By Ed McGlinn
To begin this special section we have two reviews of Jim Enger's first book, The Incompleat Angler, published early this past year.
Jim was with us as we first came together as an organization ten years ago to protect the Au Sable, this "River in Sand." He was our first editor. The newsletter was then named Au Sable News and Notes; the first issue was put out in March, 1987.
Jim wrote in that first issue: "you hold in your hand . . . . the premiere edition of a little publication designed to do a big job." It was the call to join The Anglers of the Au Sable. It also was very successful. Jim had a lot to do with our beginnings.
I met Jim over twenty years ago, when he opened the first Orvis shop in our area, in Farmington Hills where I live, a close suburb of Detroit. He called it The Mainstream. It is my memory there was no other fly shop in the Detroit area. (Young's had moved to Traverse City.) In his book, you will read about this as he first makes a friend of John Voelker. I became a friend of Jim, and was fortunate to also become a friend of his father, who loved the Au Sable as much as anyone.
I was pleased to see he has written such a handsome and delightful book. Ted Williams, the outstanding environmental and outdoor writer, and superb fly fisherman, wrote the Foreword. It is one of the best tributes for a book I have ever read.
Williams concludes his foreword with:
So it was utterly inevitable that I should fish with Enger in his twenty-inch-brook-trout bog on the evening of the day I met him, with Hexes buzzing all around us and his beloved yodel dogs at full cry. The music was just as he describes: "There were puppies in both groups, and the combination of serious, adult wailing and the comical breaking voices of the pups created a festive atmosphere." It was wonderful, just like one of his stories.
In a century or two Jim Enger will be plucked from his tar pit
and studied. Meanwhile, pay attention to this collection. Savor it. It is outdoor
literature, and it will last.
There is also a reviewed book written by Ted Williams—yes, the above Ted Williams, the environmentalist and writer, not the baseball player. The latter (a special person, a true hero of our times, who played the game as well as anyone, spent four years in two wars sticking his six-foot-four frame into fighters over the Pacific and over Korea) also is a great fly fisherman.
The book reviewed by Michael Furtman is written by the best environmental writer/reporter we have in this country. I say that without reservation. Ted Williams has regular columns in Audubon, Fly Rod & Reel, and contributes often to many other magazines including Sierra. This book is a collection of his essays from FR&R, Audubon, Trout, Atlantic Salmon Journal, Wildlife Conservation, Living Bird Quarterly, Connecticut Audubon, and Gray's Sporting Journal.
I could occupy more space telling you why I think Williams is so important, but I would rather leave it to Roger Cohn, the executive editor of Audubon Magazine:
There has never been a writer quite like Ted Williams. Surely,
there are nature writers who can match his lyrical descriptions of the natural
world and fishing scribes whose prose can equal his gripping accounts of angling
for Arctic char in Canada or bonefish in the Caribbean. And unquestionably,
there are journalists who can probe as deeply and produce hard-hitting stories
that have real impact on national policy.
But until Ted Williams emerged on the scene, there simply was no
one who put all these skills together and thus forged a new kind of environmental
journalism--rich in its detailed, relentless reporting, its uncompromising toughness,
and its love of the outdoors.
We are pleased to reprint Chris Camuto's review, first published in Fly Fisherman, of a very special book. With Delp, Harrison, Keeler, and others, Riverwatch readers have seen some very good poetry about trout and rivers. John Engels's book, Big Water, published over a year ago, can greatly enrich our experience on the river. As Camuto observes, in his review for Gray's Journal, "Big Water is about the size of a fly box. Shove a copy of it in your fishing vest for the season."
I have wanted to bring this book to the attention of Riverwatch readers since it was published more than a year ago. An eminent poet, lifelong fisherman, and now, I understand, a dedicated classic salmon fly tier, John Engels has assembled all his best poems on fishing into one very wondrous and strong collection, and we can thank Nick Lyons, again, for publishing it. There are thirty-two poems here, many of them published in his earlier books, most notably in Engels's 1993 collection, Walking to Cootehill.
Mr. Engels grew up in South Bend and began his career in poetry as an undergraduate at Notre Dame (where his father "taught Shakespeare for forty-eight years"), and has been a trout fisherman since high school under the tutelage of his uncles, especially Vincent, who worked for the International Herald Tribune. Mr. Engels describes how important Vincent was to his development as a fisherman and as a source of some of his poetry about trout and rivers:
I was for most of my younger years a bass and pike fisherman, but
my Uncle Vincent, the author of Adirondack Trout Fishing in the 1930s,
published by Syracuse and recently reprinted, taught me fly tying and trout
fishing, and is the source of many of the stories recast in Big Water. He
died in 1993 at the age of ninety, and was fishing until three years before
his death.
Engels's poems in Big Water are primarily located in the
land and streams of Wisconsin, the U.P. of Michigan (which to many in Wisconsin
is Wisconsin), and Vermont, where he has taught English literature
including poetry at St. Michael's College at Winooski for more than three decades.
The Wisconsin poems came from his many summers there (his father's family is
from Green Bay) and the "fact that I taught at St. Norbert College in DePere
for five years."
I asked him about fishing the Au Sable and the St. Joseph which flows through the city of South Bend. " I've never fished the Au Sable, alas," he replied, and "as for South Bend, the St. Joe was a sewer when I lived there. I've heard about the steelhead and salmon fishing there now, but find it hard to believe."
