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Of all the outdoor writers I have read, Harry
Middleton touches me most.
I enjoy outdoors writing, particularly about fishing,
of course, and fly fishing most of all. But Harry
Middleton struck a chord deep in my soul which
resonated with truth.
I've passed a few of his books on to others who I
thought would enjoy them, and mostly, they didn't,
to my initial astonishment. Over time, I began to
understand why.
Middleton is tragic and saturated with despair.
Collectively, his books are unit volumes of an
autobiography memorializing the deaths of those
he loved, his own battles with chronic depression,
the pitfalls of his life and the one thing that
kept him sane, kept him hopeful and alive: Fishing
and cold mountains waters.
In this regard, Middleton strikes me as more honest
than any other writer I have known.
They are not fly fishing books. They are memoirs
of a life made bearable by fly fishing, and even
the fishing was only an extension of being
where fish exist. His was a life of toils, and
the purest joy he ever knew was on the water.
Growing up with Albert, Emerson and Elias Wonder
was the happiest time of his life. Few such times
would follow. In The Bright Country he
draws a double-edged and striking blade of metaphor:
The bright country is both the mountain waters he
returns to when he can, and the clearing of his mind
after his psychiatrist finally finds the right
medication to subdue his depression. The bright
country, to Harry, is living a life without despair,
at least for a little while.
It is impossible to miss the love with which he
describes the characters that move in and out of
his words and his life, like flotsam passing boulders
on the river. Harry speaks of all of them with
affection and childish wonder. Like any person
struggling with something like chronic depression,
Harry reached out to people nearly as much as he
did to trout from the opposite end of that little
Winston rod. He is a man I would very much like to
have known and fished with.
It is a further tragedy that Harry died an untimely
death, before his books were so well-known, and the
heartache of his demise is intensified knowing he
was working on a garbage truck night shift to feed
his family. It has been speculated that Middleton
died thinking his life's work of writing had gone
largely unnoticed.
I don't think so. I think Middleton wrote more for
himself than for the public. Certainly, there is the
desire of any person who writes to be read, to be
accepted and appreciated. But Middleton's chronicles
of his life were more of a purging, a thrashing battle
with his own demons, than any intention of authoring
an outdoors bestseller. In his writing, he probably
found solace second only to those magical waters of
Starlight Creek. I know how that feels.
And that's why I like Middleton more than any other
writer: He is as human as the rest of us, perhaps
moreso in his very misery. We've all had moments of
despair, and if Harry's life was mostly defined by it,
then the joy he found in his fishing must have been
tenfold any you and I have ever known. To all things
there is a balance. The Creator of all things does
not take away without giving in return. He gave Harry
Middleton a bright country in the darkness. And without
the darkness, without Harry's words to us in exploration
of it, the bright country would seem far less magical.
I don't think Harry died unhappy. I would like to
believe he left this world with a loving family
and a creel full of bittersweet but cherished
memories. Harry Middleton doesn't strike me as
the kind of man who would cease struggling, riding
the back of a garbage truck, doing what he had to
do to provide for his family, perhaps battling with
his depression and other demons again. He had survived
too much already to be beaten down by that. From the
moment he saw his childhood friend blown to bits,
the spiraling descent of Harry Middleton was his
gauntlet in life. I think he braved it and conquered
it. Despair didn't bring Harry Middleton to his grave,
a failing heart did. Perhaps his heart had suffered
more than its share, but Harry beat the despair.
That's heroism.
Yes, I think Harry was, in his thoughts, fishing
with Albert and Emerson and Elias Wonder. I think
that if someone saw him pass by the night of his
death, clutching the back of that garbage truck,
and looked into his eyes, they would have seen the
bright country unfolding there, mountains lifting
up like sudden creation, streams and rivers cutting
across them, blind trout rising to the fly, bagpipes
crooning in the distance, and a fake parrot shouting
"Ollie Ollie Oxen Free!"
I think, or at least will choose to believe, that
when his heart succumbed, Harry was in his mind
writing their stories, his story, and he existed
in that very fine and private sanctuary, the bright
country of words and cold mountain waters behind his
eyes.
"Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the
end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my
bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered
and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my
dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known
and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons
of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow
rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers
that have eroded down deep into a mountain's belly,
sculpted the land. Peeled back the planet's history
exposing the texture of time itself." - Harry Middleton
~ Roger
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