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The Habits of Trout: And Other Unsolved Mysteries
The Habits of Trout is a collection of essays about fishing for the things in life that are hard to catch, hard to hold, and—ultimately—hard to let go. Trout, Tim Schulz reminds us in this book, are but one of those things. Through his clear-headed, big-hearted, smart, funny, honest and fresh stories, Schulz shows us that in life in general—and trout fishing in particular—we sometimes need to be grounded by the humility of failure so we can be lifted by the hope of success. Beginning with a quest to explore the rugged backwoods environs where John Voelker found an abundance of wild trout and a dearth of crowds, Tim Schulz shares his love of family, friends, wild trout and bamboo rods in a collection of essays and yarns set in Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula. With a tinge of self-deprecating humor and wit, Schulz shows how fishing can help you grow older without growing up, and scattered throughout his stories are some lessons that just might make you a better fisherman which, in turn, might help you catch the biggest brook trout of your life . . . twice.
150 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 10, 2018
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December 31, 2018
Two Profs from Trout U
Frederick Prince. Backwoods Trout: Stories of Time and Place. Center Ossipee,
NH: Beech River Books, 2018. 129 pp. $14.00
Tim Schulz, The Habits of Trout and Other Unsolved Mysteries. Houghton, MI:
Uptrout Press, 2018. 133 pp. $12.99.
If writing (and reading) about fly fishing seems somehow retrograde in the reigning era of Facebook, Go-Pro, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube––all of which seem to target the crotch-rocket moments and glorify the latest broad-grinned brand ambassador who represents this or that angling entity, company, or institution––I consider the slow-hand old-fashionedness of writing to be subversive and rebellious. I say less technology, more poetry and philosophy, is what’s needed in these uncertain global times. And here’s a feel-good, guilt-free extra: in most cases, no trout are harmed in the production of a sentence. That can’t be said about every endeavor. Give me that old time feeling any day!
I don't know what it is about fly fishing that appeals so profoundly to academics but there is ample evidence that the attraction is significant. Trout fishing and the ivory tower: maybe it is as simple as saying that writing and fishing are akin. “Fish and find out,” Irish philosophy professor A. A. Luce used to say; to which can be added, “Write and find out.” Writing sentences is like casting a fly line, in that both are repetitive, but more importantly both are intuitive, rhythmic, necessary, and hopeful. Words plug us into the larger panoptic and expansive purview of the whole shebang, beyond just the river and its fish. Philosophy, poetry, history, ecology, culture—they all come into the picture and sometimes nudge us toward pure moments of understanding about the world or about ourselves and sometimes both at once. Pushing a pen and wielding a fly rod are both gratifying physical and metaphysical acts and strike me as being good for the soul and worth practicing. Uncovering mysteries seems to be part and parcel of both processes. English major/lit prof-types seem to be particularly susceptible to writing personal narratives of the angling life––think of Frank Soos, Norman Maclean, Nick Lyons, Ted Leeson, Craig Nova, Chad Hanson, Henry Hughes, and Chris Dombrowski. Not to be outdone, however, academics from all disciplines have taken up writing the non-fiction angling memoir as well.
Frederick Prince and Tim Schulz hail from the hard sciences. Their books both enact what post-modern theorists call the “meta-narrative” of personal angling origins. That is they are individual stories about the grand, overarching collective narrative of coming to angling. Both books tell how their authors started fishing and maintained their passion for the sport through a lifetime’s arc. They tend to be anecdotal rather than exhaustive, with each chapter a spot of time in itself without necessarily being linked seamlessly to other chapters. And they are more often than not written in a practical and straightforward style that avoids mystical and quasi-religious tones. Both books hone in on a rural region of the country where fishing opportunities seem unlimited and life seems somehow less encumbered, straight-laced, and anxious than normal. Both authors follow the route of inexpensive paperback publication, which makes their books easily accessible through Amazon and reasonably priced: Prince with a small trade publishing house, Beech River Books, and Schulz via self publication as part of his on-going blog site, Madness and Magic (uptrout.com). And both writers evince a strong preference for experiential education.
