The Angler’s Art: Two Books on Fly Fishing

Mr. Kurlansky is a veteran writer. Over the course of 34 books—including bestsellers on such seemingly mundane subjects as salt, cod and paper—he has come to be known for his ability to weave history, philosophy and personal experience into compelling narratives. His latest, “The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing,” is on a subject that is clearly dear to his heart.

The book offers fascinating chapters on the history of fly fishing and tackle—flies, rods, reels, lines, even waders. Seventy thousand years ago, before hooks, we caught fish with gorges, pointy bits of flint or horn. The Maori made hooks from human bones; the people of New Guinea from insect claws. Others were fashioned from eagle jaws and cactus spurs. The Chinese were already using artificial flies 3,500 years ago. For fishing line, Plutarch recommended the braided tail hairs of a white stallion—stronger, he said, than those of other horses. Of fly fishing and the scarus, a Mediterranean parrotfish, the first-century Roman poet Martial wrote, “Who has not seen the scarus rise, / Decoyed and killed by fraudful flies?” More recently, in 17th-century England, one writer suggested making bait from powdered human skulls, obtained by robbing graves. Throughout history, the passion for fishing has driven anglers to extremes.

The fishing trivia Mr. Kurlansky cites is often marvelous. He quotes Andrew Carnegie, who, having just concluded a successful steel deal, lost his patience with an interviewer: “What is a matter of a few-million dollars profit compared with landing a ten-pound pickerel!” Clark Gable, another fly-fishing enthusiast, is quoted as saying, “Hell, if I had jumped on all the dames I’m supposed to have jumped on, I’d have had no time to go fishing.”

The author is keenly aware of how fly fishing constantly mingles art and absurdity. (These are, after all, anglers who have chosen the most difficult way to catch a fish.) For example, there are 30,000 different “recognized” flies, even though trout are thought to eat no more than 1,000 kinds of insects. That leaves 29,000 variations designed to appeal to fly anglers. Before the invention of nylon, an obsessed angler might raise his own silk worms, cure them in vinegar, then draw out the guts to fashion a fly line. Similarly, images of anglers standing in trout water didn’t exist before the mid-1800s. This is because trout require cold water and there was no such thing as waterproof waders. That all changed with the vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear in 1839.

Still, you get the feeling that Mr. Kurlansky expected this book not to have the same mass appeal as some of his other titles. “Unreasonable Virtue” is a solid, workman-like effort, but its author isn’t swinging for the fences. The parts in which Mr. Kurlansky philosophizes and recalls the rivers he has fished—which make up nearly half the book—lose any narrative thread and can be a bit of a slog.

Josh Greenberg is my kind of nature writer: unassuming, accessible and, while knowledgeable, a guy for whom knowledge serves as a reminder of how little he actually knows. He admits to being not particularly well-organized (he doesn’t keep detailed records of water levels, for example, or how many fish he’s caught) and isn’t bothered by that trait. He’s not even a full-time writer. For his day job he runs the Gates Au Sable Lodge in Grayling, Mich. He’s the sort of guy who, kneeling as he waits for a trout to rise again, might engage in small talk with a fishing buddy. “I exchanged a few quiet words with her. I told her it looked like a one-cast night.” In this case, the fishing buddy is a hen mallard.

Mr. Greenberg’s latest book, “Trout Water: A Year on the Au Sable,” opens on a May evening with the young father looking for rising trout as the spirit of a friend hovers nearby, in the “bardo,” the state that some Buddhists believe the soul inhabits between death and rebirth. He wonders what lure his friend would have cast in the given circumstances, and decides on a Hendrickson spinner, whereas another close friend, also deceased, would have used the same fly but with wings made of rabbit-foot fur. When Mr. Greenberg is on the river, these friends come to life in his imagination. That’s one reason for fishing. Another is that trout seem “uneclipsable by anything else on earth: too bright to be totally obscured by, or from, the rest of life.”

Don’t be intimidated by such weighty observations. Mr. Greenberg doesn’t linger on them. Instead, they’re strewn casually into a larger narrative that includes observations on fishing, on being a family man with two kids, and on guiding and running a lodge. Through it all, the author maintains an original sensibility. Loaded down with the various knickknacks that fly anglers acquire, a running fisherman sounds “like a cardboard box of dishware falling down a stairway.” Near the end, a lost raft dashes his hopes of making it to his son’s science fair in time. The boy, similarly in love with fly fishing, understands.

The Au Sable, we learn, is a river best fished at night because that’s when the greatest hatches of insects take place. In fact, our sense of sight, we are told, is overrated when it comes to fly fishing. We’ve been hurling pointy objects at animals for a really long time, and we’re pretty good at it. At night, you listen for the sound of trout feeding—which can be surprisingly loud once you’re attuned to it—and cast to that.

As his journal progressed, I found myself growing increasingly fond of Mr. Greenberg’s voice. Even a nonangler will see that the author gets it. He knows how haphazard life is and feels lucky rather than entitled to have fallen in love with fishing, to be connected to the great dynamo of the natural world. One night he and his wife lie in sleeping bags on the back of his truck as they watch a magnificent display of the northern lights. A lesser writer might have forced some deep insight from the experience, but Mr. Greenberg only notes that he’s exhausted. “A human can only take so much cosmic power.”

—Mr. Heavey is a freelance writer in Bethesda, Md.