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Overview
In order to mate in the same freshwater stream where it was spawned, the salmon swims one thousand miles or more and overcomes countless obstacles, from trawling nets to twelve-foot-high waterfalls. To catch the King of Fish at the end of its incredible journey, the Anglo-Saxon angler subjects his pride, his bank account, and his taste buds—poached milk, anyone?—to similar dangers. Nine out of ten salmon do not make it back to the sea once their spawning run is finished; nine out of ten sportsmen return to the hotel empty handed when the fishing day is done.
And yet, year after year, they return to the rivers and streams of Great Britain—fish and angler both. Why? Perhaps “poor Holloway,” who has yet to land a salmon after twenty spawning seasons but whose success rate with the bored wives of more skillful fisherman is scandalously impressive, knows the answer.
An elegant blend of fishing narrative, travelogue, and character study, The Spawning Run is a hilarious and heartfelt tribute to the irresistible passions that unite us all: man, woman, and salmon.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504006347 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 81 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
A longtime professor of English and writing at Bard College and other schools, Humphrey was the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters.
William Humphrey (1924–1997) was born in Clarksville, Texas. Neither of his parents went to school beyond the fifth grade, and during the height of the Great Depression his father hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed the family. Humphrey left Clarksville at age thirteen and did not return for thirty-two years. By then he was the internationally acclaimed author of two extraordinary novels set in his hometown: Home from the Hill, a National Book Award finalist that became an MGM film starring Robert Mitchum, and its follow-up, The Ordways, which the New York Times called “exhilaratingly successful.” Eleven highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction followed, including Farther Off from Heaven, a memoir about Humphrey’s East Texas boyhood and his father’s tragic death in an automobile accident; The Spawning Run and My Moby Dick, two delightful accounts of the joys and travails of fly fishing; and No Resting Place, a novel about the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears.
A longtime professor of English and writing at Bard College and other schools, Humphrey was the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters.
Read an Excerpt
The Spawning Run
By William Humphrey
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1970 William HumphreyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0634-7
CHAPTER 1
dorset, may 12
The Itchen, the Test, the Frome: the fabled chalk streams of south England, where Dame Juliana Berners and Isaak Walton fished—here I am in the middle of them, it's spring, the season has opened, and I'd might as well be in the Sahara. Even the Piddle, known also as the Puddle—the brook running through the farm here—holds good trout. I have seen them hanging in the shallows above the millrace, resting from their run, reaccustoming themselves to fresh water—for these will be sea-run trout, gamest of them all, returning to spawn: broad in the shoulder, deep in the belly, spotted like the gravel of the stream bed so that at first you don't see them, only their rippling shadows on the bed. The personal property, every one of them, of Mr. "Porky" Mitchell, the meat-pie king. Eighty-five hundred pounds sterling he paid for the fishing in three miles of the stream for ten years. So Tom Mears, my landlord, tells me. I stroll over daily to watch these trout. They congregate below the signpost which reads STRICTLY PRIVATE FISHING, just downstream from the stone bridge with the weatherworn cast-iron plaque threatening transportation to Virginia to anyone found defacing it. Mr. Mitchell's water bailiff watches me.
dorset, may 13
The Anglo-Saxons are anglers. Here on Sundays queues of them with cane poles and minnow pails line the banks of the quarter-mile of public water. In and out among their lines one of Her Majesty the Queen's swans and her cygnets glide. The serenity is seldom disturbed by anybody's catching anything.
Nowhere is the class division more sharply drawn than in the national pastime. "Fishing in Britain," says the pamphlet sent me by The British Travel and Holiday Association, "falls into three classes: game, sea, and coarse." Read: upper, middle, and lower. Trout taken from the public water here must be returned; they are the property of Mr. Mitchell that have strayed. Only coarse fish may be kept by the coarse.
Discussed fishing with my new friends at The Pure Drop.
"Pike season don't begin for another two months, but there's some fair fishing round and about for roach, dace, tench," I'm told.
I remember reading those names of English fish in Walton, but what they are I don't know. They sound "coarse."
"I'm talking about trout," I say.
