A Fly Fisher's Sixty Seasons

by Steve Raymond

  It was all for naught. “Needless to say, the President caught none of the hefty trout. They were fat, hatchery-reared slobs, and were undoubtedly terrified by the sudden transfer to a harsher environment [but] local fishermen fared considerably better after the big trout had become at least partially acclimated … Although I know for a fact that Ike never caught a single fish, much was written about his efforts to do so … Much was also made of the fact that the President … was a regular fellow when it came to fishing. This feeling was neither misplaced [n]or an exaggeration, for Ike charmed all those who made up the party with his unaffected warmth and geniality.”

  I remembered that story from the first time I read the book. But if I hadn’t read the book nearly fifty years ago and had just now picked it up for the first time, I’d probably feel less disposed to like it. For one thing, it’s not all about fly fishing. In fact, Blaisdell dwells at length on other fishing methods and talks about fishing for species I consider disagreeable. I guess I was more tolerant at the tender age when I first read the book, with opinions that were less entrenched. I also liked the book’s title, and do still. I think every fisherman should be philosophical; in fact, I’m not certain it is possible to be an ardent fly fisher without being philosophical.

  Going Fishing, by Negley Farson (1943)

  My old friend Al Severeid gave me a copy of this book many years ago, saying it was one that should be in any fishing library. Somehow, though, I never got around to reading it until recently.

  I shouldn’t have waited. Farson was a gifted writer, and though he describes fishing now more than seventy-five years in the past, his prose wears well. He was a well-known correspondent for various newspapers, traveling widely around the world looking for stories. But he always had a fly rod near his side, and usually a bottle of strong spirits.

  “This is just the story of some rods, and the places they take you to,” he says. Some places! In entertaining, frequently eloquent style, Farson tells of fishing for stripers on the New Jersey shore, “things in the water” of Africa’s Lake Victoria, sea trout in the Shetland and Hebrides Islands, bass in the Catskills, trout in the Caucasus and elsewhere, sticklebacks in the Gulf of Finland, mackerel off the coast of Egypt, trout and Pacific salmon in British Columbia, sturgeon in the Black Sea, and rainbow trout in the shadow of an erupting volcano in Chile—an amazing angling menu by any measure. Most of his adventures took place when transportation was primitive and many waters were seldom visited.

  Writing about Pacific salmon on Vancouver Island in the 1930s, Farson said: “Great green and purple rocked mountains; storm clouds pouring in from the Pacific; driving rain drenching the forests; forests of spruce, of cedar, of fir—thick as the hair on the back of a dog—a wind-twisted, crashing maelstrom. We could hear the thundering roar of the [river], sluicing down to the sea, its rapids milk-white, foaming, swift as a hydraulic jet. A wild day, even for British Columbia when the rains are on … I looked over the side. And saw the Red Host. Great, red, pale-eyed salmon stared up from its depths; an army passed, phantom-like, underneath. Weary, covered with sores, they shot in from their fight with the stream, rested, and then silently took up their pilgrimage again. Thousands and thousands of salmon, up from the sea, to spawn and then die.”

  Farson also could see the humor in every situation. He tells of a banner day of trout fishing in the Caucasus, then (1929) part of the Soviet Union. Later, while frying up some of his catch, he was momentarily distracted and the fish got “slightly crisp.” Then he was visited by a Cossack “who informed me that his official status was Instructor in Communism.” The Commie Cossack ate one of the crispy trout, “pronounced it marvelous, but said that I was a Capitalist because I had used a fly” to catch it.

  Farson always had time for at least a wee dram when he was fishing. After a day of fly fishing for trout in Chile in 1937, he rendezvoused with two companions, a Scot and an Englishman, “who held the bottle out to me … ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ smiled the Englishman as I wiped my lips, ‘how damned good it tastes after a day like this! Nothing like the same taste in a city ….’ ”

  But you didn’t need a book to tell you that.

  Squaretail, by Charles Kroll (1972)

  It wouldn’t be surprising if you missed this one. That’s because it was published by a so-called “vanity press,” where the author pays the publisher to produce the book instead of the other way around. Usually this happens after an author receives so many rejection slips from publishers he figures the only way his or her book will ever see the light of day is to pay to have it published. Vanity press books usually get little publicity and are generally ignored by reviewers, so they often go unnoticed.

