Downstream: Reflections on Brook Trout, Fly Fishing, and the Waters of Appalachia - Hardcover

by David L. O'Hara (Author), Matthew T. Dickerson (Author), Nick Lyons (Foreword by)

Downstream: Reflections on Brook Trout, Fly Fishing, and the Waters of Appalachia is a mosaic combining nature writing, fly-fishing narrative, memoir, and philosophical and spiritual inquiry. Fly-fishing narratives and fragments of memoir provide the narrative arc for exploring relationships between humans and rivers, and the ways in which our attitudes and philosophies impact our practices and the waters we depend on for life. The authors guide their readers on a journey from Maine's Androscoggin watershed--once one of the ten filthiest rivers in the United States and now home to some of the best wild brook trout fishing in the United States--southward through Kentucky into Tennessee and North Carolina, where a native southern strain of brook trout struggles to survive. Like the rivers themselves, the chapters alternate between flowing narratives and the stiller waters that settle out above dams. While each stone in this mosaic is worth a close look in its own right, seen from a distance the book offers a broader picture of the cold mountain waters of Appalachia and their famous native fish: the brook trout.

Author Biography

David O'Hara is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD. He is a graduate of Middlebury College, St John's College, and Penn State. At Augustana College, he teaches courses in the history of ideas, environment and nature, American philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He teaches outdoors whenever he can, including an annual course in rainforest and reef ecology in Guatemala and Belize; field trips to the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota; and frequent lectures under the large tree at the center of Augustana's campus quad. Matthew Dickerson is a professor at Middlebury College (Vermont) where he has taught essay-writing courses on nature and ecology and on the literature of fishing. His other books include The Rood and the Torc (an historical novel), A Hobbit Journey (on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien), and two other narratives about fly fishing, trout, and ecology: A Tale of Three Rivers and Trout in the Desert. Previous coauthored books by Dickerson and O'Hara include Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook of Myth and Fantasy.For essays, photographs, and additional materials from the authors of this book, please visit www.troutdownstream.net