Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis

by Howell Raines

Overview

Howell Raines has gone fly fishing with presidents of the United States and legends of the sport, as well as relatives, childhood friends, and his two sons. Casting deep into the waters of his tumultuous and momentous life — his storied career at the New York Times, his painful divorce, his seven-year feud with his father, his memorable friendship with fisherman/philosopher Richard C. Blalock — Raines offers his now-classic meditation on the "disciplined, beautiful, and unessential activity" of fly fishing and the challenges and opportunities of middle age. A witty and profound celebration of life's transitions and the serene pleasures of the outdoors, Raines's memories and observations offer wisdom for the younger man, comfort for the older man, and rare insight for women into the often puzzling male psyche. "Hear me, my brothers," Raines says. "Anything is possible in the life of a man if he lives long enough. Even adulthood."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060834647
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/03/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	698,039
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Before stepping down in 2003, Howell Raines was Executive Editor of the New York Times. He is the author of Whiskey Man, a novel, and My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the Civil Rights movement. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1992.

Read an Excerpt

Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis

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By Howell Raines

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Howell Raines
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060834641

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Chapter One

How It Starts: The
Song of Rapid Anne

Like many Southerners, I was ruined for church by early exposure to preachers. So when I need to hear the sigh of the Eternal, I find myself drawn to a deep hollow between Fork Mountain and Double Top Mountain on the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge. This is where the Rapidan River plunges through a hemlock forest and through gray boulders that jut from the ferny earth like the aboriginal bones of old Virginia. This is a place of enlightenment for me, the spot where I received the blessing of my middle years. Here, after three decades of catching fish, I began learning to fish.

At this point it is necessary to introduce Mr. Richard C. Blalock, a man given to pronouncements. There are two reasons for this trait. As a former officer of the Foreign Service of the United States, he is a natural-born pontificator. Also, Dick Blalock serves as the fly-fishing guru for a handful of people around Washington, and some of us provoke his speechifying for our own enjoyment.

I'll try to give you a sample of the conversation in Dick's loose-jointed old Chevy as it grinds along the road that the Marines scraped across the mountains in 1929 so that Herbert Hoover could reachthe Rapidan. In those days, the stream was reserved for his exclusive use. President Hoover liked to fish. He also needed a place where he would not be bothered by the little people while he planned the Great Depression. I find it impossible to visit the Rapidan without a haunted feeling in regard to Herbert Hoover, but more on that later. First, the fish and the river, according to the teachings of Dick Blalock.

"This species of brook trout has never been stocked in this stream. They go back to the Ice Age. That means they have been here in this form, just as we see them today, for ten thousand years. They are survivors." That is what Dick always says to newcomers by way of inspiring respect for the Rapidan and its tenacious little genetic warriors.

"They are the most beautiful fish that God ever put on this earth. When they are in their spawning colors, they are just breathtaking," he adds for those who need prompting to adore the lush greens and pinks, the unmitigated reds of Salvelinus fontinalis -- ' 'the little salmon of the waterfall."

Then he enunciates Blalock's Rapidan Paradox. "These brook trout will strike any fly you present, provided you don't get close enough to present it." This means the fish are predatory, but skittish. More to the point, pursuing them prepares us to receive the central teaching of Blalock's Way. To achieve mastery is to rise above the need to catch fish.

This part did not come easily for me. I was born in the heart of Dixie and raised in the Redneck Way of Fishing, which holds that the only good trip is one ending in many dead fish. These fish might then be eaten, frozen, given to neighbors or used for fertilizer. But fishing that failed to produce an abundance of corpses could no more be successful than a football season in which the University of Alabama failed to win a national championship.

Of course, not even Bear Bryant won every year. Similarly, the greatest fishermen get skunked. So it is inevitable that the Redneck Way, which is built around the ideas of lust and conquest, will lead to failure. In that way, it resembles our physical lives. In the days of youth, when the blood is hot and the sap is high and the road goes on forever, it is easy enough to slip the doomy embrace of frustration. But time, as a British poet once said, is a rider that breaks us all, especially if our only pleasure -- in football, fishing or love -- comes from keeping score.

By the time I reached my late thirties, my passion for fishing brought with it an inexpressible burden of anxiety. As Saturday approached or, worse, a vacation, the questions would whirl through my brain. How many would I catch? How big would they be? Would my trip be wonderful? Would I be a success? I had reached the destination of all who follow the Redneck Way. I had made my hobby into work.

