To promote the links between ecology and economy through watershed management, and to inspire a conservation ethic through education and literature. |
| Totem Flyfishers of BC Speech 2008 |
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ABOUT RODERICK HAIG-BROWN The following is reconstructed from a short address to the Totem Flyfishers of British Columbia at the club’s February 19, 2008 dinner meeting. Fellow Totem and well known fly-fisher, fly-tier, photographer, and author Art Lingren had invited me to say a few words at the conclusion of his main event slide presentation honoring the centenary of the February 21, 1908 birth of Campbell River’s legendary judge, angler, conservationist and writer Roderick Haig-Brown. Lingren generously suggested it would be appropriate for me to say a few words since I am among a small and rapidly diminishing number of people who knew Haig-Brown. Fellow Totems and guests. Everyone here knows of Roderick Haig-Brown. After all, we are anglers, and Haig-Brown is an icon in the anglingfraternity. Many, if not most of us, have gone beyond knowing of to knowing something, or a considerable amount, about him. Like most other anglers, I came to know, respect, and admire Roderick Haig-Brown mainlythrough his writing. But unlike most other anglers, I didn’t begin with hisfishing books but with his tales of adventure, with Starbuck Valley Winter and Panther for example. The Western Angler established his reputation as a thinker and writer in 1939, when Haig-Brown was 31 and I was four. Reading is still the best way to know writers, and I’ll get back to that, but first something about Haig-Brown and the spoken word.Those fortunate enough to have talked with Haig-Brown know he was an engaging conversationalist, and those fortunate enough to have heard him address audiences know he was an attention-holding public speaker, perhaps even a formidable one. I’ve heard him speak on fisheries management on several occasions, two of which are particularly memorable. The first was in 1958 when Haig-Brown addressed the Capilano Rod and Gun Club in West Vancouver. He discussed the provincial government’s woeful ignorance of and indifference to dedicated steelhead fishers—which directly led to rescinding of the salmon roe and egg ban on Vancouver Island in 1956, and a consequent decline in steelhead and cutthroat trout stocks.The second was 15 years later when he urged the Steelhead Society’s Annual General Meeting not to accept hatchery steelhead as alternatives to sound steelhead management. His audience hung on his words. Most magical, for me, was witnessing Haig-Brown talk to a grade six class at Discovery Elementary School in Campbell River in 1968. He had accepted a student teacher’s invitation to talk about writing and publishing. The student teacher introduced him to her class immediately following the aycommencing formalities. He talked to the students, asked questions, and answered theirs, was never condescending, always attentive, yet at ease. It took the recess bell to break the spell. Haig-Brown once told me he wrote and rewrote until the writing sounded right. If you haven’t yet read some of his work aloud, you owe it to yourself to do so. I’ll read two short Haig-Brown passages aloud here—to demonstrate the nuances of sound and rhythm that infuse his work, but mostly to give him the last word. The first passage comes from Measure of the Year, published in 1950. The second is from Bright Water, Bright Fish which Haig- Brown completed one month before he died—in October 1976—but which was not published till 1980. Much can be said, and much has been said, about what Haig-Brown has written. The words speak for themselves, too.“The Big Fir,” from Measure of the Year Once the Big Fir was shaded by other trees as large and larger, packed all about it in the heavy forest. The Indians had a smoke house within a hundred feet of it then and beached their canoes within reach of its shadow. I have found myself fishing and swimming and planting seeds in the same shadow, and I have sheltered new-born lambs and nursed them to life in its lee. The first trail up the river passed near it and the first skid road and the first wagon road. It is only a mass of wood, pitch-seamed, diseased, and rotten, with no more than a spark of giant life remaining in a narrow strip of sapwood. There are probably a million other great trees like it on Vancouver Island, overmature, moribund, without significance except perhaps in the seed theythrow. Only a sentimentalist could give importance to such a thing. Yet I shall look up at the Big Fir a thousand times or more before I die, and never without emotion.From Bright Waters, Bright Fish The philosophy of it all? Perhaps it can be summed up rather simply: The resource is a trust, and the first responsibility of angler, manager, scientist and politician is to ensure its protection and perpetuation. Others who come after us will need it. Following upon this, a first concept is that the resource belongs to the people of Canada, but the sport, its values, traditions, standards and ethics, belong to the anglers themselves and is in the care and keeping of anglers everywhere. The value of it all? It is worth as much or as little as people find in it: as little as an hour or two of happiness in a small child’s day (if that is little) or as much as a long lifetime of happiness and sophisticated contentment. Measured in terms of the millions of men, women and children who turn to angling for the pleasure that comes from active participation in the world’s true wealth of unspoiled natural things, this is happiness in massive amounts, harming no one, benefiting everyone. And the pleasure and happiness of bright fish in bright waters has deep meaning for many people who are not anglers at all. Peter Broomhall |
