‘Much later, in a moment of weakness, Albert confided to me that the seriously afflicted fly fisherman needed an understanding provider, someone or something that would subsidize his folly, endow his passion, fund his piscatorial addiction.’
In the previous two editions of TPR&F I reviewed the six books of American author Harry Middleton. As you have now opened this third instalment, hopefully you have been persuaded by my enthusiasm and appreciation for Harry. What follows is a selection of my favourite quotes from his books, which I trust you will enjoy, but first I must add a brief interlude.
After the first instalment of this review was published, Karl Jensen of New Jersey contacted our esteemed editor who made my introduction. Karl and I have since engaged in lengthy correspondence. Karl shares my appreciation for Harry Middleton, but has taken that much further. A noted genealogist, Karl has extensively researched Harry’s family history. Furthermore, he has found, copied and now shared with me dozens of Harry’s articles published in newspapers and magazines mostly during the 1980’s. For this I extend my sincere thanks. As enjoyable as this new material is, it is too voluminous to review here, but I will share one finding.
The Earth is Enough is set in the Ozark mountains. I and doubtless many other readers have done the simple research to learn that there are no such places as Oglala county, the town of Mount Hebron, or Starlight Creek. In a 1985 newspaper article, Harry describes his eight year old son’s fascination with a creek close to their house in Birmingham, Alabama.
“He has devoted much of his summer to an intensive scientific study down by the creek, which he named Starlight Creek, a name I like very much”.
The Earth Is Enough
Emerson has ten rods. He looked after them as though they were his children. Even cleaning them in the evening boosted his spirits. He and Albert never considered bamboo rods as things. No, they were the inanimate creeping toward life, wands as full of excitement, fortune and agony as the natural world. Supple, malleable, like the passage of life itself, something capable of giving without giving up or giving way.
Too, fly fishing was great therapy. It kept them nearly sane, out of trouble, usually sober, and allowed them to pursue a life that, in imagination at least, had no limits or boundaries.
For as long as I knew them, they never worried once about actually landing a fish. Like every seasoned trout angler, they knew they were, in the end, no match for trout. The contest was unfair from the start, the trout held all the aces. Curiously, it was a comfort to them that they would never get the best of Starlight Creek or its uncanny trout. The challenge never dulled; the thrill never faded.
Much later, in a moment of weakness, Albert confided to me that the seriously afflicted fly fisherman needed an understanding provider, someone or something that would subsidize his folly, endow his passion, fund his piscatorial addiction. In short, pick up the tab. The garden was our unselfish benefactor, our generous financier, our emancipator. Because it flourished, the old men could nurse their obsession for trout along the waters of Starlight Creek, pursue exasperating wild turkeys in the thickly wooded sloughs, walk up quail that held as tight as grouse in the plum thickets at the edge of the peafields and cornfields that the old men worked by hand because the profit of having turkeys and wild quail was worth more to them than the profit of a land without them. Where there was wildness, there was possibility, chance, genuine life full of promise and risk and perplexing uncertainty.
Before I walked down the stairs that last time, Albert had said to me, “Go fishing, son. The dying need to die”. And so he did, exactly one week later, early on a Tuesday morning, just at daylight.
On The Spine Of Time
This is just a story of mountain creeks and streams, of mountain trout, of mountains and mountain people. It’s a look at life, its losses and joys, its tragedies and happiness, what is lost in a life and what is found. There happens to be a lot of fishing in this story, as well as certain slants and ranges of light, and time spent well and time spent foolishly, perhaps. Mostly though this is a story of people-people I have met in these mountains. Some brushed against me like a wind, touched me, and were gone; others have happily become, almost accidentally, a great part of my life.
Angling is simply the best excuse I have stumbled onto for investing as much time as possible in the mountains, along mountain rivers casting for trout, throwing my hook into pools of light and shadow.
There is something in me that needs mountains and fast mountain streams. The rough-edged Smoky Mountains remind me of the Ozarks. Like the Ozarks, they are enough, all I need, time moving in the rush of a fast mountain stream, caught in the glint of light off rippled water or in a trout’s cold dark eyes, iridescent flanks, a single red leaf spiraling in the press of an autumn wind. There is no true wilderness here, but there is wildness, honest and deep and as much as a man could hope for. These mountains are sincere.
Seen at a distance, as a range of peaks and ridgelines and shadow-filled valleys, the Smokies look as though they have been violently compressed, an accordion of worn-crested peaks and thin, gnarled valleys. Many of the knuckled ridges covered with great slicks of mountain laurel give way suddenly, precipitously, to near vertical slopes that tumble at air-gasping angles into valleys and gorges so narrow that even shadows find scant comfort there.
It spent its energy in a great rush and I pulled it close, bringing the line in with my hands, not even using the reel, and as it rose just out in front of my rod tip I could see its head and eyes- eyes raven black, a blackness as wide as a clear night sky and drenched in wildness, a wildness of trout and creek and rain.
