Measure of the Year: Reflections on Home, Family and a Life Fully Lived

By Roderick L. Haig-Brown

Roderick L. Haig-Brown welcomes us onto his lush farm for a year of insights and observations. In this eloquently written account, Haig-Brown, his wife Ann and their four children tour us through each season, and teach us the ways in which the Earth governs the events in our lives. Haig-Brown observes salmon, blue grouse, blacktail deer and robins, with a soft eye and gentle appreciation for their trials. He discerns how the weather interacts with the land, and how the land interacts with our attempts at civilization. Haig-Brown also discusses his work at a magistrate, and the challenges of marriage, amateur book collecting, the craft of the writer, and the meaning of community. A snap shot of rural BC in the 1950s, Measure of the Year is a country story, told by a man happy in his chosen way of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926971667

Roderick L. Haig-Brown

Roderick L. Haig-Brown (1908-1976) was a Canadian writer, magistrate and conservationist. A prolific writer, he is the author of twenty-eight books and hundreds of articles, essays and poems. Some of the titles include Saltwater Summer (Governor General Award Winner, 1948), A River Never Sleeps, and Fisherman’s Summer. In recognition of his contribution to Canadian environmental literature, the Haig-Brown name has been gifted to a national park near Kamloops, a Canada Council sponsored writer-in-residence retreat near Campbell River, and a mountain on Vancouver Island.

Book preview

MEASURE OF THE YEAR

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REFLECTIONS ON HOME, FAMILY

AND A LIFE FULLY LIVED

RODERICK L. HAIG-BROWN

Foreword by

BRIAN BRETT

CONTENTS

Foreword by Brian Brett

Introduction

MARCH

Proper Names

Canada

APRIL

Livestock

Trees

MAY

Country Magistrate In Court

Country Magistrate Out of Court

JUNE

Organizations

JULY

Children

The Garden

AUGUST

Visitors

SEPTEMBER

Staying Free

OCTOBER

Tools

On Making a Library

NOVEMBER

On Wood

On Hunting

DECEMBER

Salt Water and Tideflats

Let Them Eat Sawdust

JANUARY

Art or Science

Country Living

FEBRUARY

The River

About the Author

This is an old picture, taken from across the river, but it shows most of the place and gives a fair idea of the layout. Barn is just visible, beyond and to left of house. Water tower now torn down. Study added to house. Big Fir just out of picture, extreme right. Balm of Gilead on river bank at left. Old orchard down river, out of sight.

—THIS CAPTION WAS WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THE PHOTOGRAPH, TAKEN IN 1946. BOTH THE PHOTOGRAPH AND THE CAPTION ARE BY RODERICK HAIG-BROWN.

FOREWORD

by Brian Brett

There are some homes where you immediately feel comfortable. The Haig-Brown house is one. Now owned by the province of British Columbia and leased to the City of Campbell River, it stands as a living, thriving memorial to the glory days of the Canada’s western wilderness—and one of Canada’s finest writers and conservationists.

Standing back from and above the Campbell River, the house is a link to Roderick Haig-Brown and his ideas, and Measure of the Year captures both with its common sense, luminous year-long ramble into nature and family and charm and community.

Roderick Haig-Brown was expelled at the age of seventeen from his boarding school in England due to graduation-day hijinks that would not even be noticed today, so this intrepid young man left his homeland to adventure in Seattle and on the west coast. He soon found work as a timber surveyor but his American visa expired. Then he caught a steamship up to the Nimpkish River region on Vancouver Island, where he worked as a logger and commercial fisherman, which also enabled him to fish and hunt and write and briefly go bounty hunting cougars (while researching his children’s tale Panther) with the legendary Cougar Smith—a romanticized occupation at the time—which I suspect led to his later qualms about hunting.

