Musings on a Life Spent Fishing
With this eclectic collection of essays, short stories, and poems, Richard Chiappone elongates the fishing-writing genre like a perfect backcast, suggesting that he finds almost anything a fisherman does interestinganything but the actual fishing.
In all the personal essays, he describes only one sport fish landeda late season Alaskan steelheadtoo cold to put up a fuss about being hooked. In another piece, he never gets any farther than his own back yard, standing in a midwinter snow bank, basting to house cats. With humor and self-skewering wit, Chiappone admits he can't cast very well, ties some of the ugliest flies in the world, and has come to understand that he will never catch a permit.
The essays, both funny and touching, reveal him as a writer of stark contradictions: a man who despises winter and loves living in Alaska, who thinks that the Clean Water Act ruined as much as it fixed, who knows that a man can flirt with a beautiful female bartender and simultaneously be thankful he is too old and too married to have to act on it. Lifting his gaze past the end of the rod tip, and beyond the river and the fish all the way into his own heart, he examines everything from a sentimental memory of his mother to his doubts about the adequacy of his grief over a dead daughter.
At the heart of these writings is one fisherman's curiosity about how others might think and feel. The real quarry Chiappone is casting about for is always empathy.