I get the look I've seen them give those who frequent the Saloon Bar, where the same beer costs tuppence ha'penny a pint more than it does here in the Public Bar. Bill Turner, speaking for them all, says, "Trout, is it? Ah well, I wouldn't know, not being a toff meself."
dorset, may 15
While watching the fish in the millrace today, I glimpsed something go through that looked like a torpedo.
dorset, may 16
Immoderate people, the British, especially in their pastimes, their reputation to the contrary notwithstanding. Take my new friend Dr., which is to say Mr., M.
M. is an authority, perhaps the authority, on the long-term effects of prisoner-of-war-camp diet on the male urinary system. On this important and insufficiently heeded aspect of war, M. has testified as an expert at war-crimes trials and in many veterans' disability-pension case hearings. This, however, is a study which M. has taken up only in the last few years, and which he pursues only out of fishing season. He is retired from practice.
He retired and came home from Africa to London three years ago, then moved down here, where he has the fishing on Thursdays and Fridays on a half-mile beat on the Frome, and Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays on a three-quarter-mile beat on the Piddle, sublet from Mitchell, the meat-pie king. Saturdays he plays the football pools.
I met M. in the farmyard yesterday afternoon when my wife and I came in from our bike ride over the heath. He was wearing waders and was busy rigging up a bamboo fly rod. I watched him do it. He jointed the rod, first greasing the male ferrule by rubbing it on the wing of his nose, attached the reel, drew the already greased line through the guides, attached a leader (a "cast" they call it here) with a deftly tied central draught knot, opened a fly book, and selected a fly. Holding it between thumb and forefinger he said—his first words to me—"What fly is that?"
I took it from him. I had tied the pattern. "I don't know what you may call it here; we would call that a Gold-ribbed Hare's Ear where I'm from. It's a number 14," I said.
He reached into the trunk of his car (the "boot" they say here) and took out another rod. He jointed this rod, put on a reel, threaded the line through the guides, and handed it to me.
"You'll do," he said. "Come along."
We went past the old gristmill and under the railroad trestle and across the meadow to where his beat of the river begins. A slow, flat, winding, and narrow stream the Piddle is, never more than ten or twelve feet wide, though just as deep, and choked with water weeds that twine snakily in the current. Along its banks not a tree or a bush to interfere with casting.
We fished for an hour, or rather I fished: M. sat on the bank, smoking his pipe and watching. I do not like to be watched while I fish. In fact, I cannot fish if I'm watched. Cannot even cast my fly properly. And I felt bad that he was giving up his sport, especially knowing how costly it was. He refused to fish, however. "I do it every day," he said. "I want to see you catch something." I caught nothing.
After an hour he announced that it was time for tiffin. I tried to decline half his tea, but when he said that if I did not share it with him he would eat none of it either, I said I would share it with him. So I had half of one of Mr. Mitchell's pork pies, half a cucumber sandwich, half a banana sandwich, and a cup of tea. Afterward I accepted a fill for my pipe from his tobacco pouch. While we smoked, M. told me about himself.
Upon finishing his residency in tropical medicine, he got married, went on a fishing honeymoon to Ireland, returned to London, where he set his wife up in a flat in South Kensington, and shipped out to Nairobi. There he spent the next twenty-five years, returning home on three months' leave every year to fish, and to see his wife. Once in that time he came back for an entire year. He had come into a legacy of £3000, which he spent on salmon fishing in Scotland. Best year of his life. If he should ever win a pot in the football pools, it's what he would do again. His period of service in Nairobi concluded, he came home three years ago, gave up the flat in London and brought his wife (their grown son was now out in Ottawa) down here and bought his fishing. On this beat here he had killed six so far, this early in the season, the biggest one thirty-two pounds.
"A thirty-two-pound trout!" I exclaimed.
"No, no. Not trout. Salmon."
"Salmon! In this little trickle of a stream?"
Now I know what that shape was that passed through the millrace yesterday, its dorsal fin out of water like a periscope.
