Praise for Upstream in a Dream
‘This is a compelling journey through fly-fishing and life. From newborn babies, to intimate coastal creek trout, the fierce glamour of New Zealand trophy rivers, and even tuna fishing on nausea-inducing seas, this book has its share of drama, yet it’s all somehow delivered with gentle humour and wisdom. An essential addition to any library, fly-fishing or otherwise.’
Philip Weigall, author of Call of the River and other titles, editor of FlyStream
‘I so enjoyed Upstream in a Dream. It produced a feeling of calm reflection just like being in the bush or beside the ocean on a still day. Occasionally I laughed, often I sighed with pleasure at the descriptions, musings, ideas. It’s a beautiful meditation on life through fishing.’
Nan McNab, editor and author
Upstream in a Dream
Water has a primal, hypnotic power that attracts us, something vividly evident in the beautiful fly-fishing essays in Upstream in a Dream.
While water seeks its level downstream, fly-fishers are at the mercy of a force that draws them upstream to the headwaters. As they fish, events in their lives and their reactions to the natural world merge into one meditative cycle.
In that cycle, life’s big events – becoming a father, losing a loved one and navigating relationships – are in Upstream in a Dream presented in heartfelt, often humorous, essays that possess the poetic, contemplative rhythm of fly-fishing.
While fish are the main attraction in local waters and further afield, the consolations of time in nature impress themselves on reader and writer, making Upstream in a Dream a must-read for fishers and lovers of beautiful nature writing.
Escape to the water and enjoy the author's mindful, soulful engagement with the natural world, which has led to stories that invite further reflection on the environment and human nature, and the changing state of both.
Excerpts
From: 1. Time in the water
When my first daughter, Meg, was lifted from my wife’s belly following an emergency caesarean, fly-fishing was a long way from my mind. When Meg’s sister Maddy came out in the same fashion nearly a year to the day later, fishing was so far from my mind that rivers were not things that held fish, but metaphors for time and the life that travelled genetically in it.
In those rivers, before Meg was born, I was as far downstream as you could go. Now, there was a future downstream of me, that in flowing on would one day flow out of sight.
It took a few months after Meg’s birth to return to the rivers I fished, although fly-fishers always cast our lines in something more than air and water. When I first went fishing after Meg’s birth, I remember missing her acutely, even though I only fished for a few hours after work that night.
But that’s not the reason I took her fishing with me the next time I went. It was because the babysitter was a keen fisher too, and was happy to mind her in her pusher on the bridge, while I fished in the river below.
From: 6. Tuna
I don’t know if it was when the face of a 15-foot wave was approaching our oncoming boat, when we were going up it, or when the boat was plunging off the back of it that I wondered if there were any conditions in which the fishing-charter owners would cancel their tuna trips.
When I booked the trip, the charter owner had warned that if conditions were too bad, they wouldn’t run it. The conditions seemed too bad and yet here we were cowering in the front of the boat, intermittently awash in sea spray as we smashed and crashed our way out of Portland Harbour and into the open ocean.
The tuna-fishing trip was a birthday present I’d given to my now-wife Charlotte, whose worst nightmare is being faced with horizon-obscuring waves, but whose wildest dream was tuna fishing off Portland.
Or at least she’d said she wanted to go tuna fishing, I think, and I thought it’d make a good birthday present for her and whoever else she cared to take.
What People Are Saying
“A beautiful meditation on life through fishing.”
— Nan McNab
“An essential addition to any library, fly-fishing or otherwise.”
— Philip Weigall
