DDR: The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing by Thomas McGuane

 

I read Thomas McGuane's first novel, The Sporting Club, in 1975 or 6. It was assigned by one of my teachers at Catonsville Community College. I'm sorry to say that while I know I read it--I'm that kind of guy--I remember nothing about it, not even if I liked it or not. But when I saw a blurb for this book, it caught my eye. Strange, as I have no interest at all in fishing. It wasn't available at the library, though. So I just let it settle into the back of my mind until a few weeks ago when I placed an order for it through Thrift Books. 

xxii + 356 = 378 pages. And I'm going to finish this one, by gum.

Day 1 (DDRD 2,845), August 15, 2025

Read to page 28.

Only took to page xx (which is only the 6th page of text) before Izaak Walton was invoked. I like that in a (fisher)man.

"Constant discovery is the eternal joy of the ahistorical." (20)

Day 2 (DDRD 2,846), August 16, 2025

Read to page 58.

This actually isn't an easy read, as McGuane casually uses fishing words which are not definable contextually, but that doesn't bother me. In fact, I'm glad that he doesn't explain via context, parentheses, or footnotes. I get enough of it to get swept up in the story. And like Isaac Walton's book, it's about more than fishing. Although I have to admit that occasionally makes me wish I did that thing. No worries, though--I shake it off.

Day 3 (DDRD 2,847), August 17, 2025

Read to page 88.

This illustration 

appears on the title page of The Longest Silence. I thought that it might be taken from The Compleat Angler, but since there was no attribution & I had a Need To Know, I thought I'd put technology to work for me. I Did a Google Image Search with the picture and got this A.I. response:

"This image is a digitized plate from a book titled "Sport in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland" by Tom Speedy, published in 1886."

Clearly A.I. doesn't know that book titles are to be the italicized, not placed in quotation marks, but still I was impressed. Being rather skeptical by nature, however, I thought I'd have a look for that book.

And my old friend Internet Archive, had that book. But after searching through it and not finding the picture, I decided to run the search again.  This time I got a different result:

British Library digitised image from page 125 of "Rambles in East Anglia: or, Holiday excursions among the rivers and broads [With plates.]"

And this time the picture itself appeared with the attribution

...though I couldn't find an e-copy of the book itself.

A.I. also informed me that "The name of this picture is "Fish by Schaldach". It was created by William Schaldach in 1937. The image is also available as a digitized image from page 125 of "Rambles..." by the British Library." 

This doesn't seem to be completely accurate, either, however, as there is a book by William Schaldach called Fish by Schaldach which perhaps includes this picture, but is not the original source.

(If anybody out there happens to have a spare $906.50 hanging around…did I mention that it's my birthday Tuesday?)

From this little foray, I've learned 3 things: (1) technology is amazing (2) AI is quite fallible, and (3) there are quite a few books about what walking around the countryside and fishing, and all of the ones I've seen have very interesting illustrations. 

I'm particularly fond of this one:

And I imagine that this one--from the aforementioned Sport in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland by Tom Speedy--

-- is the reason A.I. initially misidentified the picture that I started all of this rambling about with. It is similar in layout.

Okay, enough. I have been in this rabbit hole for 2 hours now. Back to the serious business of reading my booky wook.

"I try to tie flies that will make me fish better, to fish more often, to dream of fish when I can't fish, to remind myself to do what I can to make the world more accommodating to fish, and, in short, to take further steps toward actually becoming a fish myself." (71)

Now THAT'S some dedication to 🐟ing that I can't even begin to imagine.

Day 4 (DDRD 2,848), August 18, 2025

Read to page 120.

Not for the first time I think, "You've got to know a lot to be a good fisherman." The types of lures. The habits of fish. And beind that, this McGuane fellow seems to know Nature back and forth: every bug, every tree, every flower. It doesn't make me long for The Wild...but it does make me appreciate its beauty. And that's a big stretch for me.

At this point I'm a little less than 1/3rd of the way through this book, but I have the feeling that this is "the center" of it:

"The more we fish, the the more weightlessly and quietly we move through a river and among its fish, and the more we resemble our own minds in the bliss of angling." (101)

McGuane's wit regularly surfaces with comments like this: "I once thought that the biggest things a steelheader or Atlantic salmon fishermen can have--not counting waders and a stipend--were a big arm and a room temperature IQ. Now I know better, having found out the hard way." (102)

I might need to read some more of this guy's books. Wait, what's that sound? Kind of like a drumming noise from several miles away? Oh...it's the complete McGuane Bibliography!

