The Longest Silence (36 page)

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.

A
S 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.

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.

T
HE 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.

Wil Downs, though, stuck out. In an obituary by his colleague Thomas Aitken, Downs was described as one of the most accomplished tropical medicine authorities in the world, a malariologist, a virologist, a parasitologist and epidemiologist, an entomologist and an ecologist. From our dinners in New Zealand I knew his sharply focused and intimate views of literature. But his love of rivers and fishing seemed to overarch it all, a music as deep as his love of the world.

I also have in hand Wil Downs’s New Year’s letter for 1991, wherein he begins dispensing various accumulations preparatory to moving into a rest home. Simultaneously, he announces a trip to South America to fish some rivers that have aroused his curiosity. Departure is soon. “This causes immediate stress and a desire to unload. My suspicion is that the Argentine fishermen largely fish with wet-fly, streamer, Matuka flies and when they do the dry-fly, fish a large fly. I hope to make a serious study of the susceptibility of Argentine trout to the small dry-fly.”

Afterward he planned to go to his ranch in Colorado where, aided by his teenaged great-nephew, he meant to fish and to study “the relationship
of the abundant Culicoides of the Upper North Platte River Basin, altitude 8000’ or higher with vector-borne viruses infecting livestock, wild animals and birds, and maybe even human beings.” Then on to the Skeena drainage of wonderful steelhead rivers in British Columbia, followed by a visit to a daughter in England. There was a piano to ship, a pool table to ship, books to ship; a chapter to write on yellow fever for an Oxford practitioner’s manual of diagnosis. Splendid fighting cock necks had arrived from Monte in Kauai and must be shared among fellow fly-tyers. At this point, describing the colors of the necks—furnace, ginger, black, cree—Wil conjures fishing friends over the years, a rain of small, generous biographies, amounting to a “pantheon,” he says, “major and minor saints.”