A life way beyond fish

Lani Waller brings a wry humor and an adventurous spirit to his writing, and in this deeply personal collection of short stories and essays, he makes it clear that pleasure in the outdoors isn’t always about rivers or angling for the great fish in them; it’s about being solidly connected to the things that you love.

In one essay, he details his near-death experience after his Cessna crashed into the Babine River in northern British Columbia, Canada. (His torn-up body survived after a brush with the other side, but his three companions were killed.) There is a humorous account of his growing up in the ‘50s fishing the Klamath River in Northern California, and the account about the death of his mother is especially heartbreaking. There are also plenty of angling adventures with steelhead, tarpon and marlin, but Waller’s real gifts to the angling world are his power of observation and a heart as big as the outdoors he clearly loves.

-- Michael Koehn