I’ve been a bird-watcher since
I was a kid. Or to put it another way: Since I was a kid, I have
not been cool. For the most part, that stopped bothering me a long
time ago. Still, every now and then, I feel it. This happened
recently when I got a close-up look at the epitome of outdoor cool:
the literary fly-fisherman.
This spring, my hometown of
Ashland, Ore., sponsored a “Community Reads” event. The idea was to
get everyone to read and talk about the same book at once. It’s a
wonderful idea, and the library system chose a wonderful novel,
The River Why, by David James Duncan. For those
who don’t know the book, go out right now and buy it. It is a
moving coming-of-age story, the story of Gus Orviston, whose
consuming passion is fly-fishing for trout in the wild, fragile
streams of Oregon.
The River Why
stands in the distinguished literary tradition that takes
fly-fishing as a metaphor for life. Other well-known examples are
the Nick Adams stories of Ernest Hemingway; A River Runs
Through It, by Norman MacLean; and The Sky
Fisherman, by Craig Lesley. Their often doomed heroes
personify grace, skill and a manly love for the natural world.
There’s no doubt about it: Fly-fishermen are extremely cool.
This was brought home as I sat in the rapt audience and
listened to Duncan himself give a reading from The River
Why and his other books. Duncan was as cool as his
protagonist — funny, emotionally honest and effortlessly
elegant in his writer’s blacks. And yes, he is a passionate
fly-fisherman, and lives on a trout stream in Montana.
So, there it was again. My uncoolness as a bird watcher, stark and
undeniable. Could part of the problem be that birders like myself
lack literary role-models? The literature is thin. Sure, there is
Terry Tempest Williams’s magnificent Refuge, a
book that elevates the watching of birds into a journey of
emotional discovery. But more typical are self-deprecating memoirs
like Tales of a Low-Rent Birder by Pete Dunne,
in which the very uncoolness of birding is part of the fun. And I
don’t know of any novelist who has taken birding as a metaphor for
life. The Great American Birding Novel has yet to be written.
I understand that the cool of birding is, literarily
speaking, a tough sell. For starters, physical skill plays a big
part in cool, whether it describes fly-fishing, jazz saxophone
playing, or slam-dunking. The skill required to make a perfect
cast, placing a dry fly just in front of the nose of a big trout in
an alder-rimmed pool, is undeniable. Add to this that trout are
profoundly mysterious and can be caught only by one with an almost
spiritual connection to the fish. Birds, in contrast, are
everywhere; there’s probably one visible outside your window right
now. How hard can it be to watch them?
Then there’s the
fact that fly-fishermen get to choose between the roles of predator
and environmental saint; and both are cool. A trout fisherman can
eat what he catches or release it, showing mercy and advanced
consciousness. It’s a win-win. All a birder can do it check off his
bird on a list — an inescapably nerdy activity — or
choose not to do so, in which case he’s left with nothing at all.
Finally, where’s the danger? After all, there’s always the chance
that a fisherman might drown. This possibility comes up with
remarkable frequency in the literature of fly-fishing, adding
pathos to the tales of these difficult young men. But danger in
bird-watching? Please.
As I said, most of the time I’m
fine with being uncool. I long ago learned to ignore the amused
stares of passers-by when I break out my binoculars to get a good
look at the warblers in the park. Still, I can’t help but feel that
literary artistry could go a long way toward elevating humble
birders like me into the rarified realms of cool now reserved for
fly-fishermen. Maybe something like…
…With a
practiced motion, Brent lifted his binoculars, his index finger
rotating the focus ring even as the superb German optics rose
toward his eyes. Graceful as a dancer, he crouched slightly and
directed his lenses through the trembling aspen leaves, at the
exact moment that the wildly crying woodpecker, its heart-stopping
swoop-and-rise complete, alighted upon the sun-dappled trunk. It
was a Williamson’s sapsucker, 50 grams of feathered freedom
…
Oh, never mind.
Pepper
Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is writer and
lifelong bird guy who lives in Ashland,
Oregon.
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