Fiction

The Sporting Club (1969, novel) LFPL, 1 copy

The Bushwacked Piano (1971, novel) 

Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973, novel) Movie @ LFPL, 1 copy

The Missouri Breaks (1976, screenplay, paperback original) Movie @ LFPL, 2copies 

Panama (1978, autobiographical novel) 

Nobody's Angel (1981, novel)

In the Crazies: Book and Portfolio (1984; ltd. ed. of 185)

Something to Be Desired (1985, novel) LFPL, 1copy remote shelving

To Skin a Cat (1986, short stories) LFPL, 1copy remote shelving

The Best American Short Stories (1986, story contribution, "Sportsmen") 

Keep the Change (1989, novel)

Nothing but Blue Skies (1992, novel)

The Cadence of Grass (2002, novel)

The Best American Short Stories (2004, story contribution, "Gallatin Canyon")

The Best American Short Stories (2005, story contribution, "Old Friends")

The Best American Short Stories (2006, story contribution, "Cowboy")

Gallatin Canyon (2006, short stories)

Driving on the Rim (2010, novel)

Crow Fair (2015, short stories)

The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015, story contribution, "Motherlode")

Cloudbursts (2018, short stories)

Non-fiction

An Outside Chance (1981)

Best American Sports Writing, 1992 (1993)

Live Water (1996)

The Best American Essays (1997, essay contribution, "Twenty-fish Days")

The Best American Sports Writing (1997, essay contribution, "The Way Home")

Some Horses (1999)

The Longest Silence (2000)

Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American Northwest (1999)

Horses (2005)

The Best American Sports Writing (2005, essay contribution, "Seeing Snook")

The Best American Mystery Stories (2012, essay contribution, "The Good Samaritan")

The Best American Mystery Stories (2015, essay contribution, "Motherlode")

Screenplays

Rancho Deluxe (1975)

92 in the Shade (1975)

The Missouri Breaks (1976)

Tom Horn (1981)

Cold Feet (1989)

Partners (1993)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_McGuane

😙 

I don't eat fish very often, and when I do, it usually comes in little breaded squares, as I have a rule against eating anything that looks the way it did when it was alive, but this made me a little hungry:

"The fish in these ponds live on freshwater shrimp and their flesh is salmon pink on either side of their pearly backbones. The trout themselves are as surpassingly vivid as fine enamels,  and the few meals we make of them are sacraments." (110)

McGuane seems so completely dedicated to fishing that I find myself wondering how much it inhabits his other books...most of which seem to be Dry Landers. I find myself wanting to find out. 🤔 

Day 5 (DDRD 2,849), August 19, 2025

Read to page 140. Busy day. Lack of time, not lack of interest. 

Day 6 (DDRD 2,850), August 20, 2025

Read to page 184.

How's this for a vivid description of setting:

"Next to Key West Oxygen Service, in an ugly asphalt parking lot that rivals the La Brea tarpits* in midsummer, a bonefish skiff sits high on its trailer, bridging the imagination from the immediate downtown of Key West--both an outrageous honky-tonk and a memento of another century--to its gauzy, impossibly complex backcountry surrounds. When you're at the drive-in movie in Key West, watching adult fare with all the other sweaty neckers, the column of light from the projectionist's booth is feverish with tropical insects blurring the breasts and buttocks on their way to the screen. At low tide you smell the mangroves and exposed tidal flats nearby, and you're within a mile of sharks that could eat you like a jujube. Once the movie is over and you've hung the speaker back on its post and are driving home, palmetto bugs and land crabs pop under the tires." (157) 

* One of the children's books that I read with Jacqueline pointed out that "la" means "the," and "Brea" means "tar," so saying "the La Brea tarpits" is literally saying "the the tarpit tarpit." (Laughing Emoji)**

** For some reason I thought that writing "(Laughing Emoji")  was funnier than actually inserting a 🤣 . For the sake of complete transparency, I should probably add that I just turned 68 years old.

Speaking of funny, McGuane speaks disparaging about fishermen who are "chasing points, mounts, and records." (158) And he rarely eats his catches...with one luminous exception: he catches a fish so big it is a record for that particular species. He then has the fish prepared (decapitated, gutted, stuffed and cooked) and eats it. Most of the time? He hooks 'em, holds 'em, and then puts them back in the water. Kind of Zen, hunh?

Day 7 (DDRD 2,851), August 21, 2025

Read to page 221.

I'm amazed--and, to tell the truth,  a bit appalled--at how far McGuane travels in order to fish: Argentina, Russia.... And then, after spending hours...and sometimes DAYS catching nothing, he'll hook a fish, give it the once over, then set it free. It makes no sense to my little brain. But it seems to make him happy. Except when he doesn't catch any fish.

Hmm. On page 212 there's a reference to "my rosary," and on page 214 there's a reference to Mother Teresa. I think this McGuane feller is a Catholic! Also, I just discovered that my phone has an "emoji" for 📿. 

😎 

P.S. "McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan, the son of Irish Catholic parents who moved to the Midwest from Massachusetts." 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_McGuane

Day 8 (DDRD 2,852), August 22, 2025

Read to page 254.