  In this case, it’s difficult to believe Squaretail was rejected by established publishers because it was probably the most complete work on Eastern brook trout ever written to that time. True, it suffers a little from irregular punctuation, but who reads a book for its punctuation? The language, on the other hand, is as good or better than many works from publishing houses that actually pay authors for their work.

  The book’s foreword, by Robert J. Good, makes Charles Kroll, the author, sound larger than life: “Everything about him smacked of professionalism,” Good wrote, “from the battered, weather-worn Stetson and Mucelin-stained vest down to the stream-worn Hardy Model Perfect. His special intenseness was evident in the angle of the half-cold cigar locked in set jaws between clenched teeth. The tenderness with which he held each trout as he studied its individual beauty before the release almost belied that intenseness, but made you aware of the man’s devotion to the pursuit of the crimson-flecked denizens of these streams … It was only after the willows closed over his departing shadow that you fully realized that he walked with the aid of a cane.” Who was that masked man, anyway?

  Kroll might have needed a cane, but it sure didn’t hobble his writing: “Small brooks meandering through northeastern cedar and tamarack swamps, where the water gliding beneath the overhanging boughs is the color of dark amber, hold fish whose forebears swam there 20,000 years ago—fish mantled with flowing shades of color, from olive through beige, soft blue and fawn into ivory, among the loveliest of their species.” From that beginning, Kroll goes on to describe the brook trout’s natural history—the “gems of creation,” he calls them—their distribution across North America and introduction to South America, the types of water they inhabit (including anadromous runs of brook trout), fly patterns, and fishing tactics.

  You probably could have gotten the same information in bits and pieces from a lot of other books at the time, but Kroll was perhaps the first to put it all together in a single volume. Squaretail was largely superseded twenty-five years later by Nick Karas’s work on brook trout, but it still makes nostalgic reading about a time when brookies, and opportunities to fish for them, were far more widespread than they are now.

  Where the Pools Are Bright and Deep, by Dana S. Lamb (1973)

  Dana Lamb was a popular writer in the 1960s and early ’70s, but who remembers him now? He wrote at least nine books, some published only in limited editions, and most were a series of brief, slice-of-life angling essays, with occasional detours into wingshooting. This one includes forty-one essays in 145 pages, about three and a half pages per essay. That makes it a book that’s easy to pick up or put down as often as you like; no interminably long chapters here. It’s also graced by the illustrations of Eldridge Hardie, one of the all-time great outdoor artists.

  One of the first things that caught my eye in this book was its dedication: “In memory of a 19-year-old sergeant from Vermont, my great-uncle, Lewis Lamb. Accounted by his comrades in his native state’s Eighth Regiment of Veteran Volunteers as ‘noble, generous and brave,’ he fell while fighting well at Cedar Creek at harvest time in 1864.” I could identify with that; my great-grandfather, Sergeant Jonathan Butler of the Seventy-Eighth Illinois Volunteer Infantry, also fell at harvest time in 1864 at the battle of Jonesboro, Georgia. Although grave
ly wounded, he survived; otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

  But I digress. What makes this book—or any Dana Lamb book—so appealing is his serene, lyrical writing style. There’s nothing heavy here, no how-to stuff, no pontificating or theorizing, just easy, relaxing stories, the kind best read in front of a winter fire, reminding readers of pleasant days past and the promise of more to come. Some samples:

  From a piece called “New Brunswick Morning”: “Here, where the passing salmon pause to rest beside the underwater rocks, calm and quietness prevail. But upriver, where around a bend unyielding cliffs stand guard to herd rebellious currents through a narrow gorge, the river snarls like a panther in a trap, its roaring carried by the wind across long miles of wilderness.”

  From “Going Out to Get the Mail”: “Now, as with the family setter dog at heel he made this long familiar trip he thought of endless disappointing visits to the place as well; times in hopes, forever vain, of finding scented letters from a girl who never wrote or something from an editor besides rejection slips. Today there was no letter from his son; just appeals for contributions to what the writer, in each instance, called ‘a worthy cause,’ a statement from the Grange, an Orvis catalogue.”

