“A Celebration of Rivers and Fly Fishing”

W.D. Wetherell.

The Lyons Press 1998, 259pp, ISBN 1-55821-698-7

The classification for this book reads “Fly fishing – Anecdotes”, but this does little justice to this fine book. The third of a trilogy on fly fishing, this book is “impelled by a reformer’s zeal…the feeling that the tremendous surge in popularity that fly fishing has undergone in the last ten years has seen much lost in terms of quietude and contentment, modesty and simplicity, solidarity and fellowship”.

This is the book’s strength – a point of view, strongly held. Behind that disarming folksy style that defines a whole genre of fly fishing travelogue, Mr Wetherell asks an uncomfortable question: “How does a sport for loners and traditionalists and the few suddenly become yet another fad in the massive, exaggerated way of American fads?” With the commercialisation as evidenced by fly fishing schools, personality cults, technology and advertising, the fly fishing media, the de rigueur $1000 fly rod, the demise of stream etiquette, Wetherell urges “what we need constantly - is to remember why fly fishing is worth doing in the first place”. And cutting to the chase, we get to it: “whosoever would be a fly fisher must be a non-conformist, a paraphrase of Emerson”.

Is this a retreat into nostalgia for a time and place that never actually existed other than in Mr Wetherell’s mind? Is it a symptom of some loony backwoodsman survivalist tradition? Is it just the natural outcome of the doubts of a man in the rearguard of his life at the end of a turbulent century? I think not. There is too much in this book that encourages optimism despite the problems that he describes. “I’m going to find what I have always found – the miraculous current that connects simple pleasure to great joy – and try ten times harder to put delight back into the river from whence it all springs”. Rather than dwell on the macro-economic and the global, Wetherell advises local involvement on local issues.

Elsewhere Wetherell provides good travelogue (Yellowstone), chatty fishing logs in the time-honoured tradition of the genre, and miscellania, as in his musings of what occupies a fisherman’s mind in the closed season, but his best is reserved for his essays on his home waters.

The Upper Connecticut, the streams of Vermont and New Hampshire, the small towns where “like the river, the money has always flowed south here and probably always will”, the river logging industry; these seem to be the areas closest to his heart, and it shows. In his writing we get a glimpse of the man. A sense of much time spent alone; fishing as a solitary pursuit (of what and whom?); of talking to oneself and rehearsing conversations; of cleansing and renewal. The solitude of the fisherman and the solitude of the writer merging. Wetherell closes “this is my third book on fly fishing – I don’t think there will be a fourth”. A pity, but I can understand the sentiment.