Haig-Brown Institute

A tribute to a vanished world
Vancouver Sun
Monday, March 17, 2008
Page A09
By Stephen Hume

When I called to ask directions, the voice on the phone sounded thinner than I recalled from past conversations, still courtly, but somehow missing a remembered timbre.

"Keep going past Roddy's house," the voice instructed. That would be the modest house of the late but still esteemed writer, magistrate and university chancellor Roderick Haig-Brown. I knew where that was. I stayed there once during its subsequent reincarnation as a bed and breakfast. "Look for a sign to your right. It says The Garden of Egan. That's me, but I'm not the gardener any more."

I found the weathered sign easily enough and turned in on the gravel drive. Van Gorman Egan, fly fisherman, professional guide, retired teacher and fellow writer greeted me in the book-cluttered study that overlooks the swift-moving Campbell River.

He looked as frail as his voice had sounded, walking a bit uncertainly with a cane, but those words, they flowed as richly as they ever had.

"I had a stroke back in September, 2006," he said, apologetically, as though he might somehow have averted this inconvenience if he'd only known his guest would be coming. "I'll be 82 in three months."

And that's why I'd come to see him. All things bring their blessings and while a stroke is not something I'd wish on anybody, this event had generated its own small miracle in its victim, one that blesses the rest of us.

That fall, Egan had been out angling for one of the Campbell River system's mighty Chinook. He was fishing according to the strict rules of the venerable Tyee Club -- trolling from a rowboat, single barbless hook, no fish finders, depth sounders, powered downriggers etc. -- whose history he published in 1988, having taken honors himself as Tyee Man for landing the largest salmon, a 59-pounder, the previous year.

The sporting difficulty of the accomplishment is evident in the fact that only a handful of anglers have repeated as winner in the club's 84-year history. Egan himself went almost a quarter of a century between visits to the podium, the first time serving as guide when Richard Fitzpatrick took the honors in 1964.

In 2006, Neil Cameron, editor and publisher of the Campbell River Courier-Islander, an old friend and ardent angler himself, was guiding for Egan on the Tyee Pool where the annual derby takes place when the old fisherman suddenly felt tired and asked to go home.

"We figure he had his stroke out on the Tyee Pool while I was rowing," Cameron said. He was found at home the next day, slumped in a chair, the left side of his body paralyzed.

That's where the miracle kicked in.

As therapy for the paralysis, Egan was told to start getting his fingers moving in the intricate patterns of typing using the clunky old electric typewriter -- clunky only to me, I must add, a scientific wonder to him ("It makes corrections when I make typos!") -- on a desk positioned so he can look out across his garden at the racing Campbell River with its fringe of willow and alder.

"I started doing a little typing, just to see how well I could use my left hand," Egan said. "I wrote some of this and some of that. I found that of all the things that my left hand is supposed to do, typing it does pretty well."

Some of this and some of that turned out to be his remembrances of Haig-Brown, his old fishing companion. Slowly, the dexterity exercises grew from sentences to paragraphs and then to chapters and eventually coalesced into a small book. He showed the stories to Cameron. The editor was stunned.

"It's just a beautiful read," said the newspaper guy. "This year is the 100th anniversary of Haig-Brown's birth, so the Courier-Islander decided to publish them in book form as a special commemorative edition." Thus Shadows of the Western Angler will be bound in leather and printed on the highest-quality paper.

"It has great entertainment value for readers," Cameron said, "but there's also a sense that we have a duty as a local newspaper to make sure this gets recorded for history."

For more than half his life, Egan was a friend and neighbour of Haig-Brown, whose own writings reflected on fish, fishing and the wonders of the natural world and its seasonal cycles on Vancouver Island. More important, he helped shape the foundations of a public conservation ethic that made him an international literary icon.

Egan first met the famous writer in 1954. A farm boy from Wisconsin, he'd read some of Haig-Brown's early writings and travelled west to visit the setting of the books.

"I carried a copy of The Western Angler, second edition, and I thought I should get him to autograph it for me. It wasn't the most thoughtful thing to do, I guess, but I just drove in and asked him. He did, of course, and he was very polite about it."

