Quote of the Day (Jonathan Raban, on the Unusual Steelhead Trout)

“Seattle and Portland, Oregon, are the twin capitals of a particularly dramatic and intense form of fly-fishing: the ritual persecution of the steelhead trout. The steelhead is a queer fish, as big as a salmon, weighing anywhere up to thirty-five pounds. It's usually described as a sea-run rainbow trout, which is like describing a Roman Catholic as a Southern Baptist with a taste for incense. It spends most of its life at sea, in the ocean south of the Aleutians, and unlike the Pacific salmon, it returns to sea after spawning in freshwater, which saves it from the helpless fatalism of its salmon cousins. Whereas salmon go up the rivers in ones and twos, and, though there are distinct summer runs and winter runs, they enter the rivers during every season of the year.” —British travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist Jonathan Raban (1942-2023), “Last Call of the Wild,” originally published in Esquire, April 1995, reprinted in Driving Home: An American Journey (2011)

I haven’t gone fishing since I was a kid and, aside from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, have never bothered to read about the pastime.

But ever since reading Hunting Mister Heartbreak, I have been a fan of Jonathan Raban, I felt crestfallen when I read of his passing last year, while marveling at his heroic post-stroke struggle to finish his last book, Father and Son.

The other day, I rediscovered this Esquire article that I had clipped out for reading on a rainy day. The piece has so much to say about “the politics of nature in the Northwest,” particularly as it concerns the region’s old and new settlers.

But the paragraph that provides today’s quote really leaped out at me. It’s hard not to like a fishing article that evokes one species’ “helpless fatalism.” And that line about the Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist is practically a textbook example of how to induce a delighted surprise in a reader.

Almost anyone could write a dry, just-the-facts description of this fish. But it takes quite a stylist to make these facts come alive as Raban did.

(The image accompanying this post, of a man holding a steelhead trout, is a cropped version of a picture taken Mar. 1, 2013, by Tobin John of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.)

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Raban, on How Travel and Writing Differ)

“Writing—real writing, in the iron discipline of a book—is the mirror opposite of traveling. A book is a strictly subordinated world. Its logic, of symbol and metaphor, is at once tantalizingly suggestive and ruthlessly exclusive. From the moment that a narrative begins to develop its own momentum, it insists on what it needs and what it has no time for. It's at his peril that the writer loses sight of where the book began and where it's destined to find an ending. (Endings almost invariably change as the book develops, but the sense of an ending is crucial, even if it turns out to be nothing like the ending.) Writing is—in the terms of Philosophy 101—all cause, cause, cause, where traveling is a long cascade of one damn contingency after another. Good writing demands the long view, under a sky of unbroken blue; good traveling requires one to submit to the fogginess of things, the short-term, minute-by-minute experiencing of the world. It’s no wonder that my alter ego and I are on such bad terms.”—Jonathan Raban, “Notes From the Road,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana (2003)