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If you read Le Mouching, you’ve probably got fishing in your blood, and every day you need something, at least a small thing, to remind you of the river and its smells, the cold water, the stones… And probably, just like us, you’re some kind of a puzzle for your loved ones. All that time, that desire, all that energy that’s gone with the river. What is it? What do we look for?

Karolane has a partner who’s one of us, over there in Québec, Canada. She took her camera and followed him on the river, maybe to capture something of the mad desire of the fly fisherman…

[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/257952979]

The most famous quote about this is attributed to Thoreau : Many men fish all their lives without ever realizing that it is not the fish they are after. And just because we love you, we’ll share the secret with you: Thoreau never wrote that, but Baughman in A River Seen Right thinks he did. What Thoreau actually wrote about it in his Journal (January 26, 1853) goes like this:

It is remarkable that many men will go with eagerness to Walden Pond in the winter to fish for pickerel and yet not seem to care for the landscape. Of course it cannot be merely for the pickerel they may catch; there is some adventure in it; but any love of nature which they may feel is certainly very slight and indefinite. They call it going a-fishing, and so indeed it is, though perchance, their natures know better. Now I go a-fishing and a-hunting every day, but omit the fish and the game, which are the least important part. I have learned to do without them. They were indispensable only as long as I was a boy. I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay so much stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught.