Around the Next Bend: A Fly Angler’s Journey, by Jerry Kustich. HeadWater Books, 2013. 199 pages, $24.95.
If this book were only about fishing, I can’t imagine I would have finished it.
I don’t fish, which I blame on my father. I spent many hours with him on White Bear Lake outside St. Paul and Ten Mile Lake in Northern Minnesota, sitting in an aluminum boat under a broiling sun while he and his friends drank beer and sat … and sat, occasionally reeling in — well, I don’t know what they reeled in because I never took up fishing. Walleye, maybe.
But if I haven’t fished, I have lost friends and loved ones. I’ve had hopes dashed and wondered why the world appeared to be going to hell and wondered how, in a seeming flash, I had grown so old. And I’ve had my share of moments of exhilaration and days so perfect in a world full of natural beauty that I could hardly stand it.
These are the kinds of things Kustich is thinking about and wrestling with while he appears to be in pursuit of fish.
Not that the fish aren’t important. He loves fish, even unto the diminutive freshwater drum, with a love that surpasses understanding, and possibly he loves the fishes’ rivers, creeks and lakes even more.
Kustich grew up in New York state, worked in Alaska, lived in a remote cabin in the Idaho Panhandle with his late wife, Debra, and then settled in Twin Bridges, Mont. Debra’s death in 2009, after a long illness, haunts this book, as does, in a very different way, Kustich’s break with the R.L. Winston Rod Co., where he worked for 22 years.
What he perceived as Winston’s emphasis on the bottom line and its abandonment of high standards become for him an emblem of everything that is wrong with the modern world, with the way we treat one another and the way we treat the earth.
He writes in the first chapter about how he and four other passionate bamboo rod-makers left Winston in 2006 to form Sweetgrass Rods. My own recent break from the world of corporate journalism doubtless intensified my appreciation of this passage: “Outsourcing, downsizing, and devaluing the human effort has become the industry standard since the turn of the 21st century. By not cultivating employee fulfillment, corporations seem intent on selling out their most precious resources for short-term gains at the expense of long-term well-being.”
And so these yarns and essays have a lot to do with how fishing helped him to deal with these jarring life changes, with the loss of his wife, friends and mentors, with various disappointments and his disillusionment with certain aspects of the modern world.
Anything good that you pursue with passion is likely to improve your outlook and clear your head, but Kustich, with a nod to Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, concludes that ultimate wisdom comes from watching the flow of a river. I prefer swimming in rivers myself, being a fish to catching one, but who this side of Siddhartha ever studies a river as closely as the passionate angler?
I’m sure Kustich’s brand of fishing and writing also appeals to me because he has none of the snob about him. He does not spend all his days on blue-ribbon streams. In one amusing but troubling chapter he writes of fishing with his brother on the Genesee River in the heart of Rochester, N.Y.
A “yellow-clad mob” in full-length rain gear is illegally snagging heaps of chinook with bare treble hooks and loading stringers with hundreds of pounds of fish. “What couldn’t be lugged up the trail because of sheer weight and exhaustion was left behind to rot, or to be scavenged by other poor souls.”
Kustich grew up on the polluted Niagara River, which by the time he was in high school was “a biological wasteland,” and these nightmarish memories only feed his desire to save what good streams are left. In a wonderful chapter about catching “Mr. Big,” a huge brown trout, on Montana’s Big Hole River, he writes: “As darkness fell, I realized that preserving the beautiful places in our world is the least any of us can do to inspire future generations, and there are not many places like the Big Hole River still left.”
Occasionally I found my mind drifting off when the writing got too technical — I’m afraid “a huge, long-shanked #2 sculpin pattern” means nothing to me — but I suppose it’s better to momentarily confuse one non-fishing reader than to disappoint the many anglers whose thirst for such details is boundless.
Near the end of the book we are treated to probably the best pure story, involving Kustich and a friend in a canoe at the mouth of the Klamath River in California. They intend to stay in their sheltered bay, but they are lured out into the open Pacific by a feeding frenzy — countless salmon and three 45-foot California gray whales swarming over a gathering of krill.
They are enticed into those waters by an admirable stupidity, and Kustich, fishless all day, finally catches one salmon in the midst of much danger and incredible beauty.
In the last chapter Kustich writes of the Datsun pickup he bought new in Missoula in 1979 and then drove for 200,000 miles on various fishing adventures. When we meet it, it is parked beyond the fence in his backyard. It still works but hasn’t been driven in years, and Kustich sits in the cab thinking of love and loss and fishing and life.
Like so much of “Around the Next Bend,” the scene is tinged with an invigorating sadness. It takes guts to write this kind of fishing book.
