There seems to be a dearth of new flyfishing titles this summer — nothing’s arrived here at Cal Fly Fisher from publishers of note over the past several months, which is unusual. Perhaps this lack of product is a result of the pandemic. Perhaps it’s simply a reflection of market adjustments. Perhaps it’s not even a negative thing. Many books worth our attention have been published over the decades, but as with flies, it’s usually only the new ones that receive notice in the media. This halting of the presses, if one can call it that, gives us the opportunity to highlight two older works that deserve continued appreciation.
Roderick Haig-Brown’s
A River Never Sleeps
Reviewed by Roger LeGrande
Two years after graduating from high school, my good friend Kevin McElhinny and I climbed into my 1968 Saab station wagon, packed with camping and fishing gear, spinach noodles, rice, beans, an eight-track tape deck, a bunch of maps, and a dog. We left San Mateo on a loosely planned month-long adventure to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The year was 1971, and I had just bought two new tapes for the trip, Working Man’s Dead and Sticky Fingers. We hit the road, and as soon as we crossed the Golden Gate, we were so excited we could hardly stand it. We had heard about the great opportunities for salmon, steelhead, and trout up north and planned to camp at various spots by rivers and lakes to fish and explore.
When we finally drove off the ferry from Port Angeles, Washington, in Victoria, British Columbia, we were pulled aside at customs, where everything was searched. (I wonder if our long hair had something to do with that.) We were just about through the final checkpoint when they asked for rabies papers for my friend’s dog, which we didn’t have. My friend thought fast and handed over his Volvo registration card, which they promptly stamped DOG OK, handed it back, and let us through the border. We laughed like crazy as we headed north in the pouring rain, renaming the dog “Volvo.” He didn’t seem to mind.
It was dark and late, and we had no idea where we were going to stay as we drove up the highway. We picked up a very wet hitchhiker near Nanaimo who was quite friendly and said we could stay at his place through the storm. He lived in Campbell River, right on the water. We arrived late and ended up playing poker with our new Canadian friend and his wife most of the night while enjoying great Canadian beer and telling stories, some of which included tales of Roderick Haig-Brown.

Little did I know that this was Roderick Haig Brown’s stomping grounds, where he lived, fished, and wrote his books. He had a small farm on the Campbell River where he and his wife raised four children. The farmhouse is still in existence and is a temporary “writer in residence” lodging for one lucky author during the winter and is run as a bed-and-breakfast in the summer.
Roderick Haig-Brown was born in England in 1908 and died in 1976 in Campbell River. He survived two world wars and a pandemic. His father was a prolific writer and an officer in the British Army who was killed in action in 1918 during World War I. Soon after, Roderick and his mother went to live with his maternal grandfather on his country estate on the Frome River in southern England. This is where he learned to hunt and fish.
Later, in the 1920s, he went to live with an uncle in Seattle, where he went to work as a logger. He left Seattle and started working in British Columbia at other logging camps and also began to do some guiding and commercial fishing. He soon settled in Campbell River, where he wrote 23 books, became the local magistrate with an honorary doctor of law degree from University of British Columbia, and was chancellor of the University of Victoria. He was also a conservationist who was an advisor for Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers and a trustee for The Nature Conservancy of Canada. Of course, he was also a pioneer of fly fishing for steelhead, salmon, and trout, as well as other species.
A River Never Sleeps was published in 1946 and takes you through an entire year of fishing, with 12 chapters starting with “January” and ending with “ December.” It is beautifully illustrated by Lewis Darling. Haig-Brown’s prose seems to flow like the rivers he writes about, and his descriptions of the trees, wildlife, weather, and fishing are full of detail and at times poetic. In the chapter “May,” he writes, “May is a great and generous month for the trout fisherman. May flies drift in their squadrons and flotillas and armadas, their proudly upright wings a mark that stirs both fish and fishermen.” In “November,” he writes,
Everything came to prey on the dog salmon. Bald eagles in hundreds — we counted two hundred in two miles in one day — perched in tall trees along the river or quarreled and fed at the edge of the water. Always at dusk we saw black bears, standing on sweepers to peer down into the water, wading the shallow bars to fish or dragging the carcasses of salmon away from the water. Coons and mink picked up the leavings of the bigger animals, and we saw them too, and ducks of many kinds f lighted in from salt water.
