Breakfast at Trout's Place: The Seasons of an Alaskan Flyfisher - Softcover

The worked-over fly-fishing memoir gets a fresh sheen with Ken Marsh's tales from the Alaskan outback. A lifelong resident and editor of Alaska Magazine, Marsh has no need for wide-eyed descriptions of hairy bush plane flights or last-frontier soliloquies. Moreover, he gracefully sidesteps previous touchstones of the genre such as midlife crisis, midlife travel, and midlife discovery that equate fish as savior. Alaska is his savior, and while the fishing is good, what really sticks in the end is Marsh's evocative treatment of his stomping grounds.

When I was young, grayling were for me what bluegills often are for kids in the Lower Forty-eight: the first fish, common, generally easy to catch. Starting at age five, wearing rubber break-up boots and a second-hand wool jacket, I spent my Augusts along the gravel bars of the Nelchina River country fly-fishing for them while my elders hunted caribou.

Marsh sings his way along a Prince William Sound sea-run cutthroat creek to ward off lurking grizzlies; wrestles "bat-eating monsters" in a secret Susitna Valley creek; escapes upstream from the Kenai River hordes to pursue salmon in peace. These are not predictable tales of redemption and big fish; Marsh brings to these pages a sense of the mystery that is so essential to good angling literature, as in this extended metaphor for his uncommon local cutthroats:

There are certain items, mostly among the gear I use for hunting and fishing, that exist in an odd sort of limbo: a folding knife I've kept since boyhood, a bag of spare fly lines, a harmonica I sometimes take on wilderness trips. These things are never quite lost. Sometimes, one or another will vanish for extended periods--a summer, a year, occasionally, longer. But in time, they always turn up, out of the periphery, normally when I least expect them. Cutthroat trout possess a similar vagueness.

Anglers dreaming of Alaska would do well to dip into Ken Marsh's clear-eyed remembrances from a lifetime of fishing the state's seemingly endless waters; outdoors enthusiasts looking for a good read would, too.

Ken Marsh is the former outdoor editor, managing editor, and editor-in-chief of "Alaska Magazine," where he also created the award-winning "Hindsight" column.