Tales from Gray’s (from the 50th anniversary issue)

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by Ted Williams

I was an editor and writer for Gray’s Sporting Journal from spring 1976 (almost the start) until its temporary demise in 1989 when we ran out of money. There had never been an outdoor publication anything like ours. We were not interested in “how-to-do-it”; we and our readers already knew the nuts-and-bolts stuff. We wanted why-we-do-it and how-it-was. And we ran fiction -- long fiction, literature. Gray’s was a huge hit.

With this assessment of the hook-and-bullet press my mentor, the great Canadian writer Roderick Haig-Brown, described the vacuum we filled: “Its faults are timidity and conformity. It dare not shock or extend its readers, it must not frighten them with abstract or deeply considered ideas; it must somehow catch and hold even the dullest mentality -- or risk a reduction of the advertising rates. With so much at stake, [articles] are mainly staff-written or else edited into inoffensive inanity.”

It fell on me to read pieces that came in “over the transom.” There were dozens a day. Something like 98 percent went back with kind rejection letters because I knew what nasty ones felt like. Most of the writers we published were unknown, and it was obvious why -- there’d never been an outlet for their kind of writing.

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One day I opened a 10,000-word manuscript entitled “The Last Drink in the Bottle” from some guy in Fairbanks, Alaska named John Hewitt. It blew me away. He didn’t just tell you about waterfowling in Alaska; he took you duck hunting with passages like: “They could see the whole of the Flats from up there, or all of the lakes within ten miles of the village. Separated by great expanses of rushes that waved and winnowed in the wind like a ripe wheat field, dotted with islands of yellow birches, the lakes were deserted now, with the dozens of trucks, boat trailers and once-a-year duck hunters of the opening-day/Labor Day weekend crowd only an unpleasant memory in the village, like June’s mosquitoes.”

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One day I opened a 10,000-word manuscript entitled “The Last Drink in the Bottle” from some guy in Fairbanks, Alaska named John Hewitt. It blew me away.

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We ran it in its entirety and virtually verbatim in Waterfowl, Fall 1976. Hewitt wrote for Gray’s for 31 years, rarely missing an issue. For most of that time he published nowhere else.

My responsibilities also entailed taking our favorite writers hunting or fishing. So John Hewitt and his girlfriend Mary flew to Boston, and I brought them to my ruffed grouse and woodcock coverts in New Hampshire. Northern woodcock had settled into alder runs. And grouse poured from ancient apple trees. I can’t remember how many birds we killed, but I recall that we were happy with the hunt. Young as our bodies were, they were stiff and sore as we trudged back to my truck in purple twilight.

Every man, I informed John, is entitled in his lifetime to one good woman, one good plumber and one good bird dog. (Both of us were looking for the plumber.) Ruggles was my good bird dog. As John and Mary had observed, he was an idiot indoors and a genius in the woods.

Even then, grouse were so wild that no dog could hold most veterans. But, head high and cheeks puffing, Ruggles pointed young of the year. Once, when I circled him four times and accused him of a false point, a woodcock hit him in the belly. The previous autumn in these same woods, I’d met a hunter who lectured me about Brittanys, then overbred. “There are only two good ones left in New England,” he declared. “Whiskey and his nephew Ruggles.” I agreed and asked him if he’d like to hunt woodcock behind Ruggles. For a while, he couldn’t speak. Three hours later, he had his five-bird limit.

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I can’t write about Hewitt without including his sidekick, Ron Rau. As I noted in my introduction to their duck duet “Hunting the Hereafter” and “Here, After the Hunting” (Waterfowl November 1977), “Hewitt and Rau are two immensely talented, refreshingly irreverent young writers who live up in Alaska and whose mission, it seems, is to remind us all that fishing and hunting is -- above all the where-to and how-to, all the pious effusions and testy justifications -- wonderful fun.” In the next paragraph I referenced the “rambling wormtrails of their lives.” Rau loved it, and for years signed off as “the wormtrail rambler.”

When reading the duck-duet manuscripts, I was astonished to see that each author had intercepted the other’s and defaced it with such comments as: “He don’t trust the sun to come up neither.” And: “Did you swipe that line from a Nancy Drew mystery?” This “marginalia” was too good not to run as footnotes.