Frederick Prince is a professor of Human Anatomy and Physiology at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire and widely published in the biological sciences (as well as in outdoor magazines, where several of his chapters first appeared). Outside of school, Prince is an avid outdoorsman who began his sporting life in northeastern Pennsylvania fishing the Lackawaxen River, a trib of the Delaware. After youthful experiences spin fishing for trout, life in the form of college and graduate school (in troutless southern Ohio) and family life intervened and it wasn’t until the mid 1980s when he moved to the rural White Mountains to take his faculty position that his fly fishing life truly took off, aided and abetted by an older friend and experienced fly rodder named Chib, who appears in the collection in numerous places as a kind of mentor and sage. “Chib did most of the talking, and I did most of the listening,” Prince says. Clearly, he learned a great deal in the process. There are forays here into ice fishing, encounters with colorful, quirky people, ruminations on the passage of time, climate change, the nature of human muscle fiber types (his research area of expertise)-––those kind of observations and information that enliven a memoir with divigations, side bars, and elaborations.
The thread that binds this modest book together, however, is Prince’s discovery of the allure and fascination of chasing native “fine wild brook trout” in out-of-the-way backwoods ponds in central New Hampshire, many of them created by nature’s indefatigable engineers. “Beavers do create an element of mystery to the landscape,” he writes, “and mystery, a deep-seated need of the human psyche, is so rare in this modern world. Of course, if brook trout were involved in the mystery, then I was more than interested.”
Seeking out those unheralded bodies of water to investigate their small, brilliantly hued trout, becomes Prince’s guiding purpose and obsessive motivation. Many of his brookies are small in length. There are no out-and-out lunkers in his book that demand grip-and-grin moments of elevated prose, but of course size is relative and depends wholly on context and environment. “An 8-inch brook trout from a small stream is a very good trout. An 8-inch trout from Labrador is a minnow.” Without fanfare or pyrotechnical rhetorical flourishes Prince gives us a sense of the satisfaction that comes from hiking in, landing some fish, and now and then keeping a few for dinner. The latter is surely a lost or forgotten pleasure for many contemporary anglers, though there are few delicacies that can rival a fresh pan-fried brook trout. Through such moves Prince reaches a Zen-like insight about the rhythms of natural life and he gains “a glimpse into the connectivity of it all,” a place many of us fly fishers would agree is the whole point of our impassioned pursuit.
What I like about Prince’s quiet, understated book is also what I like about Tim Schulz’ The Habits of Trout: both go against the current trend of gonzo accounts about ripping lips and slaying hogs in favor of considered appreciations of fly fishing scaled to recognizable human dimensions and perspectives. Where Prince is more declarative and linear in his exposition, Schulz, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Michigan Tech, tends to be reflective and layered in his opinions: “There was a time when I believed I could solve the mysteries of trout in particular and of life in general. But now I think we sometimes need to get skunked. We need to break our line on a good fish now and again, and sometimes we need to cast all day without a take. We need to be grounded by the humility of failure so we can be lifted by the hope of success.” Good advice, hard-earned realizations, and light-hearted self awareness are marks of this sprightly collection of essays that show us the other, less flashy side of “high definition angling” so often current in today’s “fly-fishing culture.”
Schulz’s home waters are in Michigan’s vast Upper Peninsula, a region that is “the most wild and remote in the Midwest.” The guiding spirits of his angling quest are John Voelker (aka Robert Traver) and Jerry Dennis, so his book is not just an account of personal angling experiences (including fishing Frenchman’s Pond with legendary angler John Gierach), but also displays a literary bent and is a sort of homage to four superb northern Michigan classics, Anatomy of a Fisherman and Trout Magic and The River Home and A Place on the Water. That Schulz becomes fishing pals with Voelker’s grandson, Adam Tsaloff, and with Jerry Dennis adds to the first-hand piquancy and authority of his essays, many of which show him to be utterly comfortable with good-natured irony and self-deprecating humor. There is a degree of levity in The Habits of Trout that reminds me of the best of Nick Lyons. And Schulz is not afraid to admit there is more to fishing than catching: “Although I fished the Trophy Waters [Au Sable River] with my creative friends until well after dark, we snagged no gators, stuck no pigs, snared no toads, nor bagged no donkeys. But none of the guys seemed concerned about this, and we held a triumphant celebration upon our return to the cabin.” This is not to say Schulz doesn't land some outsized trout in this book, but overall his measures of success are not grandiose and over the top.
