WATER LINES

Bite-sized essays celebrating life, love, and water.

Gathered largely from The Flyfish Journal and Patagonia’s The Cleanest Line blog, most of these 32 essays center on fly-fishing excursions. Nakadate lives in Houston, and many of his tales are set in the rivers, lakes, and salt marshes of his home state. He also travels around the American Southwest, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, as well as Mexico, South Africa, and Swedish Lapland. We gradually learn his story: His single mother, of Cherokee and Irish heritage, gave him his first name and a love of water; his Japanese American dad gave him his last name and a love of literature. Reading these essays is a bit like sitting around a campfire by a lake at night, listening to Nakadate muse about his numerous adventures, large and small: his falls and scrapes on his way to isolated fishing spots; his encounters with orphaned baby squirrels in Texas, a crocodile on the Yucatán Peninsula, and a potato grouper off the coast of Mozambique. On the Texas-Oklahoma border, he lies on his back in a canoe to take in a total eclipse: “The whole lake and woods turn a dark, indigo silvery-blue, and Jupiter, Venus, and other stars awaken and brightly shimmer in the skies,” he writes. “None of this seems believable.” A natural-born storyteller, Nakadate can turn on a dime from amusing and wry to pithy and aphoristic, then wind up charming and sweet. “Sometimes in life you just have to get on the path and see what happens,” he writes. “That’s never been a problem for me; I’ve got escapism issues. I think it happened when I was born.” A bonus: This handsome book is graced by Stephens’ serene watercolor illustrations.

A delicious collection to be savored individually or as a whole.