Then one day in the summer of 1981 I found myself at the L. L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine. I was a correspondent at the White House in those days, and my work -- which consisted of reporting on President Reagan's success in making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white and healthy -- saddened me. In fact, hanging around the Reagan crowd made me yearn for connection with something noble and uplifting. I bought a fly rod.

I do not know if you are familiar with the modern fly rod, but it is one of the glories of industry. The maker starts with a toothpick of steel called a mandrel. Around this mandrel are laid miles of thread spun from graphite. The mandrel is slipped out, and this long taper is then painted with epoxy, producing a deep, mirrored finish of the sort one saw on the German automobiles of thirty years ago.

The result is a piece of magic, an elegant thing, willowy and alive -- a wand that when held in the hand communicates with the heart. And the more I waved such a wand over the next few years, the more the scales of my old fish-killing heart fell away. At last I stood on the threshold of being what I had tried so hard, yet so blindly, to be since that sublime spring day in 1950 when my father and mother helped me catch twenty crappies from the Tennessee River. In the ensuing decades, I had killed hundreds of fish -- bass, crappies, bluegills, shelicrackers, pike, king mackerels, red snappers, black snappers, redfish, bluefish, pompanos, amberjacks, jack crevalles, barracudas. I had been blooded in the Redneck Way by those who understood fishing as a sport and a competition. Now I was about to meet a man who understood it as an art, a pastime, a way of living easefully in the world of nature. One day my telephone rang and it was Dick Blalock.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis by Howell Raines Copyright © 2006 by Howell Raines. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

Pat Conroy

“What a wonderful book Howell Raines has wrought... as lovely as a stream.”

Editorial Reviews

A sweet narrative of friendship, fathers and sons, aging and of course, fishing.” — Washington Post Book World

“What a wonderful book Howell Raines has wrought... as lovely as a stream.” — Pat Conroy

From the Publisher

A sweet narrative of friendship, fathers and sons, aging and of course, fishing.

Washington Post Book World

What a wonderful book Howell Raines has wrought... as lovely as a stream.

Pat Conroy

New York Times editorial page director Raines combines memoir and angling odyssey. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A native Southerner, New York Times editor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and lifelong angler, Raines came to fly fishing in his forties. Like Hemingway and Norman Maclean, he uses it as an extended metaphor for coming to terms with aging. He progresses from the ``Redneck Way of Fishing'' for quantity and meat to ``Dick Blalock's Way.'' Blalock, his friend and mentor, taught him that fly fishing is about attitude and friendship, not about catching fish. As Raines traces his progress, he sketches many giants in the still-young history of American fly fishing, endorses the catch-and-release philosophy, and comes to accept death's place in life. This is a literate, contemplative celebration of life and friendship by one who has learned to enjoy both. Recommended for biography as well as sports collections in public and academic libraries.-- Roland Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Biography

Library Journal

A bold and eloquent work in which New York Times editorial page director Raines (Whiskey Man, My Soul Is Rested—both 1977) looks at his obsession with fly fishing as cause, symptom, and remedy for the woes of middle-aging. While he tries not to ridicule the men's movement, Raines—who grew up in Alabama fishing the Redneck Way—notes that many men are already "hard-wired to all the raw masculine force [they can] handle." There's a need, he says, for an antidote to the anxiety, alienation, and sadness that's been "a secret silent force among men in America"—but the antidote needn't have "become an industry with its own speakers' bureau." A man who's fished with Presidents as well as with his own two sons, Raines "measured" the fish in his life on his 40th birthday when his then-wife presented him with a photo album of the passion that had endured since age seven, when he caught 20 crappies from a bridge near his hometown. Raines admitted that he'd been, at best, a "middling" fisherman. Worse, he saw himself as "a middle-aged man in a gray suit who trudged to the White House press room" to do what "felt like stenography," rather than as the great novelist he'd set out to be. He also saw "the black dog on his trail," conjured up by the death of his friend and mentor Dick Blalock, who'd showed him fishing as "a way of living easefully in the world of nature." Raines's wonderful descriptions of streams, people, and fish; his perceptive, practical approach to the literature of fishing; and his commentary on manhood and male-bonding, from Hemingway to Robert Bly—all serve to sharpen the intensity and perspective of his journey through divorce, affairs, family problems,sickness, and death. A profound work that will hook readers from the start.

Kirkus Reviews