Today in History: March 8
Shad vary, right enough. I thought of my own Olympic fish—two and half hours on the line at Lambertville. Had I not interfered, she would have gone up to the Little Beaver Kill, jumped that waterfall, jumped the Catskill divide, swum up the Hudson to Lake Champlain and down the Richelieu River to Montreal, gone up the Ottawa to Lake Nipissing and down the French River into Lake Huron and on across Superior and up the Pigeon River and on to the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg and Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabasca and the Great Slave Lake (doing the Methye Portage in a heavy rain) and down the Mackenzie to the Rat, and up the Rat to the Porcupine, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon River, and down the Yukon River to the Bering Sea. It’s a shame I ate her.—John McPhee, “The Founding Fish”
John McPhee is 85 today. As far as I am concerned, a single paragraph by John McPhee selected at random carries more lessons about and examples of graceful writing than almost every other journalist’s Complete Works. He still teaches his course, “Creative Non-Fiction,” at Princeton University.
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Today is International Women’s Day, an official holiday in many countries, mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe, but also in several African nations and in South America. It has been celebrated each year since 1909. “Pledge for Parity,” or #PledgeforParity, is the slogan for 2016’s celebration.
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The Gad About Town 