The Judge and the Trout

ROBERT TRAVER was born and upper peninsula of Michigan in Marquette County, which has some of the finest trout streams in North America. He was trained as a lawyer and elevated to the Michigan Supreme Court, working as a judge for eleven months of the year so that he could be free to fish for the twelfth. Then he wrote a novel, Anatomy of a Murder, and with its success he retired from the bench to devote himself to the life and cogitation of a fisherman, “because,” as he says, “in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion . . . because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip . . . because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness.” Those words form part of the creed which he states at the beginning of his pictorial volume ANATOMY OF A FISHERMAN (McGraW-Hill, $10.95), a collection of essays by the judge and color photographs of the peninsular streams taken by Robert W. Kelley. The pictures are a mixed bag: the greens, especially those taken in rain, tend to be unnaturally sharp, whereas the blues and purples in the shots taken at dusk, when the fish are rising, come close to the true magic.

Text and pictures speak from experience. The judge tells us what he thinks of “the campers and tourists and assorted outdoor itinerants who thoughtlessly use our trout waters as their personal garbage pails.” He tells of the joy of stumbling on a half-hidden and unsuspected blue pond: describes a favorite spot on Frenchman’s Creek, which of course is not its right name; gives us a beautiful glimpse of a disgruntled fisherman, hands over his ears, trying to fight oil the bugs; shows us his favorite flies; and ruefully acknowledges that the main difference between experts and duffers “is that the expert knows he can’t ever make trout feed when they don’t want to, while the duffer keeps flailing away.”