Where Prince is obsessed by the allure of small waters and their native brook trout, which becomes its own counter narrative to America’s love affair with bigness, the degree of Schulz’s angling passion is best registered in his coming to love hand-crafted split-bamboo fly rods. In “The Grass is Sweeter,” he tells the tale of his conversion by way of his first ‘boo rod, a 7’ 9” hexagonal Sweetgrass Mantra. After his first success, he writes, “The rod was everything I hoped it would be and everything I now believed a rod should be….. I would fish bamboo the rest of my life.” He devotes several chapters to that belief, and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that his cane rod fixation serves as a metaphor for everything about fly fishing that is resolutely retro and historically enduring. Adopting bamboo in an age of progressive, high-tech graphite and boron is Schulz’s version of a subversive counter narrative, a strike against the ubiquity of big time corporate industry, and a rallying cry for those of us who believe slow handedness in fishing and in writing is still a viable path to follow.
Frederick Prince. Backwoods Trout: Stories of Time and Place. Center Ossipee,
NH: Beech River Books, 2018. 129 pp. $14.00
Tim Schulz, The Habits of Trout and Other Unsolved Mysteries. Houghton, MI:
Uptrout Press, 2018. 133 pp. $12.99.
If writing (and reading) about fly fishing seems somehow retrograde in the reigning era of Facebook, Go-Pro, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube––all of which seem to target the crotch-rocket moments and glorify the latest broad-grinned brand ambassador who represents this or that angling entity, company, or institution––I consider the slow-hand old-fashionedness of writing to be subversive and rebellious. I say less technology, more poetry and philosophy, is what’s needed in these uncertain global times. And here’s a feel-good, guilt-free extra: in most cases, no trout are harmed in the production of a sentence. That can’t be said about every endeavor. Give me that old time feeling any day!
I don't know what it is about fly fishing that appeals so profoundly to academics but there is ample evidence that the attraction is significant. Trout fishing and the ivory tower: maybe it is as simple as saying that writing and fishing are akin. “Fish and find out,” Irish philosophy professor A. A. Luce used to say; to which can be added, “Write and find out.” Writing sentences is like casting a fly line, in that both are repetitive, but more importantly both are intuitive, rhythmic, necessary, and hopeful. Words plug us into the larger panoptic and expansive purview of the whole shebang, beyond just the river and its fish. Philosophy, poetry, history, ecology, culture—they all come into the picture and sometimes nudge us toward pure moments of understanding about the world or about ourselves and sometimes both at once. Pushing a pen and wielding a fly rod are both gratifying physical and metaphysical acts and strike me as being good for the soul and worth practicing. Uncovering mysteries seems to be part and parcel of both processes. English major/lit prof-types seem to be particularly susceptible to writing personal narratives of the angling life––think of Frank Soos, Norman Maclean, Nick Lyons, Ted Leeson, Craig Nova, Chad Hanson, Henry Hughes, and Chris Dombrowski. Not to be outdone, however, academics from all disciplines have taken up writing the non-fiction angling memoir as well.
Frederick Prince and Tim Schulz hail from the hard sciences. Their books both enact what post-modern theorists call the “meta-narrative” of personal angling origins. That is they are individual stories about the grand, overarching collective narrative of coming to angling. Both books tell how their authors started fishing and maintained their passion for the sport through a lifetime’s arc. They tend to be anecdotal rather than exhaustive, with each chapter a spot of time in itself without necessarily being linked seamlessly to other chapters. And they are more often than not written in a practical and straightforward style that avoids mystical and quasi-religious tones. Both books hone in on a rural region of the country where fishing opportunities seem unlimited and life seems somehow less encumbered, straight-laced, and anxious than normal. Both authors follow the route of inexpensive paperback publication, which makes their books easily accessible through Amazon and reasonably priced: Prince with a small trade publishing house, Beech River Books, and Schulz via self publication as part of his on-going blog site, Madness and Magic (uptrout.com). And both writers evince a strong preference for experiential education.
Frederick Prince is a professor of Human Anatomy and Physiology at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire and widely published in the biological sciences (as well as in outdoor magazines, where several of his chapters first appeared). Outside of school, Prince is an avid outdoorsman who began his sporting life in northeastern Pennsylvania fishing the Lackawaxen River, a trib of the Delaware. After youthful experiences spin fishing for trout, life in the form of college and graduate school (in troutless southern Ohio) and family life intervened and it wasn’t until the mid 1980s when he moved to the rural White Mountains to take his faculty position that his fly fishing life truly took off, aided and abetted by an older friend and experienced fly rodder named Chib, who appears in the collection in numerous places as a kind of mentor and sage. “Chib did most of the talking, and I did most of the listening,” Prince says. Clearly, he learned a great deal in the process. There are forays here into ice fishing, encounters with colorful, quirky people, ruminations on the passage of time, climate change, the nature of human muscle fiber types (his research area of expertise)-––those kind of observations and information that enliven a memoir with divigations, side bars, and elaborations.
