[.ca] Crosscurrents: A Fly Fisher's Progress (ISBN 1558219463)

From Amazon.com:
"Oh boy. Another collection of navel-gazing essays from a baby boomer who got hold of a fly rod and a word processor and thought Eureka, I've found myself. And now wants to share." Any writer who can open a volume of, well, navel-gazing essays that self-effacingly has probably done some useful gazing, might actually have something worth saying, and has most likely manufactured a pretty good way of saying it. Fly-fishing is less avocation for James Babb, the editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, than a personal life choice. Born in the back of an ambulance in the parking lot of a Tennessee barbecue joint, he eventually resettled in New England. Through odd job after odd job, he found his equilibrium on the streams. When he wasn't out fly-fishing, he was thinking about it--and writing about it with unforced quirkiness and insight. In time, he built his own cabin in Maine with a trout pond to go with it. Why Maine? "I often say that I moved to Maine," he writes, "for the brook trout and Thoreau's wild North Woods and the joys of living in an inbred rural community where none of the cousins are mine." In a voice that's legitimately funny, magnetic, and unique, Babb has his say on just about everything from waders to wading staffs, British literature to knives and forks, which makes it a reader's adventure and an angler's catch. --Jeff Silverman

more than fish:
Babb is one hell of a writer, and Crosscurrents is about more than just fish and antique split bamboo rods. It's about one man's spiritual journey from his boyhood home in the hills of East Tennessee to the lobsterman's life in the cold North Atlantic, to the hills of Maine, where he now resides. Plenty of adventures along the way, unforgettable characters, cultural observations, literary and historical allusions, and some really fine writing. I've never thrown a dry fly in my life, but I loved it, anyway. Bravo, Mr. James Babb!

Nicely done:
Perhaps my title is insufficient. The progress is more or less identical to what any reasonable human being would want in the late 20th and early 21'st century. A man of insight, regrets, decent moral grounding and capable of facing the difficulties of the realities of ecology (a/k/a Cranes and Rainbow trout) James Babb has molded a life worth living. Would that we were all so talented and perceptive. A biography more than a fish story is to be had here.