  From “Season’s End”: “The leafy surface of the rich brown earth is dappled as the sunlight filters through the still-green leaves; the glade is resonant with joyous songs of birds. The robins, warblers, swallows and the summer yellowbirds are flocking up before they start their long flight south. The solitary angler’s gaze pursues their fitful progress from the maples to the sycamores or out across the placid pool.”

  From “Well Anyway—Almost”: “… An angler, with the passing years, will find his memories more flexible than facts. My recollections, happier by far than what is written in my conscientious day-to-day accounts, put dull statistics in the shade. That’s why dust gathers on the leather cover of the Fishing Log I’ve hidden way back underneath the eaves. Long, long ago, my diaries lay open on the table in my den. On winter evenings, with my shorthair pointer and my glass of Highland Malt, I’d watch the flaming cedar logs chase shadows up the paneled walls and think about the salmon rivers that I loved.”

  Good words, those. I could read them all winter.

  In Trout Country, edited by Peter Corodimas (1971)

  This was published as a Sports Illustrated book back in the days when that magazine still considered fishing a sport. The dust jacket illustration—an angler carrying a creel—clearly dates it to a time when the notion of catch-and-release was still in its infancy.

  In Trout Country is an anthology, a collection of twenty-seven stories about trout fishing. The editor, Peter Corodimas, a college English professor, chose well, selecting a rich variety of reading. He also wrote well, if the book’s introduction is an indication. Extolling the virtues of the trout that have inspired so many literary works, Corodimas cites William Butler Yeats’ famous poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” It describes, he says, “a Celtic god who hooks a berry to a thread, drops it into a stream, and catches ‘a little silver trout.’ Later, the trout changes into ‘a glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair.’” To understand “how idealized the trout has become,” Corodimas says, “try substituting another fish for Yeats’ trout. A little silver shiner? A little yellow perch? A little green pike? A little copper bass?” You get the point. “By allying himself with the trout, the trout fisherman has prospered beyond his wildest dreams; indeed, no other fisherman has made out half so well.” He means the trout fisherman has prospered in literature, and proves his case with the selections in this book. But while all the tales in this book are about trout—fair warning—not all the trout are caught on flies.

  A few stories are classics—Richard Brautigan’s memorable yarn about a wrecking yard with sections of used trout stream for sale, Paul O’Neil’s “In Praise of Trout—And Also Me,” Ed Zern’s hilarious “Something Was Fishy about Stonehenge,” and Robert Traver’s “The Intruder” (there are two Traver stories in this collection, even though his name was misspelled once in the table of contents). Inevitably, Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” is here, too. Other well-known angling writers—R. Palmer Baker, Jr., Dana Lamb, Philip Wylie, R. D. Blackmore, Edward Weeks, and Corey Ford—also are represented.

  Some of these writers, and many others, also are to be found in another anthology, Fisherman’s Bounty, compiled by Nick Lyons and published a year before In Trout Country. But Lyons’s book covers more fish (salmon, steelhead, carp, bass, muskellunge, and saltwater species), more fishing methods, and a greater span of time. Surprisingly, there isn’t much overlap between the two books; Traver’s “The Intruder” and R. D. Blackmore’s “Crocker’s Hole” are the only stories that appear in both.

  There’s lots of good reading in these two volumes, and although both have been around for going on fifty years, they remain as fresh and relevant as ever. They should be required reading for every angler, especially those just beginning to wade the sacred waters of angling literature.

  Fresh Waters, by Edward Weeks (1968)

  I first read this book many years ago and remembered it fondly, but when I picked it up recently and started reading it again I began to wonder why. The author, Edward Weeks, had a distinguished career as editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press and Atlantic Monthly magazine, publishing writers such as Ernest Hemingway and classic titles such as Mutiny on the Bounty. But he was in his forties before he started fishing and the first chapters of this book are mostly about his early experiences with bamboo rods and gut leaders, using worms and plugs to fish for pickerel, perch, and other unglamorous species—the sort of things most anglers do when they’re young and just getting started. Weeks did them in middle age and these early chapters are a bit like looking at somebody’s childhood photo album.

