THE OPTIMIST

Have rod, will travel: the education of a devoted fly fisherman.

“Angling is about anticipation and planning trips far in the future, but it also has a storied history,” writes Coggins. “This sport has been practiced since Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler was published in 1653, in ways that are, to the naked eye, fairly unchanged today, like a Shakespeare play performed on a thrust stage.” Coggins, who writes about fishing for the Robb Report, adds to the canon with this reflective, leisurely travelogue about some of his favorite fishing spots. Because anglers, like gamblers, are addicted to the “chance of winning,” they must be optimists: The “angler is master of a kingdom that always threatens to crumble.” Coggins reminiscences about when he went fly-fishing for smallmouth bass in Wisconsin with his grandfather’s friends and learned the fine arts of casting and maneuvering a canoe and the vernacular of bobbers, leaders, and flies. Then the author takes us to see the cutthroat trout in the “mecca of American angling,” Montana, a state that “calls the faithful like the Louvre calls painters.” Of course, there were plenty of mistakes—e.g., a broken rod and the humiliation of losing a trout that “broke me off”—before he caught “a perfect fish.” Coggins also recounts his trip to the “wonderfully isolated and remote” flats of the Bahamas to experience saltwater fishing and to catch a fish he’s never seen before, the “silver phantom” bonefish. In Patagonia, the author sought rainbow trout, the “golden retriever of fish,” whose luminous color “mirrors the joy of catching one.” Among the author’s many other adventures: chasing striped bass in New York’s Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, running with Atlantic salmon in New Brunswick, Canada (“many shattered dreams lay at the altar of this revered fish”), and pond fishing for brook trout in the Maine North Woods, “a 3.5-million-acre wilderness that extends all the way to Canada.”

A wise, affectionate chronicle of a passion pursued.