Later that year, after studying the fly patterns recommended in The Western Angler, Egan was fishing on the Campbell River. He encountered Haig-Brown again.

"I was up fishing the Sandy Pool and I was using a two-handed rod and figuring out my cast. I didn't know it, but he was up on the bridge watching, He came down onto the sandbar, picked up a Silver Lady fly and said, 'Is this yours?'"

"I reeled in my line and found I was fishing with no fly. I guess it snagged on something and my leader snapped. But he was pleased that I was using his pattern and he invited me to dinner.

"'Come early,' he said, 'and we'll play croquet.' So I went and played on the lawn and spent a pleasant evening with him and his wife, Anne, in the famous study.

"He later took me fishing up the Elk River before the flooding that came after the dam was built. I'd never had fishing like that in my life.

"It was a pretty river but it wasn't a beautiful setting. They had logged the valley and pretty well shaved it. Every year you'd have to re-learn the river. It would swing from one side of the valley to the other and back. But the trout were there. Everything we caught was cutthroats. Now they seem to take all rainbows. Something is changing."

At the time, Egan was running a small motel at Shelter Point, south of Campbell River, and he'd met Maxine, his wife-to-be. She died in November 2005, and we paused to look at the photo of her with a 48-pound Tyee, the largest caught by a woman in 1989 and only a half-pound larger than the one that won her the same honours in 1964. Haig-Brown served as best man at the Egans' wedding and the friendship deepened.

"For a couple of vagabonds, which we were, he was awfully kind to us." The writer urged Egan to move to Campbell River and take a teaching job. But the teacher's pay was only $2,200 for 10 months work, and with the bills of the newly married coming in, he instead went to tend bar at Forbe's Landing before taking a job at the local pulp mill.

Then, in January of 1956, out for a drive with Maxine, they saw a small house for sale right on the Campbell River. "We backed up, turned in and bought it right there. I've been here ever since."

The move proved fortuitous. The shortage of school teachers in the booming Campbell River area was so acute that Haig-Brown persuaded the school board to offer Egan more than he could earn in the mill to teach. He took the job teaching biology and later designed Canada's first high school course in oceanography, which he taught until his 1986 retirement.

In the meantime, Haig-Brown, today lionized by Campbell River and the provincial government -- has parks, mountains and historic sites named after him -- was being marginalized and vilified in his own community for the strong stands he took on environmental and conservation issues.

"He wasn't thought of very highly by some people around here because of his opposition to flooding [the upper Campbell River]. The business faction did not look on Haig-Brown as a very welcome member of society.

"I remember attending a meeting after the province approved the flooding in Strathcona Park. Somebody, a lodge operator, announced: 'We sure beat that Haig-Brown.' That was the attitude. They were making big money off the boom. They thought flooding Strathcona Park was a victory. They thought they had won. That lodge is gone now. I've never forgotten that.

"Haig-Brown later said to me, 'You never win a conservation battle, but you've got to fight them.' I've never forgotten that, either." Then, suddenly as a winter freshet, Haig-Brown was gone himself, dead, his voice silent except for the legacy of 28 eloquent and far-seeing books.

"I was one of the pallbearers at his funeral," Egan said. "It was one of most awful times, in a way. I found it so hard to believe that a man with a stature like that -- a giant of our time -- was dead; how could that be?"

Then the old fly fisherman showed me one of his treasures, maps drawn from memory long ago, hand-sketched by Haig-Brown himself with directions to the best dry and wet fly water on Vancouver Island rivers, some so remote that few anglers fish them. The two he showed me, deft, confident outlines of landmarks on the Nimpkish and Campbell rivers, revealed in a few detailed pen strokes the mind of a man who loved the land, remembers its forms and the way it is shaped and burnished by the life-giving waters we so casually exploit and abuse for short-term gain.

These maps of a vanished world from before the old growth was cut, the rivers dammed, the watersheds mined, before the malls and the sewage outfalls, they, too, will be part of the public legacy of Roderick Haig-Brown and his friend Van Egan thanks to the Courier-Islander and its sense of public duty.

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