Exploring the west coast, he not only developed his wilderness skills he honed his writing to a simple beauty. Eventually, in 1934, he married Ann Elmore whom he’d first met in Seattle in 1929 and after renting a place in Campbell River for two years, they purchased the home soon named Above Tide, a now quaint house on the banks of the beautiful and once-rich-with-fish Campbell River that Haig-Brown loved and fought so hard to protect. He became recognized for his evocative prose, and his children’s stories about cougars and salmon and fly-fishing, writing a stream of popular books (more than twenty in his lifetime), including his now venerated books on fishing. I remember once when I was residing in the Haig-Brown house and hosting the poet Patrick Lane—a noted stylist in both fiction and poetry—I showed him a copy of Measure of the Year. After a while, he looked up from the book and said: This prose is so clean and simple. It’s like children’s writing, yet it’s deep and beautiful.

There are not many who can write as cleanly and deeply as Haig-Brown—a master of the windowpane prose and simple political sense that George Orwell displayed in his essays. This is why his books on fly-fishing found such a wide readership. Many are so lovely they continue to be read by people with no interest in fishing—the words sustaining their power several decades later. And his A Primer of Fly Fishing remains required reading for anyone actually interested in fishing.

However, Measure of the Year is his most notable book. Published more than sixty years ago, it’s a glance into the life of a famed writer and environmentalist, lovingly portraying his family and Above Tide. Filled with his traditional common sense and decency and observations, it was an immediate success when published in 1950. It remains not only a loving record of a year, but also a record of a different time, a different richness, and wealth of experiences that are now lost to so many raised with our urban streets and suburban mall culture.

Its fresh and clever excursions are filled with insights into local living, such as his brief meditations on being appointed a local magistrate, which make us remember what justice should be.

I stayed in that comfortable home for five months as a writer-in-residence, a tradition supported by the city, the Campbell River Museum, the Canada Council for the Arts, and a group of good-hearted volunteers keeping alive the aspirations of the Haig-Browns.

I was working late during a snow storm in my new office, which was once the Haig-Browns’ study, when the trouble light went on outside the window. Surprised, I sat there, wondering why someone was in the garage at the back of the house in a snow storm. Then, finally recognizing that this could be a problem, I slipped down into the classic old basement, picked up a stick of wood, and carefully opened the back door. There was nothing, except some tracks rapidly filling in with snow, tracks that went around to the entrance of the house. I shut the door, locking it, and ran back up the basement stairs to the front door. When I flung it open, there was the print of a big butt in the snow on the top step, and a pair of paw prints, where the bear had sat, surveying the front yard and the highway beyond it. The bear was already gone. He was fast moving—that bear—intent on his own world, and for a brief moment of fantasy, I felt I had been visited by Haig-Brown’s spirit.

When you read his writings, you are always approaching such magical moments. In a recent homage, his son, Alan Haig-Brown, talks of regular bear sightings in his youth while fishing with his father. Because where there are bears, there are fish. The few bears still fishing the damaged-but-surviving Campbell River in the fall are a testament to Roderick Haig-Brown’s not-always-popular commitment to its waters.

Beginning with the initial wave of dam building in 1947 on the Campbell River at Elk Falls, Haig-Brown—who was perhaps British Columbia’s first activist environmentalist—put up a mighty battle to save it and other rivers. He lost more than a few preservation fights, and the defeats were crushing. Yet he managed to turn even his losses into victories, acknowledging them, and then demanding whatever concessions could be achieved, and encouraging thousands of others to also defend the environment that survived. As he notes in Measure of the Year : Conservation is fair and honest dealing with the future, usually at some cost to the immediate present. His drive to preserve the kind of world he matured in, eventually led to him putting aside his hunting rifles, and becoming more interested in swimming with the fish than in trying to catch them.

What was once a small gravel road through the heart of the Above Tide acreage gradually was expropriated into a highway leading to the dams and communities of the north island. Instead of giving in to despair, the Haig-Browns negotiated the best possible expropriation right-of-way through their beloved homeland so endearingly described in this book. He never gave up on that river, fighting for spawning channels and control of water releases, even going so far as to take up scuba diving in his later years, so he could swim with the fish while developing a signalling system to the dam controllers above the river, learning which water releases injured the spawning beds the least.

