The
Habit of Rivers, written
by Ted Leeson, offers one angler’s work of words transcribed from the very
homewaters he heeds descending seaward of the Pacific Northwest. His portrait of language, weaved of and wound
in accordance with any fisherman who seeks and values a lasting connection far greater
than that of his taught line, are inspirations made clearly of those insightfully-reeled of the intoxicating virtues of Nature and his perennial pursuit for those
“sources of hidden significance” that
only angling may be lured to reveal of life at-large. Riseforms of reflection, for what exists
beyond the reach of one’s cast and always ahead of his finding footsteps. Fundamentally, they are the striking moments
of recognition one only finds first-hand within the quaking, cork-wrapped grip
of a fly rod or witnesses as the breathing, hand-held opalescent afflatus
imparted as habit of floating flies through stream shallows for that sudden “surprise out of nowhere.” Altogether, the book’s pages are the treatise
of a retired college English professor, a memoir of the life-long and remarkably-storied revelations
– philosophically-minded, historically-measured, and poetically-painted - of an
angler aloft in thought, acquainted knee-deep to running water, fishing somewhere and somehow for “points of fixity and pattern in our
involvement with rivers and landscapes, with trout and fly fishing, as a way of
plumbing their peculiar sustaining power.”
There is always more to fishing than meets the eye, and often enough the
invisible parts are the most compelling.
The dozens of quotes and
passages listed below are those I chose to share from having read this book. If not for their linguistic elegance alone, I
believe most can be admired for a relatable, innate, and habituated commonality
found in the familiar and irreducible practice of angling, whether waded in fresh or saltwater, by means of fly rod or surf-stick. I hope you can enjoy reading some of them as much as I
did. Then, if you haven't done so, do yourself the favor of reading the book. Cover to cover, its pages serve as the
best $4.18 I’ve ever paid for the pleasure of
owning a used paperback on freshwater fly fishing stories.
“Every
book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of forests, and mines,
and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
………………………………………………………………………
Ahead
lies an apparently simple geometry – the salmon migrate upstream, the fisherman
down, and somewhere along this thin ribbon of water, the opposing vectors
converge. It’s astonishing, though, how
much more complicated the matter can become.
………………
Even
conscientious catch-and-release fishermen, if they’re honest, will admit the
difficulty of handling a big fish without a momentary, impulsive desire to
possess it.
………………
Salmon
don’t pause here; they just pass through, which means that most casts fall on
empty water and you’re fishing mainly for a species of coincidence.
………………
The
river is a flux, the salmon a counterflux.
………………
To
those who pay attention, the coming of the salmon has as much to do with a world
view as anything, with a cosmos in or out of kilter. This, I suppose, as far as I can explain it,
is the reason I’ve coaxed myself out of bed long before dawn, managed just
enough coffee to simulate consciousness, and driven in a half-sleep for over an
hour to arrive at the river before sunrise.
………………
The
salmon run is a confluence of origins and eventualities when, for a moment,
life wraps round and touches its own tail.
The countercurrents of river and fish, of beginnings and endings, of
ancient days and new ones, are briefly contiguous. Still at sea, the salmon sense home rivers on
the faintest dilution of fresh water and know its significance with the
certainty of instinct. But a fisherman
must work to unravel the meaning, and finally his fishing is only an argument,
a studied drawing of inferences about undisclosed things.
………………
The
salmon move gracefully, are perhaps even beautiful, but what holds you to a
spot is their perfect visibility. The
fish you can believe; it’s the fact of your seeing them that seems incredible.
………………
To
catch a river unguarded is less a matter of where to look than of when, and so
while other fishermen have secret places, I have a secret time.
………………
Most
fishermen find better footing in the shifting forces of current than on what is
called solid ground.
………………
Fishing
in general has always seemed to me a form of subversion anyway. In a world that insists upon “means” and
“ends,” that dooms every path to a destination, fishing elides the categories
and so slips the distinction altogether.
You become engaged in the nonterminal, participial indefiniteness of
“going fishing.”
………………
To go
fishing is essentially functionless, though that’s not at all the same thing as
saying it is without purpose.
………………
The
craft of angling is the catching of fish, but the art of angling is
receptiveness to those connections, the art of letting one thing lead to
another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realized some small
completeness.
………………
In a
world that rolls ceaselessly underfoot, rocking and lurching like a subway car,
I’ve found that the cork grip of a fly rod offers a pretty steady handhold – an
unremarkable fact that becomes interesting only when, one day, you look up and
ask just what the other end of that rod might be attached to. Though I can’t prove a thing, I trust that
it’s something solid.
………………
No
two anglers I’ve ever fished with defined their boundaries in quite the same
way or devised quite the same rationale for what they did. We each map the borders of a world and fish
in an envelope of our own making that is both intensely personal and flagrantly
arbitrary. If pressed, we can give
“reasons” for where we drew the lines, though often enough these are equally
capricious and persuasive only to the likeminded. Our private strictures answer to a vision
that encompasses a practical conduct, an aesthetic, and an ethic – which is to
say, I suppose, that it is a philosophy.
……………
The
darkest water is usually best, and coming upon it gradually from the edges,
shading from the visible to invisible, sanctions your anticipation. Only an understanding of shallows entitles
you to depths.
………………
The
earth swims through space in the narrowest band of possibility circling round
the sun, not all that different, really, from the trout stream at my feet,
travelling its own ecliptic between lifeless banks.
………………
It takes good river eyes to see them through
the wrinkled crosscurrents that cast fishlike shadows on the bottom. But if you wait, in time a billowy upwelling
from beneath the bridge smooths the surface into perfect uniformity, as though
a window pane were laid on the water. It
drifts downstream and slowly dissipates, a momentary lens fixed on the secrets
of the river. Before the window closes,
I count four rainbows.
………………
A
running river is not the uniformity we see.
Near the bottom is a chaos of eddies and whirlpools, backwashes and dead
water and pillowy cushions. The flow is
laminar with current layered on current, each a different configuration of
effects, a different landscape for the fish – fierce hydraulic winds, jagged
seams and breaks, shifting edges and dynamic, twisting columns. What we see as only water, the trout must
sense as a vibrantly textured world.
Current and obstruction sculpt the river into strata of force, fantastic
canyons and rugged crags, deep washes and cliffs of turbulence, and the trout
shapes its existence around them as closely and surely as an Anasazi.
(The Anasazi being an ancient Native American Indian people of the
southwestern U.S. – Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado - renowned for
colonizing an extensive network of cliff-sited dwellings)
………………
Seeing
the first trout of the year was more than a relief – it was a form of spiritual
survival. The trout were still there;
something important had continued.
………………
Every
angler is an expert in the husbandry of hope, doling it out one spot, one cast,
one fly at a time.
………………
Catching
is not all of fishing, nor size the whole story in catching.
………………
There are places in a river that must simply be
stumbled upon. Their logic, if it is
ever understood at all, comes only after the fact. Refusing to advertise themselves, they remain
hidden and so remain yours, at least as far as you can tell, which is far
enough.
………………
I make the first casts to the tail end, less in
anticipation of raising a fish than in raising the pleasure of anticipation.
………………
The gear is of little help; it is built by
summer, rigged for seduction rather than struggle, its employment a slender
insinuation into the ways of the river.
A looping fly line transcribes the contour of the breeze. Feathers and fur take the shape of an
afternoon hatch. A fly rod curves with
the trajectory of a June twilight. Each
implies the other. But on a raw winter
day, the tackle in the trunk seems far less substantial than it did six months
ago, not so much inadequate as insufficiently material for what’s ahead, and
you wonder if maybe you made a mistake.
Everything – the weather, the water, the fish, the absurdly tiny dry
flies in a brittle plastic box, your own better judgment, all argue against
your being there. But somehow there you
are, urging private folly against prevailing wisdom, leaving others to wonder
whether you know a little more or a little less than they do. Which is precisely the case.
