As a wanna-be fly fishing writer, I know just how hard it is to make words dance, excite and motivate. But as I put down Dave Karczynski’s Calling After Water; Dispatches from a Fishing Life, I deeply felt the calling of rivers and streams thanks to his effortless prose. Excite is exactly what his words did for me during the dead of winter doldrums when fishing doesn’t have the same allure that summer hatches bring.
Karczynski eloquently takes readers from chasing muskie in the Midwest to camping in the backcountry of Patagonia to swinging for Kings in Alaska, across the Atlantic to Poland for a romantic homecoming via local rivers, and so many more places across the globe.
It is obvious that the passion for fish and fishing, and healthy river ecosystems, is alive and well in Dave.
When talking of early days of his fishing experiences, he writes in Chapter 8, The San River: A Love Story “…in certain moments of direr crisis I would find myself wondering, with a combination of anxiety and shame, how it was that I’d would up with this janky brain whose default setting was fish.”
While fishing in Alaska to rectify a slow start to the fishing season, Karczynski writes about the enormous plenty that is Bristol Bay: “By the midpoint of the trip I was starting to even my ledger for the year, not only in terms of fish, but novelty of experience. Every day presented a different body of water, a different style of fishing, a different series of snapshots through the window of the Beaver: bonsai gardens of black spruce; meteor craters full of sapphire-blue water; bear trails like someone dragged a garden rake across a pool table; beluga whales like grains of rice.”
What a novelty it is for readers to breathe deeply via a writer’s words and inhale the full spectrum a fly fishing experience offers.
He clearly uses all his senses to experience each outing. In Chapter 11, Vision Quest, Dave questions his eyes while chasing carp on Michigan’s Beaver Island. In Chapter 1, Kidney Country, he starts with such a descriptor of a fish eating, you feel as though you could be right there:
“I was young. I was free, And I was screwed.
Below me, in the gin-gimlet pool, the trout rose again. He was eighteen inches if he was eight, and in a tight spot. A snarl of branches formed the canopy above him, a limestone cliff pressed in tight just across. I stood chin-high in prairie grass, parting milkweed for a better view. The hatch was plain: Mayflies, frail as vapor, wafted up and off the film. Not plain was how to execute a backcast or rollcast––any cast, really. No, without a well-trained hummingbird to personally deliver my fly, there was no way I was reaching water, let alone a feeding lane.”
Oh, how many times have we been there? A fish feeding with no way of targeting it, but I highly doubt many of us have gone so deep as to consider the surroundings with such eloquence let alone such a farcical method as a hummingbird fly-delivery mechanism.
The depth at which Karczynski immerses himself in each setting shines through gracefully and with color that ignites fly fishing passions. As in Chapter 19, So Long on Long Island, he writes from a place of profound life changes:
“In my past life I’d taken pains to stay just that kind of limber. Every fishing expedition was a trial period of a new life you could pursue if you so chose, every outing something that could be made to last forever, or at least for a few months. You could move to Anchorage, to Ennis. You could learn Spanish and migrate to Patagonia every winter. You could spend the next few years entirely devoted to the capture of the muskellunge. You could follow the bugs from April to August, watch their wings getting bigger and bigger, then smaller and smaller.”
While he is certainly reminiscing about the incredible fishing life he once led, he is also projecting future dispatches of a fishing life with his wife and daughter, and what could be grander than passing that fly fishing passion on to others, especially those whom you love.