He was the inspiration for hundreds, and later thousands, of environmentalists who took up the cause. Thus a few of the flashing salmon and trout still remain in our rivers, thanks to the once lonely environmental fight he began long ago in The Western Angler : the logging methods at present in use (1939) seriously threaten the future of Vancouver Island streams. The practice of clear logging leaves the banks of the streams without cover, and at the same time causes a rapid run-off of the rainfall, with resulting extremes of high and low water.

Haig-Brown took life seriously, studying the natural world with a keen eye, yet he also found time to play with his children, and sometimes, it’s been rumoured, that after a few glasses of wine, he could be coached into striding onto the carefully maintained back lawn of Above Tide where he practiced his casting, to stand a wine glass in the lawn and cast a fly into it from astonishing distances. Measure of the Year captures all these qualities.

Residing at Above Tide forty years after Haig-Brown retired as a magistrate, I still encountered those who bragged about having been sentenced by him, and also those who criticized him for being too soft on criminals and the environment. I think he explains himself well in this book. Justice is common sense and decency—and it should also recognize the beauty in everyone and everything. And perhaps that’s what Measure of the Year accomplishes most. It’s a classic of its time, and a book for the future.

INTRODUCTION

by Roderick L. Haig-Brown

I have written here of my family almost without meaning to, but that is natural enough since marriage and family are immeasurably the most important things that can happen to any man. I say I have written of them. Rather, they have come into the book inevitably, taken it over and in large measure made it. Ann is my wife, with whom I have now lived through sixteen years of steadily growing understanding and unity. Valerie is my eldest child, one day less than fourteen at this writing. Mary Charlotte is two years her junior. Alan is my son, baptized on Pearl Harbor Sunday and named for his grandfather who died in the first war. Celia is our post-war daughter, not yet three. Uncle Reg is our neighbor, now seventy, British Columbia born, pioneer and man of honor, close friend of many years.

It was necessary to list this cast of characters because, as I say, they have come into the book with a casual inevitability that caught me unawares and let them by without any other close identification.

If a book must have a clear purpose beyond mere sharing of experience, the purpose of this book is to show a family trying to live out a sensible and positive life in the twentieth century, trying to keep on terms with its world and yet not be too much fooled by it. I have tried to describe the concrete factors that surround the life of this particular family and the more abstract issues that affect it. This family lives in the country, so things of the country have a heavy emphasis. But it does so in a civilization that is primarily urban, with remarkably good communications, so it escapes few of the things that affect all families. It may set up slightly different defenses against some of them, and so doing may be part of the reason for living in the country. But it cannot escape them and does not want to escape them, only to meet them on its own terms and solve them.

I have left out many important things—religion, for instance, and music. The first of these must be implicit throughout the book, in every approach to everything shown, or else I misunderstand the meaning and value of religion. The second is more typical of the many important things I have left out; though I am fond of music and often deeply stirred by it, I do not trust my knowledge or understanding far enough to write about it. If Ann were writing the book she undoubtedly would put it in, as she would put many other things differently or with different emphasis.

While this way of living is my main theme, at least one minor theme follows through with it all the way: that is the account of natural life and changing seasons carried by the month chapters, a thread that strengthens and supports and gives depth to the other. Such variations as the magistrate chapters are both on the theme and from the theme. The theme in which they are set gives them increased meaning, while their own inherent values give body to the theme. To put that concretely, a man’s performance on the bench is undoubtedly affected by the type and quality of his life at home; the fact that a man is a professional writer, a hunter, a fisherman, a magistrate, undoubtedly has influence on almost every phase of his family’s life.

I have written about some things that it is difficult to touch on at all without seeming pretentious or smug or both—unless one evades the issue by being trivial. I have done so in all humility and with all the honesty I can find in myself; if my measures of humility and honesty are too light to carry the load, this is a chance I have to take, because I believe it is important for ordinary men as well as great men to state themselves.

