Nelson Bryant, whose lyrical columns in The New York Times for nearly four decades chronicled his love affair with fishing, hunting and outdoor life, and made him the dean of outdoor writers in America, died on Saturday in Oak Bluffs, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 96.
His longtime partner, Ruth Kirchmeier, confirmed the death, at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He lived on the Vineyard, in West Tisbury.
From the mangroves of the Yucatán watching for green-winged teals to the grand ballet of fly-fishing on the Salmon River in Nova Scotia, Mr. Bryant’s often-poetic, first-person accounts took readers to many places, but perhaps none more so than the mythical past, when boys went fishing with their fathers, watched rainbow trout hover above the pebbles in a brook and learned that patience, cultivated during hours in a duck blind, was more than a needlepoint virtue. His insights appealed to many readers who had never set foot in woods or a stream.
Raised on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Bryant was a seaman, a carpenter, a ditch digger, a logger, a cook and a dock builder. He was also a Dartmouth College graduate and a reporter and the managing editor of The Claremont Daily Eagle in west-central New Hampshire for more than a decade in the 1950s and ’60s.
But he was never far from the hunting, fishing and outdoor life he had learned from his father, and his storehouse of field skills and lore were deployed in the sports section of The Times from 1967 to 2005, often in four or five columns a week, under the rubrics “Wood, Field and Stream” and later “Outdoors.”
Unlike news articles, columns reflect an author’s opinions and experiences, and Mr. Bryant, who often took his two sons on camping, fishing and hunting expeditions, offered readers not only his knowledge of wildlife and the rods, reels, lures and guns to bag it, but also insights into what his experiences meant to him. (...)
With his white beard and weather-beaten face, an old pipe clenched in his teeth, he looked like a 19th-century seafarer: a big, sturdy outdoorsman who climbed mountains, portaged canoes and carried his load of guns and tents. But he was remarkably graceful in a trout stream, and his cast was delicate and precise — plop, into the distant pool where the rainbows lurked.
“Every sport has a supreme chronicler,” The Philadelphia Inquirer said in 1994. “Nobody has written about baseball like Roger Angell. Nobody has written about golf like Bernard Darwin. Nobody has written about boxing like A.J. Liebling. Nobody has written about the outdoors like Nelson Bryant.”
by Robert D. McFadden, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Alan Lovewell/The Vineyard Gazette
[ed. I once had the honor of being interviewed by Mr. Bryant for one of his columns in the Times.]
His longtime partner, Ruth Kirchmeier, confirmed the death, at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. He lived on the Vineyard, in West Tisbury.
From the mangroves of the Yucatán watching for green-winged teals to the grand ballet of fly-fishing on the Salmon River in Nova Scotia, Mr. Bryant’s often-poetic, first-person accounts took readers to many places, but perhaps none more so than the mythical past, when boys went fishing with their fathers, watched rainbow trout hover above the pebbles in a brook and learned that patience, cultivated during hours in a duck blind, was more than a needlepoint virtue. His insights appealed to many readers who had never set foot in woods or a stream.Raised on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Bryant was a seaman, a carpenter, a ditch digger, a logger, a cook and a dock builder. He was also a Dartmouth College graduate and a reporter and the managing editor of The Claremont Daily Eagle in west-central New Hampshire for more than a decade in the 1950s and ’60s.
But he was never far from the hunting, fishing and outdoor life he had learned from his father, and his storehouse of field skills and lore were deployed in the sports section of The Times from 1967 to 2005, often in four or five columns a week, under the rubrics “Wood, Field and Stream” and later “Outdoors.”
Unlike news articles, columns reflect an author’s opinions and experiences, and Mr. Bryant, who often took his two sons on camping, fishing and hunting expeditions, offered readers not only his knowledge of wildlife and the rods, reels, lures and guns to bag it, but also insights into what his experiences meant to him. (...)
With his white beard and weather-beaten face, an old pipe clenched in his teeth, he looked like a 19th-century seafarer: a big, sturdy outdoorsman who climbed mountains, portaged canoes and carried his load of guns and tents. But he was remarkably graceful in a trout stream, and his cast was delicate and precise — plop, into the distant pool where the rainbows lurked.
“Every sport has a supreme chronicler,” The Philadelphia Inquirer said in 1994. “Nobody has written about baseball like Roger Angell. Nobody has written about golf like Bernard Darwin. Nobody has written about boxing like A.J. Liebling. Nobody has written about the outdoors like Nelson Bryant.”
Image: Mark Alan Lovewell/The Vineyard Gazette
[ed. I once had the honor of being interviewed by Mr. Bryant for one of his columns in the Times.]
