Review by Mack Hassler
“Follow me, and I will make you
fishers of men”
Matthew 4:19
Do the Right thing. It will gratify some
people and astonish the rest.”
Mark Twain, epigraph to Chapter 22
One of the things that interests me about all of literature, reaching back even to the Akkadian documents when the Hebrews were still Egyptian slaves and using cuneiform script, is how clubbish, fanlike, even like a bunch of fraternity brothers writers seem with their invocations of one another Only the chosen few, the scribes, could do it ; and they were “special,” an elite club. This fact is very ancient, even earlier than the Babel story in Genesis, and it is, perhaps, necessary for the evolution of literature. The results are new literatures, new genres—in fact, literally, mental discovery. This book is from the fly-casting elite. Schulz opens by evoking generations of the elite who write about fly-casting and who tie their own lures. The oldest is Nick Lyons (b 1932) and so not a part of the opening conversations about the anecdotes except to give a front cover endorsement of the book.
So Schulz opens A Cast AWay in Montana with “the group” (minus Lyons as too old to go out of the rivers anymore) encouraging one another on their cellphones while casting on the Au Sable in Grayling Michigan. The anecdotes and memories abound on how to tie a lure (Bob White provides fine, detailed examples in his illustrations. The active enthusiasts are still very much in the game: Jerry Dennis (b. 1954), Bob DeMott (b. 1943), an English professor whom I knew when he was finishing his Ph,D at my University in Ohio. But perhaps most important is the wife of Schulz (he teaches Engineering.) Her name is Roxanne, and she shares his love of fishing the streams, and along with DeMott is urging her husband to throw himself—to cast himself West and North in order to fight the real rivers with his casting. Schulz is afraid of being too old and does not want to leave his wife. But they start anecdotally in Grayling Michigan.
At first his anecdotal style seems to be one, long looping cast that hangs gracefully in the air until (and fortunately for the book) he “does the right thing” and makes the hard decision urged by his friends. He decides to “outcast” himself and to travel North and West through emptiness and loneliness to the Upper Missouri River drainage system in Montana. He is afraid he might be himself too old and, even, unsure of his footing along the narrow high trails needed to get to where he can cast his line near Yellowstone. His big cast and looping movement, finally, becomes very serious at the start of Chapter 22 that he titles “Redemption” and where he uses the Mark Twain epigraph or “lure” of astonishing his reader. The urging of his wife and of the other elite fly-casting fishers when his spotting of a real Artic Grayling becomes much more than anecdote. From his chums in Grayling Michigan to the upper drainage of the Missouri in Montana, with some trepidation over the length of the trip and the danger in the high mountain trails the style moves from anecdote to a real Quest. His status of being an outcast suddenly snaps into a real Quest for the big fish. Schulz does not lose his sense of humor. He assures us that his chapter on Redemption is not really a Church thing in spite of my own epigraph. And he says early in the chapter that “Stealing another man’s fish is like stealing his soul” P.189. So he jokes about following a Quest, but that is exactly what his journey to Montana is. And the vividness of the journey, along with the sense of community among those who do this sort of fishing, who fashion their own lures and who are always looking to cast themselves father makes a very successful book
A Cast Away in Montana, by Tim Schulz, Illustrations by Bob White, Forward by Jerry Dennis (Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, Essex, CT, Lyons Press, 2024), 218 pages, Hardcover, $29.
