My Secret Fishing Life
"There are many of us," writes Nick Lyons, six decades on the pond behind him, "for whom a day on the trout river is so pleasant an event, such an amiable and engaging pastime, that it feels, both going and coming back, as comfortable as an old shoe. We go for the sheer joy of it, not to put notches on our rods." Anglers keep returning to Lyons's finely honed prose for precisely the same reason. The collection of essays that comprisesMy Secret Fishing Lifeis a personal journey into the various "rivers" he's waded as a husband, father, teacher, writer, collector, publisher--and, of course, as a fisherman, the single noun that manages to tie all these lines together. The shorter pieces of the first half, many of which were originally published inFly Fishermanmagazine, explore subsets of the fishing life, drifting casually between philosophical rumination and memoir: the rituals of preparing for a new season, getting older, a lunchbreak spent fishing for stripers in the waters off Wall Street. In such sketches he presents his languid yet alluring phrases as delicately as if they were flies to a rising trout. Here he is on the inherent purity of the dry fly: "The only possible practical argument for using the dry fly more frequently is Lee Wulff's--that the dry fly fished on a floating line grants for the trout the sanctuary of its part of the river, allowing the connection to take place only at that place where air and water meet, and only at certain times." Two longer pieces comprising the book's second half are less successful--maybe too personal here and there (especially a windy defense of his wife's painting career), but overall it's honest, thoughtful work. Like fly-fishing as a sporting enterprise, the writing casts more toward the journey than the destination, allowing itself to hook into a share of verities along the way.--Jeff Silverman--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.