River Music: A Fly Fisher's Four Seasons
James R. Babb imbues his devastating wit, ornery perspective, and musical language within each of the ribald tales in River Music. This is exemplified in the “Prelude,” his opus about “the occasional laugh, the occasional thought, a bit about fly fishing and a bit about Life, and all of it underpinned by the music of rivers.” The pieces are arranged in a harmonious current that carries us through the seasons, and life itself.\ He recounts a disastrous—and hilarious—spring canoeing trip with a...
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The sequel to Crosscurrents, which Library Journal hailed as one of the best fly-fishing books of 2001. Library Journal This reviewer once compared Babb's Crosscurrents: A Fly Fisher's Progress (LJ 12/99) to fellow fly-fishing author John Gierach's Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders (LJ 615/00). Babb's latest book is better than anything Gierach has written in five years. Babb, the editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, takes his readers on a roller-coaster ride through farce and satire to elegy and folktale. He's a flyfishing Mark Twain who knows a little bit too much about Beavis and Butthead. The stories meander and turn like the streams on which they are set, leaving the reader wondering where each essay will deposit them. The result is a joy to read and essential for any library. Jeff Grossman, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
(from AUTUMN: The Coreolis Effect):\ " Harry just shook his head. I'd been interrogating him about Chilean rise rings since we'd left Alabama that morning and in a flurry of inquisitional faxes even before. I was sure he was holding out on me about which way the rings spiral, though for what reason I could not yet fathom. But ahead of us was a week on the Futaleufu River in the Patagonian Andes, and by all accounts there'd be trout rising as far as the eye could see. And all of those rise rings, according to this theory I'd caught but could not seem to release, would swirl counterclockwise. I'd get to the bottom of this or annoy everyone around me trying.\ 'When the trout in my pond snarf kibbles,' I told everyone still pretending to listen, 'the swirl goes clockwise. In the Northern Hemisphere air flows out from a center of high pressure in a clock-wise circulation, and air flowing into a center of low pressure--a hurricane, for instance--veers counterclockwise. South of the equator it reverses. If the Coriolis effect governs hurricanes and plumbing drains, why not trout? And dogs? When my dog hits the sack, she circles her bed with the clock. So does my friend Byron's dog down in Tennessee. Only once did I see Madison circle counterclockwise, and that after his housemate, Gibbon, had beat hell out of him for trying to sneak into her bed. Wow, has the lodge got a dog? Did you ever notice which way it circles when it goes to bed?'\ I was getting excited now, but my fellow travelers were looking for polite ways of changing the subject. Obsessions, I have to keep reminding myself, are only interesting to those who have them.\ Like many members of my annoying generation, I catch obsessions the way normal people catch colds, and like colds most last a week if indulged or seven days if ignored. For many people fly fishing is an obsession, but having acquired the habit before the onset of sentience, fly fishing is for me more an involuntary act of everyday living, like sleeping or eating or watching reruns of The Simpsons20.
PreludexiI.Spring11.Darling Buds of May32.Bumping Bottoms133.Humility Creek214.Tales of the Vienna Sausages27II.Summer395.A Slacker's Tale416.The French Connection517.Disappointing Carlos778.And When I Died89III.Autumn979.The Coriolis Effect9910.Nature's Call11911.Fish Willies12912.Little Jewels135IV.Winter15913.Through the Ice Darkly16114.Those Who Say Woo17315.Little Big Business18116.The Vice of the Vise191
\ Library JournalThis reviewer once compared Babb's Crosscurrents: A Fly Fisher's Progress (LJ 12/99) to fellow fly-fishing author John Gierach's Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders (LJ 615/00). Babb's latest book is better than anything Gierach has written in five years. Babb, the editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, takes his readers on a roller-coaster ride through farce and satire to elegy and folktale. He's a flyfishing Mark Twain who knows a little bit too much about Beavis and Butthead. The stories meander and turn like the streams on which they are set, leaving the reader wondering where each essay will deposit them. The result is a joy to read and essential for any library. Jeff Grossman, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsBabb is undoubtedly living the dream of thousands of American men: he's not only free to fish the rivers of North and South America—he's paid to do so (and write about it). He opens his paean to the art of rod-and-reel during a Maine spring, when the caprice of the May weather ruins one of his elaborately planned fly-fishing expeditions. His ability to evoke the woodlands of Maine in May—the movements of the animals, the quality of the air, the clear song of the white-throated sparrow—ranks him with some of the best nature-writers in print. Anyone familiar with the great forests of the American North will recognize how canny Babb's word-photography is, and as his narrative moves on to other fishing expeditions in Canada and later South America, his prose becomes more concrete, but no less poetic. He makes new friends and finds new fishing spots in Quebec, is awed by the beauty of Chile, and waxes rhapsodic about the little rivers he first fished as a boy in Tennessee. He dissects the joys and miseries of camping, with a sharp eye for the absurd. The clash of cultures, the rituals of mating, and the precariousness of the natural world are all carefully woven into the story as subtexts. The author's sometimes ribald humor will not be to everyone's taste, but his offbeat style is likely to find its own audience. A good addition to any collection of nature-writing.\ \