If you want a book about the beginnings of fly fishing for steelhead in the Campbell River area — or anywhere, for that matter — this is a great read. And it’s not just about fishing, but about bird hunting, his dogs, his family, his life. A River Never Sleeps is rich in history and philosophy, and although it’s not fiction, I would put the writing up there with Hemingway and Jack London. I picked up a copy of this book in 1975, not long after my trip to Campbell River with my friend Kevin, with whom I still fish, and I recently reread it. I could not put this book down. It is a true classic, not just for fly fishers, but for anyone who enjoys history and a good book about the great outdoors written by a true legend.
A River Never Sleeps was originally published by William Morrow, 1946.
Thomas McGuane’s
Ninety-Two in the Shade
Reviewed by Michael Checchio
A tragedy is a comedy misunderstood.
—Chuang Tz
Key West. . . . Key Wasted. . . . A wasted life and death Some serious alpha-male craziness is playing itself out in the Florida Keys, where the sun lights up the ocean as if to announce the plenitude of life. Ninety-Two in the Shade is the great Key West novel. And it is the fishing book that speaks most directly to my generation. The opening sentence could replace “In God We Trust” on the dollar bill. “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic.”
Thomas McGuane’s novel opens with a fanfare — surely the finest depiction of being stoned ever written, Hunter S. Thompson notwithstanding. The good doctor of gonzo journalism was so blown away by this novel that he had the words Ninety-Two in the Shade etched onto a gold plate and fastened onto the back of his writing chair so that it would always be behind him for inspiration.
Thomas Skelton has come home to Key West, the extreme southern end of our nation, where the road runs out at the ocean, and while we never learn exactly what this college dropout had been up to while on the mainland, it definitely involved the use of dangerous drugs.
He stuck out his thumb and thought, They won’t see I’m insane until I’m already in the car. It is hot and when I get to Key West I’ ll borrow some money and order a beverage. I’ll get a six-pack and take my skiff out on the reef. If they say in the car that I am insane, I will take over the wheel.
No one said he was insane; neither the hardware salesman, the United Parcel driver nor the crawfisherman who drove the last leg into Key West suggested such a thing. When Skelton told the hardware salesman that the paint had just lifted off the whole car in a single piece, the hardware salesman agreed with him about how Detroit put things together. This was the epoch of uneasy alliances.
Once out on the blue-green water, with sunlight penetrating down to the reef in shafts like pure church light, Skelton downs his beers while looking at a great panorama of ocean and marine life. “When the bait was gone and Skelton was drifting once more in the wooden skiff over the stony, illuminated reef, he saw that he would have to find a way to go on.”
That “way of going on” is for Tom to become a fishing guide. But the saltwater flats around Key West are already well staked out by two other guides, one of whom openly threatens to kill Skelton.
Ninety-Two in the Shade is the McGuane novel where everything comes together in perfect equipoise: character, story, style, and setting. The people in his rollicking story are vivid, but have weight. We enjoy their company and care about what happens to them. McGuane is a master at creating eccentrics whose impulses have a kind of grandeur.
Skelton comes from a privileged background, but has rejected materialism. Like many young people of his generation, he feels alienated and thinks there might be a better way to live. The novel creates a powerful disconnect between a romantic way of life and the loss of ideals in a commercial culture that the author sizes up as “hotcakes land.”
