Like anti-social herons, the men went their separate ways. I’d follow my father all day. I had to be sure to keep in view or, sometimes, in sudden panic, he’d rant at me, so dangerous was the lake, so deep and cold and perilous the steep tumbled shore of glacial boulders. If you fell in your chances of getting out alive were slim to non-existent, slimmer than anyone ever said. My father, may I remind you, had a fiercely hot temper, as hot as molten larva, so I made sure not to drop from sight, if I could. He might fall from sight himself before I could realise it, before I could catch up. But the fault would be mine.
He could explode at the drop of a hat. So once at least I spent most of a very wet day in Coventry for leaving my hat behind. Though come early evening and the rain eased away, so did his mood, as if it had never been, and he’d joke about my being a dreamer, though my day had been a nightmare until then, the rain feeling my collar first, then seeping in, down my back and round my chest, to my waist, and my head plastered as if with Ifor’s Brylcream.
I first cast my line where the stream from the Melynllyn pipe made a stir and did my best in the widdershins whirl of the winds. So this was it, and here the day began, an enormous day. It was a shock for me, I’ll tell you, if you can have a shock on a slow fuse, a gradual, cumulative shock, an incremental shock in the accumulation of minutes into hours, a shock in slow-motion: hour one.... the beginning, again, to which the thread is made of filament, 3lb breaking strain (3lb to be optimistic), and you must feed it in that chop and bluster of the wind out through the eyes of the rod and tie your flies to the droppers and the end of the cast. Though I knew already all the knots to know and I doubt you do, the double blood-knot most testing of all, and could tie it blindfold, and in the highest wind, my back to the wind, like Trefor there lighting a fag in the cup of his hand even before he has put his rod together, melancholy Trefor surveying the waters.
* * *
More than two seasons would pass before I caught a fish, towards the end of my third. As to catching trout, here I don’t include the Glen stream, the source of the Lledr, Dulyn stream or Llyn-y-Foel.... I mean at the Black Lake. But you’ll know why I loved the stream, and how it saddened me if the men were too keen to get home and wouldn’t delay for me, though they’d delay for themselves, or for my father whose stamina or sheer determination outstripped theirs, until night was almost upon us, if it suited, and fish were rising, or might just yet rise, though none had done all day.
Let me pour into your mind all those blank days, at least half if not the majority of them bleak days, wet and cold, and ask you to think of what my tale is told: of stoicism and endurance beyond whose years? Not beyond mine then, resolved into my own invisible self, if beyond them now.
I was too small, too slight, however wiry, to do more than I did by way of fishing the Black Lake, and for safety’s sake too bound to fish in my father’s wake, where the water was disturbed. I did my best, struggling to cast without my back-cast hooking me up behind, without my line splashing onto the water, without falling in. But really everything was against me. A less determined or peculiar boy might well have decided after a few Sundays that he’d had enough of fishing at the Black Lake. Bugger that, he might have said, for a game of soldiers. But not yours truly. I could absorb any amount of such punishment, being captive to the dream and standing oblique to the everyday world already, maimed by it. As my life at school had shown. So much for ‘Schooling’:
Pay attention at the back there.
But the back of the mind knows better.
If it didn’t where would I be,
and who, empty of all poetry?
* * *
People who don’t know tend to think all fishing is sitting on a bank waiting for a fish to bite. But fly-fishing is one of constant activity, of casting and retrieving, and re-casting, zipping the line back out, through the full 180° of the shore, or as near to that as obstacles, in this case the rocks, allow. There was not a single stunted shoreline thorn or mountain ash to hinder you at Dulyn, or for a trout to feed under either. So you work methodically through the arc, eighteen inches by eighteen inches, or yard by yard, as you judge or the winds permit, retrieving the line by drawing it back in short lengths, letting it fall at your feet, or coiling it in your hand. Then by mounting motion, flicking the rod to and fro, you let the line shoot out again, with a minimum of casts.
