Manly Thor's Day Special

Regrets, I've had more than a few
The fall is coming. You started feeling it in the evening air about ten days ago here. Not actual autumn but the sense that it was just over there and thinking about moving in. It's nothing to complain about. For starters, it's the most beautiful season in this part of the world by a considerable stretch.

It's also a season of plenty. The animals (including us) feed especially well over the next month or so. For humans, the autumn of our lives is a time when we are most likely to have accumulated wisdom, comfort and wealth.

But, for all that, it's still fall and this is the season when it's hardest to believe that the cycles go on forever. And they do not, in fact, go on forever.

Back where I grew up, the water in the once great salmon rivers is usually getting low this time of year. It's time to fish smaller flies, more delicately presented, so as not to spook the fish. Salmon are not that easily spooked otherwise. I knew a great salmon fisherman who would slam his line and fly down on the water and still catch them with a regularity that few others could match. But in the fall things change.

I've been reading David Adams Richards' book Lines on Water. It is one of life's oddities that there is lots of great literature about trout fishing and not one single great book about salmon fishing. And the Atlantic salmon is not a true salmon but a trout, something that you might ought to have improved the odds of someone writing a great book about Salmon fishing.

Alas no and this book won't change that. I had hopes for this one because, without giving too much away, David Adams Richards and I overlap quite a bit. He is about a decade older than me but we know and knew a lot of the same people. My uncle was his parish priest when he was a boy. Beyond that we think in ways that are very much alike.

It doesn't take a great angler to be a good angling writer. John Gierach, for example, will cheerfully tell anyone who asks that there are angling writers who are much better fly fisherman than he is. But he is not only a much better fisherman than you or me or David Adams Richards, he is also better than we could reasonably hope to be. To be as good as he is, you'd have to turn the clock back and live a completely different life and there is the rub. As a consequence, he draws from a very deep well when he writes about the subject. A good example of this is what happens when Gierach writes about the person who is better than him. He knows enough to confidently identify the exceptional person and not get taken in by bombast.

Richards, while he is better writer than Gierach, is not, unfortunately, capable of this. Too often he writes about what he thinks is the mystique of the sport but is really just some old con man taking him in. The odd result of this is that his book comes off as being really about himself and salmon fishing seems more like a gimmick he used to try and hide this that doesn't quite come off. For Gierach, fly fishing for trout has been and is not just his life but is, rather, life itself; when he writes about one he writes about the other.

I do think, though, that Richards passes by what could have been a great book in these pages. He is determinedly writing one kind of story but his real story is something else. As The Last Psychiatrist likes to remind us, when we do that our real intention keeps slipping through:

I was a town boy. And my father owned a business downtown and went to work in a suit and tie.

His world consisted of approximately eight blocks. As far as serious fishing was concerned, I may as well have been living in downtown Toronto.

The boys who fished with their dads would look on me as someone who knew nothing, a neophyte. This angered me. It angered me because they were right.

The story Richards wants to tell is a story about a crippled child who overcame all obstacles to become a salmon fisherman. The story he actually tells is a story of a man angry with his parents. A man who looks back and regrets the things he didn't do because of them.

He called me, in his gruff old voice, "the little Christ child" because of the pitchfork going through my left foot a few years back. He had made the mistake—just as many others in my neighbourhood had—of believing that this is how I had become lame. He didn't know the real reason—my mother falling on her stomach when she was pregnant, and causing a brain hemorrhage—and I did not volunteer that information.

There is ton of anger and regret in this book. I think Richards thinks he has dealt with that and he wants to tell a story about something else, about a guy who triumphed over the lameness through dogged persistence but the story that keeps haunting us is the one he didn't tell about the angry boy denied boyhood.

It's too bad because that is a universal story. Not denied childhood. Childhood is the problem. We are given extended childhoods that we don't really want. Childhoods that run so long that when they are over its time to be adults. What the war and depression generations denied their children was boyhood. And we still do that to boys now.