his angling escapades with countercultural author Richard Brautigan, and Bill Barich’s “Small Wonders,” a deeply observant recollection of a wine-country bass pond that served as something of a touchstone during Barich’s early years as a writer. I came across Barich again when I picked up his collection of writings, Traveling Light (published in 1984), at a usedbook store in San Francisco. I would walk the city on weekends seeking out interesting things to read, including travel memoirs, a genre that flourished in the 1980s. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book’s opening story, “Hat Creek and the McCloud,” involved trips to fly fish those two California blue-ribbon waters. It remains one of my favorite stories, with Barich’s deceptively simple lines weaving the threads of reminiscence into something witty and wise.
In A Sportsman’s Library (2013), which lists “100 essential” fishing and hunting books, Steve Bodio makes a passing reference to a “Golden Age” of outdoor writing that ended either just prior to or early in the 1960s. But outdoor writing soon began a resurgence, perhaps influenced by the rise of the “New Journalism,” in which the writer becomes part of the story, and perhaps influenced as well by the cultural turbulence of the 1960s. Norms and expectations were changing, so it was no surprise that writers would experiment with prose, structure, subjectivity.
Toward the end of the decade, Sports Illustrated had printed fishing and hunting stories by such literati as the novelist Tom McGuane and the poet Jim Harrison, and in 1975, Ed and Rebecca Gray launched Gray’s Sporting Journal, bumping up demand for literary-type work involving field sports. Two years later, the publisher of Rolling Stone launched Outside magazine, broadening the range and frequency of outdoor experiences making their way into print. Fly fishing, a sport centered on the related acts of contemplation and evaluation, is a natural vehicle for an often reflective type of writing, and by the mid-1980s, fly-fishing magazines, which were growing in number, included a “lyrical” piece in pretty much every issue. This was when I entered the sport, as a novice fly fisher visiting magazine stands every month or two in search of advice on how to improve my abilities.
Seybold’s anthology had shown me that fly fishing could be the stuff of literature. Yes, how to fly fish competently was important and was the primary reason I purchased fly-fishing magazines. But stories that touch on why we fish, what we gain from it other than a creature f lopping in a net, can at their best influence how we think about our sport, our lives, and the world around us. I wanted the mirror and window that good writing can provide.
And after finding Traveling Light, I sought not only books and articles whose subject was the experience of fly fishing, but especially the experience of fly fishing in the state where I live. What did others think about it? What insights, angling or life-related, might they reveal? And less highfalutin: Can I, ever the seeker of intel, glean ideas on where and how to fish?
More than a few books deal with the California fly-fishing experience, and I would like to bring them to your attention here. I won’t, however, go into detail about their themes, leaving instead the pleasure of discovery to you.
Bill Barich
In alphabetical order by author, first up is Bill Barich. Although he has written widely on a variety of subjects, most notably horse racing, he does have one book that focuses on fishing, Crazy for Rivers (1999). California waters have a prominent place in it, as they do in three of four fishing pieces in another of his books, a collection of sports-related stories titled The Sporting Life (2016). Barich brings to our attention aspects of the world that he finds intriguing, and writing about fly fishing is one of his ways of doing so. All of his work, his fishing stories included, can appeal easily to the nonanglers in your household — take a look, for example, at his online pieces at Narrative magazine (www.narrativemagazine.com; enter “Barich” into the Search Site bar).
By the way, the story “Hat Creek & the McCloud,” which had first run in the New Yorker before appearing in Traveling Light, was published again in 1988 as a fine-press book under the Canto Bello imprint out of Santa Rosa. Only 150 copies were printed, so what was a rarity then is even more so today.
Russell Chatham
Bill Barich’s angling stories revolve mostly around trout. In contrast, Russell Chatham, who grew up in Marin County, fished for a variety of local fly-susceptible species. One of his early stories, published in Sports Illustrated, even involved fly fishing for herring along the coast. An expert fly angler, Chatham was also a highly-regarded painter, an accomplishment made more impressive in that he was largely self-taught. The same was true of his writing, to which he often brought a painterly eye.
I was unaware of Chatham’s books until I read a review in Fly Fisherman of his 1988 collection of essays, Dark Waters. I recall it being favorable, but the reviewer chastised Chatham for mentioning drug use, a finger wag that felt twenty years behind the times. What caught my attention, though, was that much of the book dealt with fly fishing in California, with stories on trout, salmon, shad, steelhead, and striped bass. Just what I was looking for! I ordered a copy, had my socks knocked off when I read it, then immediately ordered Chatham’s other collection of stories, Silent Seasons, which had first been published in 1978 and then reprinted in 1988. It presented “21 fishing adventures by 7 American experts,” one of whom was Russ. Two of his essays in that book had California settings.
I was so taken by Chatham’s writing and illustrations that on my weekend walks, I set out to scrounge up his only how-to book, Striped Bass on the Fly (1977). I managed to find two copies, each for around five bucks, prices that would be unfathomably low today, even with the collapse of the Bay Area striper fishery. The most noteworthy of Chatham’s books for California fly fishers is The Angler’s Coast, initially published in 1976, then reprinted in 1990 with a new introduction and photographs. Given that the book first appeared nearly half a century ago, it of course celebrates an era of plenty. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it also serves as a eulogy to a place and possibilities and people that are long gone. The Angler’s Coast is thus a historical document, but also the work of a heart enamored with the moods that landscape and water create and with the pursuit of fish. It should be the centerpiece of any collection of books about fishing in California.
Michael Checchio
I met Michael Checchio in the early 1990s, shortly after I had launched California Fly Fisher. A recent émigré from New Jersey, he dropped by the magazine’s office, in a semi-derelict can factory on San Francisco’s industrial waterfront, to introduce himself. I might have just published one of his pieces (if not, I shortly would), and I absolutely wanted to publish more. He sees the sport and our state with fresh eyes that are sympathetic, yet open to irony.
Checchio’s first book, a collection titled A Clean, Well-Lighted Stream, came out in 1995. It’s an odd-shaped volume, wider than tall, and it remains my favorite of all his books for the simple reason that its narratives occur mainly in California, which despite despoliation is a place that retains qualities that fill the soul. This is not to say Checchio’s other books aren’t similarly excellent reads. Two of them also deal with fly fishing: Mist on the River (2001), his quest for steelhead, and Being, Nothingness, and Fly Fishing (2001), a road trip to waters around the West. Both include action in and observations about California. All three deserve your attention.
Seth Norman
Around 1991, while working on my fly casting at the Oakland casting ponds, I fell into conversation with a friendly, bearlike fellow, a little older than me, who was likewise working on getting his line to do what he wanted. While we talked, he mentioned he was a writer. I somehow ended up with his phone number, I no longer remember why, and months later, out of the blue, I gave him a call. “Would you be interested in contributing to a California fly-fishing magazine I’m putting together?” Not long afterward, a short piece titled “Destination: September” showed up in my mailbox, and Seth Norman’s “Master of Meander” column was born.
Norman is a prose stylist unlike any I’ve come across in angling literature, and he crafts stories that remind me of architecture, with elements that work together to support a sometimes complex edifice. His focus is often people, the fishers and those around them, and he is unafraid of sentimentality — an emotion usually ignored, even despised, in modern writing. Here’s a bit of what Steve Bodio wrote in A Sportsman’s Library about Norman’s first book, Meanderings of a Fly Fisherman (1996): “It’s a moving book, delightful in its observations and details.” “Even the lightest pieces in the book would be worth recommending. But it’s the long pieces that put this book in the absolute first rank.” Yep.
Similar and also excellent is Norman’s only other story collection to date, A Fly Fisher’s Guide to Crimes of Passion (2000), which Bodio recommends, too.
Scott Sadil
I probably first came across Scott Sadil’s work in Frank Amato’s Flyfishing magazine, but I certainly became aware of Sadil’s talents as a fly fisher and writer when Amato published his Angling Baja in 1996. I bought a copy because I was trying to figure out how to succeed in the surf zone and figured the book could provide tips, even if I was only hitting the Alta California coast. Angling Baja, however, was much more than a how-to or where-to and about much more than Baja. As the front cover announced, this was “One man’s fly fishing journey through the surf.” It’s an angling biography of sorts, with lessons on fishing, lessons on living, and plenty of intriguing detours.
Sadil has gone on to write five additional books. Two of them are works of fiction set outside California. Three are basically nonfiction: Cast from the Edge (1999), a collection of fly-fishing stories framed as fiction, but not really; Fly Tales (2010), essays about particular flies and fly fishing, and, reviewed in the previous issue of this magazine, Pacific Coast Flies and Fly Fishing (2023). Sadil is not only a gifted writer, he reminds me of John Gierach in the quality and quantity of fishing advice he slips into his work. Most of it can apply to Golden State fisheries.
Each of the five writers highlighted above has had stories published in California Fly Fisher, and because I am a reader first, fly fisher second, all have enriched my life on and off the water, as have other writers who use fly fishing as a way to explore themes within and beyond the sport. I wonder, though, whether this Silver Age of fly-fishing literature, if such it is, might be coming to an end. Consumer preferences continue to shift from physical magazines and books to on-line and digital content and from the written to the visual and aural. Or, perhaps, our growing cornucopia of mediums will lead to a flourishing of artistic expression with words, images, whatever. Artists will always seek to touch our hearts, help us see. I’m looking forward to what comes next, although fingers are crossed it’ll be a book with good stories about fly fishing in California.
Editor’s note: Although the book reviewed below was published twenty years ago, the continuing crisis with the sustainability of our salmon populations means it remains timely, as are the solutions it proposes. These solutions, however, require governmental action, which means your voice and vote play a role.
The King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon
By David R. Montgomery. Published by Westview Press, 2003; $26 hardbound.
