Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  My thoughts kept going back to Australia. It had a lot in common with Canada, yet it was a far less fertile country. Could it be just that water is in shorter supply there, or was there something else?

  4

  The Duty of Memory

  I had been standing on the bridge looking at the salmon and the sight of the huge chinook rolling in the water had just taken me back forty years. An unkind person might have said my mind was wandering, but I would counter by saying that I was being thoughtful.

  I understood then I had a duty to record what the area was like all those years ago, so I returned to where I had parked the car, bought a few groceries I probably didn’t need and another newspaper to check the date—it was Monday—then got in the car and went back to the cabin I had rented. Because I had been thinking about Meade’s cabin I had to be careful to drive in the right direction. The paper told me the body of the young Mexican, and the remains of his raft, had been found some way down the river and that the local people were collecting money to send the dead youth back to Mexico. I thought how sad his parents must be, and I realised I would have to do everything in my power to watch over young Ned. I took out my notebook and wrote this down.

  At the same time I thought about our duty to the young. Every older person has a responsibility to pass knowledge on but, when doing so, we have to do it in a way that doesn’t put the young person off. The best way, I have found, is a twofold approach. First, write down your feelings and the facts, but don’t try to deal with them all; they can be mulled over later. Then, be casual about things and try to draw out what is inside a youngster’s mind. Don’t try to put things in. There is nothing more satisfying to the young than feeling they can contribute too, so ask kids what they think. It is very easy for oldsters to forget we can still learn a lot from the young.

  My view is education is the most important thing, but we don’t get all of it by going to school. I have never been much of a diplomat, being somewhat clumsy with my social skills, but I have always been patient with young people and this served me well when teaching. To succeed in this difficult job teachers have to engender wonder as well as interest. I hoped that on this beautiful river I could conjure up some of this magic and that I would be able to show my grandson how to fish.

  Geologists have always found it easy to wander through time. But I have noticed that near rivers almost everyone forgets about the clock. Our bodies are largely water and I have no doubt that this is why nearly all humans are distracted in this way.

  I fell under the spell of water in 1931 when I was three. My mother took her eyes off me for a moment and I ran away. Fascinated by the small colourful fish spawning in the gravel shallows of the Cranberry Brook, I made my way there with unerring accuracy even though it was a long way from my home. Luckily for me there were big boys there, who had carefully removed their boots to get at the fish, so I didn’t drown. I remember I waded into the water still wearing my shoes. Eventually the village policeman found me and took me home to my distraught mother.

  Because of that first fishing trip I became aware there were two kinds of people: those who wore good stout boots and had to take care of them, like those boys at the Cranberry Brook, and those rich enough to wear fancy shoes. The older boys were very kind. They showed me how to catch tiddlers and gave me a jam jar to keep them in. To my mother’s horror and dismay I wanted to be just like those boys.

  Now I am older I meditate and reflect upon life quite often. Water helps people think probably because it continually poses questions. When the water watcher is very young he or she wonders where the water comes from and where it goes. Later he or she wonders what is in it, whether it is fit to drink and other simple things. Then, finally, when you get to my age watching water is similar to owning a huge library. It is a source you frequently consult, because if you have fished it for years you know that somewhere along its length it holds pretty well all the answers.

  Nowhere is change more apparent than when you go back to a river you knew in the past. From the moment of getting off the plane and renting the car I was aware that even beautiful British Columbia had changed. The traffic on the roads had increased threefold since my last visit and so had the carrion eaters, the turkey vultures. They were everywhere. Whenever one looked into the sky one saw them circling. They are easy to identify as they carry their wings curved upwards with the pinion feathers spread out, and they are superbly efficient in the way they fly. They always glide slowly and never seem to move their wings—one cannot help but admire the way they ride those thermals.

  The bald eagle, mainly a fish-eater, was so common in British Columbia that in the past I had many times seen more than a hundred feeding on a single salmon-spawning run. But on this visit I noticed the eagle was now almost as rare as it was in the United States. It seemed fish were now in short supply across the whole continent. The New World was ageing fast.