………………
Lovers, poets, religious madmen, and anglers
seem to me to have this in common – they live for the impassioned anticipation
of an uncertain thing.
………………
Few of us would fish if the object were
perpetually unachievable, if fish were caught only rarely and then with extreme
difficulty. If anticipation were largely
vain, it couldn’t sustain us. But it is
equally true, I think, that few of us would fish if trout were caught on every
cast. Reduce anticipation to certainty,
and there’s little left to appreciate.
Catching fish is undeniably a pleasure, and I’d rather do it than not,
but there is a pleasure too in fishing, the savor of pure possibility always on
the brink of realizing itself – or not – and the attraction of fishing has much
to do with the keenness of expectation and desire urged against the uncertain
and unpredictable. That is, it has much
to do with the peculiar pleasure of hope, which balances on the slightest of
perches between unfulfillable wishfulness and foregone conclusion, and looks
precisely like a trout fly.
………………
As both commencement and terminus, as the point
of departure and culmination, the trout fly is the nexus of the sport, a tiny
point from which radiate a thousand strands of our engagement. Despite its reliance on the line, fly fishing
is not linear. It is radial and
weblike. At the center is a rising
trout, and millimeters above its nose is the fly. From it, paths trace outward to the
engineering and art of tackle making, to geology and hydrology, botany and
birds, aquatic and terrestrial insects, landscapes, books, history,
photography, and a thousand other intersecting filaments that lead just as far
as you wish to go.
………………
To make a thing by hand and in so doing give it
the imprint of yourself is a distinctly godlike activity. You sit down, deity of the vise, and from
bags of feather and fur, people the world of your fly boxes with creations made
in your own image, that answer only to the design or delusion of your own
mind. That the final products turn out
as equivocally as the creations of other gods at other times merely reinforces
the connection.
………………
A fly that takes shape from feather, furs, and
hairs may be an imitation, but it is not faked or ingenuine. That a trout believes a trout fly to be
something alive comes as no surprise to the tyer. There’s life in the materials, and that we
catch trout on feathers and fur, lure one animal with another, strikes me as a
perfectly proportioned and symmetrical idea, and also an ancient one.
………………
(On the “potent, mystical material” that is
grizzly hackle, “or any of the variant hackles that are barred, flecked, or
figured with the alternating patterns of life.”)
Its long, narrow feathers, tightly banded in
honey and cream, droop like tendrils, lush as an orchid. It deserves its own bodyguard – to protect it
from me if no one else.
………………
Catching fish is, often enough, simply not that
difficult, and to hang your hope on it is to make the universe play by your
rules for a little while. This, I think,
is the unconscious genius of the fisherman and the brilliance of fishing.
(“it” being, tying a fly and fishing one)
………………
To find wild geese, you must seek them where
they live, which is almost always a place called “the middle of nowhere,” whose
only known approach is the highway of excess.
………………
Their angling lives were molded from the
conviction that it’s infinitely better to be on the water than not, and on the
water you fish, and when you fish, you fish for whatever is there. The fact of the fish is secondary, its
particular denomination something to be dealt with only afterward.
………………
All other divisions aside, I think in the end
there are but two kinds of anglers – those born to fishing and those not. It has nothing to do with expertise or
determination or enjoyment. A born
fisherman has a soul that wiggles, and though he may be temperamentally
inclined to this species or that method, beneath it all is the simple,
overriding compulsion to be connected to a fish. If need be, any fish, any way.
………………
At some level, all fish and fishing, like all
gods or powerful emotions or other forms of intoxication, are more alike than
not, and it may be that the only difference between a passion and an addiction
is the worthiness of its object. I
wouldn’t know.
………………
According to Jung, crossing a river represents
a fundamental change of attitude. Pity
he didn’t fish; he would have recognized that rivers are far more powerful as
agents of transformation than symbols for it.
………………
In fishing (among other things) style and
technique are important only insofar as they define the shape of one’s
appreciation. Alter the style, and you
change as well as the nature of your pleasure.