One March, the wormtrail rambler became the only angler in history to fly from Alaska to Massachusetts to fish for yellow perch. I wasn’t sure when or if he’d show up, but through mist swirling from the “prayer ice” of Secret Pond there emerged a gaunt figure clad in what looked to be homeless clothing, shouting and brandishing an ax.

“Anyone who would use an ax to chop a hole in the ice,” I told him, “is the type you’d meet along James Dickey’s Cahulawassee River carrying a sandwich in each armpit and clutching a rusty shotgun with a string trigger.”

I taught him how to chop holes with the chisel made for me by a Worcester, Massachusetts steel worker (nothing you buy works). Then we stretched out on the slushy ice, cupped our hands over the holes and watched our dancing jiggers, baited with perch eyeballs and ringed by perch moving only their pectoral fins. When a perch would suck in his neighbor’s withered, week-old eyeball we’d snap our fiberglass jiggersticks, and the fish would fly up and bounce on the ice, its lovely black and gold bars glowing in muted sunlight. A tilt fisherman hollered to ascertain if we were alive.

With that, we rose to our feet, assuming the posture of all respectable jiggermen -- left hands on hips, jiggersticks level, feet spread, gazing into tamaracks. Toward evening, perch flew from the holes like popcorn. And blood from their broken necks (I don’t like to see fish flap) rendered the icescape a miniature Little Bighorn.

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“Anyone who would use an ax to chop a hole in the ice,” I told him, “is the type you’d meet along James Dickey’s Cahulawassee River carrying a sandwich in each armpit and clutching a rusty shotgun with a string trigger.”

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Then there was Edna P. from Vermont. Only I had heard of her because we’d both written for Horticulture. I knew she was good, but until I read her long story “Stone City” (Upland Birds, September 1979) I hadn’t known how good or that she, like me, was obsessed with grouse hunting and trout fishing.

Nothing I have read before or since approached the quality of her prose. Sometimes it was dark, but always infused with frolic. She had an osprey eye for characters and an owl ear for language. One example from “Stone City”: “He broke off a grin maliciously, exposing two flawless rows of plastic teeth, to let me know that I had been seen on exploratory hikes with neither rod nor gun in my hands, a senseless, effeminate occupation to men who still hunted for food… ‘My advice to you if you want to know where there is pats, is get real close to Banger… because what he don’t know about the country and what lives in it is smaller than that.’ He raised a dirty, inch-long stub of an amputated finger, the local identifying badge of maimedness that marked apart from lesser mortals those who worked with axes and chainsaws in the woods.”

My editing of this piece began and ended with changing the title, with Edna’s permission of course, from “Blood City,” which struck me as too obvious, to “Stone City.”

Her lede in “The Pickerel as Gothic Cathedral” (Summer 1980) became my go-to example for young writers: “There sat Sharpe, that secretive hypocrite, hunched over a book as usual. His dark, sleek head, his thin, black-jacketed arms and striped tie, his bent scrutiny at the blonde desk dappled with yellow sunlight gave him the look of a wasp at a ripe pear.”

With each new submission, I told Edna she’d be famous. She wouldn’t believe me.

Edna had learned from experience with the hook-and-bullet press that subscribers didn’t want to read anything about fishing or hunting written by a woman. So, even with us, she used the byline “E. A. Proulx.” She recalls an “awful” rejection letter from some hunting rag “full of bad spelling and clumsy syntax, suggesting that I should change my name to initials. Very tiresome. I went along with it.”

She hates to do interviews, but in 2009, long after her byline became “Annie Proulx,” she offered this to The Paris Review: “In those days I was an ardent fisherperson and bird hunter. And any stories to do with blood sports or the outdoors -- hook-and-bullet stories -- went in men’s magazines. Stories like, ‘I Was Attacked by Eighteen Lynxes,’ or whatever. So when Gray’s came along everybody who was even faintly literate and involved in outdoor stuff was thrilled. It was beautifully produced, the illustrations were top-notch, and there was good writing in it. After the magazine first appeared I bought an issue or two and finally subscribed to it. One of the writers that I knew suggested that this was something I could do. I wrote something [Stone City], sent it to them, and they published it. For the late [seventies] they paid magnificent sums… But there was a group of us who wrote for them and hardly ever got paid because they kept running out of money. I swapped a story for a canoe at one point. It was a three-way deal where Gray’s ran an ad for Mad River Canoes, I got a canoe, and they erased the cost of one story. It worked out pretty well -- I think the canoe was eleven hundred dollars. I named it ‘Stone City.’”

