Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... One River Moreby W. D. Wetherell
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
Part autobiography, part seasonal journal, and part fishing log, "One River More" follows a typical year of fishing in Vermont and Montana. Whether writing of his home waters in northern New England or the classic trout rivers of the West, Wetherell honors those traditional values of his sport -- the intimacy, the quiet, the solitude -- that have been threatened by the tremendous surge in fly fishing's popularity over the past decade. At the same time, his speculations push the limits of conventional fly-fishing prose, so that what starts out as an exploration of fishing often turns out to be an exploration of much more, from the love that binds a family together to the discipline and craft of a novelist's art.Coming after two memorable books on fly fishing, "One River More" forms the final in Wetherell's trilogy on rivers and streams, and yet stands alone as a testament to what one fly fisher still finds in the rivers he so passionately loves. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)799.1The arts Recreational and performing arts Fishing, hunting, target shooting FishingLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
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. ( )