Near Patagonia, Arizona. Photo copyright 2010 by Phillip Capper.

Although his life in the American West is rich and interesting, Harrison remarks in the interview that he does have feelings of loss in leaving he Upper Midwest years ago. “I miss the U.P. terribly,” Harrison notes. “It became a retreat for me from the real world. … It was like, after a disgusting two weeks of movie meetings, and then a day later you’re at the Dunes Saloon in Grand Marais after taking a 4-hour walk with your dogs and never seeing anybody, because I’d say 99% of my hiking, I never saw another human being. Which is the way I liked it.

Much of his recent work is centered on characters and events in Michigan, and Walton quotes Harrison in saying that, “I know I’ve written about Michigan a lot lately, and I wonder if the origin isn’t homesickness. Which is a very deep feeling, what the Portuguese call saudade. It’s that longing for a place.”

Harrison’s latest, The Farmer’s Daughter, is out now.

Racers ... Start your engines.

The 62nd annual Weyerhaeuser AuSable River Canoe Marathon wrapped-up today. The winners, Andrew Triebold and Steve Lajoie, finished the run from Grayling to Oscoda with an unofficial time of 14:17:42. Triebold and Lajoie were the winners of the race last year, along with 2004, and Triebold was half of the 2007 winning team, as well. A record number of entries were recorded this year (over 90), although the record time for the race was set in 1994 at 13:58:08 by Serge Corbin and Solomon Carriere of Canada.

Even completing the grueling 120-mile race is a feat of great athleticism, and although fly anglers in general are no fans of the average weekend rental canoer, in my experience the racers I’ve met on the AuSable have been courteous, wonderful people. True|North|Trout congratulates Andrew Triebold and Steve Lajoie on their win!

As a bit of history, and an enjoyable bit of perspective, check out this recap of the 1973 race in the form of an essay written by Jim Harrison and published in Sports Illustrated entitled “A Machine with Two Pistons” on the win that year by Luc Robillard and Jerry Kellogg, and on the dynamics of racing back in the earlty 1970s. Interesting to see how the race, the racers, and the boats has changed, and how they have remained the same.

Closet Fodder

It’s hard not to notice the general decline in the quality of outdoor writing in the hook-and-bullet press. There are notable exceptions, of course, but the truth is that most sporting and outdoor publications are simply not exhibiting the quality or variety of writing that they once were. The best publications, thankfully, are holding up better — I put Gray’s Sporting Journal in that camp, for example — but for many of the mainstream outdoor publications the pattern seems to be to focus on favorable gear reviews for companies that buy advertising, along with a smattering of kiss-and-tell accounts of fishing on the better water. All in all, it is a minimal effort, but apparently it is enough to clear the newsstands, or so it would seem.

To me the Golden Age of outdoor magazine writing can be found in the mid-1960s through nearly the whole of the 1970s, and what set that time apart from now was, above all else, the generally outstanding literary quality of the writing itself.

I say all this by way of prelude as, thanks to the Internet, much of this writing can be revised today in the form of Sports Illustrated’s online archives. Although you might now associate Sports Illustrated with boobs and bikinis, boxing and baseball statistics, the truth is that, like Playboy, the 1960s and 1970s were actually rich periods for the magazine both in terms of the reach of the subject matter on which they were willing to publish, along with the quality of the writers that they asked to do the work.

A glace at the archives tells the story.

"Come to Michigan"

Start with Leland Day’s 1962 piece on fly fishing on Michigan’s AuSable River entitled “Drama of the Mayfly.” It remains as fresh and as interesting as the day it was published. Then check out Hank Babbitt’s 1967 essay, “A Boom and A Blunder On Lake Michigan” that relates the details of the introduction of Coho salmon on the fishery and the impact of that decision in terms of sportfishing expectations throughout the watershed. Babbitt also relates, briefly, the story of the famous 1967 storm that drowned seven anglers in the Sleeping Bear Dunes area (Jerry Dennis relates the details of the same story in his book The Living Great Lakes but from a different perspective).

A few years earlier, in July of 1961, Robert Cantwell told of fishing the Two-Hearted River, coincidently in the week of Hemingway’s death (“The River That Will Flow Forever“). Time and literary attention has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the river Hemingway has Nick Adams fishing is actually the Fox, but Cantwell does a good job of trying to make the facts fit the actual Two-Hearted nonetheless. His remarks about the land and the people of that area — now with a view back of almost 50 years — are worth perusing.

