Crosscurrents and River Music
by James Babb. The Lyons Press, 1999 and 2001. Reviewed by Bill Lamberson
(cover photos from Amazon.com)
I had not come across James Babb’s books until a recent visit to a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. Given that I visit bookstores and fly shops as often as possible and routinely first scan the books for fly fishing essays, I was surprised that these had not come to my attention. Perhaps you too have missed them.
Babb has been editor of Gray’s Sporting Journal since 1997. These books largely are modified collections of his essays from Gray’s. He is a native of East Tennessee, which doesn’t make him unique, just different than most of the rest of us. As his finely bred Maryland wife, after her first visit to the soil of his roots, was heard to tell her sister, “I used to think there was nobody else in the world like him. But my God, there’s thousands of them down there.” But, there aren’t thousands that write like Babb. His topics are more varied than John Gierach’s, the writing not as literary as Tom McGuanes’. His writing perhaps reminds me most of that of Harry Middleton.
Crosscurrents is subtitled, A Fly Fisher’s Progress, and that aptly describes it content, essays on where Babb is as a fisherman, and how he got there. He writes of his personal experiences, as a child fishing for brook trout in mountain streams, bluegills wherever he could find big ones, and, when twelve, drowning in the outflow of a hydroelectric dam on the Tennessee River while fishing for catfish. He didn’t die, at least not permanently, a catfisherman in a boat saw him go in, ran his boat among the turbine outflow and managed to gaff him and haul him, unconscious, out of the water.
Now a resident of Maine and editor of Gray’s, Babb has had the chance to broaden his horizons. Still his tastes in fishing are eclectic, jigging for mackerel of a pier, fly fishing for blue sharks in the Gulf of Maine, taking the Atlantic salmon tour through the public waters of Quebec, and, of course, fly fishing for brookies in tiny streams in Maine.
In River Music, Babb organizes his essays across the seasons. Although that is a familiar pattern of fly fishing books, these essays are a departure from the normal fly fishing essays. This is a very entertaining book. You are never quite sure where an essay will take you.
James Babb’s latest book is Fly Fishing Fool, The Lyon’s Press, 2005.