You don’t want to thrash the air, or whip the water. That will disturb any fish that might be in the swim, near the surface, feeding perhaps, or hunting for food, or hanging with minimal motion in mid-water, at some preferred place, where natural food washes by, or is stirred up by a feeding streamlet. The little flies dart forward as you draw the line back a few inches at a time, or at whatever speed you feel is ‘lifelike’. Their movement catches the trout’s eye. The trout ‘rises’ to take the fly.
Or so it goes in theory. But circumstances alter cases: time of year, recent weather, weather on the day, weather in the moment, water temperature, wind temperature, wind-direction and force, the flies you chance to try, to stick with or restlessly replace, the delicacy with which your line settles on the water, the speed you retrieve at, your ability to sustain concentration, to cast methodically, at the right range, in the right place, for which you need an eye to know, and practice, to identify, to read the water. Then you must do that all morning, moving along from place to place, as the arduous terrain permits; all afternoon, all evening. For if your line is not on the water, what will you catch but thin air?
To do so much as begin, for the first hour, you must find your rhythm and measure and minimise your effort, until you discover you are on automatic pilot, in a trance of motion, your own casting motion and the motion of the waters in the warp of the weather and the turning day, yet vigilant and ready for a trout’s sudden swirling take.
Like the waves in the water you have your peaks and troughs, your fallings off and your rising up, especially if you see a fish rise nearby, but mostly without such encouragement. You must manage your mind and your body, as you’d do in a race across country. But at ten years old, at eleven and twelve, in torrential mountain rain and whipping wind? Or even on a fair day of ideal conditions? With no encouragement from the fish, not a sign or a chance all day? Minute upon minute, hour upon hour? And every discouragement as your father catches his first and then his second and his third, and Ifor, when you meet up, has six fish in his polythene bag, and you are no better than Trefor, except your line isn’t out and sunk from view with a worm on the end of it. For there is also competition in it, for the sake of self-esteem. Such strife is good for mortals, as someone said. If hard on ten-year- olds?
* * *
How many trips it took me to become a philosopher in my apprenticeship, I cannot say. For boyhood hope springs eternal, and when its spring has sprung, disappointment follows hard on it, and crestfallen sorrow settles in. Presumption is ever followed by despair. But little by little unconsciously I displaced it. The present became my experiment, the discovery of the present.
I became a conscious and unconscious naturalist in one. My fishing bag and even Scotia became props in another adventure, my cover story, to serve a parable-maker one day; and perhaps this was why I didn’t catch a fish sooner? I spent more time fishing half-heartedly while staring into the soul of things, of sight and sound, as the unmeasured hours blew across the bowl of sky above the rocky cauldron and its black, black-hearted lake.
In such a place it would be profoundly wrong to say nothing happens. A wilderness lake is like a wild island inside out. For me it was a training ground for Inis Mór and the incantation of reverie. As no-one knows better than I do now, what happens in such places happens differently, at another pace, on a different plane. The seasons rotate. Days lengthen and shorten but the prevailing direction is round like the shore of the lake – longest way round, shortest home – and sometimes up and down. Our day is only a day and not the devil but the bounty is in the detail.
Winter fills what sum
mer drains, or at least so it was in the old dispensation. Water temperatures rise a degree or two and fall. Trout rise. The ring-ouzel haunts the heath on the cliff and flits up to perch in the rowan to sing, if song you’d call it. Mist descends. For half the day it hangs and drifts mizzling about the cliffs. What happens is of that order. In time your mind registers, weathers in it, as a stone weathers and records its weathering.
I became consciously a survivor, a scavenger, pausing to gather tinder, dry heather stalk and bits of wave-washed wood and other combustible waftage, jammed under rocks. Where did it come from? It was hard to imagine. But there was always a supply, though it thinned out through the season. I looked ahead to the brew and the baked-bean feast. I looked ahead to fire and warmth. I looked ahead to these things as I lay in bed waiting for my father to rouse.