………………
You fish, in essence, for surprise out of
nowhere, for an instant in which you suddenly become aware that you’re attached
to a heartbeat.
………………
You want to catch the fish, but you want more
to figure it out, and the particular satisfactions stem less from the
eventuality than the process by which the whole thing unfolds.
………………
Rumors take on a life of their own whenever big
fish are involved.
………………
Every angler radiates a force field, a little
zone of sovereignty he carries with him up and down the river, shrinking or
enlarging it according to the character and promise of the water he’s
fishing. The slightest trespass on the
farthest limits reverberates faithfully to the center, like a moving magnet
inducing current in an electrical wire.
………………
A river, like the aurora borealis or a
landscape or a radish, is only itself and has no way to resist being channeled
into preconceptions or filtered through assumptions that falsify what it
is. Come upon a river with purpose, or
desire, or ideas, or even words and you merely make it into these things. We have overlooked countless rivers by seeing
them just this way – that is, by not really seeing them at all.
………………
(On the anthropomorphism of Nature and how a
writer’s use of words “giving shape to what we see, preempts what it may
actually be.” Specifically, “as many
fishermen know, and many writers seem not to” that “despite what you may read,
rivers can’t “sing” and they don’t “dance;” they can’t “chatter merrily” or “rush
with impatience;” pools don’t “brood” and riffles don’t “laugh.”)
Investing the natural world with human
behaviors has become suspect. The whole
enterprise attempts to make something more out of something already whole – and
ends up making it less.
………………
Catch-and-release may be good conversation, but
it is ethically ambiguous. Between the
man who kills and eats a fish and the man who derives pleasure from a trout’s
panicked struggles, it’s worth asking who occupies the moral high ground. Or if there is any.
………………
(On harvesting fish, and how “on a purely
biological level, we must kill to survive.”)
Stripped of the opaqueness of euphemism, a
central truth of fishing emerges – nothing, not fish, not fisherman, just
lives; they all live at the expense of something else. To continue living at all requires certain
insensitivities. Ritualizing them
doesn’t change the fact, though ritual may help to forgive it.
………………
Fishing is not apart from life, nor like life,
and is no more a “metaphor” for life than a pregnant woman is. It is the thing itself.
………………
If you can forget what others have said or
written, and resist their efforts to transform a river into something else, the
river will transform you.
………………
I don’t think I’m stretching the matter at all
to say that given half a chance, a trout stream can make you a better
person. This isn’t particularly a reason
that I fish, but certainly one of the things I like about it.
………………
A river is only itself. If forced, the water will mirror the likeness
of an ego; on its own, it reflects only sky and clouds, and readily rewards
those who approach it with humility and wonder.
………………
The irreducible constant of fishing is water.
………………
With a few firm exceptions, fishing from boats
holds little appeal. It has a certain
industrial quality about it, a no-nonsense fixation on the business of catching
fish, and I’d much rather drift from place to place, working the promising water
on foot, which brings you closer to everything.
………………
When the fish don’t come, as sometimes they
don’t, you grasp, all at once, the comic sense of scale, the cosmic disparity
between the volume of water in front of you and the ridiculously small fly with
which you are attempting to “search” it.
In the mind’s eye appears an aerial photograph – a vast expanse of blank
water surrounding a randomly placed, subatomic speck. In the face of that kind of futility, another
cast is almost unbearable.
………………
A point arrives when fishing turns into
casting, and casting devolves into empty and mechanical reflex that barely
registers on consciousness.
………………
(On the “pervasive attitude, relentlessly
vented in magazines and books and fly shops, where the only trout worth
mentioning run so many inches or pounds, and the failure to catch them is
attended by the subtle guilt that you’re not ‘doing your best.’”)
A brand of gunnysack-ism persists in the era of
catch-and-release, and you feel the weight of an unspoken assumption: that the
way, the proper way, to go about fishing is to seek out the best water and do
what’s necessary to extract its trophies.
Anything less makes you less than a serious fisherman, a lightweight if
you don’t succeed, a mere dabbler if you don’t care to try – angling’s version
of the “be all you can be” mentality that insists upon its own somewhat
diminished notion of being.
………………
The fish of a lifetime can make your day and
spoil something larger.
………………
A fisherman does well to heed the creatures
that fly. For the fisherman, birds still
reenact their ancient role of augury.
………………
For Aristotle, the soul tends upward; spiritual
things naturally rise. This is the only
proposition I know of that broaches a metaphysical argument for dry-fly
fishing.
………………
Few moments in fishing hold the same immediacy
and vividness as the rise to a floating fly, and none are endowed with the same
satisfying sense of closure.
………………
A drifting fly is a test, a series of questions
inscribed on the surface. It is the
visual extension of our imagination, probing what can’t be seen and charting
the shape of human inquisitiveness and expectancy.
………………
When a fish takes a fly, it hasn’t become more
manlike; rather, the angler has become more fishlike. Each cast tries the limits of the river; each
take successfully integrates us into its processes and offers an increment of
understanding.
………………
The surface of the river is a hypothetical
fulcrum, balancing the aquatic world with our own imperfect grasp of it. On this plane of our own invention, we cast
our surmise, wonder, and hope bound up in so much feather and fur.
………………
(On “the fulcrum of seasons” and “the
recognition of autumn coming suddenly” in that “one day you first hear the
geese, or rather, you first become aware of yourself hearing them.”)
Bound
for the south, these birds seem to me a strange point of fixity and
resoluteness. Perhaps geese are the real
geophysical constant, for in a sense they don’t move at all. They take to altitudes to stay in one place,
not migrating, but hovering, while the equinoctial tilting of the earth rocks
the poles back and forth beneath them.
The geese remain, an index of what used to be where, and of what will
return again. Their seasonal appearance
denotes your passing, not their own.
………………
It is
a commonplace of angling that to catch fish, you must think like a predator, a
vision of fishing that is really more like hunting, and sometimes true. To fish trout, you must think like the prey
and work a fly in the knowledge of how it feels to try to escape, to shrink
yourself to insignificance in the face of impending threat when everything
about you advertises your presence.
Being the predator is exciting, but being the prey is a lot more like
life and infinitely more interesting, since in the end, the prey sets the terms
and so call the shots.
………………
In
the end, to fish well is to cultivate an arrangement of time and place, of
circumstance and perspective. We arrange
ourselves into the arrangement, and if the collusion is careful and lucky, we
reap a kind of enclosed moment of some sharply felt beauty and
significance.
………………
Fishing
is commonly, and mistakenly I believe, regarded as a form of escapism. But it seems to me more closely allied with a
deeper historical impulse, a submerged conviction in the national consciousness
from the very beginning that some new and improved brand of the self can be
reinvented in the fresher air of uncorrupted places, where the best things will
flourish and the worst die of inanition.
~ Select sentences exemplifying Leeson’s technique of interweaving
repetition (anaphora & epistrophe) ~
…………………………………………
I dig
the spare keys from my pocket and, twisting around in the seat, looking over my
shoulder to back the trailer to the river’s edge, I see on the rear window the first streaks of the first winter rain.
………………
…where
I will watch the last few rises to the last few caddis, down to zero, on a
summer-solstice evening, at the best
part of the best part of the
year.
………………
A fly
tyer’s materials are the anticipation of
an anticipation.
………………
But
at certain times, in certain moods, it simply feels better
to be moving than standing still. And
rather than go no place, I decided
to go no place in particular.
………………
That something as beautiful as trout inhabit
something as beautiful as a trout
stream is a coincidence of inexpressibly good fortune, and just the kind of
thing you can steer by.
………………
You
wade in the reflection of a reflection, and the coppery water
streams against your legs like something molten.
………………
And
now they navigate seven hundred circuitous miles, 6,000 feet of altitude, and a hundred million years
to this spot at the heart of the heart
of the mountains, surfacing high in this oldest of places. Altitude is a fortification, and it is also fortifying.
………………
A good night’s sleep comes only after the trip – sometimes only after the season.
