Meeting the Mad Angler

By: Michael Delp

Several years ago, in the stupor of losing my best friend and premier fishing companion to cancer, I fell into a long sleep. From this distance I suppose it seems more like a kind of fever, but it was a black, long night. For the first time in my life coming almost awake I felt myself lifting out of a dark basement and I found myself on a dream river. This was like no other river I had ever seen. I knew instantly that I was fishing with my reconstituted friend in the dream confluence of all the rivers we had ever fished. I woke, fully, and lay in the sun, counting my blessing, that I had seen him once again and that I had fished in such lovely water.

Now I realize that I carried something else away from that dream. To borrow an image from Jim Harrison, if you put a linen shroud over the body of the United States you will soon see visible blotches of brown, sluggish water...hundreds of them, their meandering ways scattered all over the country, until they look like bloated veins, almost all connected to each other. American's rivers are literally under siege: development, pollutants, human traffic, bottled water industries...you name it and there is damage being done around the clock...you can se it on the markings on the shroud.... devastation, degradation, American's rivers as drains and gutters.

Stepping out of that dream so many years ago and riding with me for years after was a new persona, someone I have finally come to know as the "Mad Angler". And he's mad in two ways, really, mad as in angry at all this riverine destruction and mad as in crazy...loony, the bull-goose loony of rivers.

When he decides to speak he comes to me in the half-light, moves me away from the keyboard and does as he will. This is his first pronouncement:

I speak with the voice of water,
rivulet, brook, stream and creek,
or the whitewater in lost gorges,
boiling cataracts, every place
where the souls of wild fish gather
to remind us of the power of hydrology.

I speak with the name of rain,
with the soft lips of condensation,
even the dew which gathers each night,
every drop another transition from sky to earth.

I invoke the masses of insects to take over the world,
to begin the hatching and mating, sure in the fact
that tomorrow another dam will fail, another levee will crumble,
another river where you live will tire of its banks
and seek retribution on your lawn,
running up your driveway and into your basement.

I praise the flash flood,
the artesian well, the flowing hearts under out feet,
the webs of underground rivers
coursing through solid rock.

I fish in incantations, genuflections,
my body a living marker for the crest gauge,
tidal fluctuation, flood tides and fresh water sieches.
When my eye falls on rivers I praise their transparency,
their nature of shaping their way as they move. 

Water is my heart churning in a white hydraulic,
my tongue longing for a quiet pool, the skin of night
settling in, mayflies on the edge of moonlight
sifting out of the trees.

I praise the lust for emergences,
the urge to quit the job, convert the pension funds to
river frontage, the sudden impulse to carry the flyrod
into a meeting, the fly ripping at the lips of your superiors.
I embrace the chant of waterfalls, the litany of holy rivers:
Battenkill, Firehole, Bighorn.

I trust only the sweet smell of rotting cedar,
the scent of mudbanks festering with nymphs,
the rivers rising in my blood like an illness, a fever sent by
the god of desire to make his presence known, something jolting
through the veins to replace the done deal, the raise with a
corner office, the soul trader you most likely have become.

The Manifesto is excerpted from THE LAST GOOD WATER, WSU Press.

Michael Delp is an instructor of creative writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts