Two years after the publication of former The Flyfish Journal editor Steve Duda’s River Songs, Mountaineers Books plans a follow-up with The Wisdom of Rivers: Family, Friendship, and the Fly-Fishing Life through their Skipstone imprint. The author, Roger W. Thompson, is a Ventura, CA-based “entrepreneur, writer, producer, and fly-fishing ambassador” whose previous books include We Stood Upon Stars and My Best Friend’s Funeral, a memoir.
You’d think as the editor of one of just a few nation-wide flyfishing publications in the U.S. I would be familiar with just about everyone out there publishing books on flyfishing. You would be wrong. I’m always surprised—mostly pleasantly, sometimes not so much—by the writers and books that come bubbling to the surface. Regardless of my personal or professional reaction to the work, it’s heartening. I can only assume the last few years' spate of flyfishing book publications is a good thing.
Thompson’s new book falls into the category of one of those pleasant surprises. Though I worried that the first essay in the collection, “The Measure of Eternity,” might fall into the well-worn ruts of the reflective father-son fishing tale (it begins: “The happiest I remember being with my father during our brief life together was fishing a small snowmelt creek in the western Sierra Nevada Mountains.”) Thompson’s sentences held my attention, and pretty soon I was following along on a vividly recounted story of a day on the Owens River in which the author's father played only a supporting part. Given the amount of flyfishing stories I read on a daily basis, I judge highly one that grabs my attention and holds it tight.
Thompson’s book is divided into four sections: “Friendship,” “Fatherhood,” “Love” and “Faith.” Though at times this kind of organizational trick can be eye-roll inducing, I recognize the utility in it. I think most readers appreciate signposts of one sort or another, whether they realize it or not. With that being said, I have to say offering a section called “Love” makes me think of an old joke I once heard about the fact that any poem—no matter its subject—could be given the title “Love Poem” and it would probably track, one way or another. (Try it, you’ll be surprised.) In any case, one should tread carefully. Nothing produces eye-rolls quite like sentimentality, no matter how earnest.
Author Roger W. Thompson. Photo: Courtesy Skipstone Books.
Of course, this risks missing the forest for the trees, and the forest here is rich and layered, regardless of how it might be organized. “The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea,” (Fatherhood) buzzes with a dark undercurrent, an almost slapstick fatherly helplessness I admittedly found relatable. Faced with a questionably outfitted guide in Islamorada, Thompson teeters between a just-out-of-reach sense of sport-fishing ethics and resignation in the face of a child having a good time on a flats skiff. The guide instructs Thompson to beat back sharks attracted to a chum of ladyfish with a small bat while Thompson’s son casts to the same sharks. Thompson’s carefully selected details bring the guide to life, a masterclass in personification. With a hammerhead approaching, the guide says, “‘Aim for the blood in the water,’” and you can imagine it reflected in blood-shot eyes, imagine the smell of salt on his breath. Thompson continues: “Our guide either looked at me, through me, or somewhere else entirely, before adding, ‘Everything will be fine.’” Some things surely will, and some surely won’t.
Jumping back and forth through the book, reading essays somewhat at random, one thought came to mind: Obsession. This is a guy who wants to fish, who finds himself thinking about it constantly, who finds the simple act of fishing tangled up with big ideas like “Friendship” and “Faith.” This is a guy so obsessed with fishing that, probably wisely, he plans a honeymoon road-trip to what he imagines to be the least fishy location he can think of (Iowa) in order to preclude fishing’s intrusion into the newly-minted marital journey. (I know this tactic well; on my own honeymoon to Iceland, I purposely left rods/reels/flies/waders at home to foreclose any temptation.)
But there’s a degree of equanimity in that obsession that keeps it from becoming unhealthy, and maybe that’s part of the “wisdom” in the title. At least, it’s one interpretation. If there’s one thing that turns me off when it comes to flyfishing writing, it’s a myopic focus on rivers/lakes/seas as ends in themselves. Thompson’s book avoids that pitfall, without reaching beyond the confines of whatever insights—big or small—flyfishing can indeed offer, for the most part. I don’t think “Love” should be used as a section heading in any book, let alone a flyfishing book. But in The Wisdom of Rivers, Thompson makes a good argument for why I might be wrong, or at least misguided.