Somewhere Else
by Charles Rangeley-Wilson
Yellow Jersey Press $188
Don't be fooled by the green marsh-fellers, the beer-toting armchair fishermen lolling in 'leanbacks' under prepaid umbrellas watching corks bobble and battle for space between the flotsam.
Angling has a mystique: geographical mazes and mysteries of the mind to navigate, a bamboozling biological diversity to contemplate.
And there is no angler more keen to inveigle himself of these flights of fancy and fact than the freshwater fly-fisherman - he who revels in the path of piscatorial righteousness, who prefers the wisp of the windmill to the efficiency of a modern water pump, or the kind swish of a curving rod and gentle rush of a shooting fly. Not for him the grunt of the spinner's cast, splosh of lure and ratchety clack of a geared-reel's retrieve.
It is into these morning mists that Somewhere Else leads the reader, down byways dappled with dawns and dusks, through rustling grass and bulrush heads that seem to breathe in the breeze.