This evening, telling Tom Mears about my day, I learned why M. did not fish while I was fishing. Here in England when one buys a beat on a piece of water, or subleases as M. does from the meat-pie king, one not only buys a specified number of days of the week, or half-days, one also buys a specified number of rods. What M. has is one rod for his days on his beat. Should he bring along a guest, he may not fish himself. I won't be taking up his invitation to go with him another time. In fact, I must give up hope of fishing in Britain. It's too complicated.
dorset, may 17
So much for yesterday's resolution! I was at my desk this morning when I heard Tom call up from below, "Bill? Come down! Something here I think you'll want to see."
On the bricks of the back court, at the feet of a man in waders, lay the biggest fish I have ever seen. Silver, sleek, shaped like the fuselage of a jet plane. Its jaws were bared in a ferocious snarl. I had never seen one, but I recognized it.
"Yes, that's a right nice cock salmon. Should run to about forty pounds, maybe forty-five," said the man in waders.
I stretched myself out on the bricks beside the fish. We were just about a match.
And from there I lay looking up at Mr. Porky Mitchell with envy and class hatred.
dorset, may 19
"Scotland," said Tom. "There's the place for you. Up there they've got fishing hotels where you can buy rights by the day or by the week."
"Too far. Too expensive."
"Wales, then. Be there by afternoon."
Wales.... The Severn. The Wye. The Usk.... In the county town of Dorchester—Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge—where I went today to get myself outfitted with fishing tackle, I parked my car in the municipal lot.
"Enjoying your holiday over here, are you, sir?" asked the attendant as he copied onto my ticket the number of my Virginia license plate.
"Very much, thank you."
"First visit to Dorchester? Perhaps I can tell you some of the sights to see."
"Very kind of you. As a matter of fact, I've been here before."
"What! Here to Dorchester?"
"Why, yes."
"What would ever bring you back a second time?"
"Well, what has brought me back several times is my interest in your great man, Hardy."
"Mr. Hardy, is it? I knew him well. I was his driver."
"His driver! Were you really? You fascinate me!"
"Do I then? Well, so I was! Yes, Mr. Hardy had one of the very earliest automobiles in Dorchester. A fine big Daimler it was, the kind they don't make anymore. I used to run him up to London every month. We did it always in under three hours. Loved speed, he did."
"Loved speed? Now I should never have expected that!" (He used to get about the town on a tricycle.)
"'George, faster!' he would say. 'George' (that's me) 'faster!' Ah, he was a fine man, and when he died he remembered me in his testament. I keep a photo of him here in the hut."
"Do you! Well, that is wonderful! You must cherish a very tender memory of him."
"I do. I do. Be glad to show it to you, if you'd care to see it."
"I'd love to see it!"
The photograph—framed—bore only a faint resemblance to Hardy. I said, "This doesn't look much like other portraits of him I have seen."
"Oh, you're wrong there, sir. I knew him well and that's caught him, all right. A speaking likeness, that. Yes, yes. Built some of the very finest houses in this town, did Mr. Hardy."
I knew that Hardy had spent a long apprenticeship as an architect, but it seemed hardly the thing to remember him for. "What's more important," I said, "he wrote some of the best novels and some of the most beautiful poems in the language."
"That will be the brother," said the parking-lot attendant. "It's Mr. Henry Hardy we're speaking of, the building contractor. Ah, he was a fine man, and it's a pleasure to talk to you about him."
My tackle consists of my rod: a two-handed ten-foot second-hand Farlow which looks as if it has caught a great many fish; line: oiled silk, torpedo-head taper, FBG; two hundred feet of backing, thirty-pound test; reel; hobnailed hip boots; two dozen gaudy big double-hooked salmon flies; gaff; two books on the salmon, his habits, and how to catch him. Or rather, no. One does not catch a salmon. One kills a salmon. The distinction resembles that preserved in English between the verbs "to murder" and "to assassinate": ordinary citizens are murdered, leaders are assassinated. So with the King of Fish. He is not caught, like your perch or your pike or your lowly pickerel. He is killed.