  I kept reading, though, and about halfway through the book, after Weeks graduated to fly fishing for trout, salmon, steelhead, and other more challenging species, I began to rediscover why I liked the book so much on first reading. On periodic trips abroad, scouting for new writers or unpublished manuscripts, Weeks always took a fly rod and was ever on the lookout for fishing opportunities. He found them in Uzbekistan, where he “caught nothing but friends”; in what was then Yugoslavia; and repeatedly on the chalk streams of England, chronicling his adventures in rich prose. His description of St. James Street in London would have made Ernest Schwiebert jealous:

  “Here is every delight but one to please the male: wine from Berry Brothers, whose cellars deep under the pavement were first reinforced to support the coronation coaches of Charles II; hats from Lock’s, whose shop has been swept but otherwise unchanged from the days they were shaping a cocked hat for Lord Nelson; from Prunier’s delectable bisque homard and Dover sole; from Webley’s a fowling piece or rifle to match your build, and at the upper level, those clubs, Boodle’s and White’s, Brooks’s and Pratt’s, whose banter and decorum are a perpetual surprise to the American visitor. Around the lower end of St. James’s on Pall Mall and across from the Palace is Hardy’s Fishing … the cornucopia of English angling.”

  Weeks also dropped enough names to make Schwiebert blush, but never ostentatiously. He fished the Klamath with Clark Van Fleet, author of the classic Steelhead to a Fly, and the Gold River on Vancouver Island with Roderick Haig-Brown. He made friends with and wrote about Dr. Lauren Donaldson, pioneering University of Washington fisheries professor and my old friend. He also was a frequent visitor at Salmon Brook Camp on the Miramichi in New Brunswick, which meant nothing to me when I first read about it years ago but later became my base for fishing that great river. Weeks’s guide way back then was a relative of the man who much later guided me.

  OK, you say, maybe you just had to be there to appreciate all this. But with Weeks, you are there, sharing his love for the people, the places, and most of all for the fishing. Reading about fly fishing doesn’t get much better than this. It’s all right if you choose to skip the opening chapters
and start in, say, at about Chapter 8.

  Trout at Taupo, by O. S. Hintz (new and enlarged edition, 1964)

  What’s a book from New Zealand doing on this list of old tomes? Well, if ever you needed proof that fly fishers speak a universal language and share common experiences, you’ll find it here. Trout at Taupo, like most other books listed here, describes fishing that may not exist anymore, or, if it does exist, is not the same. Yet the book makes it abundantly clear that the attitudes, spirits, vocabularies, practices, and humor of fly fishers hardly ever change.

  O. S. Hintz’s full name was Orton Sutherland Hintz, which probably explains why he always went by the nickname “Budge” (which also might have had to do with his physical stature). He was editor of the New Zealand Herald, and like another editor I know, he sought solace and escape through fishing—in his case, on the bountiful waters of Lake Taupo and its numerous tributaries.

  I’d heard of this book somewhere and was surprised to find a copy in the catacombs of a secondhand bookstore near Seattle’s Pioneer Square. It still had the original price written on the inside cover—$2—so I bought it on the spot. How could I not? I hadn’t yet been to New Zealand when I bought it, but once I read it I knew I had to go. Several years later the opportunity came, and thanks to Hintz I had a good idea what to expect when I got there.

  Hintz recites native Maori legends about the restless volcanic past of the mountains surrounding the great inland sea of Lake Taupo and provides a good history of the introduction of trout to the lake. He describes the fishing tactics and flies used in the lake and the rivers that flow into it, and rhapsodizes over the many scenic attractions of the countryside. But he’s at his best when telling fishing stories, including many that will make you smile and others that will make you laugh out loud.

  One thing I gleaned from my first reading of this book was a desire to fish the little Waitahanui, Hintz’s favorite Taupo stream—he devotes an entire chapter to it—and I headed there soon after I arrived in New Zealand on my second trip. His description was right on the nose, and the Waitahanui greeted me generously, just as the Kiwi fishermen did.