The Bright Country: A Fisherman's Return to Trout, Wild Water, and Himself
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
First Edition. Hardcover.
First Edition, First Printing.
The Bright Country is an affecting, funny, and eloquent story of life's turmoil and travail. It is also testimony to the healing power of the natural world, of wild trout and high mountain rivers, and an extended meditation on the wonder and beauty of the world we live in but too often take for granted. When Harry Middleton lost his job at a prominent magazine, it was but the beginning of what turned out to be a year marked by personal crisis. In the course of that year, as he searched for new work and battled severe depression, he eventually ended up in Denver, where he began exploring the high mountain country west of the city. For Middleton, the turning point in his long journey through life's dark side came with the discovery of a blind brown trout in a Rocky Mountain stream where Middleton spent his every spare moment feeding what he calls his "terrible addiction" to fly-fishing. That bright river and the blind trout would assume a larger significance and become for him a metaphor for struggle and survival. Middleton's writing and his determination to come to terms with life as it is, with the fits and starts of the human condition, seem always to involve trout and fly-fishing. Middleton's books are dominated not only by memorable rivers and trout but also by some of literature's most colorful, comical, and fascinating people. The Bright Country is no exception. As we follow Middleton on his journey through the terrain of paradise and hell, we meet: Swami Bill, president and CEO of the Holistic Motor Court, Ashram & Coin Laundry in Boulder, Colorado; his main squeeze, the heartbreakingly beautiful Kiwi LaReaux; and Dr. Raul Yarp, a short-order cook who spends his nights on the roof of a west Texas hotel looking at the night sky through a cracked telescope. There is the life and death of truth, Dr. Truth; the seductive Mi Oh, hostess at the Now & Zen restaurant in Denver; and, of course, the blind brown trout. In its blind eyes Middleton finds not dead shadows but living light.
ISBN: 0671758594
Octavo, 1/4 blue cloth, light grey paper over boards, 304pp.
Fine in dust wrapper and protective mylar.
Price: $35.00