Or as I listened to the wind and rain at my bedroom window, I feared the day and lamented my fate. There seemed no middle way between lamentation and hope, fear and hope. On cold days the action in fishing kept you warm. Fire was the only other thing that might, apart from a brown trout rising to your cast. But how long must I wait? I would try to read the day ahead on the ink-wash air of dawn, what my great-grandfather called the ‘carry’, as we left the house, whether it would be wet up there or cold, or fair, and as we drove towards the Conwy revise my opinion.
When we moved to live under the Wooded Hill you could see the mountains from the house, even as you brushed your teeth, and through the week take the measure of your doom as Sunday approached. But you could never be sure, for a sudden change of wind direction might bring rapid and icy rain, as the clouds crash-landed on the mountains, or peat-soft soddening drizzle, as the mist rolled down, fuming. So low it might fall it could seem as if it rose from the lake. Then every sound was hugely amplified, every sheep-bleat or cough, every bird-call, and the tumbling and dashing of water roared. These were the mood-swings of god. Once on such a day I watched an immature peregrine falcon stoop and stoop on an immature herring gull, dashing it into the lake, and dashing it again as it rose, playing with it, cat-and-mouse, practising, for how long I do not know but it seemed all morning.
But once at least, after a day at Caw Lwyd, I saw the real kill, and benefitted from it:
All day fishing there I waited as much for its shrill kek-kek-kek-kek
kek-kek and scimitar soaring overhead as for the dimpling fish below.
How the day might plod on otherwise, the water hypnotic,
light falling like manna, and all slap-happy in the rocks.
Every plane and facet of wave-mirror and cliff-hanging
edge of expectancy, pitched there, in and out of the dream.
What sense trying to address the future? Whatever it contains
won’t include us. The art of waiting its métier as mine.
Once as we came back on an autumn evening, weary for the road,
school to face in the morning, homework not done, down one raced
in his scholar’s gold rim glasses, and tear-smudged eye from too much study,
and thumped a grouse into the heather. Then, wings winnowing
and alarmed kek-kek for cry, it shot away, leaving us its prey,
the bird warm where we found it, severed from its head.
How much out of ten might I get for that? At fourteen, mind-wandering,
learned only in the progress of the clock, in a world beyond time.
As we drove and as we marched to the Black Lake, I would be thinking of my favourite corners, and the one I loved best of all, the tiny northwest bay, right under the cliffs, fed by little streams, from waterfalls down the black rockfaces.
In time when I could spend the day on my own this is where I’d head, and I’d not pause at all on reaching the lake, but say goodbye to the men, and hike as fast as I could, and then come upon it quietly, slip into it, as if it was as natural for me to be there as it was for the dipper bobbing on a rock in the middle of a steep and gushing streamlet, or for the sudden peregrine, flashing its crescent across the sky, and crying kwaahk-kwaahk-kwaahk and kek-kek-kek-kek, as it soared breakneck to disappear among the precipices.
The peregrine was the rarest of sights in the 1950s, DDT having soared up the food-chain, at the top of which it perched, knocking off contaminated pigeons until the peregrine could no longer reproduce. I longed every day I was there, for a sight of it, or failing that to hear its cry. I’d crane my neck the moment I heard it for just a glimpse of its lightning – the ‘foreign hawk’: ‘Hebog Tramor’ as the Welsh name has it, and as I once called a poem about seeing the peregrine in Manhattan’s Upper West Side:
Once the falcon fell from hearing,
from the top of the food chain,
as the DDT rose in its bloodstream.
And man held his dominion
over the world below.
The falcon could not hear the falconer.
But the centre held as once its talon.
Where did the falcon go?
Like a people uprooted forever
and no store set until too late?
I used to crane my neck to see him
thinning the mountain air
and marvel at the way he’d sheer
two steep seconds off the moor,
quicker than you can say fate.
Now I crane to see him again
spiralling round the ‘God Box’
centre for world religions in New York.
In Welsh ‘the foreign hawk’,
as if looking for a way in.
