Walk on Water: A Memoir

Readers of Lorian Hemingway's memoir about salvation through fishing will be let in on a secret known to anglers through the ages: the act of fishing is a physical embodiment of hope--and for some it is a form of recovery. "I take fish personally," writes Hemingway in the opening chapter of Walk on Water, a seemingly coy statement that is proved repeatedly in these pages. A juvenile bass rescued from a pothole shrinking in the hot sun--a fish saved in the innocence of childhood--is her first piscine connection, followed by the care of a southern-fried cook named Catfish. But innocence fades, and it is not until many years later--after an adolescence blurred by alcohol, dope, and larceny--that the author rediscovers the redemptive qualities of fishing. Now living in the opposite corner of the country, she learns to stalk the Northwest's coldwater fish while raising a daughter and partaking of the natural world's rejuvenating life cycle: "I have fished with my daughter on a stretch of the Alsea River in Oregon that runs through vine maple forest where moon dollar beams of light spot the forest floor, the pattern shifting with the wind. In autumn the leaves bleed scarlet and the air is tinted pink with the refraction of all that red. High in the trees pileated woodpeckers knock a beat and red-tailed hawks glide above the canopy." The end of the line, it turns out, is alive with possibility.