I felt oddly content as I sat at the bottom of the canyon, and willing to wait to fish again until I absorbed it all, the idea of the streamlined shapes coming in from the sea, by the moon, by the tide, by whatever mystery, up through the sheep pastures, bent on some eternal genetic strategy. They know what they’re doing.
Roderick Haig-Brown
FOR MANY WHO REGARD angling as the symptom of a way of living rather than a series of mechanical procedures, the writing of Roderick Haig-Brown serves as scripture. He is a genuinely famous fisherman in an era when famous fishermen scramble to name flies and knots after themselves with a self-aggrandizing ardor unknown since the Borgia popes. Anyone who has sat in on the bad-mouth sessions at fly shops and guides’ docks will welcome the serene observations of a man more interested in fish than fishing, and in the whole kingdom of nature rather than holding water and hot spots.
There is scarcely an angler so avid that he doesn’t spend most of his time not angling; much of the time, because of the inclemency of weather or the demands of work or the inferiority of actuality to fantasy, he pursues his sport in what is called “the armchair.” There are any number of armchair anglers who do not own armchairs and often are harmless creatures whose minds have beaten out everything else for the control of things, and for them the theory of the sport lies heavily upon the sport itself.
Others use the armchair, actual or not, selectively, to read and to think, and at such times they’re susceptible to the guidance of men who have written about this peerless sport which affects the world’s fortunes not at all. For them there is no better place to turn than to the work of Roderick Haig-Brown.
That much has been clear for some time: Haig-Brown’s prominence in this fugitive literature is seldom doubted. His series Fisherman’s Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter is an integral part of the bookshelf of every angler who thinks about what he is doing. Measure of the Year, Return to the River, and The Western Angler amplify that great series and lead to increasingly broad preoccupations within his sport, until the reader shares with Haig-Brown a continuity of perceptions from the tying of small brilliant flies to the immeasurable and celestial movements of fish in migration. Finally, he accounts for the ways the angler holds his fishing grounds in trust, because I suppose before anything else Haig-Brown is a conservationist.
He lived in Campbell River, British Columbia, and one summer I decided to pay him a visit, not, I hasten to admit, without some trepidation. Sportsman, magistrate, prose stylist of weight, Haig-Brown seems artfully contrived to make me feel in need of a haircut and refurbished credentials. I wanted to withdraw my novels from publication and extirpate the bad words, reduce the number of compliant ladies by as much as 96 percent.
As I winged my way north, the Rockies, in my present mood, unrolled themselves beneath me like skin trouble. A drunk boarded the plane in Spokane and was assigned the seat next to mine. He wore a shiny FBI drip-dry summer suit and a pair of armadillo cowboy boots. He told me he couldn’t fly sober and that since he was doing emergency heart surgery in Seattle that afternoon, he certainly didn’t have time to drive.
“At three o’clock,” he explained, “I’m going to thwack open a guy’s heart and I’m already half in the bag. I may have to farm this mother out. I’m totaled.” He leaned over to look out the window. “Aw, hell,” he said, “I’ll end up doing it. It’s my dedication. Think about this: when the hero of Kafka’s Metamorphosis wakes up and discovers that he’s been transformed into a giant beetle, the first thing he does is call the office and tell his boss he’s going to be delayed. Where are you headed?”
I explained about my trip. As a reply, I suppose, my seatmate told me he’d seen matadors in the Plaza de Toros fighting a giant Coca-Cola bottle as it blew around the arena in the wind; ultimately it was drawn from the ring behind two horses and to resonant olés, just like a recently dispatched bull. “Tell that to your buddy Haig-Brown. He’s a writer. He’ll like that story.”
At this point, my companion confessed that he wasn’t a doctor. He was an inventor. He’d come up with an aluminum ring that you put over the exhaust pipe of your automobile; stretched across the ring was a piece of cheesecloth. An antipollution device, it was already patented in twelve states. “If you kick in twenty thousand,” he said, “I can let you have half the action when we go public.”
“Well, I don’t know—”
“I’ve got a friend who sold ten million smackers’ worth of phony stock and got a slap on the wrist from the Securities Commission. This is free enterprise, pal. Shit or get off the pot.”
“I just don’t see how I—”
“How about your friend Haig-Brown? Maybe he can buy in. Maybe he can stake you and the two of you can split the action. What say?”
In Vancouver, I spent a long layover waiting for the small plane to Campbell River. There were a number of people whose small luggage suggested a weekend trip to Vancouver, an enormously muscular girl in hot pants, and a number of loggers. At one point I looked up from the book I was reading to see a familiar face. It was Roderick Haig-Brown, lost in conversation with the ordinary people around me, many of whom seemed to know him.
I introduced myself and we flew north together, Haig-Brown describing the country of mountain ranges and fjordlike inlets beneath us with great specificity. Everything we saw provoked further instances of his local knowledge, and despite his modesty as a storyteller (and he is a meticulous listener), I was reminded of his two great strengths as a writer: his command of anecdote and his ability to reason.
When I told him about the surgeon-inventor I’d just escaped in Seattle, his chin dropped to his chest and he laughed convulsively. I began to be able to see him.
Haig-Brown is British-born and somehow looks it. Though the great share of his life has been spent as a Canadian, you think instead of the “county” English for whom culture and sport are not mutually exclusive. To say that he is a youthful sixty-three suggests nothing to those who know him; he is neither sixty-three nor, it would seem, any other age. He is rather tall, strong, and thin. He is bald on top, and the prelate’s band of hair that he retains sticks out behind like a merganser in profile. His eyes are intent and clear and suggest such seriousness that it is surprising how quickly he laughs. He has a keen appreciation of genuine wit, but will accept whatever is going. He relished Mister Hulot’s Holiday.
By the time we approached Campbell River, Haig-Brown was at my urging describing his origin as a lay magistrate in the British Columbia courts. “Well, my predecessor as magistrate was a teetotaler and didn’t drive an automobile, and he was hard on the loggers and fishermen who were my friends.”
We landed on the edge of the forest and Haig-Brown’s wife, Ann, met us in a car that said on its bumper: LET’S BLOW UP THE WORLD. WE’LL START WITH AMCHITKA. Both Haig-Browns, I was to see, had a sense of belonging to a distinct political and cultural entity that seems so fresh among Canadians today as to be something of a discovery both for them and for the Americans who see it. The inherent optimism — this was back in the seventies — was in some ways painful for an American to observe. But to a man like Haig-Brown, whose formal judicial district is some ten thousand square miles of mostly wilderness, it would be difficult not to be inspired by the frontier.
The Haig-Browns headed home, caught up in their own talk, while I waited for my rented car. Later Ann Haig-Brown would ask me quite ingenuously, “Isn’t Roddy wonderful?”