Howard Schaap: Author Brooding Upon the Waters
“What is most emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences—the unproductive periods.”
Howard Schaap on Fishing, Faith, Failure & Finding Home in the American Landscape | The Storied Outdoors
What can fishing, farming, failure, faith, and a particular place teach us about who we are? On this episode of The Storied Outdoors, we sit down with Howard Schaap, author of Brooding Upon the Waters: A Memoir of Farming, Fishing, and Failure in America’s Lost Landscape, for a deeply reflective conversation about rural America, fishing, family, faith, land, memory, and the search for rootedness.
Howard Schaap grew up in rural Minnesota during the farm crisis of the 1980s, a period that profoundly shaped his understanding of farming, family, community, failure, and the American landscape. In his memoir, he weaves together stories of fishing and fly fishing, rural life, family history, mental illness, depression, faith, and the decline of rural communities. His writing reminds us that our stories do not happen in the abstract—they happen in particular places.
In this conversation, Howard reflects on the creek below his childhood home, the fishing holes and rural landscapes that shaped him, and why he eventually felt drawn back to the places he had left behind. We explore the importance of sense of place, the loss of rural traditions, and what happens when people become increasingly disconnected from land, community, and history.
We also talk honestly about failure and grace. Howard shares stories of unsuccessful fishing trips and reflects on the “long silences” of fishing and the ways those experiences can become a window into the silences of God. Drawing on Tom McGuane’s The Longest Silence and Wendell Berry’s writing on rural America, we consider what fishing, farming, and failure can teach us about patience, hope, and grace.
Howard also brings a rich Christian and biblical imagination to the conversation. We discuss the Genesis picture of God hovering over the waters, the biblical vision of the new heavens and the new earth, and what it means to imagine redemption through the particular landscapes we know and love. Howard shares a moving picture of his father, his last walleye, and the hope of a restored creation—imagined not as an abstract eternity, but through the familiar waters and places that have carried our stories.
Along the way, we discuss Charles Ingalls and Little House on the Prairie, Wendell Berry, Tom McGuane, fly fishing, rural Minnesota, the American farm crisis, family legacy, conservation, tradition, and the longing many people feel today to become rooted in a particular place.
This episode is ultimately a conversation about how place shapes identity, how failure can open our eyes to grace, and how fishing and the outdoors can become places of reflection, prayer, memory, and hope.
If you love fly fishing, outdoor stories, rural America, conservation, Christian faith, Wendell Berry, Tom McGuane, storytelling, farming, hunting, fishing, or thoughtful conversations about what it means to live a rooted life, this episode of The Storied Outdoors is for you.
“Been a long struggle with dad, But I know now which point we are at. The one where we look forward to that other shore. Like that other fisherman, Huck Finn, I have not time for visions of robes and harps, for eternal praise and worship. So I try to imagine a new earth but with local pictures. Like the fish breakfast Jesus made for his disciples after a long night of fishing, except its on the shores of Lake Wilson”