Often after I go on a fishing trip, when something exciting happened or when I catch a new species, I’ll email my fishing buddy several states away, Greg Keeler, to tell him the news:

Greg! I went to Huzzah Creek yesterday and caught a bunch of longear sunfish for the first time! Their bellies are so bright and bulbous, like little mangoes, and their vivid red eyes and blue serpentine lines blew my mind! I caught them on little rubber-leg buggers bounced off the cliff-face opposite the shoreline where I was wading. The strikes would happen right when they plonked into the water—.

Yet as I write the words, the images and memories get blurry, and they deteriorate somehow, and by the time I push the “Send” button, I feel kind of glum. I didn’t manage to recapture the magic, not at all.

Tim Schulz’s new book, A Cast Away in Montana, attempts to capture the magic. The book follows the author on a three-week mad dash trip from the upper peninsula of Michigan to Montana, zipping around Big Sky country meeting friends, encountering oddities and fishing lots of bodies of water and catching as many trout as he can (plus some whitefish and one grayling). The sheer pace of the trip was exhausting, and I found myself mentally counting the miles and hours as Schulz’s Suburban constellated Montana’s river access points. Schulz sleeps in his vehicle a lot, and the reader gradually inhabits that cramped space with him.

A Cast Away in Montana reminded me a bit of Jim Barilla’s wonderful first book, West with the Rise, which documents a similar self-deprecating sprint across legendary trout waters. Barilla’s book is anticipatory of the looming specter of fatherhood and its requisite evolution in responsibilities; Schulz’s book, on the other hand, is more retrospective and yet linked to this same theme by a closing chapter in which the author’s grown son joins him for a final adventure.

Schulz’s fishing scenes are a blur, but I suppose that’s kind of the point. Everything is a cast away—or just beyond reach in the irrecoverable past. It’s as if you as the reader feel the inevitable rift between the thrill of strikes and near-misses, and the recollection and recasting. This is a tricky territory, because it exposes something profoundly unsettling: this thing that we love can’t really be translated or communicated, or at least never fully. It sounds so obvious, and yet each time we snap a picture of a rainbow in our palm in the water or try to relay the scenery from our latest outing, we fall back into this familiar existential trap. I hate to use the presumptive “we” so much, but I really think it is something shared: flyfishing isolation and its communal discontents.

In Schulz’s book there are enjoyable meditations on the nature of consequences—Schulz brings a shrewd scientist’s eye to this everyday phenomenon—as well as on his strategy for insomnia: mentally tie flies and see how many you can get done before you doze off. I dig it. I’ve now been trying it, and I think it worked! But lately, my dreamwork soft-hackle streamers get finished, only to be fished, and then I get stuck in an unconscious loop where I’m casting them slightly upstream and watching them swoop with the current, ever undulating.

A Cast Away in Montana, which includes illustrations by Bob White, was published in May 2024 by Lyons Press.