Notes from an Old Fly Book

Rating:
Summary: "A fisherman and a Teacher, In that order."
Review: Gordon Wickstrom is a WWII Navy veteran, a graduate of Standord with a Ph.D., a college professor, and a serious student of Shakespeare. For the past sixty years, when asked about his occupation, he said he was a fisherman and a teacher, in that order. With the publication of this book he can truthfully include author, a good author, to the list.
This is a elegant book about fly-fishing and so much more. Wickstrom has spent sixty years fishing in his native Colorado streams and rivers as well as legendary rivers in Ireland and the fabled chalk streams in southern England. During that time he has not only studied the intricacies of the sport but thought about it's connection to literature, music, Shakespeare, friends, family and other things that matter. Drawing upon his storehouse of knowledge and experiences he has written this small, remarkable account of anglers and their calling that is destined to become a classic. The book contains stories, essays, poems, biblical passages, and a song to explain who fihermen (and women) are and why they do what they do. Indeed, it is an attempt to understand WHY anglers do what they do rather than simply what they do.
In numerous short essays he suggests that given the "...vast, detailed, and powerful..." expanse of literature and its impact on anglers, that perhaps fishing is really the material expression of the literature. Thus, it could be that literature came first and then the angler. In his elegant, understated, sometimes humorous manner he summarizes such literature and how it has affected the sport in general and himself in particular. This is an interesting thesis that will give the reader pause. The story of his affliction common to the most serious anglers, the never-ending accumulation of rods, reels, lures, and other "essential" tackle, and how he came to realize that really the most important item was his 1937 Chevy Coupe, is a delight. The essay on the catch-and-release program now in vogue is a thoughtful treatment of the subject, both pro and con, and will give the novice and serious angler alike pause for reflection. Interspersed throughout the book are short stories about the history and characteristics of legendary flies that a surely found in many an anglers Fly Book.
This book will speak to the heart and soul of any reader remotely interested in the fly fishing phenomenon, literature, music, family, friends and a host of other things that matter in life. I am usually skeptical about the need for another book on fishing but this is a worthy exception.

Rating:
Summary: An Artful Angler
Review: On analogy with another field of human pleasure, we can say that the brain is the most important piece of angling equipment we own. Some fishermen are of very little brain, others of massive. NOTES FROM AN OLD FLY BOOK issues from the latter species.
Let us first admire the sheer balls of the man. To commit yet another book of reflections on fishing! I mean, really Hedda, people don't do such things. They don't unless they can leap over that toppling pile next to your chair and bring something new to the party.

While it's easy to poke fun at earnest people (such as write about angling, there's no denying that Wickstrom is in large company with this book. I'm happy to report that he fits right in, while occupying his own unique niche.
That niche might be labeled "Sentimental Intelligence." Of course, sentiment is much maligned these days. Like any human faculty, it can, exercised in excess, produce a pretty loathsome babble, on and off the page. The current sentimental tsunami, Political Correctness, having swept clean our few remaining beaches of reasonable discrimination into a very mere pudding, only now recedes. Wickstrom bravely stands up in the undertow and dares to write with serious sentiment about his beloved avocation. Good on him, sez I!

Wickstrom's sentimentality directs itself primrily to the past, often the very distant past. He properly reveres the past and much of what he writes could be called history, in the best sense. That is, he mines the past for significance, for the odd shy fact no one else has noticed, the contribution of someone hitherto unknown or neglected.
More important, to my mind, he mines his own wide and thoughtful experience for those feelings we've all had but have mostly set aside in the press of daily affairs. Wickstrom boldly tells us about his past in order to bring life to our own. He evokes his personal history, not to parade its value or to wallow in regret for snows past, but to revel in celebration: again and again he creates history that illuminates the now, that offers his readers a chance to understand and celebrate their own feelings through their sympathy with his.

One last word: about the technical accomplishment of this fine book. Wickstrom manages with grace and vigor to create that most elusive quality of ggod writing: a sense in the reader that nothing but this writer's concerns matters very much. He does this in the time-honored way of the grat wriiters: he lays bare his own intense concern and bids us follow him. So indeed we do.
But this laying bare doesn't just happaen. There's laying bare and then there's laying bare. Wickstrom does the second kind, and skillfully. He makes sentences and paragraphs that display their content in shapes, frames, of clear, simple beauty. The best example I can give is this: I had thought to conclude this review with a quotation, a sentence or two lifted from the book that would both demonstrate the quality of his prose and neatly conclude this encomium. But I can't find a sentence or two that will consent to be so lifted. Everything's of a piece, each thought sliding effortlessly into the next. Effortlessly for us, of course, not for him. We know that effortlessness, how truly hard it is, how valuable when someone masters it, and how necessary that we love and celebrate it as Wickstrom loves and celebrates his new and ancient art of fishing with an angle.