Bookshelf: Rivers Always Reach the Sea

They do: Rivers always run to the sea. But they rarely course a straight path, or flow unimpeded and unchecked, or arrive at their final briny destination looking anything at all like they did in their vernal beginnings. Each river travels its own journey, and few enjoy passage unmarked by humankind. It’s those journeys that Monte Burke is most interested in throughout his new collection of stories, Rivers Always Reach the Sea. A river’s ultimate destination is less interesting than its cobbled, braided, beleaguered, and sometimes—thankfully—restored flows. When the right person casts a fly into such waters, there’s a good chance that the prize has already been caught.

Collections are tricky, and as one who has published a number of them, I attest to the challenge of creating a meaningful whole out of pieces and parts that have accumulated over the years. On the one hand, you want to craft a book that holds together and makes sense on its own two feet. On the other hand, you know that readers are going to dip and dive into the thing like a tern picking at glass minnows, never returning to precisely the same spot for the next morsel. So, you must serve two masters: the deliverer of the quick fix and the source of deeper introspection. Dopamine and complex carbohydrates, and it’s an uneasy alliance between the two.

Monte Burke has proved to be a leading contemporary voice for all things fly, with book-length reporting (Lords of the Fly, Saban, 4th & Goal, Sowbelly), long-form magazine narrative (he’s a contributing editor for Forbes, Garden & Gun, and The Drake), and plenty of short personal essays. The stories in Rivers Always Reach the Sea are taken from those titles plus ForbesLife, Field & Stream, The FlyFish Journal, Fly Rod & Reel, the Tom Beckbe Field Journal, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. Although he can’t seem to shake his affinity for lesser endeavors such as writing about football—he has an upcoming book about coach Pete Carroll—Burke’s best-selling and genre-widening Lords of the Fly cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s leading chroniclers and translators of the sport.

Burke is a storyteller, for sure, and he’s also a writer’s writer. Beyond the fishing and adventures and shenanigans, I was struck by his facility for intertwining powerful literary devices throughout his writing. He crafts stories, paragraphs, and lines like he’s building the body of a complex fly, and delivers with the pinpoint accuracy required of a pressured Keys tarpon. A northwest wind raking across a jetty is akin to “Longfellow’s Keewaydin,” Burke writes, tipping his hand that he paid attention during his English classes.

Chaucer makes an appearance, as do Ken Kesey and Sparse Grey Hackle and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. In back-to-back paragraphs, we find Robert Frost and Cormac McCarthy. Not many could pull that off. In an essay about losing a secret fishing spot in the Bahamas, perhaps my favorite in the book, Burke writes that the loss “feels like the Fall of Man, a stripping away of some sort of innocence—unfair, but also a revealing of your naked covetousness.” We’ve all been there. The line makes me think Burke might also have spent some time in Alabama and North Carolina Sunday school classes.

He’s also clearly a well-read fan of the early chroniclers of our continent. He puts us in the footsteps of Henry Hudson, anchored in Jamaica Bay, and Giovanni da Verrazzano, and Jacques Cartier, and the Lenapes, whose island they called Mannahatta, which could still be described as the “land of many hills,” although far fewer clear streams. This is aspirational writing, firmly affixed in the pantheon of literature. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. It was a joy to trip along with his plain ol’ gut-punches of description. The Staten Island Ferry “is a big orange behemoth that smells like a giant urinal mint.” That’s gold, right there.

But I’m picking the good gooey caramels out of the chocolate box, because I’m partial to gooey caramels, literary devices, and colonial explorers. What matters more than Burke’s stylish phrasing is the collective weight of the words. Writing about what you love extracts a toll from the very thing you love, and writing well enough to make a living means writing a mountain of words. It’s fun and games, but less so than you might think. As much as Burke has given to fly fishing over the decades—sacrificing time away from his wife and three daughters, miles and days and weeks on the road, all the fun he could have had playing pickleball instead—it’s what fly fishing has given him that comes through most clearly in Rivers Always Reach the Sea.

There are the tangibles, the life lessons from the fly pole. “Pursuing difficult fish requires an optimism that sometimes must be forced,” he writes. “It demands patience, problem-solving, and an appreciation for nuance. All these things are like muscles: work them harder and they get stronger.” And there are the intangibles: memories and friendships, the knowledge of what has been lost, the bitter taste of what may be futile to attempt to regain. For Burke, the abstract and the concrete, like the giving and the taking, run together. Like a river at the mouth of the sea.

Burke uses a fishing term that I don’t use, which means nothing other than the fact that I want to underscore it as I wrap this up. Jamaica Bay “fishes,” he writes. I’ve heard the term applied to all sorts of places. A particular rock “fishes.” A tidal rip at a specific time “fishes.” It’s a line you don’t hear much in my neck of the swamp, but I like it. It recognizes both the physical and spiritual components of certain special places. If a place “fishes,” it offers opportunity. It gives, nourishes, and blesses. It delivers. Burke fishes.

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