Crosscurrents (reviewed)

Crosscurrents
A Fly Fisher’s Progress
by James R. Babb
The Lyons Press, 1999, Hard Cover, 210p.,
ISBN 1-55821-946-3

This book is an entertaining, instructive, and occasionally bittersweet memoir about fly fishing. Entertaining probably does not do it justice. Such is the reality of some of the situations that Mr. Babb described himself in that I laughed out loud. Fly fishing is like that. Man against nature is an unequal battle notwithstanding the technical help and gadgetry and prey with brains the size of a pea. The serious fly fisher needs to learn to laugh at him or herself. Underlying it all is Babb’s wry southern wit. Grits, as he explains, are only the grout that fills the tines in the fork so you can get the red eye gravy off the plate.
These essays are the columns that Mr. Babb has written as editor of Grey‘s Sporting Journal. Free of the need to sell his words to an editor for a living his fly fishing advice comes through with the flavor of clean common sense. On small streams cast sidearm when you can. "Despire the emphasis on casting for distance the best fish are probably only thirty feet away and can plainly see your rod flashing back and forth high in their portable viewing windows."
Mr. Babb carefully distinguishes between fly fishing as a field sport and the fly fishing industry. He writes about the sport as it was and sometimes still is without the whining refrain that fly fishing the industry is destroying fly fishing the sport. "That I am both an uncomfortable observer of and a willing participant in the global industrialization of fly fishing I excuse by declaring myself a Gemini, which, as I was told some years ago by a young woman who sought absolution in star charts and face painting for the sin of majoring in market-ing, means two persons in one." As another Southern writer, Tom Wolfe, said "you can’t go home again" but that does not mean you can’t have fun or enjoy fishing as you find it.
Babb the sport fisherman has bad days on the stream, bad trips, bad weather, grim lodges pretty much the way the rest of us in the real world have. In this book he does fish widely, fresh water and salt, subartic to tropical, but in his heart he is a small stream man. Small streams are often near by, neglected and peaceful. They are never easy. "Small-stream fishing is trout fishing reduced to its essence.... On a small stream you have no one to blame but yourself, and the consequences of your errors are readily visible and invariably instructive." I judge that if you fail to permit yourself the enjoyment of this book you have no one to blame but yourself. RWOL

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