On the topic of Hemingway, take a peek at E.M. Swift’s piece from 1984 entitled “In the Country He Loved,” about Jack Hemingway’s return to his father’s Idaho landscape on a hunting and fishing expedition to the Sun Valley area.

Two favorite writers of mine had their work repeatedly grace the pages of Sports Illustrated in the early 1970s — Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane. Check out, for example, Harrison’s classic, “A Plaster Trout in Worm Heaven” (about the Kalkaska Trout Festival, among other things) along with “To Each His Own Chills and Thrills” (republished these days with the title of “Ice Fishing: The Moronic Sport”).

Trout Stamps

And here is a special treat — arguably the finest thing ever written on the topic of permit fishing, and perhaps keys fly fishing itself — Tom McGuane’s “The Longest Silence.” McGuane’s essays begins with what I would argue is perhaps the greatest opening line in the history of the literature of fly angling: “What is emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences—the unproductive periods.” This is a Hegelian notion, certainly, but also very much the case.

While you’re at it, take a few minutes to have a look at another of McGuane’s pieces in the vault worth a read — “An Unobtrusive, Shadowy Presence” — on the vicissitudes of hunting bonefish with a fly rod. Originally published in 1972, its another gem that will make most of what you read on the newsstand shelves these days even more banal than it already is.

Yellowstone River

True|North|Trout reported in May on a story in the New York Times on ex-Michigander Jim Harrison’s Arizona adobe casita (“Catching Up with Jim Harrison”). Harrison winters and writes in Patagonia, Arizona, where he also hunts birds. But in the warmer months of the year he spends much of his time at his ranch home in Paradise Valley, just North of Yellowstone National Park, and just South of Livingston, Montana.

The Wall Street Journal now follows-up where the New York Times left off with an article and interview with Harrison, along with a slide show of photographs of his Montana home. His ranch is “nestled near the foothills of the Gallatin Mountains and near Yellowstone Park, his 10-acre property abuts a hay farm and a sheep ranch, where he shoots Hungarian partridges and sharp-tailed grouse in the fall. In the summer, he catches brown and rainbow trout on the Yellowstone River. The horizon is dotted with peaks—the white-tipped Absaroka Range and Bear Tooth Mountains to the east and the green foothills of the Gallatins to the west.”

I’ve been by his old farmstead on the Leelanau Peninsula just to the west of the Village of Lake Leelanau many times, and it is a fine farmstead, indeed, nestled in against a quiet, almost hidden Leelanau hillside. But I also know the Paradise Valley region quite well, too, and that long valley below the Absaroka mountain range, cut-through by the rolling Yellowstone River, is among the most beautiful places on Earth.

Jim Harrison

Long gone from Northern Michigan and his farm on the Leelanau County, Jim Harrison now resides in Patagonia, Arizona, and Livingston, Montana where he continues his writing life. Harrison remains, however, a favorite writer among the hook-and-bullet set of Michigan, and also remains Michigan’s most famous literary son. His work also continues to captivate the New York Review of Books crowd, and reviews of both The English Major and Returning to Earth have recently appeared.

What brings this to mind, now of all times, is an interview with Mr. Harrison that Charles McGrath conducted on his visit to Harrison’s adobe casita on Sonoita Creek in Patagonia, Arizona two seasons back. I missed the interview the first time around, but found it on the web and thought it was worth sharing.

The inteview is classic Harrison and demonstrates that, now in his early 70s and retired from screenwriting, he continues to enjoy “the pleasures of the hard-worn life.” His topics range from his life in novels, to hunting, to cooking, to the beauty of the Arizonia landscape.

“Writers go out to Hollywood for the same reason stockbrokers go into business, and that’s greed … Even when they’re cheating you, they’re cheating you at a level that’s unheard of in academe, say. But I finally quit because I didn’t want to die in that suckhole.”

The essay also includes a link to a fine receipe for Jim Harrison’s Mesquite Roasted Doves and Linda Harrison’s egg and Gruyère cheese polenta. As Harrison notes, on this we have no choice: “Eat or die.”