"The St. Joseph used to fascinate me for the huge carp that populated it," he added, "great, bronzy things that I worked over with flies and plugs, and with doughballs, etc., all to no effect. There's a poem in my forthcoming book, Sinking Creek, about trying to spear them with a pitchfork. In South Bend, north of the city, there is a stream called Juday Creek, where I used to catch trout--stocked fish, mostly--when I was in high school."
"But the big rivers for me in my youth were the South Branch and North Branch of the Oconto in Wisconsin, as well as the Thunder River and, especially, the Peshtigo before the dams went up."
By his poetry you can tell he's fallen in love with Vermont. It has been a productive place--as a poet, a teacher, and a fly fisherman. His poems are not confined nor are they always focused on human conditions; many are directed to the outdoors--about rivers, blizzards, and deep skies, about cardinals, otters, and the promise of an early spring. There are poems about what we can see when we look into another world, what we should see as the real world, such as:
. . . . long
gray shapes lying easy in the water,
almost still, maybe once in a while
a little curl of the fin.
As Lawrence Biemiller states in his excellent review a year ago: "Walking to Cootehill, his book before Big Water, got just one review after it was published, in 1993. This hardly seems fair. Walking to Cootehill has 114 poems, written between 1958 and 1993. All are thoroughly readable, and some are flat-out stunning, as intense in their way as paintings by Vermeer. They let you see things you never saw before--for example, how a muskrat dives:
. . . . frantically, smoothly webfoot down
through the rank blackness of the lake, his fur
trailing light, his wake starry with bubbles."
And what about his fly fishing today? "Nowadays I tie classic salmon flies, and am almost ready to say that I'd rather do that than fish, if the choice had to be made. Haven't tied a trout fly in years, though I keep up on the latest developments, and could if I wanted to--but the fire's gone from the belly for that particular discipline."
Big Water is a book we will treasure as we grow old and remember the rivers and the trout. It has the value of an ice-cold brook trout in the hand on an early day in spring when its colors tells us it's here to stay and be with us forever.
I don't believe we could have an unbiased review of a Nick Lyons book in The Riverwatch. Nick discovered fly fishing for trout on the Holy Water of the Au Sable. As related by John Barton in his review in this issue, the leading story in Lyons's new book is about the weekend where his wife and his two young children head north from Ann Arbor, after a long winter of school, to explore the northwoods of Michigan. He finds the Au Sable, breaks out his spinning rod, and has a "very pleasant morning."
Later, the same day, he takes a drive with his family which ended at a bridge. He then went fishing, now with a "white fly rod" and a "Plueger Medalist reel fastened to the handle," and had his first trout come to a dry fly and take it, and then lose the trout. He has been possessed ever since, much to his delight and to our benefit.
As I write I have a Plueger Medalist on the desk and a white fly rod (a Shakespeare Wonder Rod that belonged to my friend, Mitch), in the corner of the room. Memories of the river almost four decades ago flood back to me with great vigor. Then I dreamt the river, and counted days to the opening. The river was fresh and every day on it was cherished.
I suspect this is part of the charm of Nick Lyons's prose: he brings us back to a place where we were and where we would like to be. But I would argue that it's more than that.
As Russell Chatham said, when commenting about Lyons's previous
book, Spring Creek: "(Lyons) keeps alive, in
sensitive, heartfelt language, the spirit of why we fish to begin with, and
why we will always do so."
After all these years he still has the energy, the skill, the desire to continue to write about this somewhat peculiar passion we share and to make such exquisite sense while doing it.
"Au Sable Apocalypse" was first published by the Riverwatch (and in Midwest Fly Fishing), and we were very honored.
We also republished (Summer 1993) the story "At The Second Bend Pool," from his book Spring Creek. Our guest artist then was his wife, Mari, with illustrations from the same book.
In that issue, I wrote that "no one has contributed more to American fly fishing and its literature than Nick Lyons. As a writer, editor, publisher, and advocate, he has given this sport all he could."
I might add that he also has been a generous friend to this sport, as obsessed with its beauty as the most stricken among us.
This latest book is simply an expression of that love and no one has written about fly fishing with such consistent ardor for so long.
But enough of my miserable attempts to describe the quality of
Lyons's work. Tom McGuane says it so much better: "Nick Lyons is a remarkably
unpretentious writer, given all he knows and how well he writes. The essays
in A Flyfisher's World are the field studies of a cultivated man and
a windfall for their delighted reader."
Lyons has written fourteen books, mostly about fly fishing, and his articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Audubon, Men's Journal, Fly Rod & Reel, Field & Stream, and Fly Fisherman. You will also be delighted with the very original and splendid illustrations by his wife, Mari. They make a unique contribution. Mari is a successful painter who shows regularly at the First Street Gallery in New York.
Her most recent show was Montana Landscapes which opened in November.
I hope you enjoy the following reviews. The books we've chosen are all very good. Any one can be enjoyed this winter, and help you through the cold months ahead.
I want to thank the reviewers. It was especially generous for Steve Bodio, Chris Camuto, and Michael Furtman to give us permission to reprint their reviews.
RWOL
© Copyright 1997 - , Anglers of the Au Sable, Inc. All rights reserved. Last modified: March 26, 2002