  Looking into the town pool at the twelve large salmon had brought a lot back: living in Meade’s cabin, my adventures on the west coast and lots of other important things. One of my favourite writers, the tramp-poet W. H. Davies, said it perfectly when he wrote:

  When I look into a glass,

  I see a fool:

  But I see a wise man,

  When I look into a pool.

  I told my mother something like that when I was three.

  In my experience writing and fishing have always been connected. All good writers fished and it didn’t matter what country it was. England always had the best of these wonderful people with Juliana Berners starting it all in 1486 with one of the world’s first ten printed books leading to Walton’s masterwork The Compleat Angler that has run into more editions than any other book. Then came hundreds of others who wrote about this noble pursuit; the long list includes people like Virginia Woolf and even Agatha Christie who used to fish the Dart as a welcome change from mystery writing. Dylan Thomas talked about this phenomenon often and said in a talk on the BBC in 1945 the two best writers of prose so far in the twentieth century were Arthur Ransome and George Orwell. He said it was probably because they fished. Eric Blair liked fishing so much he took the name of Orwell, his favourite river, as a surname and in true angler fashion disguised himself as just another George. Ransome also liked the Orwell River, writing at least two books about it. Dylan Thomas was right, and I wonder where one needs to go to find good fishing writers like these two today.

  As I drove back to the cabin I realised the details of my fishing trip with my grandson were still pretty vague. His visit to the river had to be fitted in with a number of other important sports activities that I call games. I didn’t have much sympathy for these demands but I had to go along with them. Fishing was the low man on the totem pole in this arrangement, and I had to wait.

  I got back to the cabin and the long wait began. I had no mobile phone but that was part of the plan; it is to escape from technology that we go into the bush. There was no one to talk to so I wrote in my notebook about the missing trees. Matthew had made it clear that he couldn’t say when Ned would be free. Their lives were busy. To ease my nervousness about the meeting, I imagined I was trying to get an interview with the Queen. All I could do was stick around near the river and wait for their arrival.

  I thought of the lives led by my step-grandchildren in Australia. My wife’s daughter was a high-powered executive for one of the huge corporations. Every day she drove all over Sydney; every other week, it seemed, she flew round Australia and south-east Asia. Yet still she managed to work on her computer, speak on her mobile phone, send text messages to all and sundry and drive the kids in one of the family’s numerous cars to netball, soccer and volleyball and to the beach. Her husband helped her but there was no doubt she was a world leader in multi-tasking. My wife and I referred to her as Wonder Woman. We understood completely that being a modern parent was a demanding job, yet at the same time we couldn’t understand why such multi-tasking was necessary. In our childhoods we organised our
own games. There were few private cars, adults were busy earning a living or doing housework, and we wandered around unsupervised. My wife played in Central Park in New York and I explored the English woods and rivers and talked to gypsies and tramps. No one ever kidnapped or murdered us so why, we wondered, did modern kids need such tight parental control? Is the modern world really more dangerous?

  Thinking about it in this remote place in the woods where there were cougars and bears, I decided the media was to blame. Almost every night on the TV in Sydney we hear of violence, of people being stabbed or threatened with knives and, according to the news, terrorists threaten us everywhere.

  Animals, I have found, are peaceful most of the time, whereas many of my ancestors, and therefore Ned’s, were soldiers, going back as far as Waterloo. I have no hesitation in being critical of their deeds, although, as they were all cannon fodder, I do not blame them. But if I had been around when they were, I would have made every attempt to convince them not to listen to others and to think for themselves. My son now has all their medals including the world’s first war medal, a huge chunk of silver, given to our ancestor after Waterloo, and I am sure he shows them all to Ned. I can only hope he tells him that fighting is not only bad, it is also stupid. That I think is why I don’t like ball games. Many argue they are useful because they get aggression out of the system, but I am inclined to think they are in reality training for war; some of the most aggressive people I have ever met, especially in Australia, have been players of games.

