A prepossessing journey through Wisconsin's driftless area in
search of fish-though not only fish-that's as pleasurably
meandering as any of the spring creeks found there. In the
southwest corner of Wisconsin lies the driftless area, where the
glaciers, for reasons still not understood, failed to reach. Unlike
the smoothed country surrounding it, the driftless area is punched,
crumpled, and unleveled. Through it, a number of spring creeks run,
lovely miniatures: immediate, vivid, intimate waters that Leeson
(The Gift of Trout, 1996, etc.) makes it his job to get to know.
And he does, acutely. The fish might have drawn him to these
locales-to Jerusalem, Emerald, and Mariposa creeks, though the
names are all changed to protect the innocent waterways-but it's
not long before Leeson enters into a discriminating rapport with
the entire landscape: the clarity, steadiness, and quiet beauty of
the water; the hummingbirds; the jewelweed and wild mint; the lay
of the land. He gets to know the place by beating the bounds,
discerning the areas of specific streams and their environs as they
fit his personal notion of perfection, then ranging out, "riding to
the hounds of possibility," with fishing as the spur but not the
real deal: The sense of place overrides the throwing of a line on
water. Leeson chinks his story with bits and pieces of Midwest
sociology and Wisconsin history, stories of his chums, and
recountings of those particularly rare days on the streams that
"transport us outside of ourselves and envelope us in a kind of
perpetual present." These aren't the elite spring creeks of
Pennsylvania, California, or Montana, but they well afford Leeson a
chance to take his bearings and patrol the borders of his own
sensibilities. They've made a humble transcendentalist memoir of a
fly fisherman. A wonder-working landscape, appreciatively rendered.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Every existence has its pulse points," writes Ted Leeson in this
brilliant new book, "those places where life rises somehow closer
to the surface and makes itself more keenly felt. Spring creeks
have been mine." Jerusalem Creek is an exploration into the unique
landscape and of the "driftless area" of Wisconsin. Left untouched
by a succession of glaciers that continually reshaped the
surrounding territory, the driftless area slowly weathered into a
region of hundreds of narrow valleys carved by hundreds of small
spring creeks that, taken together, make up ten thousand square
miles of trout country. But for all its size, the driftless country
"is a geography of small concealments" - of coves and hollows, oak
groves and shady bends, winding brooks and trout: "It is not a
landscape that you hike up, or climb down into, or stand out
looking upon; it is one that you slip inside of," and this book
presents the view from within. From the rumour of an old fishing
log that first sends him into driftless country in search of trout,
to a recognition of the loss and compromise that lie at the heart
of many landscapes and many lives, Leeson reflects on waters and
people - and the nature of his spring creek country. At times
thoughtful and hilarious, passionate and wry, he journeys into the
special charms of small-scale waters and pastoral spaces; the
nature of meandering in trout streams and trout fishermen;
ruminations on dairy cows, honeybees, and the Midwestern character,
family and angling companions, Amish farmsteads, the memory of a
missing photograph, the equivocal dream of owning a trout stream,
the ways in which the past endures in the present. Jerusalem Creek
tells the story of how we create the places we love - and how they
in turn create us. This is a wise, poignant, and haunting book.
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