Whenever I read the works of the late Harvard sociobiologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson, I wish I could be as upbeat as the author about our prospects for saving the planet. Wilson was convinced that man’s intelligence and best instincts would overcome his innate greed, enabling us to reverse a trend toward widespread species extinction before it is too late. And this from a man who once wrote a book entitled On Human Nature.
David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, also believes that common sense can trump our cupidity. While he understands that we can’t return salmon to their former glory days, he also refuses to accept any fatalistic judgment that salmon and civilization can’t coexist. “I don’t care more about fish than I do about people,” he writes in The King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon, but he is convinced we can change our behavior to protect them.
Montgomery’s field, geomorphology, is the study of landscape evolution. And landscape — habitat — is the key to the salmon’s survival. Human society and evolutionary processes operate in “mismatched timescales,” Montgomery says, and salmon simply cannot adapt through natural selection as quickly as humans can change the fish’s habitat. As Montgomery puts it: “Humans have conducted at least three full-scale experiments on how well salmon adapt to a changing landscape. Salmon failed each time, first in Great Britain, then New England, and now in the Pacific Northwest.”
Montgomery’s point, of course, is that it is really humans who have failed the test. The King of Fish is an overview of a thousand years of human actions (the subtitle’s “thousand-year run”) affecting a fish that probably has inspired more universal ref lection and wonderment than any other creature that swims. Montgomery chronicles the rise and fall of salmon in the Old and New Worlds and outlines the steps we must take if we are to halt the salmon’s coming extinction. Mostly it involves rethinking the ways we make our environmental decisions about how we use land in our river valleys.
Montgomery shows us how human settlements have changed the salmon valleys of Europe and North America over time and how the spread of agriculture and later of industry ultimately doomed the fish in most European rivers as well as in New England. It wasn’t that humans didn’t recognize the need to protect salmon runs from earliest times. (An edict dating back to Richard the Lionhearted mandated that all dams and obstructions on English rivers contain a “King’s gap,” a passageway for salmon that had to be at least “as wide as a pig standing sideways in the stream.”) No, it wasn’t ignorance, but shortsighted policies that failed them. And so where once you had historical descriptions of salmon runs of the “you could cross the rivers on their backs” variety, by the time of the Industrial Revolution, most of Europe’s salmon streams had been wiped out, and in New England, every stream in the Maine woods wide enough to hold a sawmill was stopped up by dams. Thoreau was soon lamenting the absence of the once teeming salmon in his beloved Concord River.
Montgomery warns that salmon in the Pacific Northwest will soon go the way of their cousins in Britain and New England if we fail to learn from our mistakes. At one time, thousands of sockeyes swam up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to spawn in Idaho’s Redfish Lake. Montgomery tells the story of a sockeye named Lonesome Larry, who in 1992 swam a journey of a thousand miles, climbing over the fish ladders of thirteen dams, the only one of his kind to make it back to Redfish Lake. “Instead of a nice female to spawn with, he was clubbed over the head and had his sperm squeezed out of him by technicians to fertilize hatchery fish from which the agency hoped to revive his kind. Larry himself, the last Redfish
Lake sockeye salmon, ended up on display on the wall of a museum managed by a dam construction company that built many of the dams Larry swam over.”
Montgomery shows us the failure of hatchery programs that were set up to create salmon on demand as a substitute for destroying habitat. Natural selection enables only the hardiest salmon to survive a naturally high culling rate in the early stages of a salmon’s life in the stream. Pellet-fed fry raised in hatcheries and not subjected to selective pressures in a stream become even more susceptible to predation once in the wild. As Montgomery puts it: “Releasing hatchery fish into a stream is like dropping suburban teenagers into the Congo.” The author also warns of the potential dangers of salmon farming, now all the rage, on natural stocks: “Critics fear that transgenic salmon, which they call ‘Frankenfish’ because the growth-inducing genes come from other species of fish, could wreak havoc on wild salmon by either competing with wild fish or through the Trojan gene effect, in which larger transgenic males attract a large share of mates but produce fewer fit offspring.” And he summons up further images of a brave new world this way: “Advances in biotechnology may mean that we can continue to eat salmon without needing the fish itself. Scientists have devised ways to grow fish meat in the laboratory. A lump of fish used as starter (sort of like for sourdough bread) is bathed in fats that become assembled onto the original lump.”
The fact is that wild salmon can thrive in rivers and even adapt quickly to colonizing new streams, as long as riverine habitat supports their relatively simple life-cycle requirements. Their needs are basic and not many and include gravel for spawning, cover to hide their young, and clean, oxygenated water. In the final chapter, Montgomery tells us what he thinks is necessary to sustain such streams and to reverse the decline in the Pacific Northwest. These include greenbelts along our rivers, fish sanctuaries, urban buffer zones, and restoring natural stream flows by reclaiming portions of floodplains. But it all comes down to our political will. The obstacles today are the same as they were in the past: political agendas and vested interests, bureaucratic inertia, and corporate and social denial. Montgomery believes that the only way to avoid past mistakes is to reinvent the ways we make decisions about our rivers. If we do this, he claims, then the salmon can rebound even as human populations increase.