The thread that binds this modest book together, however, is Prince’s discovery of the allure and fascination of chasing native “fine wild brook trout” in out-of-the-way backwoods ponds in central New Hampshire, many of them created by nature’s indefatigable engineers. “Beavers do create an element of mystery to the landscape,” he writes, “and mystery, a deep-seated need of the human psyche, is so rare in this modern world. Of course, if brook trout were involved in the mystery, then I was more than interested.”
Seeking out those unheralded bodies of water to investigate their small, brilliantly hued trout, becomes Prince’s guiding purpose and obsessive motivation. Many of his brookies are small in length. There are no out-and-out lunkers in his book that demand grip-and-grin moments of elevated prose, but of course size is relative and depends wholly on context and environment. “An 8-inch brook trout from a small stream is a very good trout. An 8-inch trout from Labrador is a minnow.” Without fanfare or pyrotechnical rhetorical flourishes Prince gives us a sense of the satisfaction that comes from hiking in, landing some fish, and now and then keeping a few for dinner. The latter is surely a lost or forgotten pleasure for many contemporary anglers, though there are few delicacies that can rival a fresh pan-fried brook trout. Through such moves Prince reaches a Zen-like insight about the rhythms of natural life and he gains “a glimpse into the connectivity of it all,” a place many of us fly fishers would agree is the whole point of our impassioned pursuit.
What I like about Prince’s quiet, understated book is also what I like about Tim Schulz’ The Habits of Trout: both go against the current trend of gonzo accounts about ripping lips and slaying hogs in favor of considered appreciations of fly fishing scaled to recognizable human dimensions and perspectives. Where Prince is more declarative and linear in his exposition, Schulz, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Michigan Tech, tends to be reflective and layered in his opinions: “There was a time when I believed I could solve the mysteries of trout in particular and of life in general. But now I think we sometimes need to get skunked. We need to break our line on a good fish now and again, and sometimes we need to cast all day without a take. We need to be grounded by the humility of failure so we can be lifted by the hope of success.” Good advice, hard-earned realizations, and light-hearted self awareness are marks of this sprightly collection of essays that show us the other, less flashy side of “high definition angling” so often current in today’s “fly-fishing culture.”
Schulz’s home waters are in Michigan’s vast Upper Peninsula, a region that is “the most wild and remote in the Midwest.” The guiding spirits of his angling quest are John Voelker (aka Robert Traver) and Jerry Dennis, so his book is not just an account of personal angling experiences (including fishing Frenchman’s Pond with legendary angler John Gierach), but also displays a literary bent and is a sort of homage to four superb northern Michigan classics, Anatomy of a Fisherman and Trout Magic and The River Home and A Place on the Water. That Schulz becomes fishing pals with Voelker’s grandson, Adam Tsaloff, and with Jerry Dennis adds to the first-hand piquancy and authority of his essays, many of which show him to be utterly comfortable with good-natured irony and self-deprecating humor. There is a degree of levity in The Habits of Trout that reminds me of the best of Nick Lyons. And Schulz is not afraid to admit there is more to fishing than catching: “Although I fished the Trophy Waters [Au Sable River] with my creative friends until well after dark, we snagged no gators, stuck no pigs, snared no toads, nor bagged no donkeys. But none of the guys seemed concerned about this, and we held a triumphant celebration upon our return to the cabin.” This is not to say Schulz doesn't land some outsized trout in this book, but overall his measures of success are not grandiose and over the top.
Where Prince is obsessed by the allure of small waters and their native brook trout, which becomes its own counter narrative to America’s love affair with bigness, the degree of Schulz’s angling passion is best registered in his coming to love hand-crafted split-bamboo fly rods. In “The Grass is Sweeter,” he tells the tale of his conversion by way of his first ‘boo rod, a 7’ 9” hexagonal Sweetgrass Mantra. After his first success, he writes, “The rod was everything I hoped it would be and everything I now believed a rod should be….. I would fish bamboo the rest of my life.” He devotes several chapters to that belief, and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that his cane rod fixation serves as a metaphor for everything about fly fishing that is resolutely retro and historically enduring. Adopting bamboo in an age of progressive, high-tech graphite and boron is Schulz’s version of a subversive counter narrative, a strike against the ubiquity of big time corporate industry, and a rallying cry for those of us who believe slow handedness in fishing and in writing is still a viable path to follow.
Displaying 1 of 1 review