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The season of a fisherman - A fly fisher’s classic evocations of spring, summer, fall, and winter fishing. By Roderick L. Haig-Brown. Douglas & McIntyre and The Lyons Press. $60.00
Haig-Brown wrote the four books separately, as he chronicled a fisherman’s year, one season at a time. But seeing these works bound together, one can’t but feel this indeed, was the way it was meant to be offered - as a complete, sweeping piece of work. Each of the books has its own charm, its own feel to it. And true Haig-Brown fans will no doubt want to hang on to their individual copies of the four season books. But Douglas & McIntyre and The Lyons Press have done a wonderful job in binding the four books together. The cover photo by Larry Dech shows one man alone, fishing in the mist. It is easy to imagine it is Haig-Brown himself, searching the bright water on a cold spring morning when the salmon fry are emerging in his beloved Campbell River, or perhaps casting on the magical rivers of Argentina and Chile, when the rivers of Canada are trapped beneath ice. Roderick Haig-Brown wrote more than a dozen books, but his seasonal quartet contains some of his best writing, or at least his best fishing writing. Fisherman’s Spring was first published in 1951 and was the first of his books on the seasons. At the start of it he wrote, ironically as it would be proved, that he felt he might have exhausted the subject of fishing. “I have already written a lot about fish and fishing, and perhaps I have nothing new to say.” Perhaps Fisherman’s Spring and the three more books on the seasons that followed were as good as they were because, concerned that the subject might be running dry, he searched so deeply in it and found such wonderful new material - much of it not dealing directly with fishing, but with the things that surround it and make it such a beautiful sport. “Later, when the food was eaten and most of the wine was gone, I suppose I slept for a little. But I was awake at one-thirty, listening to the chatter of parakeets in the trees above me. I could see them, none too clearly, against the sky, then suddenly the whole flock took off,” he writes in Fisherman’s Winter. “They were brilliant green in the sunlight, slender bodies on narrow wings, like arrows, straight and swift in flight. I sat up and saw Jacko asleep on his back, the two boatmen asleep with their blanket ponchos thrown over them. I picked up my rod and stole away to the river.” Oh, there’s lots of fishing in these books. But lots of other things too. For a Haig-Brown fan the book is a collector’s item, and a chance to get all four of the season books together. For the reader who has heard of Haig-Brown, but perhaps never read him, there couldn’t be a better place to start. Waterside Reflections. By Van Egan. Frank Amato Publications. $14.95.
It is remarkable that two fine writers should have sprung from the banks of that rather small river. Maybe it’s the water. Van Egan, a poet, didn’t turn his hand to prose until late in life. He wrote Tyee - The Story of the Tyee Club in British Columbia, a serious, historical book in which he sometimes gave a glimmer of the type of writing he was capable of. In Waterside Reflections, he stretches out, reminiscing about his life time fascination with fishing. And like Haig-Brown, he writes about more than just fishing. Early in the book he tells the story of building a make-shift boat with a boyhood friend, and then launching it on the Chippewa River, where horror awaited. “Just ahead the Great Fifth Avenue Sewer looms over the river. Its massive walls, like those of Middle Ages dungeon, suspend a huge pipe. Built of roughly cut gray stone blocks, it stands fully fifteen or sixteen feet above normal water level and through its galvanized gut drain the wretched sediments of raw sewage, plunging like a dirty bridal veil into the Chippewa River. “As we approach the eddy below the outfall our attention is drawn to a mound within the backwater. It is dark gray, like basaltic rock, and barely breaks the surface. But there is no rock of that size anywhere in this part of the river. . .I push on it with my paddle. . .and a human face stares up through the dismal water. . .” There is some beautiful writing about fishing in this book too. The night sounds of summer. Big fish, fought and lost. Dreams. And a meeting on the river bank with a fellow fly fisher....who turned out to be Haig-Brown, and who became his great friend. Waterside Reflections is a wonderful book and well worth searching out. And although it is much smaller in format, and more humble in content, we can’t help but think it belongs on the shelf, right beside ‘the seasons of a fisherman’.
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For any fan of Roderick Haig-Brown, this is an almost perfect book. For the first time contained under one cover is the quartet of books he wrote on the four seasons: Fisherman’s Spring, Fisherman’s Summer, Fisherman’s Fall, Fisherman’s Winter.
Just as Haig-Brown did most of his writing in his home on the banks of the Campbell River, so too did his long-time friend, and neighbor, Van Egan.
