Frankly, revealing what a day astream means is a good bit harder than describing an eight-part nymph leader or showing the reader where to place his feet when sneaking up on an undercut bank. Fishing is infinitely subjective and we sense, I think rightly, that all instruction is unreliable. After a century of science in materials and the design of fly rods, no generally accepted set of tapers for a trout rod exists. There is more objective agreement about cellos, fiber optics, and nuclear submarines. Haig-Brown’s work rests most firmly on those subjective issues that seem to last better.
Haig-Brown discovered that the meaning of fishing lies more in its context than its practice: a day alone on a remote steelhead river; floating with your child; fishing a lake with your family when picnic preparations overpower the angler’s concentration; seeking a fish whose race is threatened by your own or whose ancestral breeding grounds have been lost to town crooks. Fishing is sometimes about a disinclination to go fishing at all. An important part of life, maybe the most important part, is the quest by each of us to discover something we believe to be more worthy and permanent than we are individually. Haig-Brown persuades us that the truth which angling can lead to about our place in nature is one such greater thing.
In generic fishing literature, the angler is always raring to go. Fishing is forever a challenging problem the angler usually solves. In the end, he admits it was tough but knows he will try again, for that’s the kind of stuff he’s made of; in short, group attitudes, as in a fraternity. We float the river, rain or shine; we always use antelope fur; we always stop for a big bag of doughnuts and hot coffee on our way to the stream; and so forth. By comparison, Haig-Brown is a lone wolf. Not that he’s antisocial. My most pressing memory of my visit to Campbell River was of someone embedded in a community, a wizard at making diverse people comfortable in his presence. He was a natural leader and probably never thought about it. In person, he was considerably more presidential than our last five presidents, and if he had possessed just a sliver of vigorous fraudulence, he might well have risen to great political prominence. Forgoing such shortcuts, he was nevertheless chancellor of the University of Victoria, a member of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission, and the magistrate for a vast area larded with wilderness, seacoast, and often perfunctory human settlements.
Does all this high-mindedness imply a detachment from the intriguing minutiae of fishing? Hardly. He was as unscientific and prone to voodoo in selecting a fly as you and I; in youth as vulnerable to booze-fueled miscalculation as any young bachelor; and in adulthood, according to one biographer who coiled himself around a man in every way his superior, prone to marvelous and imaginative follies supposed to discredit him in the eyes of frowning Christians. Indeed, Haig-Brown lived a life as any other except that it was richer than most and, from his bohemian stint in London to his logging days on Vancouver Island, higher in risk. Still, he found intimations of immortality in fishing and along rivers where ancient human instincts encounter nature at its most profoundly cyclical and mysterious, where human behavior is so clearly part of nature, where our detachment, even from the brevity of our own lives, is consoling.
Down Under
THE RIVERS of the world translate high-country snows to the salty rollers of mid-ocean. Some, like the Makarora of New Zealand or the Whale of Labrador, are images of perfection; the Nile and the Mississippi, images of deep history and civilization. Too often, the rivers we grow up with are like the Rouge or the Cuyahoga, rivers which catch fire or take the paint off the bottoms of ships. But even the worst ones are quite wonderful. I live among the smaller headwaters of the Missouri, crystal cabinets of moving trout water that begin in watercress. Eventually their waters move thousands of miles, ending in drifting sludge, syringes, and condoms before debauching into the Gulf of Mexico. These intimate by-products of man-the-party-animal are the most appalling things transported by moving water in its several manifestations. But if you love rivers you have to take the good with the bad.
I was flying low over the sheep pastures of New Zealand in a small helicopter whose doors had been removed to facilitate jumping on red deer which had been detained by a net gun. The man who leaps onto the backs of frantic and dangerous creatures wears motorcycle leathers in bleak anticipation of the tossings and abrasions he may reasonably expect. Generally, if he wasn’t the town bum, he would not have gotten himself in this position. But for some it is an awful thing to run out of beer, and stranger things than jumping out of aircraft upon wild animals to cover bar tabs have perhaps been done, but not many.
Today I’d taken his seat, and such meager room had been allotted this luckless individual that my right buttock was hanging over thousands of feet of clear antipodal space, so charging my senses that, half a decade later, I intently remember the brand-new green of that country, the pale and eerie sheep trails and the cedar forests where the kia bird, a knee-high alpine parrot, whiles away his evenings pulling nails out of the roofs of sheep stations. Everywhere there were rivers, and though I never quite feel I’ve seen or fished enough of them, this was certainly a vast supply.
These flights over the South Island of New Zealand jarred me out of my routine perceptions, especially those I’d acquired as an angler. When my friends and I settled in at a small and comfortable lodge in Makarora, I was almost surprised to find Americans there: specifically, an emergency room doctor, Monte Downs, and his father, Wil, a man in his seventies who had dedicated his life to tropical medicine and flyfishing. The two men were on a month-long trip together and you sensed a great catch-up devised fairly late in the game; in the glow around them was an almost palpable relief. They sang antique harmonies, they discussed dengue fever and trout, and they fished very hard. Old Wil seemed to drive the guides like rented mules. And at dinner, if conversation flagged, he dropped his chin to his chest and went to sleep. He often grabbed insects out of the air or, apparently, when he was shaving, off the bathroom mirror. At the end of his stay, he presented to the proprietor, pinned on a sheet of Styrofoam, a neatly organized and labeled collection of these bugs, and recommended the display as a training aid for the guides. Of this stay in Makarora, I recall one riverbank aircraft landing sufficiently in doubt that the Kiwi pilot was moved to remark, “Chaps, it looks a bit rough. We’re going to have to thumb it in soft.” No one compares to New Zealanders when it comes to bestowing stupendous vulgarities on delicate subjects.
Mostly I think of that father and son, a month of fishing together; that is, days and nights spent in active intimacy at what might have been inflexible ages, late in life in a country where we were all strangers. The rest of us, men with fathers, either living or dead, caught this out of the corners of our eyes.
Six years later, a big box arrived at my house in Montana, filled with fishing books — first editions beautifully bound in fragrant leather — along with a letter from Monte Downs which confirmed what the rest of us had suspected, that the month the two men had shared was the best time of their lives together and a permanent resource to this surviving son.
Wil Downs died the past January 26 after returning from two weeks fishing in Patagonia. Monte said Wil had often mentioned our good times and comic evenings in New Zealand, and Monte wanted to commemorate that with this gift of books from his father’s library. I put the books on my shelf thinking that they somehow told me something I would one day have to understand, something about all that has come to me through rivers and fishing, memories of people who were spending the best of themselves in time.