And the amount if time he devotes to fishing! McGuane talks about fishing from before sun up until sunset, about doing nothing but fishing for days at a time, even without making a single "catch." I cant imagine doing anything for that length of time...except reading. Or sleeping.  📚 😴 

Speaking of reading...I picked up these two times at the library yesterday:

Mmm-hmm.

And speaking of mmm-hmm, I just started reading the chapter entitled "Izaak Walton."

"From the Restoration until now, The Compleat Angler has been renewed by turmoil, none more conspicuous than the Industrial Revolution, which produced an explosion in the popularity of angling and an idealization of the pastoral life. Its cousins, Gilbert White's Natural History of Selbourne and Thoreau's Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, profited similarly. Armchair anglers and the various harried people of the western world have elevated these books to scripture." (229)

And furthermore,  "...the three...share a conviction that the elements of the natural world are Platonic shadows to be studied in search of eternity, a medium in which man was presumed to float as opposed to sink, as in the present when eternity has been replaced by the abyss." (230)

A long time ago I found an old and ripped up poetry journal and read a line from a poem which has stuck with me ever since:

"We are all underwater,
And the angels are fishing for our souls."

That might not be exact, but that's what has become lodged in my memory. I don't know the name of the poem. I don't know who wrote it. And I don't know where that old and dripped up poetry journal has gone.

BTW, here's (in part) what AI had to say about these lines of poetry:

"The quote echoes the sentiment of a fish seeking the ocean while already being in it, a metaphor used to highlight the importance of recognizing the value and meaning in the present moment, rather than constantly searching for something beyond what we already have. This perspective suggests that we might be so engrossed in the "underwater" experience of life that we fail to see the larger spiritual context or the divine assistance that is readily available to us. 

"Ultimately, the quote invites reflection on our connection to the divine, the challenges of earthly existence, and the ever-present possibility of spiritual growth and redemption."

Not fucking bad, AI! Maybe you SHOULD be in all of the schools.

(Tip of the hat to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.)

If any of you out there knows of or wrote this poem, please 📞 . So to speak.

This is what made me think of that poem: "The angler who understands such things may betake himself to steepletops and, with his rod and line, angle for swallows." (232-233)

That'd make for a cool painting. And Hey didn't Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse do this (except with bats) in The Bojeffries Saga? I have a copy somewhere, but I don't have the energy for an archaeological dig right now.

I ran up to Locust Grove to check out their book sale. It was super crowded,  which is extremely off-putting for me,but they have such amazingly good stuff that I hung in there long enough to buy three books:

What I didn't buy...because it cost $200...was this beauty:

Yep. A two volume edition of The Complete Angler (sic) published in 1880. Holy shit!

"An important part of life, maybe the most important part, is the quest by each of us to discover something we believe to be more worthy and permanent than we are individually." (252)

Day 9 (DDRD 2,853), August 23, 2025

Read to page 284. 

"...when I was fishing two hundred days a year...." (266)

😲 

In today's reading, there was a long section entitled "Unfounded Opinions, Rants, and Miscellany" (pages 261 to 277). Or maybe it's just seemed long. It had a few moments,  for sure, but is also included all list of and commentary upon many of McGuane's fishing rods. 😴 Maybe a fisherman would find this interesting, but I, sir, am no fisherman. If you're not, too, itd probably be best* to skip this section.

Man...I really wanted that 1880 The Complete* Angler. ***

* Hi, Melania. 

** Again, Sic.

*** I told my son that if I'd been 40, I would have bought it, but at 68 there just aren't enough years left to enjoy it $200's worth. 😶

Day 10 (DDRD 2,854), August 24, 2025

Read to page 317. And with that...I'll probably be finishing this book tomorrow. And oddly enough, I feel like reading more 🐠 books. I'm thinking either Gould's Book of Fish--which I've Been Meaning to Read for a few decades now--or one of my Crunch and FD's collections...or maybe even a re-read if The Compleat Angler. Speaking of that last one, I was back at the Locusts Grove Book Sale again today--because my daughter wanted to go, not for me--and that 1880 Angler was marked down to $100. Oh. I fondled it. I strokes the cover passionately. Then I put it back, wiped away some tears, and paid for my daughter's five books. 🙄

Day 11 (DDRD 2,855), August 25, 2025

Read to page 340. Just a brief pause for reflection, then I'm going to read the last 16 pages.

McGuane writes with great wit and wisdom. He also throws some humor into the mix. I don't give even a gram of shit about fishing...and I didn't understand many of the terms employed here...and yet I really loved this book. I'm tempted to just pick up another McGuane book when I finish this one...and I just happen have a book of his short stories I picked up from the library...but I'm also thinking about continuing on the 🐟 journey. Dunno why.

Meanwhile...

This last section is pretty interesting. McGuane writes to a bunch of his fishing buddies to ask them how they feel about fishing as they've gotten older. Some of the buddies are pretty famous people like Dave Grusin, Huey Lewis, Tom Brokaw, and Jimmy Buffet. Interesting. 

To page 356, The End.