A Good New Book

              AND THEY WENT OUT

        INTO THE WILDERNESS OF THEIR PROFESSION

 I have just read a really good book. Eric and Libby Ericson, of Boulder and Santa Fe, have joined hands to present the experience of their early lives together when they deployed their courage and devotion to go far abroad in the professional search for oil, but more deeply and truly into the fundamental strata of the human mystery of family. There were the rocks to probe, dangerous politics, strange diseases amid myriad languages-- and the children, “the boys”.

   It is a compelling look at the geology of oil and family life, all of it told in a most remarkable modesty. They never speak for their competence, but we as readers never for a moment doubt it. The book is a cultural marker showing us a model of what was once possible in America:

      An Oil Geologist Abroad: Exploration with Family:

       Bolivia, Spain and Nigeria  1956-1966   (Santa Fe, 2011)

   Built as the Ericsons have built it, their book is that rare thing, a necessary  book. Its subject has rights. It is to be written and published. It is what writing is for.

   Eric and Libby follow one another with short essay-like sketches, one after the other from field to home and back again, Eric looks for oil in structures of unexplored rocks of Bolivia, Spain, and Nigeria. Libby’s hugely devoted effort is to get that family going and make it prosper.

                       Searching and Breeding

   This book, a vivid portrait of an American family at an historically loaded moment in the nation’s life and a submission of evidence, documenting what now seems an almost magical time in our lives and our culture. It is memoir, history, sociology, science, even romance. I think it must be unique.

   The 1950’s --A time, often decried as a static culture of conformity and lack-luster pursuit of dreary middle class comforts, securities, and regularities, is something quite different in this book. There were those young people back then with a fine new, public education for the professions, who were suddenly presented with the challenge to Go Out, almost in a Biblical sense, to do good and to serve.

   And knowing what they wanted, they were ready to learn fully how to do it. They went out as young families to breed and to spread the good news of their liberal learning and vision in the wildest of unexplored places.

    I write this, of course, in the only way I can, as a man who, like Eric Ericson, was accompanied by a remarkable woman, who was at least as ready as he for anything.

   Libby Ericson, educated in fine arts, gets her say in this book of alternating essays. I think it might be read as a text in early feminism. What proves my point and is so astonishing about the book is the balance between the alternating essays. Male and female created He them.  There is not the slightest hint of male dominance or compromise anywhere in the book. The woman, at this early moment, appears as not just an equal power with her husband, but as one who has always been such. This balance between the essays is the balance between souls.

    Style? The writing is good, clear, economic, educated, and self-edited. I would call it, “American Plain”. Some sentences run urgently on under the buoyant pressure of the essential narrative, and verbs, in their hurry, can fall quickly into the passive. But, it is a style with a draw to it, meaning that it keeps pulling the reader eagerly forward with the narrative. It is rigorously anti-metaphoric, uncolored, forthright, and seemingly unconscious of itself as literature. It is just right for its task.

    But, as I write this, I cannot keep from musing on how this book clarifies and gives a local habitation to what many of us experienced and felt back then, at the center of that magnificent storm of education that was the G I Bill of Rights.

   I see a bit more clearly, from reading this book, where that education sent even me, I see that I too went out into a wilderness of exploration, in no way comparable to that wild, big, brave thing the Ericsons did, but still…. Still, I think that many of us back then (I am a couple years older than the Ericsons) went out, in the midst of what was The American Century and lived crazy, productive lives and sometimes left a mark.

   Ours was the culture of science. Even in the arts, science was a model. Bertolt Brecht, a voice for many of us, spoke of himself as “a child of the age of science”. That’s what I always wanted to be-- like Eric Ericson.

    But today it’s all gone to hell. We are threatened with the leadership of those who want only to live private lives of private wealth, oiling their hinges at the public supply-- all the while preening themselves with their religious suspicions of evolution, global warming, and science in general!

    Bad Luck! They, in their particular, are not the affirmation of humanity we thought they might become when, back then, we were teaching them. We had gone out into the wilderness of the future to do our work and look what we got!

    But, I must not loose sight of what we got in this book, a testimonial to what once was and might be again in the human family.

    Christmas, 1945: Betty and I talked of Upsula, but we didn’t go.

