by Yale University Press, 2007
This anthology brings together stories, essays, and poems from 42 remarkably diverse authors, from trout-fishing notables Ernest Schwiebert and Robert Behnke to poets John Hollander and W. B Yeats. With attractive illustrations by James Prosek, the book has something for both the avid fisherman and the reader for whom the pursuit may seem a bit odd. As Nick Lyons points out in the forward, the authors lean more toward “literature” than toward “how to” or “where to.”
For this reader, Tight Lines’ most compelling essays express the powerful allure of water. In “Jetties,” Tim Weed (a past contributor to Northern Woodlands) reflects on wading along the Atlantic’s rocky, seething shoreline for stripers amid crashing waves: “Why am I still out here? It’s not only the possibility of catching a big fish. There’s something sublime about this, a terrible beauty in the moment. The greens of the water, the yellows and rusty browns of the seaweed, the luminescence of light and shadow playing on the curling rips. And I’m part of it…playing an active role, probing for the living, pulsing heart of the ocean.” Such vivid imagery abounds in Tight Lines.
In “Fishing with My Daddy,” Jimmy Carter recalls a trip to one of his father’s favorite fishing spots on the Little Satilla River, “a serpentine stream in the flattest part of Georgia’s coastal plain.” This “fish that got away” story includes an experience with his father that led him to write some 50 years later that “many of the most highly publicized events of my presidency are not nearly as memorable or significant in my life as fishing with my daddy [on that day] when I was a boy.”
Any good fishing anthology ought to include some hard facts about the sport, and in his essay “Amare O Pesar,” Howell Raines playfully dispels one of the more common myths about the sport, that “women just don’t get it.” Howell writes that, despite some male revisionism, all fishing writing “stems from Dame Juliana Berners and The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, published in 1496.” Hers were the first instructions on fly-tying in Britain. He notes also that the first person to make flies based on the study of nymphs in a home aquarium was Sara McBride, who wrote about her experiments in 1876, well before Theodore Gordon, the so-called father of American fly-fishing even caught his first brown trout. But Raines then reinforces another stereotype by claiming that the reason that fishing becomes an addiction for men more than women is “that men are generally more susceptible than women to obsessions with inconsequential pursuits.”
Evidence that women are not immune from the fishing addiction can be found, however, in “Birth of an Angler.” Newly acclimated to the world of fly-fishing, Christine Hemp writes, “My fly-rod has become part of me, its reflex an extension of my limbs. Each delicate flip of the line, each jiggle to dance the hopper upstream, ties me closer to the world of marmots and jays, and to a balance I’ve only begun to comprehend. I am shocked when, every time I feel the rush of a trout on the line…an unfamiliar elation washes through my body. I am being carried by a river inside me.” Such moments of awakening and awareness help convey the connection anglers feel to the natural world. The act of casting a fly to a cutthroat on the Rio Grande is, for Hemp, transcendent, almost spiritual.
James Prosek, who co-founded the Journal during his junior year at Yale, remarks in the preface, “it’s the contemplative nature of angling that prompts people to write about it. Fishing is mostly about time spent in silence and it provides a chance to think about family, friends, what’s going on in one’s life, nature, art and writing stories. Fishing is really a catalyst for sharing what you’re working out, or to simply tell a good tale.” While fishing may be the catalyst, these stories are ultimately about much more. From a reflection on the meaning of friendship, to a wistful recollection of a near-death experience involving a hippo and a Daredevil, to a scholarly “Fishing Talk” at Yale University, there’s something here for not only those who fish but also for those who wonder what all the fuss is about.