In a sense, this novel is about the death of the hippie dream. In spirit, it is a little like Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers and James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, two other classics that came out of that same stoner decade. Rolling Stone called Crumley’s riotous detective story “the last great mystery.” Think of Ninety-Two in the Shade as the last great fishing novel. (Strictly speaking, A River Runs Through It isn’t a novel, but a novella, and the only mind-altering substances in it are whisky and maybe beer, and beer in Montana isn’t even considered drinking.)
Ninety-Two is one of the world’s f inest “voice novels” — one so funny it cries out to be read aloud. Each sentence has perfect pitch. Many are highwire acts. McGuane’s characters speak in a kind of highly inflected vernacular that can sound both low rent and Elizabethan at once. The force of the narration never once loses momentum. The tone throughout is jocose, yet splenetic. McGuane is a language rock star and a writer primarily of perceptions, not plot devices, and his heightened language and raised consciousness in numerous antic scenes leave us feeling that we, too, are in an enhanced state of awareness, or at least have scored some awfully good dope.
The characters engage in comically awful behavior in Key West, an island town barely functioning as an outpost of civilization, right next to a pristine wilderness of tidal f lats and mangrove islands, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other, and within sight is the Gulf Stream. But there is a feeling throughout that the frontier ethic is dead or dying.
Young Tom Skelton has studied, to good effect, the patterns and styles of the island’s two alpha fishing guides. Faron Carter is a Chamber of Commerce backslapper and marsh weasel. Nichol Dance is a dangerous misanthrope who once shot and killed a man “in hazy circumstances.” On the saltwater flats, Carter plays the percentages; Dance is a master of long shots. Skelton favors Dance, a born loser who has already put one notch on his gun. The two guides see Skelton as an interloper who will take away their business — the kid is that good.
After falling victim to a cruel joke at their hands, Skelton sets fire to Dance’s skiff. Dance vows to murder Skelton with his Colt Bisley revolver, the one with the Mexican pearl handles, if he ever spots Tom on the water guiding. Skelton figures Dance just might be true to his word — “credence” is about all Nichol has going for him. But Skelton’s need to be on the water is organic.
Thomas Skelton thought that Key West was a town he could only take so much of. Without the ocean, he knew he couldn’t take it at all A seabird crowded sky made it quite impossible for Skelton to stay very long on land; and on days when exaggerated tide fell below the mean low, exposing the f lats around Key West and filling downwind side streets with the smell of ocean at its most fecund, he could grow quite frantic about it.
So while Dance waits for the insurance payout for a new skiff, Skelton orders his own custom-made boat after securing a loan from his grandfather, Goldsboro Skelton, a wheeler-dealer and old-time political boss with a “Huey Long complex” who is a direct descendant of “Key West’s last important wrecking master.” Meanwhile, Tom’s father has taken to bed in “a bassinet,” and he might even be sneaking around at night. This sensitive man is a student of the world’s religions, having been drummed out of the military “on a mental,” all his dreams and enterprises flopped, including his blimp factory and the whorehouse he managed, the one with a “Catholic-anarchist reading room.”
Everyone who cares about Tom is aghast that there is a man in Key West threatening to kill him. Especially upset is Skelton’s girlfriend, Miranda, who can’t help but wonder if her boyfriend has a death wish. Perhaps most perplexed by this oncoming duel in the sun are the two protagonists themselves. Neither Dance nor Skelton really wishes the other harm. Hell, they like each other.
Miranda said without challenge, “I wish I could understand.”
“It’s the only thing I can do half right. It’s as simple as that.”
“What about biology? Your teachers told me you were gifted.” “They said that? Huh. Well, yes I was good at it. But it needn’t have taken me that many years of school to see I just like salt water, you know, at some simple phenomenological level. I like fishing better than ichthyology because it’s all pointless and intuitive. I mean, there is no value equivalent in biology for the particular combination of noise and sight of blackfin tuna working bait in the Gulf Stream.”
