The River Home -- An Angler's Explorations
By Jerry Dennis
St. Martin's Press
New York, NY 1998
227 pages, $22.95 hardcover
ISBN 0-312-18594-4
The River Home is a delightful book. In fact it is one of the most enjoyable fishing books that I have ever read. It's the kind of book you could read in one sitting: a sitting that would appropriately take place in a comfortable chair beside a fireplace in a rustic log cabin somewhere. At least this is the kind of mental image I get when reading Jerry Dennis' fine work. I found myself instantly drawn into the pages, one after another, starting from the beginning chapter, Home Again, in which the author discusses his passion for his home state of Michigan. He expands on this and ends the chapter with the notion that we are "citizens of the world." A notion I'll adopt on a trout stream anywhere, but I'm not sure I'll stick with on the streets of Baghdad.
What makes for the attraction of The River Home? I think it is in the relaxed and comfortable Ø yet witty, wry and sometimes sentimental style of Jerry Dennis. He avoids the modern tendency of some writers to overuse unusual or obscure words, and saves these gems for places where simple language just wouldn't be fitting. He talks of things that as anglers we have all experienced or pondered and wraps them into a nice package with a befitting title. For that matter, like the name of the book itself, most of the chapters have aptly named titles that provide a lead into the subject itself. Titles like Why Fish? Eight Days of Hendricksons, and Tying Your Own, are a few examples.
Jerry's style is comfortable without lacking zip, and he has a real talent with introspective prose, such as the closing paragraph of Why Fish?: "Anglers are people who want to get beneath the surface of things. . . fishing is simply a way to open our hearts to the world." He made me laugh out loud in the essay "Fish Naked" (another aptly named chapter), and some of his stories at the end of the book got me a little choked up. This, I maintain, is the mark of an excellent writer: someone who can make you laugh, ponder, and even cry in the same book: having the ability to shift gears nicely between being light-hearted and easy-going and thoroughly pensive.
The reason Dennis is able to accomplish these things is, in my estimation anyway, because he speaks from the heart and writes about things he knows and cares about. His love of fishing and the outdoors is obvious, as is his love of family and friends, whom he speaks about frequently. His love for the Midwest, particularly Michigan, is also very evident, and this is refreshing. Over and above the fact that I have fished several of the rivers he mentions, and share a couple of mutual friends, it is good to read about adventures outside of the realm of "The West," where most books of this type seem to revolve. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I can relate to The River Home, and so can thousands of other fly anglers that have fished the Midwest.
Additionally, The River Home also includes essays about Iceland and Chile to give it an international appeal -- something that adds spice to any essay collection.
Although this is a pleasure book, not something for the angler who wants nothing-but-the-facts, many of the essays hint at some angling tips and concepts that contribute something to the learning curve. An example of this is the essay "Giants" which speaks about fly fishing for big fish with big streamers, a concept turned passion that I know only too well.
Another feature that I find different and interesting about this collection of (soon to be) classic fishing literature, is that the book is divided into two parts: essays and stories, with the essays making up the bulk of the 227 pages. I must say I enjoyed the essays most, but still found the five well-written stories captivating. They seem to be less about fly fishing and more about life, but always retain a common piscatorial thread. There are a couple of stories that leave you feeling a little sad and dark, but let's face it -- life is like that sometimes. It's not always our concerns about drag free drifts and room for backcasts that keeps us awake at night. The chapter "One Angler's World," a story about a famous fly angler and his failing marriage, speaks to this eloquently, and has me dying to find out who he really was -- unless there is no such character.
After all, the best told tales are both part truth and part fiction, aren't they? RWOL
© Copyright 1998- , Anglers of the Au Sable, Inc. All rights reserved. Last modified: January 29, 2002