It seems of some importance that we are Canadians. Not that by this our problems are greatly different from those of most American families, but that our approaches may be. We live by a slightly different machinery of government, another variant of the active creation that is western democracy. We are not citizens of a giant power that can shape the world or shake it by physical force alone. Nor do we look forward to becoming such a power. We are a strong and active minor power that is still growing, and growing rather fast, with a long way to go. Of all the minor powers we are closest to and most like the United States. Yet we are different, we expect to grow differently and to remain different. We believe that in this natural independence of thought and being in small powers is the only hope of effective world government; so it is well that the great powers should know something of us and of what we think.

Again, this has meaning only against the frame of living, down on the level of ordinary people breathing and talking and eating and sleeping and trying to be themselves. Living, for any family, is enormous diversity. Only a fraction of the diversity that makes our own living is in this book, but this fraction is meant to be enough to bring us alive, to make us ordinary people.

All this is the solemn purpose of my book, the only apology I can make for it. The rest is pleasure and gratitude, with no more serious intent than to share experience with other people in the hope that they will enjoy it by recognizing patterns of their own pleasures or reflections of their own gratitude. When all is said and done, a writer can have no more serious purpose than this. His duty is to stir echoes in his readers, to touch thought and ideas that might otherwise have remained idle and forgotten in the back of the mind. It is a rare book that changes a life; a poor one that adds nothing to it. I have tried to add by showing our own confusions and prides, our pleasures and worries and attempts to grow.

—R. H-B.

Campbell River, B.C.

24th April, 1950

MARCH

Spring on the pacific coast of Canada is not normally reluctant. In a good year there should be at least a few seeds planted in the vegetable garden by March 15. This year March 15 went by and the garden was not even plowed. There was snow on the ground from December 1 until the last days of the month; there is still snow under the alders behind the barn and under the shadow of the river bank, and there is still frost in the ground, as I found when I tried to move some trees last week.

The first ten days of March were beautiful, warm, and full of sunlight, with only light breezes. On March 8 a swarm of robins passed through. I heard them first, as I came back from milking in the morning, then saw them all over the lawn and through the main orchard. During the day I went up the river and when I came home towards evening there were more robins than ever, through the Big Fir pasture, in the willows and small alders along the river bank below the vegetable garden; at least a hundred of them, the breasts of the males warmly and brilliantly red in the evening sun, their voices lively, their wings flashingly active. It seemed like spring to see them there and the day felt like spring, yet there was still the pale brown of the pastures, the feeling of ice under the thawed surface of the ground, the hint of a night’s frost to come on the evening air.

Nearly a week later I went up the river again. It was raining and the rain changed to sleet, then snow. It was bitterly cold, far colder than the coldest day of winter, with a sodden power to drain away warmth from any exposed part of the body. Such days and such cold belong peculiarly to the months between the seasons, to November before winter is fully come, to March before spring warmth has worked its way into the ground.

Spring has come when the earth is warm to the hands that work it. There was no such warmth in the March soil this year, and it was clear by the middle of the month that there would not be. But it is the countryman’s concern to take fullest advantage of spring’s coming by anticipating it, so he watches for signs to guide him—gropingly, hopefully, with the measure of faith that his nature permits him. Some things were as usual this year. The mallard greenheads came to the river and the mergansers paired in their time. By mid-February the black sea brant were moving into the Gulf of Georgia on their northward migration. The mass of robins was a few days late; March 2 or 3 is more usual here in this little block of twenty acres on which we live. Frogs should be croaking on the east side of the house by the second week of the month; that week passed and the next, and I had not heard them. There was no green in the tops of the alders, no generous swell of leaf bud in willow or ground maple or salmonberry. In an early year the maple seedlings show their first narrow, flat leaves at the very beginning of the month; as the month ended the hard shells began to crack and the roots to thrust down.

Perhaps there is not much sense in watching for signs, in saying over and over, This is a late spring, or Looks like an early year. But to watch the signs and say these things is a rite among men and it has meaning; strongest meaning for those who are closest to the soil and the weather, but strong meaning for all men, even those who live most determinedly in the cities and shield themselves most closely from the rigors of winter and the caprices of spring. Even today, in the most modern of cities, man has not been able to make himself altogether independent of the weather, and perhaps that is a good thing.