But other bird presences at the Black Lake laid claim to me too and held me spellbound: the raven rolling overhead calling cronk-cronk; the ubiquitous wren, weaving its bold story, in and out of every nook and cranny, and declaring its regal heritage, singing to itself, with the loudest and most piercing song, big enough to deafen a mountain; or the melancholy ring-ouzel in its clerical bib with its rat-a-tac-tac-tac warning, its hellfire sermon; and the dipper – in Welsh aderyn du’r dwr, the blackbird of the water – again submerged on the spill of golden gravel where the little stream falls into the lake, the dark waters limpid when the light is right and the wash of waves small, the dipper dining, on caddis larvae. I could find myself so close to it – find myself indeed – I could see its little rusty bib, like the blush of rusted iron in granite in those mountains.
The dipper shares its call and song with the wren: clink-clink, tap-tap-tap, as of two pebbles struck together rapidly, and then the quicksilver warbling. So if you hear either you must turn to be sure which one it is. In Welsh the dipper shares its name with the ouzel – the blackbird of the water, which is unusual in a language so tending to specificity in naming. Then the stonechat, the wheatear, the meadow-pipit... the cuckoo on the skyline.
Something in me fell for these birds. My heart in hiding? Every time I saw one it was the first time, as for the trout itself. I couldn’t watch them or stare into them too long. They made time fly as much while they sat still as when they flew. The streamlets here filled the sound-scape, folding you in so well you seemed to be contained in a bubble with the birds that came and went about their business, oblivious or careless that you were there, in their dwelling-place, beside the lake’s wide eye, its heavenward gaze. A gaze that trafficked in light. Nowhere else except fishing from rocks by the Atlantic have I felt so much caught up by the aura of water. Nowhere until that adventure had I so sustainedly studied durance and endurance and learnt my place in the world.
I became absorbed into the physical intimacy of the place itself more generally, the rocks, the stones, the slabs and cliffs, and the colour in them. They were never black and never grey but the light fell on them differently and the rain washed them, and as the seasons shifted ground, from spring to autumn, the foliage changed hue, and impressions of the place mutated. They mutated by the moment and once you saw that, whether you knew you were seeing it or not, you were more finely absorbed into the soul of the place, and the nursing air and the elements became yo
u.
Not only were there the sounds of tumbling streams and of the wind, but also the bleat of sheep, the occasional cough echoing, sounding almost human. Sheep used to graze on the crag in dizzyingly impossible places. Sometimes you’d see one fall, bouncing once or twice, to its death. Sometimes you’d discover by your nose alone, one that had fallen since your last visit.
All this was something I never felt more powerfully than when my head hit the pillow at the end of the day and for a moment the whole world I’d been in, rolled and plunged about me, as if reluctant to let me fall into the underworld of sleep, or else to ease my fall, with all the sights and sounds in which the day had held me entranced, suspended from the world and its business. It was like falling out of one dream, and into another, in the dark of the night ahead, where other days stir fecund.
So my first love affair began, and like the course of true love, like life itself, it had its trials and sorrows, its heartbreak days, its moodswing frustrations and minor dramas.
* * *
We’ll move on. For we have some way to go, some years to travel, round this water and the world might otherwise be over before we get there.
We’d move on, in my first times there, most often by the southerly shore, westward, to the last bay on that southwest side, parted from what became my beloved northwest bay by the highest and most massive cliffs. While my father would climb the spur of cliff and disappear down to ledges where he might fish, I must go by ‘The Eye of the Needle’. This was the narrowest and lowest of passages, with irregular steps, cut out under a huge natural lintel. As to incline, it was hard to get an extended fishing rod through it. As to width, the full bulk of a man, rich or poor, and his fisherman’s trappings were a squeeze. The ‘Eye’ and its steep steps led you up through the rock, and onto the bluff there, from which you could see the whole lake before you, except that immediately below, where my father fished, invisible but for the flashing tip of his rod or the sight of his darting line, and I would wait up there, for however long he might be, waited and above all stared.
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