Haunting the Waterside

There is a handful, a small handful, of those today who can write lyrically and yet without pretension about the joys and tragedies the angler or the gunner encounters in the seasons of his year. If there is among this number a more sensitive observer or a more able writer than Dana Lamb, I cannot think who he is. As the angler waits, impatiently, for spring, and the gunner for fall, so I wait, along with others who share a love for rivers and woods and those who frequent them, for the appearance of Lamb's stories. Fortunately, the past 15 years have seen the publication, every year or two beginning with On Trout Streams and Salmon Rivers, of collections of these stories.

Reading the 30-odd pieces in Beneath the RisingMist, one is reminded inevitably of past favorites. Among mine is "How To Really Enjoy a Martini" (On Trout Streams and SalmonRivers) in which it turns out that such enjoyment begins to rise with the sun and includes a full day's fishing before ever the gin is poured. Or "Pardon My French" (Bright Salmon andBrown Trout), with its guide Pierre who will - and apparently can - speak only French until an awesome salmon releases in him a string of eminently clear, if profane, English. The same obtains with memorable lines, which I have collected and pinned above my fly-tying desk, lines like those describing Lamb's round-about return home: "lest, like a sprinter pulled suddenly up short, the muscles of my soul be strained by the too abrupt transition from Matapedia to Manhattan." His writing also contains elements of honesty which may surprise the uninitiated. It is comforting, for example , to discover that there are others who half fear that some monstrous fish actually will take one's fly or who, despite public scoffing, whistle and sing loudly when they see fresh bear tracks.

There are plenty of both, entire stories and passages from them, which become part of one in Beneath the Rising Mist. "Renewed Like the Eagles" contains the best description I've read of a stream-reared brown trout, a fish "too beautiful by far to kill." And "One Evening" captures matchlessly the vulgarities of those without the generosity which characterizes the best sportsmen. Readers of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE will remember "The Orioles Are Back" (June 1975), reprinted here, and will know that these stories are often as little about fishing as are Hemingway's. Nor, of course, are the stories here only for the angler and gunner, but rather, as Lamb has it, for all "who softly haunt the waterside with fly rod, painter's palette, prayer or pen."

Lamb's is not the only Dartmouth name with which one associates these skills. I think of Nelson Bryant '46, who writes quite straight- forwardly and yet with beauty, and whose advice on fishing wet flies for trout or searching for woodcock cover conveys the real appeal of these pursuits. No one, however, writes of rivers great and small with such fluency and poetic grace as does Dana Lamb.

BENEATH THE RISING MISTby Dana S. Lamb '21Stone Wall Press, 1979. 139 pp. $15

A specialist in ancient and Near Easternreligions, Dartmouth Professor Oden is experttoo at tying those flies he half fears "somemonstrous fish" will take.