Fishing With My Fathers

Book excerpt: “Between fish, my father and I, two men who are as comfortable with each other’s voice as we are with each other’s silences, talk about the purpose of things, and how everything fits into the overall design.” This book is like no memoir you’ve ever read. Paul Rath writes with the soul of a poet, his prose alive with vibrant images and metaphors that capture the raw beauty and challenges of fishing for white fish in the frigid November air – “when the wind takes us into her cold mouth, and crunches us between her teeth. Her cold makes our eyes freeze – until they feel like stones, frozen in their sockets of mud ...” Yet this no mere fish story. As much as this book is about fishing, it is even more about relationships. Fishing with My Fathers explores the deep bonds that form between men of the earth, between men and the land and the water and the creatures that feed their spirits. Rath, the eldest son of a Lutheran pastor, pays homage to his father and tribute to the men who shaped and challenged him, even as he claimed his own space and place in their lineage. With wonderful humour and genuine sensitivity, he regales the reader with tales of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, as well as of his mentors – of the men who taught him how to grow up, how to control his emotions, how to work, how to grow his spirit, how to love, as well as how to fish.