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<\/a>These are the kinds of things Kustich is thinking about and wrestling with while he appears to be in pursuit of fish.<\/p>\nAround the Next Bend: A Fly Angler\u2019s Journey<\/i>, by Jerry Kustich. HeadWater Books, 2013. 199 pages, $24.95.<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
If this book were only about fishing, I can\u2019t imagine I would have finished it.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t 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 \u2026 and sat, occasionally reeling in \u2014 well, I don\u2019t know what they reeled in because I never took up fishing. Walleye, maybe.<\/p>\n
But if I haven\u2019t fished, I have lost friends and loved ones. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve had my share of moments of exhilaration and days so perfect in a world full of natural beauty that I could hardly stand it.<\/p>\n
<\/a>These are the kinds of things Kustich is thinking about and wrestling with while he appears to be in pursuit of fish.<\/p>\n
Not that the fish aren\u2019t important. He loves fish, even unto the diminutive freshwater drum, with a love that surpasses understanding, and possibly he loves the fishes\u2019 rivers, creeks and lakes even more.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s death in 2009, after a long illness, haunts this book, as does, in a very different way, Kustich\u2019s break with the R.L. Winston Rod Co., where he worked for 22 years.<\/p>\n
What he perceived as Winston\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cOutsourcing, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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?
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