All of this was gathered not in one glance, but over several nervous minutes of observation, because the shadowy, stilt like figure with the conspicuous nose, bobbing Adam’s apple and clown feet was at the time leaping desperately, violently, up and down on some object. Throwing his spindly arms up as if to gain ever more momentum, the figure all but launched himself into midair, uncoiling so that at the apex of his leap he was straight as a freshly ironed pleat; then in an instant, in one revengeful motion, he drew up his knees and drove them into whatever it was that had obviously driven him insane.(Roth Comers Tewksbury, and the lucky fishing hat which had betrayed him).
The Bright Country
With little effort fly-fishing can become a powerful and impressive obsession, the best part of which is not so much the angling, but rather where fly-fishing takes me. As a junkie for wild country and rivers and fish, I am certain of one thing about fly-fishing. There is something wonderfully simple about it, a rhythm, a rhyme, some beat of heart and blood and bone beyond the normal geography of language.
There is in me, among so many longings, a yearning for the essence of things, of mountain and sky, sunlight and shadow, wild fish rippling in deep, dark waters still touched by wildness, moving in time’s inexorable flow, life as it comes and goes.
West of Kenosha Pass, the land looked like a measureless earthen bowl, one filled with wind and relentless cast of sunlight and shadow, a chaos of rock and stone and tall, swaying grasses, huddled strands of gnarled trees. Embracing it all were the mountains, the eastern flank of the Rockies, the crenellated peaks of the Continental Divide tearing a vast autumn blue skies, and through its heart the river moved, creating and destroying, shaping what it touched while it probed for its own kind, that place where it would finally join with the sea.
Sunsets off the Mosquito Mountains silhouetted peaks that looked like rows of worn, yellowed, rotting molars, while the same sinking sun gave the gutted ridges of the Sawatch Mountains the look of row upon row of shattered jaws crowded with splintered incisors.
As for Swami Bill, be claimed to be wonderfully and equally befuddled by both magic and luck. He did not claim to understand luck, but he was always delighted when it turned out to be in his favor, like when he learned about a new kind of underwear being developed, underwear laced with particles of metallic silver to protect the wearer’s sexual organs from unsafe levels of radiation. Bill was able to get in on the ground floor, cheap. Confidently, Bill assured me that silver metallic underpants would be even bigger than talking tombstones.
Working on county garbage truck No. 2 has taught me that I do not actually have to go fishing to satisfy my addiction. All the mountains and rivers and trout of yesteryear are still wrinkling around in my memory. They survived depression’s black maelstrom, too. Everything is still there, deep in my brian, even that bright country of Colorado’s Mosquito and Sawatch mountains, the great high meadows of South Park, the waters of the Middle Fork of the South Platte River flashing silver blue at dawn and twilight.
Rivers Of Memory
It wasn’t the bluefish’s taste I admired but its wildness, and the wild dark winter sea it moves through, life endlessly in motion, jaws rattling menacingly.
Southern Progress is a publisher of regional magazines. Its most famous magazine is ‘Southern Living’, which has been touted as the world’s most successful regional magazine. Its readers adore it because each month the magazine leads them on a wonderful journey through fairyland – through a South, not as it was or as it is, but as they imagine it to be, a place of perpetual sunshine and happiness, a place of endless prosperity and good times, a never-never land of beauty and harmony, a land free of violence and prejudice, hatred and ignorance, poverty and suicide, a land that generates nothing but opportunity, success, great recipes, bountiful gardens, luxurious homes, bright and shiny people caught in the generous embrace of success and good news. Few magazines can whip up an image as can Southern Living. I polished the image as hard as anyone.
The Starlight Creek Angling Society
The farmhouse seemed as corrugated and rough as the mountains. It was marked by a permanent list to the right, toward the creek, as though it was somehow actually shouldering its way through the fits and starts of living. It was more home than house, more place than structure, a union of stone and hand-hewn logs and planks, two stories of practical, homespun architecture, a house that sidestepped every principle of architectural sagacity and efficiency. It refused to look built. Instead, to me, it always looked like something that had actually evolved from the mountains and creek bottom land that surrounded it, was some curious manifestation of life, more animate than inanimate.
If the Starlight Creek Angling Society had had a charter, it would have applauded nothing more loudly than angling’s potential for mystery and intimation, for renewing the shrinking inherent, libidinal connections between man and earth, the natural world, wildness.
Below Karen’s Pool was Martha’s Chute, a long narrow sluice of fast water that gave way to Cervantes’ Shallows, a ragged and rocky stretch of water that suddenly deepened above the farmhouse where the creek began a wide bend to the south. Just below the farmhouse there was a dramatic series of slick rock falls and shadow-filled plunge pools, three in all, which gave the place its name: Trilogy. Beyond the plunge pools, the creek widened dramatically, slowed, crept lazily through the valley bottomlands and oakwood sloughs toward the old abandoned Woollum farm, then past the low hill occupied by the Mount Hebron First Primitive Methodist Church.
Illustrations by Peter Corbin, reproduced from The Starlight Creek Angling Society.
Writing – Paul Adams Colorado, Winter 2023
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