On the Water: A Fishing Memoir

by Guy de la Valdène

Overview

From the acclaimed author of Fragrance of Grass comes a meditation on water and nature, fishing and growing older. On the Water is a gorgeously written collection of essays that all take place on or near the water and pay tribute to the flora and fauna associated with those ecosystems. There are essays about the finer points of tickling rainbow trout in the streams of Normandy, and of eagles and ospreys fishing for bass while barely breaking the surface of the water. There are stories of droughts and floods, of dogs and boats, of worms and rattlesnakes and even of catching and cooking soft-shell turtles that taste like osso-bucco. There is fishing and diving in the Bahamas, tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys, and fly fishing for sailfish in Central America. And there are larger-than-life personalities that are bigger than the fish tales they tell! On the Water is a finely honed and well crafted collection of tales for the true sportsman and makes for a perfect companion volume to la Valdene’s celebrated collection of essays on hunting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493016259
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	02/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	991,070
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Guy de la Valdene was born and raised in France His previous books include The Fragrance of Grass,  For a Handful ofFeathers, Making Game and a novel, Red Stag. His numerous articles have appeared in Sports Afield, Field & Stream and Gray’s Sporting Journal.  In addition, La Valdene is the director and producer of the highly acclaimed documentary Tarpon.  Filmed in Key West in 1973 and featuring Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison, the film was recently restored and re-released.  La Valdene lives on an 800-acre farm near Tallahassee, Florida.

 

Read an Excerpt

“Proximity to water has always been part of my life. Where I grew up in Normandy there were two mapped rivers, a dozen streams and rivulets, subordinate farm ponds, and a moat that girdled the castle. Later it was on the saltwater flats of the Bahamas and then in the shallow waters of the Florida Keys where I learned to appreciate fish I could see and stalk, fish I could cast at, and fish that fought back. Once I knew how to use a fly rod, I added to my angling settings the Pacific Ocean and a number of the rivers around the world. Now, as an older man with an aversion to crowded airports, it is once again a freshwater pond that gathers my attention.”

--From On the Water

Table of Contents

Foreword Carl Hiaasen 1

Prologue 3

Spring Pond 7

To Build a Pond 11

La France 21

The Sound of Fish Swimming 33

The Islands 45

To Cast a Fly 55

Summer Pond 59

Bald Eagle 65

The Living Pond 69

The Drought 79

Tarpon 87

Woody 97

Fall Pond 109

Curtis 113

Osso Buco 117

Sailfish 125

Winter Pond 135

Hunting Stones 141

Tom and the Fat Boys 145

Salmon 157

Bill 169

Rain 175

Epilogue 179

About the Author 183

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Fragrance of Grass
 
 

"The Fragrance of Grass is an exquisite, big-hearted celebration of a life grandly spent outdoors.  Any novelist who'd try to invent a character like Guy de la Valdene would be doomed to fall short.  He is a unique philosopher-scoundrel with a wise, gentle heart, and he writes like a dream."   —Carl Hiaasen

"Guy de la Valdene's portraiture of French farmers, landowners, and sportsmen is flawless, his appreciation of dogs profound.  He writes with a lyric toughness that gives his work the tonal richness of literature.  The Fragrance of Grass feels as though it was descanted rather than written, one eloquent sentence flowing into another.  His view of hunting is, at its deepest level, a joyous, melancholy meditation on life and death."   —Christopher Camuto, Gray's Sporting Journal

 

"Guy de la Valdene’s sublime On the Water is the spiritual yin to The Old Man and the Sea’s yang. De la Valdene engages with water, its creatures, and the fishing of them as a profound expression of connection and even love, a way into the self and into the wider universe that illuminates the deep nature of both. On the Water is an instant classic of a memoir."
—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“One doesn’t know whether to envy Guy de la Valdene more for the life he has had or the books he writes. This one, like Walden and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pulls a catch of big, finely scrutinized and rendered observations on man and nature from small water—interspersing an acutely-studied account of the natural history and seasonal life of a 27-acre lake on Valdene’s property with exuberant fishing adventures from around the world. The resultant mixture of memory and desire, of wit and wisdom, is nothing less than a classic.”
—Charles Gaines, author of the National Book Award finalist Stay Hungry



"Guy de la Valdene's On The Water is more than a fishing memoir. He remembers his wild youth in the Caribbean, handling sharks at night and chasing waterspouts, and his intense days flyfishing in salt water with literary legends. He contrasts them both with wise and sometimes melancholy thoughts at the pond he made on his farm, seeing nature in this microcosm like a earthier version of an old Zen sage. Shake your head at the recklessness of youth, revel and laugh with the writers, and learn from his hard-won wisdom." - Steve Bodio, author of Field & Forest, Eternity of Eagles and many more.

From the Publisher

Guy de la Valdene's On The Water is more than a fishing memoir. He remembers his wild youth in the Caribbean, handlining sharks at night and chasing waterspouts, and his intense days flyfishing in salt water with literary legends. He contrasts them both with wise and sometimes melancholy thoughts at the pond he made on his farm, seeing nature in this microcosm like a earthier version of an old Zen sage. Shake your head at the recklessness of youth, revel and laugh with the writers, and learn from his hard-won wisdom.

Field & Stream

This utterly charming book is ostensibly about a man and his pond.. . .Valdène’s observations about the pond he built on his northern Florida property, though, are merely the starting point, segueing seamlessly into autobiographical details of a life well lived, and one that has been centered around water. Valdène relates enchanting anecdotes about his boyhood, spent partly living in a castle in Normandy (Valdène is an actual French count), where he appears to have spent most of his time out-of-doors, chasing various finned creatures, from trout (some of which he manages, at one point, to actually tickle) to the ferocious and moody pike.. . .Valdène’ is refreshingly unsentimental. This is not a finger-wagging book. Instead, Valdène views his life in the same way he does his pond: All of the different seasons warrant careful observations of their varied virtues and hardships. The book is almost worth it for Carl Hiaasen’s beautiful introduction alone, truly one of the best I’ve ever read.

Forbes

Guy de la Valdene's On The Water is more than a fishing memoir. He remembers his wild youth in the Caribbean, handlining sharks at night and chasing waterspouts, and his intense days flyfishing in salt water with literary legends. He contrasts them both with wise and sometimes melancholy thoughts at the pond he made on his farm, seeing nature in this microcosm like a earthier version of an old Zen sage. Shake your head at the recklessness of youth, revel and laugh with the writers, and learn from his hard-won wisdom.

Field & Stream