In my home library is an original copy of Roderick Haig-Brown’s original publication of A River Never Sleeps, so you can imagine my surprise when I opened the mailer from Skyhorse Publishing to find a newly reprinted copy of this classic.
As I scanned through the chapters I was struck again by the delightful and insightful writing style that characterizes all of writings of Roderick Haig-Brown. While mostly written about various fishing adventures the text is lavishly enriched with observations of the natural world.
Perhaps it is my own advancing years that compelled me to read again the chapter entitled Before I Die. Having read this chapter many years ago, when my sense of my own mortality was less developed, I failed to appreciate the pathos contained in this chapter. In it the author lists all of the things he would like to do before he dies. A ‘bucket list’ of sorts, it is a collection of places that he wished to fish for the first time and places that he wished to fish again. From the chalkstreams of his native England to his beloved Campbell River on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada it read like laundry list of great places to fish. It is a bittersweet reflection on a life well lived but somehow incomplete. Roderick Haig-Brown died in 1976.
He summed up his love of rivers and fishing in the final chapter.
“A river is never quiet; it can never, of its very nature, be quite still; it is never quite the same from one day to the next. It has its own life and its own beauty, and the creatures it nourishes are alive and beautiful also. Perhaps fishing is, for me only an excuse to be near rivers. If so, I’m glad I thought of it.”
Reprinted, with a new introduction by Nick Lyons and an afterword by Thomas McGuane, this classic record of an angler’s year is a wonderful addition to any angler’s library.
A River Never Sleeps
Author: Roderick Haig-Brown
Skyhorse Publishing Co – Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-60239-939-6 - $29.95
Available March 15, 2010
Originally published March 1, 2010 on Fly Anglers Online by Reviewed By Neil Travis.