Skelton also knows he needs that ocean to cure his “psychotic lesions,” the ones that come from gazing too long at our republic. Without the numinous world of tidal flats and ghosting marine life, Tom has little chance of restoring his mental and emotional equilibrium. To be exiled on dry land would mean a spiritual death,
Two nights earlier he had gotten so frightened that Dance would kill him that he had cried; but he never felt the yawning that came between himself and everything when his essential facilities for control began to lock up. Studying biology — at the end — he lost the connection between the sessile polyp he was dissecting and the firmament, in effect the kingdom-and-glory; or that at least was his f irst sign; within two hours, only Thorazine drove Satan from his eyes long enough for him to reform the connections between himself and what was palpably not himself. One more week he was in Key West again, where it was widely reported that he had “lowered his expectations.” He wants to be a guide, people said, looking at each other with signification, out in a damn boat all the doo-dah day.
As the culture curdles on land and things heat up on the water, nature goes on being its spontaneous self. Do they see the jewel in the lotus in between rounds of rum at the Red Doors on Caroline Street? Or are the charter captains too drunk to notice the beauty around them? It’s all one — it’s all Gaia. “He considered: mucous egg congestions are related to radiant sea creatures via indecipherable links of change.” Tom certainly sees a threat to the sea’s ecology. “God, if they will leave that ocean alone, I can take it all.”
Like characters in a Conrad story — another writer of mischievous sea tales — McGuane’s antiheroes are swept to their fates as if on lunar tides. In the foreground, his characters play out their dramas amid a wealth of detail, and in the background, the universe gets all the best lines. At least Skelton gets to have a lot more fun than Lord Jim ever did. Unlike Conrad’s novel, McGuane’s tale is no slow boat to China.
Two spotted rays shot out in front of the boat and coursed away on spotted wings, their white ventrals showing in their hurry; then vanished in the glare. The water was still and glassy, green over the turtle-grass bottom. There were birds everywhere now, soaring out before them — the cormorants that rested on stakes and mangroves to dry out their wings, the anhingas, gulls, frigate birds, and pelicans, the wading herons and cranes of every variation of slate, whites upon whites, emblematic black chevrons or stripes, wings finished in a taper or left rough-ended. They threaded the keys amid this aerial display over uncounted fish coursing the tidal basin, over a bottom itself home to a million kinds of animal that walked, stalked, and scuttled by every tropism from heat to light, and lived in intermeshing layers, layer upon layer, that passed through each other like light and never touched.
Events proceed apace to a foregone conclusion, yet the ending still comes as a shock. Life and death are the same process. And Skelton realizes this truth early on. “It’s just that when you realize that everyone dies you become a terrible kind of purist.” But then, Tom is a doomed romantic. And we realize with some suddenness that the comedic novel that has us in stitches has been a tragedy all along.
Ninety-Two in the Shade is a master class in satire. It manages to be both coolly nihilistic and a romantic adventure at once. A mix of loosely structured and hallucinatory episodes poetically wrought, the story is grounded in the kind of attention to detail that makes the scenes feel realistic, despite their antic nature. The men in this novel have what the author elsewhere has called “high-specific skills.” They can stalk permit on the tides and know how to break down and reassemble an outboard motor as if it is second nature to them. In contemporary fiction, where few people actually know how to do anything, this can be very refreshing. McGuane gives us Key West at full throttle. Nobody has charted it better. In his hands, the town is more than just a setting. The island is like another character in his novel.
Is there a fly-fishing guide in the Florida Keys who hasn’t read it? A few have probably memorized it. (And did they notice everybody is using bait, not fly rods?) This is the f lats guide’s Bible and Code of Bushido. Here is the Samurai Way for anyone aspiring to a life on the water. Who out there poling a skiff doesn’t want to be Tom Skelton?
“He had long since learned that the general view was tragic; but he had simultaneously learned that the trick was to become interested in something else. Look askance and it all shines on.”
Ninety-Two in the Shade was originally published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1973.