Keep Calm and Read On: The Good Fisherman
By Wayne Limberg
President Jimmy Carter reportedly once said that he was almost happy that he lost his bid for re-election in 1980 because it freed him to do other things. One of those things was writing "An Outdoor Journal," a very personal memoir of his life in the outdoors. Of his 35 books, Carter called it his "labor of love." When released in 1988, the New York Times called it "the stuff of heroes." It is still in print and available online.
As Jason Carter noted at his grandfather's funeral, no president since Teddy Roosevelt did more to protect the environment than Jimmy Carter. Even before becoming president, Carter played a major role as governor of Georgia in saving the Cumberland National Seashore and launching programs to restore Georgia's wildlife populations. As president he put further protections in place for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and upgraded Biscayne National Monument to national park status. These measures paled, however, next to his 1980 decision to designate 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness as national monuments. Ultimately, he put over 80 million acres under federal protection, leading to the creation or expansion of 13 national parks, 15 wildlife refuges, two national forests, two national monuments, and 26 wild and scenic rivers.
Carter always found what Izaak Walton called "contentedness" in the outdoors. As a boy he hunted, fished, and tramped the woods around Plains. His father was an avid fisherman and quail hunter and often delivered Jimmy to school late with feathers still sticking to his clothes. Carter’s mother, the famous Miss Lillian, loved fishing and liked to remind her son he still had a lot to learn about the sport, especially when he was president.
Most of Carter’s boyhood companions were Black. Early on, he learned that the best hunters and fishermen were not necessarily the pillars of society or even men, but were good sources of advice. He also learned that while good advice helped, in the end you were responsible for your successes and failures. These lessons stuck.
As governor and president, he would slip away to fish or hunt. At Camp David he often ducked the press and went with Rosalynn to nearby Hunting Creek or flew to a favorite spot in Pennsylvania. While governor of Georgia he tried his hand at flyfishing and was hooked. He was soon compiling a library, testing gear, and tying flies.
"An Outdoor Journal" also reveals some of the personal traits that complicated Carter's years in the White House. The confidence that was founded in his outdoor experiences could at times border on arrogance. Whether in the wild or Washington, humility was all too often saved for his relations with the Almighty. He seldom if ever reached out to members of Congress, Democrat or Republican, who shared his love of the outdoors. Throughout, he remained the outsider, seeking others’ advice, but keeping his own counsel. At the end of a trek in Nepal, he pressed ahead to climb one more peak even though he lacked necessary gear and even though Rosalynn had already retreated rather than risk potentially fatal altitude sickness. Looking back, he called it one of his worst decisions.
"An Outdoor Journal" has its lighter moments. At a fishing camp in the Okefenokee Swamp a young Jimmy overheard a woman imploring the camp’s owner to guarantee her son would not fall out of a boat and drown. The owner assured her that her son’s drowning was unlikely as the gators would likely get him first. Some of the humor is at Carter’s expense. As the Alaska lands legislation wound its way through Congress and the Iran hostage crisis raged on, the Alaska Junior Chamber of Commerce, which opposed the deal, organized a booth at the state fair where people threw bottles at pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and Carter. Carter reports that the pile of broken bottles under his picture was a "little larger."
The book is best when Carter deals with his youth in Plains and the wonders of the natural world. His passages on fish and game are detailed and on a par with Thoreau, while those on the thrill of landing a big trout or stalking a wild turkey border on the lyrical, rivalling those of Leopold. One reviewer compared his prose to Muir's, which is ironic as Carter in one passage calls Muir's writing "flowery." At times, however, he can get into the weeds, leaving the reader with the feeling that he must have a record of just what fly he used on every trout he ever caught.
Carter ends the book with a quote from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes and the hope that if we teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will last forever. A day after his funeral, The Washington Post ran a cartoon of Carter and Jesus walking side by side in heaven with the caption, "Welcome home from one carpenter to another." Maybe. But a more fitting cartoon may have been Carter talking to St. Peter, another fisherman, about which flies to use on a steelhead.
Do you have a good read? If so, send it along to wplimberg@aol.com. Meanwhile, keep reading and stay safe. See you on the trail.
