Not too many years ago, Denis “Dee” Dauphinee likely would have been spending his winter somewhere spectacular, climbing mountains, shooting photos and fly fishing for some species or other.
Now, at 55 years old, the Bradley writer and former adventurer admits he has slowed down a bit over the past few years.
“It’s not the years [that slow me down], though,” Dauphinee said. “It’s the mileage.”
That’s not to say Dauphinee is sitting around, relaxing. In fact, he’s wrapping up work on two books, including a sequel to “Stoneflies and Turtleheads,” a collection of essays about his globetrotting, fly-fishing past. A new collection, which he’s calling “Something’s Wrong With My Fly,” is due out in August.
In May, he’s hoping to release a work of historical fiction called “Highlanders Without Kilts,” which commemorates an epic World War I battle fought by a Canadian battalion that included two distant relatives.
He also wrote a novel released in 2013 called “The River Home,” a gripping love story told under the template of — you guessed it — a man’s passion for fly fishing.
Dauphinee is particularly proud of “Highlanders Without Kilts,” the real-life version of which has intrigued him since he backpacked across Europe in 1988.
Dauphinee explains he found himself at a memorial for the Battle of Vimy Ridge and wound up talking with an elderly Frenchman who asked him if he knew what had happened on that hallowed ground.
When Dauphinee admitted he didn’t, the man told the story of the battle and of the hundreds of thousands who died there. Among them, Dauphinee learned, was a Canadian who shared his last name — a distant relative.
“[Writing] the book was a tall order, because also that year [1917, a massive explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, killed thousands],” Dauphinee said.
His book’s protagonist is from Halifax, and the city’s tragedy also needed to fit into his narrative, he said.
Dauphinee spent time researching the battle and the Halifax explosion, in Toronto and in Novia Scotia. At one stop, he visited a museum in Halifax that holds the mortuary bags that once held the remains of 2,000 killed in the explosion.
On each bag was a description of personal effects found on the victims, as well as a description of the injuries suffered.
“The one that got me most was [a description that read] ‘a pencil, an army man, and a penny,’” Dauphinee said. “It said, ‘Boy. About age 10. Can’t describe.’ That’s all it said on the tag.”
While Canadian schoolchildren learn about the battle, Vimy Ridge isn’t nearly as well-known in the states. Dauphinee said it’s difficult to understate how important the battle is to Canadians.
“[Canadians] gained their military history at Vimy Ridge and at subsequent battles. And a lot of people consider it the birth of a nation,” Dauphinee said. “Whether it was or not, they did do great things before that. But they certainly gained an altered sense of self after Vimy Ridge.”
In “Something’s Wrong With My Fly,” Dauphinee will retell a few of his favorite stories earned during a wild and woolly decade spent traveling the world in search of adventure.
The collection of essays have been relatively easy to create, he said.
“I have 28 journals [from that time period] that are full,” he said. “And in those, other than journal entries, are photos and notes and gifts from people, barroom napkins from with notes jotted on them. It’s fun to go through them, and the process of writing is the most fun.”
Dauphinee said he began traveling the world back in 1981, when he began learning from professional photographers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
“I got good enough — just barely,” Dauphinee said. “There were much better photographers than me, but I was willing to crawl in a swamp for a mile to get a photograph. I was also willing to go into harm’s way. I was young and silly and not too smart, and I signed on with war correspondents a couple of times. I was in Nicaragua and in El Salvador. I was in Beirut once. Places like that.”
He also became a mountaineering guide and took clients to some of the world’s highest peaks.
And at each stop, there were a couple of constants.
First, he kept notes in his journals.
Second, he fished.
“Everywhere I went, on any photographic trip — and some were just mountaineering pleasure trips — I took my fly rod, and I fished every ditch I could.”