Mr. Porky Mitchell's peculiar word is now explained: salmon, male and female, are called cocks and hens, I learn from my books. The salmon appears to be a very odd fish.
ross-on-wye, may 21
In the spring a salmon's fancy also turns to thoughts of love. Not a young salmon's but an old salmon's. And not lightly. With the single-mindedness of a sailor returning home after a four-year cruise without shore leave.
The salmon is anadromous. That is to say, he leads a double life, one of them in freshwater, the other in saltwater. His freshwater life may be said to be his private, or love life; his saltwater life his ordinary, or workaday life. The salmon reverses the common order of human affairs: a lot is known about his private life but nothing at all about the rest. We get the chance to study him only when the salmon is making love. For when the salmon, aged two, and called at that stage a parr, leaves his native river and goes to sea (to be a smolt until he returns to spawn, whereupon he becomes a grilse), nobody, not even Professor Jones, D. Sc., Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Zoology, University of Liverpool, whose book The Salmon I am reading, knows where he goes or how he lives, whether in the sea he shoals together with his kind or goes his separate way, why some stay there longer than others or why some return home in the spring and others not until the autumn. He disappears into the unfished regions, or the unfished depths, or both, of the ocean, and is not seen again until—it may be as little as one year or as much as four years later—impelled by the spawning urge, he reenters the coastal waters and the estuaries and up the rivers to his native stream like some missing person returning after an absence of years from home.
Nothing of what the salmon does in the sea is known, only what he does not do: namely, reproduce himself. He cannot. For his mating and for the incubation of his offspring, fast-flowing freshwater is required. And he can't, or won't, or at least would a lot rather not spawn in any but the same stream in which he himself was spawned. This may be far inland, perhaps deep in the mountains of Wales, and he, when he begins to feel the urge, may be in the Baltic Sea—in tagging experiments salmon have been tracked as far as sixteen hundred miles from their native streams. No matter—home he heads, and, what is even more remarkable, he knows how to find his way back. He does it, they think, by smell.
By 1653, when Walton published The Compleat Angler, tagging experiments had already shown that salmon, if they can, return to their native rivers to spawn. Walton writes,
Much of this has been observed by tying a Ribband or some known tape or thred in the tail of some young Salmons, which have been taken in Weirs as they swimm'd toward the salt water, and then by taking a part of them again with the known mark at the same place at their return from the Sea ... and the like experiment hath been tryed upon young Swallowes, who have after six moneths absence, been observed to return to the same chimney, there make their nests and habitations for the Summer following: which has inclined many to think, that every Salmon usually returns to the same river in which it was bred, as young Pigeons taken out of the same Dove-cote, have also been observed to do.
Since Walton's time, much thought and many ingenious experiments have sought answers to the questions, why and how the salmon does this. Memory? Instinct? The "conclusion" of these, up to now, is Professor Jones's hypothesis that each river has its characteristic odor, and that throughout the period of his wanderings in the sea the salmon retains a memory of, one may say a nostalgia for, this odor. Neither Professor Jones nor anybody else knows how the salmon finds and follows the trail of this scent through hundreds and hundreds of miles of salt seawater. This smell Professor Jones supposes to be a complex one, composed of many things, chemical and physical, owing to the different substances dissolved in the water, and it is this complexity which makes the scent of each river unique and unmistakable to its salmon offspring. One is asked to imagine the salmon working his way home past tributaries where the scent is almost but not quite the one he is seeking, like the hero of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past almost succeeding but repeatedly just failing to recapture the sense of happiness that came to him momentarily with the taste of the petite madeleine dipped in tea, until finally the flavor reminds of when he last tasted it and his mind is flooded with recollections of his childhood vacations at his Aunt Léonie's house in Combray.
Salmon do have a very fine sense of smell. Migrant salmon on their way upstream have been seen to shy and scatter when a bear put its paw in the water above them. Also when a very dilute solution of the odor of the human skin was put in the water above them. And they do not respond this way when the odor introduced into the water is not one they associate with one or another of their natural enemies. So their sense of smell is not only sharp, it is highly discriminating as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Spawning Run by William Humphrey. Copyright © 1970 William Humphrey. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- The Spawning Run
- A Biography of William Humphrey
- Copyright Page