The Longest Silence (35 page)

The salmon took a hard left onto the shallows where he made a fearful uproar. I told myself that I would never land this fish and I was right. Ploughing around in the rocks, flinging water everywhere, he liberated himself as decisively as he had taken my silly little fly.

But I was so jubilant because for a moment at least we had agreed about something! It was like a brief truce in a marriage, following which one partner says, “I’m out of here.”

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.

F
OR 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?”

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.