The great clear signs of the changing seasons, the migrations of geese and salmon, of caribou and buffalo, the swell of leaf buds in spring, the first fall snow on the high mountains, have meaning beyond themselves and a power of association that must go far back into the earliest development of man. They have passed, many of them, through wonder into superstition and religion, and are now become wonder again and living pleasure. One observes them because they are inescapable and responds to them in the sanction of long usage. But for every one of these there are a thousand lesser signs, persistent in their multiplying variation from year’s end to year’s end and through all the seasons. Some are signs of changing season, some of progressing seasons, some of nothing more than their own change and growth. There is little concrete reason to watch them, yet men have always watched them, often with intense pleasure, and many men have thought it worthwhile to record them minutely and faithfully.

Observation of this kind holds its own satisfactions and lively triumphs; it is full of surprises and rediscoveries, of new sensations and sensations renewed. By themselves these would be enough. But over and above them all is the sense of participation in the world’s real life, of steadily increasing intimacy, of possession that grows gradually stronger over the years.

It may seem strange to write of observation as participation, but no man is solely an observer of the natural world, the countryman least of all. We are all basically hunters or gardeners, gleaners or predators, we all feel the weather on our faces at times, and the things that stir and change about us stir within us also.

So this year spring is late. But now, at the end of the month, the things of spring have come. Crocuses are in bloom, daffodils in bud, the frogs are croaking on both sides of the house, the snow is gone from under the shadow of the hill. There were two nights without frost and moths came to the lighted windowpane; behind them, seen only occasionally through the darkness, a bat wheeled and hunted. Stone flies and the big orange crane flies hatched out and blundered up from the river. One morning, almost at the end of the month, swallows were flying back and forth over the ridge on the far side of the river, then they were down along the river itself and out over the fields. The scarlet shoots of the peonies are bright in the border and the leaf buds of the horse chestnuts have burst out of their shiny covers. The sheep are finding grass in the pastures as only sheep can, and the cowbirds strut there and the robins bob and lean their heads to listen for worms.

There have been other things during the month. The vivid laugh of the great pileated woodpeckers, the mating flights of the ravens, slow, intricate repetitions, marked by the liquid, urgent voices of the competing males. There have been the paired mergansers in every eddy of the river, the coppery shower of catkins on the alders, the first show of dogtooth violets and false Solomon’s-seal along the banks of the river. Seen or unseen, heard or unheard, these things must happen here in March. I hope for them and turn quickly to the first warning, but I do not watch for them. There is an important difference. One is play, the other is work.

Both yield records: the first a casual record of pleasure in the memory, the second a written record of dates and times and places that is likely to be important. The first is a gentle art, yet a part of living; the second is positive science.

How far I am from science I know from the experience of the purple finches. For many years I saw them first in the flowers of the big maple by the back door and happily considered them returning spring migrants. Then, five or six years ago, I saw a pair in mid-January as I crossed the old orchard, to the east of the house. I thought it unusual, noted carefully that I could see only grey in the female, without the overlay of green one notices later—then forgot all about it and went back to expecting purple finches with the maple flowers. Last winter, just after Christmas, Ann and I went down to Tom Hudson’s farm at the mouth of the river to skate. The trees around the house were full of purple finches. They’re always here, Tom said. And they eat all the buds off the cherry trees. A week later I saw two pairs at my neighbor’s house. And a week later than that a male was feeding with the towhees and juncos at my own house.

So much for the precision and scientific value of my own observations. In fifteen years I have learned that purple finches winter comfortably here on the Pacific Coast, just north of the fiftieth parallel. I shall still welcome their migrant brothers and sisters when they come, two or three weeks from now, to hang on the maple flowers, brighter blossom than the tree will bear of its own sap run.

PROPER NAMES

When a family has lived in one place for several years it becomes a place of many names. This of necessity, as the family goes about its daily affairs; the