I was raised two miles from Canada, but this seemed to be the interior. Most of my trip from Vancouver to Campbell River had been over grizzly country, yet in those noble ranges I had seen some of the ugliest clear-cut logging. The woman who brought me my car had moved to Campbell River from the Yukon. My spirits rose. How did she like it here? Very well, she replied, but the shopping plaza in the Yukon was better. I wondered if she would have the same chance to marvel at decimation’s speed as we’d had at home.
From the largest seaplane base in North America, poised to survey the roadless country around us, to the hockey hints in the newspaper and the handsome salmon boats with names like Skeena Cloud and Departure Bay (despite the odd pleasure boat with Costa Lotsa on its transom), I knew I was in another country.
During my week of visiting Roderick Haig-Brown, at some inconvenience to his intensely filled schedule, I began to see that I had little chance of discovering that precise suppurating angst, that dismal or craven psychosis so indispensable to the author of short biographies.
I had fantasized a good deal about Haig-Brown’s life; angler, frontiersman, and man of letters, he seemed to have wrested a utopian situation for himself. So it was with some shock that I perceived his immersion in the core problems of our difficult portion of the twentieth century.
I knew that his work with the Pacific Salmon Commission represented an almost symbolically tortuous struggle for balanced use of a powerful resource among explosive political factions. But the hours I spent in his court did as much as anything to disabuse me of any cheerful notions that Haig-Brown’s clarity as a writer was the result of a well-larded sinecure.
A man brought before him for reckless and drunken driving allowed that he did not feel he was “speeding too awful much.” His speed was established by the arresting officer as something like 300 percent of the limit. The officer mentioned that the motorist had been impaired by drink and described the man’s spectacular condition. “I wasn’t all that impaired.” The numerical figure from the Breathalyzer test suggested utter saturation. The accused had heard these numbers against himself before, yet reiterated doggedly that he hadn’t been “impaired that awful much,” before giving up.
A young logger and his girlfriend who had run out on a hotel bill were the next to appear. What did he do, Haig-Brown inquired, referring to the specifics of the young man’s profession. Boomed and set chokers. Haig-Brown nodded; he, too, had been a logger, and one who’d blown up his inherited Jeffries shotgun trying to make fireworks in camp on New Year’s Eve.
“You are addicted to heroin, aren’t you?” Haig-Brown asked the sturdy young man. The logger replied that he was; so was his girlfriend. He had always lived between here and Powell River, had only had eight dollars the last time he got out of jail, and so on. He and his girlfriend wanted to help each other get on the methadone program and feared their chances of doing so would be reduced if he went to jail.
The prosecutor wanted just that, but Haig-Brown released the young man on promise of restitution to the hotelkeeper and adjourned to his chambers, where his mongrel dog slept in front of the desk. I asked what he thought about the young logger. “He’s probably conning me,” Haig-Brown said, then added with admiration, “but he’s a marvelous talker, isn’t he?” Haig-Brown believes that a magistrate who risks an accused man’s liberty risks his own honor as well.
Haig-Brown feels himself in the presence of the potentially ridiculous at all times, yet does not seem to feel that his position as magistrate or as chancellor of the University of Victoria separates him by nature from the people who come before his court. And when he talks about the scheme to dam the Fraser River and wipe out the major run of Pacific salmon, a toothy smile forms around the stem of his pipe and he says, “Bastards!”
After court one day, we stopped to buy some wine. While he shopped, I wandered through the store and discovered some curious booze called (I think) Hoopoe Schnapps. I brought it up to the cash register to show Haig-Brown. “Bring it.” He grinned. “We’ll take it home and try it.”
We spent a number of evenings in his study and library, where I prodded him to talk about himself. He would stand with one foot tipped forward like a cavalier in an English painting, knocking his pipe on his heel from time to time, trying to talk about anything besides himself: his children; Thomas Hardy, whom as a child he’d actually seen; his literary heroes like Richard Jeffries and Henry Fielding; the great Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
Eventually my persistence led him to sketch his schooling at Charterhouse; his attempts to get into the shrinking colonial service; his emigration to Canada; his experience during the Second World War as a major in the Canadian Army on loan to the Mounted Police; his life as a logger, angler, conservationist, university administrator, and writer. As he stood amid an Edwardian expanse of well-bound books, sipping brandy and wearing a cowboy belt buckle with a bighorn ram on it, the gift of the Alberta Fish and Game Department, I began to visualize that powerful amalgamation and coherence of a successful frontiersman. In Haig-Brown, a Western Canadian with roots in Thomas Hardy’s England, I imagined I saw a pure instance of the genre.
He had just made his first trip back to wander the streams he had fished and the places of his childhood unseen in forty years. I asked how it had been.
“It was like being psychoanalyzed,” he said.
Such a life does not produce sentimentalists.
AS TIME GOES BY, Roderick Haig-Brown seems to rise higher in our esteem. Not many years after I visited him, he died. It’s clear there was no one around to replace him.
At that time, fishing was still enjoying its last esoteric days, and had neither been invaded by the current numbers of people nor tormented by the new technologies. We were still in the reassuring hands of fine old generalists like Ray Bergman and Ted Trueblood.
Haig-Brown began as an Englishman, a European, looking at the rapidly disappearing empire with colonial habits of mind, a thoroughly democratic disposition and the matter-of-fact sense that he would have to make a life for himself. He settled in the Canadian Northwest for a while, very much an emigrant. During World War II, his thoroughgoing travel in all of Canada while on secondement to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was, I remember Ann Haig-Brown saying, “the making of a Canadian.” I think by then he felt quite detached from his British origins — perhaps on purpose — and had not particularly enjoyed a recent visit to his first home. Happily, I believe he retained his English view of amateur sport and its importance in everyday life. His many confirming expressions seemed a real tonic in the face of the professionalization of American sport at every level. One pictures a logo-festooned Haig-Brown with enormous difficulty. Americans and probably Canadians are sufficiently tainted by Calvinism to feel that to play is to sin or waste time, so we assuage our guilt by associating ourselves with manufacturers so that our days afield reveal the higher purposes of product research, promotion, and development.
Haig-Brown was after different game. He was trying to define the space we give to angling in our lives, and to determine its value, by finding its meaning in his own life. Most fishermen do this, remembering their first waters, their mentors, their graduation through various methods; there is for each of us a need to understand and often to tell our own story in fishing. It is this that gives Haig-Brown’s work its lasting quality, despite writing that is often quite impromptu, ranging from absentminded and repetitious to sublime, like life. It is this plein air quality, with triumphs accorded no greater emphasis than failure and boredom, that spares so much of his work the calamitous mustiness that afflicts most fishing writing after a while, particularly that which tells us how to fish.