Crazy for Rivers

Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous prose encapsulating a somewhat shopworn theme.
Review: Barich lends his gorgeous prose to a flyfishing "rite of passage" theme that has been done many times before by many writers with mixed results. Nothing new here and for the technical angler there are no insights relating to techniques. Enjoy for the sheer beauty of the prose. The book has been promoted as containing illustrations by Russell Chatham. Strangely, the copy I purchased had no illustrations whatsoever! Some prospective purchasers of the book may be put off by its brevity. It's really not much more than a medium-length essay, albeit a beautiful one.

Rating:
Summary: CRAZY FOR RIVERS will make you crazy for Barich
Review: CRAZY FOR RIVERS Bill Barich Lyons Press $16.95 80 pp.

"That autumn, I went a little crazy for rivers," says Bill Barich at the beginning of this deceptively simple book. Fortunately, Barich went crazy for words many autumns ago; he can create deep pools of prose with catch phrases at the bottom which sparkle with insight when brought to the surface of our consciousness. In this paean to fishing, he takes us to rivers like the Bear, "...with a chilly wind blowing and bruised looking clouds bunched on the horizon;" Stuart Fork, where a "silvery little rainbow" leaped up, "...as hooked in the moment as I was;" or the Buffalo, which had "soul...and compensated for its shabbiness by serving up eager brook trout." Barich lures us steadily through these rivers to the autumn he went crazy, and the lessons he learns. With his evocative writing, Barich makes standing in the water and waving a stick a magic entry to a land we might like to visit, even if we don't like to fish. However, Barich casts his prose lines out for a bigger catch than just a good fish story. In his hands, the rod becomes the measure of his life; reel time is reflection time, as if the bait tossed into the water ripples through his consciousness. He discovers that an "ugly" river may deliver much better fishing than the prettiest of streams; he learns that standing longer where others have stood with less patience may produce results; and shortly after releasing a brown trout back into the North Yuba River, he has an epiphany: "It must all be catch and release in the end, I thought, all part of a flow whose essence we cannot grasp." In the short span of eighty pages, we watch Downieville(on the Downie River)change from a town full of old geezers selling gold flakes on plank sidewalks, to a trendy village where mountain bikers guzzle cappucino at a sidewalk café. We also experience the transformation of the young Barich, who "...had too much nervous energy to sit calmly on a bank," preferring "the wading and casting and stalking," into the older Barich, who "...imagined a day might come when I could sit by a stream without fishing at all, just meditating as the monks were said to do." Such peerless prose, with no pretensions, will make you crazy for Barich.

Rating:
Summary: CRAZY FOR RIVERS will make you crazy for Barich
Review: CRAZY FOR RIVERS Bill Barich Lyons Press $16.95 80 pp.

"That autumn, I went a little crazy for rivers," says Bill Barich at the beginning of this deceptively simple book. Fortunately, Barich went crazy for words many autumns ago; he can create deep pools of prose with catch phrases at the bottom which sparkle with insight when brought to the surface of our consciousness. In this paean to fishing, he takes us to rivers like the Bear, "...with a chilly wind blowing and bruised looking clouds bunched on the horizon;" Stuart Fork, where a "silvery little rainbow" leaped up, "...as hooked in the moment as I was;" or the Buffalo, which had "soul...and compensated for its shabbiness by serving up eager brook trout." Barich lures us steadily through these rivers to the autumn he went crazy, and the lessons he learns. With his evocative writing, Barich makes standing in the water and waving a stick a magic entry to a land we might like to visit, even if we don't like to fish. However, Barich casts his prose lines out for a bigger catch than just a good fish story. In his hands, the rod becomes the measure of his life; reel time is reflection time, as if the bait tossed into the water ripples through his consciousness. He discovers that an "ugly" river may deliver much better fishing than the prettiest of streams; he learns that standing longer where others have stood with less patience may produce results; and shortly after releasing a brown trout back into the North Yuba River, he has an epiphany: "It must all be catch and release in the end, I thought, all part of a flow whose essence we cannot grasp." In the short span of eighty pages, we watch Downieville(on the Downie River)change from a town full of old geezers selling gold flakes on plank sidewalks, to a trendy village where mountain bikers guzzle cappucino at a sidewalk café. We also experience the transformation of the young Barich, who "...had too much nervous energy to sit calmly on a bank," preferring "the wading and casting and stalking," into the older Barich, who "...imagined a day might come when I could sit by a stream without fishing at all, just meditating as the monks were said to do." Such peerless prose, with no pretensions, will make you crazy for Barich.