I recognized and rejoiced in the darkness and frolic in her 1993 novel The Shipping News. After it won the Heartland Prize, the Irish Times International Award, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize I phoned her. The first thing I said was: “I told you so.” She laughed and said, “I am so sick of myself.”

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Edna had learned from experience with the hook-and-bullet press that subscribers didn’t want to read anything about fishing or hunting written by a woman. So, even with us, she used the byline “E. A. Proulx.”

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Before Annie Proulx was famous, we went salmon fishing in Newfoundland. The Great Northern Peninsula’s salmon had been genetically transformed to grilse because only they could fit through the prolific gillnets. But we were happy to exercise them on trout rods. We fished first on the Torrent River that hurries down from Hawkes Bay through a rocky gorge lined with stunted fir and spruce that almost touch in the middle. I tied on a Green Butt and quickly hooked a decent fish that leapt four times, then broke off when the backing wrapped around a high rock on shore. I laughed. Annie groaned.

She didn’t fish much. She was more interested in learning Newfie ways and Newfyspeak. A local angler provided her with examples of both when he rebuked me for releasing a grilse: “Fer shame!”

Later, Annie bought a fixer-upper house on a huge stretch of shoreline for not much more than what we were supposed to have paid her for a piece. She lived there for a year, becoming fluent in the language and learning about the island's landscape, weather, food, fishing history, and the habits, triumphs and travails of its residents. She nailed it all in The Shipping News.

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When I took Ed Gray to my New Hampshire coverts, he brought his golden, Whitney. Whitney hated porcupines because they quilled him. So whenever he saw one he killed it, got quilled again, and hated them even more. “No worries,” I told Ed. “I’ve hunted these coverts for ten years and never seen a porky.”

We weren’t 100 yards into the first covert when Whitney ran by, shaking a porcupine and creating an all-day job for a vet. We dropped him off at the nearest clinic. Neither I nor Ruggles was upset that we now lacked Whitney’s “assistance.”

We picked up Whitney just before dark. He was still anesthetized, so when we got back to Brookline, Ed carried him up the stairs. Becky thought we’d shot him. She was so traumatized I gave her my two grouse.

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We weren’t 100 yards into the first covert when Whitney ran by, shaking a porcupine and creating an all-day job for a vet.

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And there was the time Margaret Deeds Murphy, our cooking editor, ordered Ed and me to procure a three-pound pike within a week. Catching any pike in Massachusetts is only marginally more challenging than catching a coelacanth. It would have to be a three-pound pickerel -- possible but a long shot.

We launched my canoe at Glen Charlie Pond in Wareham. Finally, I caught an 11-incher. Ed pounced on it. “We can get a miniature platter,” he announced, “some cherry tomatoes, some doll’s knives and forks…” Just then another pickerel breached near the canoe, cutting a suicide course for shore, its wide dorsal fin flapping in the breeze. Not a three-pound pickerel, probably a five-pound pickerel and obviously a very sick pickerel. I restrained Ed, who nearly tipped us over trying to net it. “They just have to look at him, not eat him,” he shouted.

Miraculously, toward the end of the day, I did catch a three-pound pickerel. When the cooking-page galley was ready, I was horrified to see that Murphy had decapitated my pickerel and slathered the body with thick, white sauce. She could have used a stick of Italian bread.

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When I was ten my grandfather gave me a copy of “Anatomy of a Fisherman” by Robert Traver (aka John Voelker). It was my favorite book. Today a signed copy of his famed “Testament of a Fisherman” hangs on the wall of my New Hampshire fishing camp.

Voelker quit the Michigan Supreme Court to fish for brook trout and write about it. Arnold Gingrich, founding editor of Esquire and trouting literatus, called him “the character’s character,” “the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon,” and nominated him for the next dean of flyfishers after Sparse Grey Hackle (aka Alfred Miller, whose delicious stories we also published and who hit only home runs).

When Voelker was invited to participate in the dedication of the Mackinac Bridge, connecting the UP with lower Michigan, he wired the organizers this message: “Sorry, but I’ve been named chairman of the Bomb-the-Bridge Committee.”

