W.D. Wetherell - A River Trilogy: A Fly-Fishing Life

Praise for A River Trilogy

W. D. Wetherell is a good fisherman, a better writer, and a most agreeable companion who has a deep feeling for the natural world in which his quarry swim.

Chicago Tribune

Wetherell writes about fishing with an anglers love for the sport and a novelists eye for detail.

John Gierach, author of All Fisherman Are Liars

Wetherell defends the plain pleasures of his sport and the environmental purity to sustain it, as well as what he, a novelist, calls the wild upland province of words. He moves naturally from the beauty of a Copper Run trout to Beauty itself... He has a naturalists eye, glorying in the things mankind has not yet sullied, grieving for those we have.

New York Times

Wetherell has better than any writer I know caught the character of Eastern fly-fishing: the energetic personalities of its seasons, geographies, politics natural and unnatural, and inhabitants both civilized and wild. These books have been provided us courtesy of an artist unwilling to concede that there is a distinction to be made between what is said and the manner of its saying.

John Engels, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

Vermont River is one of those rare instances when fly-fishing writing overflows its banks and spreads freely into the fields of literature.

John Merwin, founder of Fly Rod & Reel
and author of Stillwater Trout

These are bold little gleeful books by a writer Ive admired for years that should endear themselves to everybody who likes streams and woods and country as well as simply to other fishermen, who will find them both astute and lyric.

Edward Hoagland, author of In the Country of the Blind

Immensely readable books by a young fisherman-writer equally obsessed by the twin pursuits of the elusive trout and the elusive word. I both love and envy them.

Robert Traver, author of Trout Magic

Wetherell understands the currents that flow through a fly-fishers soul and he taps into them with rare wit and grace. One of the most talented voices to be heard in angling literature in a long while. I found myself wishing for at least one page more, or one chapter more, and one book more. So will you.

Steve Raymond, author of Trout Quintet

Delightful books that impart the soul of the river the angler, and the surrounding countryside.

Ted Giddings, journalist

This is my idea of what fishing books should beand too seldom are. Like fly fishing itself, the books soothe the soul and answer more than a few questions all of us have asked of a day, a river, or a trout.

Gene Hill, former columnist for Field & Stream

Deeply felt yet resolutely unsentimental, consistently generous yet unflinching in its allegiances, Wetherells is a voice of sanity and sense for our increasingly virtual age. Reading him is like coming home.

Mark Slouka, author of Nobodys Son and
recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship

Literary gems.

Paul Marriner, author of Atlantic Salmon: A Fly Fishing Primer

Wetherell is the ideal armchair companionan elegant writer, a fastidious, observant angler, a charming streamside companion.

J. Z. Grover, writer for In-Fisherman

Copyright 2018 by W. D. Wetherell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Vermont River originally published by Nick Lyons Books, 1984
Upland Stream originally published by Little, Brown & Company, 1991
One River More originally published by the Lyons Press, 1998

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Tom Lau
Cover painting credit: The Rapids, Hudson River, Adirondacks (1894) by Winslow Homer

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2824-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2825-7

Printed in the United States of America

For Celeste, Erin, and Matthew

Contents

A Word at the Start

M y books on fly fishingCelebrations, I like to call themare now back in print, published together in one volume as Id always intended. Thirty years have gone by since the first of the trio, Vermont River, came out, so Id like to briefly explain how I came to write of rivers and fishing, then go on to talk about how the books have fared over the years, and how I view things now.

In 1981, I published my first novel, Souvenirs. It fared as most first novels do, or at least first earnestly-imagined, ambitiously-written, philosophical/experimental ones do. Respectful reviews, friends and relatives being kind, a publisher unwilling to do any promotion, the buzz surrounding its publication lasting all of ten minutesand then nothing but remainders.

Bruised, battered, but in no way ready to quit, I cast about for my next project. I had fallen in love with fly-fishing as a teenager, thanks to my parents buying a summer house on a bassy Connecticut lake. This led me to fly-fishing, and thena passionate reader as a kidto the literature fly-fishing boasts of, the fishing in print. Don Quixote fell in love with chivalry by reading romances about it; I fell in love with trout fishing by reading romances (for thats what most fishing books are) about itand for many years my passion, like Quixotes, went largely unrequited.

My twenties were a wretched decadeand at least part of the reason was that, stuck in New York, I hardly fished at all. It was only when I met Celeste and we moved to northern New England that I at last began to fish as much as I wanted to. My love (well, two loves; Celeste and I were married now) was at long last requitedand the miracle of this gave me lots to write about.

I told my agenta sophisticated West Sider who thought Siberia began just north of 86th Streetthat I was interested in writing a book about fly fishing. Fine, she said, lifting her lovely aristocratic nose. But I am no longer your agent.

Fine, I said back to her. But I am writing it anyway.

Its a fools errand now, but back in l983 it was just barely possible to have a book considered by a publisher by sending it over the transom without anyone at the house ever having heard of you. The odds were longyour manuscript, if read at all, was pulled from the aptly named slush pilebut no worse than buying a lottery ticket, and all it cost you was postage.