Gordon Wickstrom

September 12, 2011

 SCHOOL FOR POLITICIANS

OR

WHEN  IN THE MUSIC HALL WATCH YOURSELF

NEVER CROSS THE PLAYERS

THE CLOWNS,

THE FOOLS

THE MAKERS OF THE MUSIC

THE ACROBATS

THE HORSES

AND THE TELLERS OF THE TALES

NEVER ALLOW THEM TO TAKE YOUR MEASURE.

NEVER GET ON OR OFF ON THEIR WRONG SIDE.

THEY ARE ALWAYS RIGHT

EVEN WHEN THEY ARE LEFT

THEY ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE MOST HIGH

Let them be well us’d for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. 
After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

Hamlet

1946- 1950

                                    

                    for anglers too young to remember

   Under correction, I want to make the case that those four short years of my title, immediately after WW II, were a period of expansion in the technology of angling unmatched in the history of the sport. Never before or since has so much happened so fast. So much and so fast that I hardly know where to begin this narrative.

IN MEMORIAM

Frank Brady

July 14, 2011

   Frank didn’t quite make 85, but he took off, anyway, down the mountain ahead of us carrying the load of meat. Don and Bill and I stumble along behind and will catch up all too soon.

Seven Is a Natural

      

                                           MY DOCTORS

                   Therein the patient must minister to himself

                                                        Macbeth  V.iii

    I have fully seven of them, a consortium of Boulder physicians, minding me in my old age. Seven excellent men dedicated to the care and repair of my human body. The most respected of men along with the clergy, the postman, and the man from Prudential-- and, dare I add, teachers-- even if, in the end, they can no longer deliver the goods. 

Midsummer 2011

 

   A few moments ago at 11:16 AM, MDT, Spring closed down and Summer  opened up. MIDSUMMER Now the action of the days and nights will be ripening and the movement:  toward Harvest,  as the  days get shorter and shorter, darker and darker. It will now be allowable, I am happy to say, to think of the coming of Christmas. It's an important day: Midsummer.

   Sixty-three years ago, at about this exact hour, we were on the first day of our honeymoon, having left Denver for points north to Yellowstone for the fishing. Well past Cheyenne in our 1937 Chevrolet coupe, we began to hear that  worst  of all sounds in all the world: a bearing had burned out in our engine, and the piston rod was trying to hammer its way out of the engine  block. We limped into tiny Glendo and there spent three of the most remarkable days our lives. (Read all about it in Notes from an Old Fly Book.)

   My point is: if you must  venture forth on Midsummer, be cautious. There are strange forces  at work.

   I call to mind J.M. Barrie's highly popular West End and Broadway circa 1900 play DEAR  BRUTUS. In it a fashionable assortment of dreadfully messed-up, unhappy people respond to an invitation to  spend a long week-end at a grand country estate, south of London in  Surrey, the home of  the strange and eccentric  Mr. Lobb. Of course it is Midsummer (Why else would I bring it up? And, of course, Shakespeare haunts this play too.)

   Old Lobb warns his guests that they should not venture out into his Woods that night, that it is extremely dangerous.

   And so, of course, that is exactly what they all do. They go out there and encounter forces that  enable them to go back and relive and redirect their lives away from all the destructive frailties  that ruin our lives. The guests are highly  excited and go about changing themselves. 

   When they come out of the Woods at dawn, they find that they have made the same terrible choices, taken the same wrong  turnings, and  are  still as utterly miserable as they were before this Midsummer night. Old Lobb is full of glee. 

    So, I say, Beware!

                Cassius:  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

                                   but in ourselves that we are underlings.

                                                         Julius Caesar

Betty and I took our chances this morning and drove out into  the country and had  breakfast  at a country crossroad. We took our chances as we begin our 64th. year of risking it. We have the protective spell of Glendo still working for us.

                                                                        

   

Writing About It

   It troubles me.  I retired from my life as a teacher and stage director in 1991, fully expecting to be close to the end of Everything. And here I am, twenty years later, at this keyboard, writing-- about angling and, as I have threatened, about everything else. I have delighted in the discovery that most anything can be thinly disguised and stuck into talk of fishing. All sorts of ideas can peak through the remarkably expansive and elastic language of angling.