One of the first things I did at Gray’s was entreat Voelker to submit. In came “Fishermen at Night” (Trout and salmon, March 1977), aptly extolled in this one-word review by Ed Gray: “Monumental.”

Voelker’s wit sparkled in everything he wrote. In “Bear With My Fishing” (Trout and Salmon, April 1978) he recalls “Lost All Night Alone in a Swamp with a Bear,” a story he authored when 12: “Ten books later I sometimes find myself nostalgically trying to recapture those magic days when my prose was so taut and lean I could pack all I had to say in a single title.”

My editing of Voelker consisted of adding or deleting the odd comma and, because he kept his pen name, changing “John” to “Robert” or “Rob” whenever he quoted people addressing him by name.

In the fall of 1980 I met Voelker at a bar in his hometown of Ishpeming, Michigan. He never took anyone fishing without first checking them out.

Because of the recent profusion of edible mushrooms, it took us all the next morning and some of the afternoon to drive the 20 miles to his camp at Frenchman’s Pond, the watershed of which he had purchased with royalties from Anatomy of a Murder.

When our baskets were full, we turned off the dirt road and blasted into jack pines and dense spruce. As we crossed his property line, the road got even worse. Voelker had festooned trees with mufflers, tail pipes and hubcaps, a warning too subtle because the stuff kept piling up. We passed apples he’d set out for bears and a sign that said “Home of the UP Cribbage Champ.” Further on, another sign said “Home of the Former UP Cribbage Champ.”

His camp was arrayed, not unattractively, with artifacts salvaged from the surrounding countryside -- ornate metal fish, old inn signs, bird baths, an ancient church pew on which we sat, setting up our rods and sipping whiskey. The chewing gum of forgotten sinners who forgot was still stuck underneath. He was right in Testament: Bourbon out of old tin cups does “taste better out there.”

Voelker dug into his vest and retrieved two nameless green-and-white flies, passing me one. I asked if he tied them. “Far from tying a fly,” he intoned, “I am barely able to zip one up.”

Squinting through bifocals, he added a length of 8X mono to his tippet. Dealing with 8X, he explained, is like “trying to catch a fart in the wind,” but it turned his “troutlings” into “tuna.”

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Voelker dug into his vest and retrieved two nameless green-and-white flies, passing me one. I asked if he tied them. “Far from tying a fly,” he intoned, “I am barely able to zip one up.”

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Hardwoods surrounding Frenchman’s Pond glowed red, yellow and orange. Above them, the spires of spruce jutted into an infinite northern sky etched with south-bound geese and wispy clouds. It was all mirrored in the still surface, dimpled by feeding brook trout, little fish of big country. “Shall we?” said Voelker.

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M.R. Montgomery (aka Monty Montgomery), the Boston Globe’s outdoor columnist, was one of the writers I brought to Gray’s when I quit the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. My superiors at the Division loathed him because, unlike the other outdoor scribes, he didn’t ask the right questions like “When will you be stocking pheasants?” He asked wrong questions like “Why will you be stocking pheasants?” He loved words nearly as well as trout and woodcock, a newspaper man who aspired not only to report but to write.

I was manning the Division’s phones the morning his column came out explaining that for invasive fish eradication we had eschewed the chemical rotenone in favor of biological control via piranhas. Missing the joke, the night editor assessed it as major news and moved it to the front page.

Mothers hauled their offspring to terra firma, frantically counting digits. Several informed me that their children had been bitten. Our director -- conditioned to discount nothing -- issued vague, Nixonesque denials, interpreted as confirmation by a suspicious public.

On a bright May day, several years later, I took Monty to a favorite stocked trout stream in western Massachusetts. Spring azure butterflies clung to wet ruts, and the Hendricksons came off at 2:00. In those days, the beavers hadn’t choked the flow, so you could canoe for miles.

Driving out of the woods that evening, I spied a wheel rolling across a clearing. Odd, I thought. I then noticed that my Ford Bronco had shed it. I noticed also that the undercarriage was dragging, squealing, and that melted grease from the ruptured gearcase was burning. I scooped up my Hardy reel, and we disembarked, waiting for the explosion. There was none.

