LINES ON THE WATER

A gentle, almost shy evocation of New Brunswick’s Miramichi and of growing up along that great salmon river’s banks.

The Miramichi has long been a destination for wealthy anglers who jet in to spend a week at a fishing camp, but it is also a place where everyday Canadians live and work. If you’re one of them, and if you like to fish (a high probability) you will know the water better than any swell—know it for its eels and mackerel as well as its salmon, know the feeder streams, what flies to fish, and all about riparian laws. Richards (Mercy Among the Children, 2001) recounts stories of the guides, good ones and bad—though any of them could run rapids blindfolded or while turning handstands on a canoe’s brace—who labored under the class divisions, and others (among not a few ordinary citizens) who simply appreciated the river as a birthright, part of their vital fluids, and worth a fight: “To a poacher, the salmon or moose becomes a political weapon in a battle with other human beings, who have no other political weapons left to use.” At times it feels as though Richards is hardly bitter enough about the fact that he doesn’t have much access to his homewaters (“The law will always favor some more than others”), but he does manage to keep out of mischief by working hard to get there, hard enough to make him feel he’s one with the landscape. He’s most comfortable in the reverie of a backwoods camp with people who know not only secret waters but also when to fish them and from what vantage. Here are the stories of Richard’s gradual inclusion into that life.

An affectionate tally of days on Canadian salmon rivers: and an envy-maker for those who only dream of wading in.