The Sporting Road: Travels Across America in an Airstream Trailer

The Sporting Road: Travels Across America in an Airstream Trailer- with Fly Rod, Shotgun and a Yellow Lab named Sweetzer (Reviewed)

The Sporting Road: Travels Across America in an Airstream Trailer- with Fly Rod, Shotgun and a Yellow Lab named Sweetzer
by Jim Fergus
St. Martins Press, 1999, Hardcover, 269 pp.,
ISBN 0-312-24245-X

Jim Fergus is back afield with his yellow Lab Sweetzer. He wrote many of these essays as a field editor for Outdoor Life though they have been further edited and enhanced. He has a fine dry wit and a job that most of us would regard as leisure. He quotes the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset to describe his job as "a vacation from the human condition." He is right of course and the only way that most of us can enjoy anything like it (barring a day on the Au Sable) is in print.
Fergus hunts through the first two thirds of the book. Usually for upland birds and usually with Sweetzer, although there are other prey and a recurring collection of other hunting personalities. Hunters harvest game. There is no catch and release Done responsibly this is use of the land. Use of the land leaves it materially unchanged while using the land changes it irrevocably. The legal term for using the land is waste. That subtle alteration of phrase, using for use of, underlies much of what Fergus has to say while he entertains us. He documents, sadly, how the land has been used and demonstrates the proper use of it.
Fergus fishes through the last third of the book. Sweetzer was no help. A bird dog isn’t. Fergus had a fishing dog, Colter, now gone. "...[T]he main requirement for [a fishing dog] which being that they not get in the way." Colter used to watch the trot line and alert Fergus to a bite. The philosophic difference between use of and using the water comes through here as well.
I have been a dedicated fly fisherman for so long that my other gear has rusted and fused to become unusable. I went through it not long ago to try to put together an outfit for a grandchild but no go. I have not kept a trout in three decades although I know that by bad luck some have died. Waste. There is always another side to every issue and it is probably prudent every now and then to peek at it.
Fergus does.
I am a firm believer in, and a steadfast practitioner of catch-and-release angling. I have been releasing most of my fish since I was ten years old -- long before it became fashionable. But there are still some places and circumstances in which it’s alright to kill a fish or two for dinner. In this same way, there are certain waters and species whose bounty and fecundity can support, within sensible limitations, the perfectly natural process of human predation.
As much as I still love to do it, as much as I think it is appropriate to many species and waters, I no longer think of fly fishing as a religion.
Colter watched a trot line for the first trout dinner of the year. This is an interesting, provocative book and it is ...
[Webmaster's Note: In the process of tranferring this story, some of the original text is missing from this point forward. We are currently attempting to find it and complete this review. Many apologies for this inconvenience.]
RWOL

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