Three hours later, after my wife had driven us to a gas station and the wreck had been retrieved, the mechanic provided an estimate of $600. When I filled his donut box with hatchery trout, he allowed that maybe he could get me an estimate I’d like better once he had the Bronco up on the lift.

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Humor that consistently works is the hardest kind of outdoor writing, but Cliff Hauptman pulled it off. His “Dog-Nose Chronicles” are now available in a popular book by the same name. The first of these chronicles appeared in Gray’s in Spring 1982, and he was a regular in our fun column “Yarnspin.”

One day I got a phone call from Alaska moose researcher Dr. Vic Van Ballenberghe, my main source for articles in Gray’s and elsewhere on what the state calls “wolf management” -- basically getting rid of them. “You know that striper-fishing invitation you keep offering?”

“Yeah,” I said. “When you coming down?”

“Never!” chortled Vic. He had just finished Cliff Hauptman’s “Fishing the Hollow of the Deep Sea Wave” in Sporting Classics, illustrated with the woodblock print from “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.” Salient copy: “Nearly every time I have had a near-death experience, Ted Williams has been at the helm… I do not know what Ted Williams fears, but I know what he does not fear. He has absolutely no fear of the prospect of dying while fishing.”

Here’s how it went down. On a frosty November morning Cliff and I trailered my Mako to Harwich on Cape Cod and headed out to Pollack Rip. Cliff was an accomplished black-bass angler, but at that time a novice in the salt. With his bait-casting rod he slung a plug around his head, on the third orbit catching my two-ounce Stan Gibbs Pencil Popper and driving one of the hooks into the knuckle of his right forefinger.

“Cliff,” I said. “We can go in, lose the day, and you can pay a doctor $300. Or I can do now for free what the doctor would do.” Cliff is no wimp. The cord-around-the-shank-press-down trick didn’t work because the hook was too deeply embedded. “Plan B,” I said, fishing out pliers.

“They’re rusty,” croaked Cliff.

“Don’t matter. I’m not gonna touch you with them.” He leaned back. I leaned back, and “pop” out came the hook along with a tendon. I shoved the tendon back in, patched him up, and we kept fishing.

The surface was glassy, but there was a storm at sea. When the swells hit the sandbar a mile offshore, breakers towered to 15 feet, and each time they crashed, stripers cartwheeled into the air.

“Too bad we can’t go in and catch some,” Cliff mused.

“We can,” I said. But don’t even think about playing a fish near the bar. Just free-spool, and we’ll motor out before the next breaker.” It worked splendidly. After Cliff landed five, I decided to catch some, too. But when our lines got crossed, I lost track of the waves, one of which caught us sideways, filling the boat and turning it on its side. Cliff dangled from the railing; I dangled from the steering wheel, both of us contemplating the green water and golden sand under our feet. The steering wheel broke off in my hands. Somehow we righted. Somehow, the motor didn’t die. With thumbs and forefingers, I steered out. Then I pulled the plug and drained the boat.

Stripers kept cartwheeling into the air. Cliff opined that we probably shouldn’t go back in, but I assured him that this time it would be “safety first.” We’d alternate. Each of us caught about six more fish. The next day, we learned that so many anglers had died on Pollack Rip that the Coast Guard kept permanent watch with a telescope. We’d given them their best show.

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I miss my days at Gray’s. They helped me grow as a person and a writer, but not as an editor, because most copy I saw didn’t need fixing. I wish all editors understood what I learned at Gray’s -- that you don’t change something that works just because you think you can make it better, and that all writers don’t have to sound like you. Good writers do things for reasons.

Later, when I wrote two regular columns for Audubon magazine, one feature-length, I spent long, tiresome hours undoing vandalism of my prose done by copyeditors freshly out of college. Because my stuff filled the most space and was the most read, they concluded that I deserved extra editing. Incomprehensible to them was the editing philosophy of our oldest editor, Pat Crow. Pat had been John McPhee’s editor at the New Yorker. When I asked what that was like, he said, “There wasn’t much to do.”

Now, when youngsters attempt to give me special treatment by vandalizing my prose, I offer them examples of my Gray’s editing. Then I quote Pat’s favorite line from one of his New Yorker writers: “Every editor needs a pimp for a brother so he can have someone to look up to.”

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Ted Williams writes exclusively about fish and wildlife.