The Sporting Road: Travels Across America in an Airstream Trailer--with Fly Rod, Shotgun, and a Yellow Lab Named Sweetzer

by Jim Fergus, Rick Bass (Introduction)

Overview

More than just a "man and his dog" hunting adventure, The Sporting Road is a book about the land and man's place in it.

It is also, in many ways, a book about relationships; with nature, animals, and the people with who live around us. As Rick Bass says in his introduction, Jim Fergus is a man for whom "The common denominator is not geographical, but internal; here is a man who belongs intensely to the living. And slowly, gradually —essay by essay—you become aware of the unsaid: the fact that he fits a diminishing time, a diminishing space, and a diminishing code of manners. That he always puts others before him; that he considers and respects his friends, his prey, his dogs, and the landscapes that engage these things."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312267803
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/17/2000
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	681,360
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Jim Fergus is the author of One Thousand White Women, The Sporting Road, A Hunter’s Road and Wild Girl. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of national magazines and newspapers, including Newsweek, Newsday, The Paris Review, Esquire, Sports Afield, and Field & Stream. Fergus was born in Chicago and attended Colorado College. He worked as a teaching tennis professional before becoming a full-time freelance writer. He lives in southern Arizona.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Fergus ... relates simple and vivid details in this pleasing account of six years of travel and sport.... the honest allure of a good campfire yarn."—Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Fergus ... relates simple and vivid details in this pleasing account of six years of travel and sport.... the honest allure of a good campfire yarn.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Whether scrambling up the desiccated slopes of Utah's Desolation Canyon in pursuit of birds known as chukars or whipping a tenuous fly line into the Florida surf, Fergus (A Hunter's Road) relates simple and vivid details in this pleasing account of six years of travel and sport. Perhaps befitting a sportsman, Fergus has a spare writing style and uses only what he needs. The result is a light and enjoyable collection of tales featuring Fergus, his dog Sweetzer and a random cast ranging from a Georgia native known as Fishboy to a modern-day Davy Crockett, whom Fergus dubs the Mountain Man in deference to his flintlock rifle and steady hand with a double-bladed tomahawk. Fergus and the people with whom he hunts are not the beer-guzzling, reckless pillagers of nature who often live in the popular imagination. Even those who don't condone the sport should heed Fergus's points that hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt began the conservation movement, and that development, overgrazing and chemical farming cause incalculably greater harm to animal populations than does hunting--harm that is "rarely perceived by anyone other than the knowledgeable wildlife biologist." Because the book is composed primarily of previously published, though reworked, articles, readers are sometimes reintroduced to people and species that have already appeared. Even so, these overlapping tales have the honest allure of a good campfire yarn. Illus. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Handsome, deliberative hunting vignettes, many collected from the column Fergus (A Hunter's Road: A Journey with Gun and Dog Across the American Upland, 1992, etc.) wrote for Sports Afield. Ranging far and wide in his beaten Suburban, following the seasons (which provide the book with its superstructure), towing an Airstream and a company of dogs, Fergus hunts up hunting venues and friends, then fashions from them these neat sketches. It's clear from the start that Fergus is where he wants to be, outside, peeling back the dead skin and exposing a clean surface, drinking in the miracle and wonder of walking with a dog, a shotgun, and a well-chosen comrade in the uplands and draws and river bottoms. He talks of the attentiveness demanded of, and the grace conferred on, the hunter, visits the rarified and inaccessible homeplace of the white-tailed ptarmigan, fly fishes from a sea kayak in skinny water and gets towed by his catch (yes, shades of Papa, but Fergus's own). There are enough frustrations and minor disasters—ruined days when caught mistakenly trespassing on a very ill-disposed farmer's land, dogs meeting the wrong end of a porcupine or the lightning-quick hooves of a mule—so that when you read "opening day dawned a fine cool September morning," or that on the estate he was hunting in Florida "a dense fog settled over the massive live oaks that were hung in Spanish moss like oxidized tinsel," you actually feel good for the guy. Not all is an unqualified success—two of the fishing pieces sound more like writing assignments than experiences, and there is a hunt with Rick Bass in the Yaak Valley that aspires to portents and magic and falls way short. But the dudsare few. It is Bass who writes in an introduction that Fergus "considers and respects his friends, his prey, his dogs, and the landscapes that engage these things." That makes Fergus a rare and real presence in any world, hunting or otherwise. (photos, not seen)

Kirkus Reviews