Guy de la Valdene - On the Water: A Fishing Memoir

I would like to thank

Colleen Daily, Patrick Smith,

and Janice Goldklang for their help and support

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2015 by Guy de la Valdne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4930-0793-6

eISBN 978-1-4930-1625-9

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Gil Drake

and

Fanny Malone

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives;

for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are

but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows...

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

Contents

Foreword

In the interest of full disclosure, I confess to being a friend of Guy de la Valdne, and therefore not an objective source. We were introduced to each other by Jimmy Buffett, a character in his own right, whod told me stories about Guy that sounded like strands from Jimmys songs.

When we first met, on a fly-fishing trip, Guy was deceptively well behaved. Over time his inner rascal emerged, and I dont think anyone has made me laugh harder while cringing at the subject matter.

For quite a while I didnt know he was a writer, because hes uncommonly humble about it. Eventually he sent me a small book hed finished about his quail farm, and it was a gem. A few years later, when I learned he was working on something new, I began nagging him for the manuscript.

On the Water arrived at my house not long ago, and from the first page I was carried away. Although Guy and I have lived very different lives, weve been addicted to some of the same destinations, from the Florida Keys to the Bahamian Out Islands to western Montana. Even his boyhood memories of fishing the moat at his familys French estate struck home, because the thrill with which he describes a pikes strike at twilight stirred my own recollections of stalking bass at dusk in the Everglades.

Of youthful summers in the Bahamas, Guy writes, Imagine a mirror granting every wish, and then imagine looking into that mirror every single day. You could care nothing about fishing and still fall in love with that line.

In On the Water , Guy frames such magical reminiscences around a top-to-bottom account of how he engineered and vitalized a twenty-seven-acre pond on his farm near Tallahassee. I imagine his editor saying, You want to write about what ?

My little pond, Guy would have replied with the usual mischief in his smile.

He knew what to do. The book is a beauty.

His affection for natures delicate details brings John McPhee to mind, and his awe of waters turbulent pull on the human soul makes me think of Norman Maclean. And then of course theres Thoreau, who was also famously inspired by the seasons of a pond.

A few years back I made a trip to Guys farm. He put me in the bow of a small jon boat and gave me a tour of the water while I casted streamers at hungry largemouth bass. Naturally he knew every turtle, gator, moccasin, and osprey that appeared.

On the edge of the pond that Guy brought to life sits the small wooden house where he writes. Its baffling how he gets any work doneif it were me, Id spend all day in front of the window watching for drama. The stagecraft of wild predation will never fail to make your heart thump.

Even if Guy wasnt my friend, even if Id never laid eyes on the pond, I could honestly say that page after page of this book delivers glistening passages I wish Id written myself. In such an admission theres no jealousy, only marvel.

Carl Hiaasen

Prologue

Five years after the end of the Second World War, my sister and I boarded an ocean liner in New York City and sailed across the Atlantic to Cherbourg, France. A week later, after clearing customs and driving for what felt like an eternity, we were safely ensconced behind the walls of the estate our parents had purchased in Normandy. I was six years old. France was my new home.

Since none of the children in the adjoining village or any member of my parents staff spoke English, my sister and I, surrounded by the rapid fire of the French dialect, learned how to speak our new language in six months. The following year, I was sent to boarding school thirty miles away. The long, gray winter months of Normandyknown as the chamber pot of Francewere cold and dreary, but they were not as dreadful as some would make them out to be. There is a lot of fun to be had in boarding school, and I took advantage of it.

During the holidays, I spent much of my time exploring the waterways that crisscrossed the land I lived on. I would set traps in the mud burrows of water rats, build fish weirs across streams, and watch for high-floating feathers on the surface of ponds as a sign that the fall migration of ducks had begun. I dangled strips of red cloth from cane poles in the faces of frogs, gathered maggots for bait, tickled rainbow trout, studied the gait of long-legged birds that walked in a parody of purpose, and battled solitary pikes, emperors of their watery domains. I fished in creeks, swam in rivers, ate sandwiches on the shores of ponds, and once, when I was twelve years old, kissed a farm girl in the shadows of a chestnut tree next to a moat. When I was tired, I slept in the shadowy chambers of weeping willow trees and dreamed of the mischief I hoped to get into next.

Proximity to water has always been part of my life. On the land where I grew up there were two mapped rivers, a dozen streams and rivulets, subordinate farm ponds, and a moat that girdled the castle. Later it was on the saltwater flats of the Bahamas and then in the shallow waters of the Florida Keys where I learned to appreciate fish I could see and stalk, fish I could cast at, and fish that fought back. Once I knew how to use a fly rod, I added the Pacific Ocean and a number of rivers around the world to my angling settings. Now, as an older man with an aversion to crowded airports, a freshwater pond once again gathers my attention.

In 1990 I bought a farm in northern Florida that showcases red clay hills, live oak trees, and loblolly pines. There are doves in the fall, bobwhite quail in the winter, and turkeys in the spring. Sixty miles to the south there are redfish and flounder on the grass flats, sea trout and tarpon on the reef, and oysters on the beds. From the ten-acre spit of unproductive water that came with the property, I fashioned a twenty-seven-acre body of prime bass-fishing habitat. Its proximity to my house rekindles a number of childhood memories.