The Drift: The Best Fishing Stories

My daughter is nine months old, and she’s gone through more than the usual trouble with sleep. Between colic, reflux, and coming into the world six weeks early, her relationship with sleep took a while to develop.

Now she’s at the point where she doesn’t want to fall asleep at bedtime because anything is more interesting than her crib. Whether it’s our two dogs, the ceiling fan, or the zipper on her pajamas, it’s been hard to get her to calm down enough to sleep lately.

This is where good fishing stories have saved the day (and my sanity).

You’re supposed to read to your kids for a number of reasons. There’s all the usual stuff about strengthening emotional bonds and quality time, but apparently it helps with brain development and language acquisition, too. But as I’ve taken over bedtime duties lately (partly to give my wife a break, and partly because I haven’t been home as much as I’d like) I’ve started to think about how best to introduce this little baby to fly fishing.

We started with a few rambling retellings of my recent days on the water, but without a physical book to read from, my stories all seemed to end the same way: with dad having caught an enormous trout, when it looked all but certain I wouldn’t. I’m not sure how I always end up the hero when I tell the stories, but you can’t blame me for taking some creative liberties, can you?

Now, I’ve dug out all my old copies of John Gierach books, and we’re working our way through The View From Rat Lake. He’s a much better storyteller than I am, and one thing I’ve always admired about John is the ability he has to take something so mundane, and write an engrossing essay about it.

Take the second essay from Standing in a River Waving a Stick. John manages to make an afternoon at a new-to-him bass pond with Mike Clark and John Barr into a chapter-length story that has all the elements of a good tale, with none of the pretension. That’s not an easy thing to do, and it got me thinking: what is it, exactly, that makes a fishing story good? Why do some of these stand out in our minds forever, like Tom McGuane’s The Longest Silence, or Callan Wink’s Fly Fishing with Jim Harrison, or, of course, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. 

I’m no expert at writing, but I enjoy reading stories, and what I think endears us to some authors and books more than others is this: the best fishing stories are also just great stories. They have a clear beginning, middle, and some sort of ending, even if it’s anticlimactic. In some ways, you feel like you’re there on the water, making the cast yourself; in others, these stories make you think about life outside of fishing. But they don’t get preachy or meander through an endless garden of similes about how fly fishing is really some path to enlightenment.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who appreciates good stories, who wouldn’t also like something by Gierach or McGuane. It might not be their cup of tea, but the reason both those men made a living from writing has an awful lot to do with their ability to tell a story that keeps your attention. In today’s world, that’s no easy feat.

So, as I focus on putting together my own stories to tell my daughter while she falls asleep, I need to take a page out of their book. Instead of stories where I always end up catching the big one, I just need to shoot it straight, something I think parents have always struggled with, especially with their first child.

Hopefully, my daughter will fall asleep to my stories, too.