  On the other hand, people who occasionally kill something like a deer or a fish tend to be more reverent towards life. Perhaps it is because they are actually responsible for death. For an old man it is a difficult and complex world; one can only imagine what it’s like for a kid.

  I went to look at the river again and explored more upstream and downstream to try to find some slower-moving water but my search was in vain. Everywhere the water moved with too much force to fish. I thought of the monsters I had seen in the town pool. No wonder they were as big as porpoises and the kings of fish; they had to be to get up the river.

  Over the next six months smaller species of salmon would arrive. There were four other kinds of salmon that would come up this particular river before the winter began. I knew, when I booked, that it was not really the best time for the kind of salmon I preferred to catch, but the cabin was fully booked for the rest of the year. I wanted to show my grandson how to catch trout so I imagined the end of May would be a good time for them. That is true in most places in the northern hemisphere, but I had forgotten about the snowmelt in the coastal mountains of British Columbia. Like the young Mexican, I had made a mistake. All was not lost, however, for I could show Ned what a river in flood looked like, and there were other less-wild rivers in the region where we could fish, as well as many small lakes. We might pick up a homely cutthroat or two.

  To fish the big lake would be much more difficult, I knew from living in Meade’s cabin all those years ago. There were fish there, but it was difficult to reach them because, like all big-lake fish, they preferred to live in the thermocline, which varied in depth below the surface according to the direction of the wind as well as the time of day. Water below this layer had insufficient oxygen for fish, and water above it was usually too warm. Fishermen with large boats were able to carry the heavy electronic equipment needed to find these fish, but, even if I had access to this kind of gear, I wouldn’t use it. When I hunt or fish, I prefer to use my wits and I like my prey to have some chance of getting away.

  Many of the modern techniques of catching fish I consider to be environmentally disastrous. I don’t go on about it much and if anyone asks me why I don’t use more modern gear I usually say it’s too expensive for me; I don’t tell them that most of the time it doesn’t do what the advertiser says it will, and if it does one becomes guilty of overkill. It’s like using an elephant gun to shoot rabbits; it’s showing off.

  I decided to look at the river again and try casting in a slower backwater. I had only been working my fly for a few minutes when a black-tailed deer appeared and I looked away from the water. They are quite small, about the size of a goat, much smaller than the mule deer found in the coastal mountains or the three even larger species found on the mainland, the caribou, the elk and the moose. The little black-tail hadn’t seen me and, as the gently moving breeze was at right angles to the river, she couldn’t smell me. She was browsing on several different kinds of plants and she reminded me of a human at the self-serve restaurant in University House in Canberra, always a good place for breakfast. She picked delicately at almost everything.

  Black-tails seem unafraid of people and when this one’s eyes finally focussed on me and she realised I wasn’t just another bush she slowly finished chewing her mouthful of leaves and quietly moved away. Because of the extensive logging in British Columbia today there are probably many more of these deer, as they thrive on the small stuff that springs up after the bigger trees are cut down. Deer are not really animals of the deep forest; they prefer the forest’s edge. Logging has increased the amount of fringe areas and with them cougars because the deer provide them with more food. Black-tailed deer are now moving into suburbia and the cougars are occasionally following this easy prey right into town. They are so common today the best way to run into either one of these animals is to play golf on one of the ever-increasing number of golf courses. I have never worried about cougars, and I ignored the deer and carried on fishing.

  While I had been thinking about the interconnectedness of these other animals my fly had swung around to my left bank but, even though I had been watching the deer, I knew it had aroused no interest. If I was eventually going to connect with a fish, I would have to concentrate more. I am not a very good fisherman these days; I rarely fix my mind on what the fly is doing because there is so much else to think about and look at.

  This backwater, although flowing with a great deal less force than the main river, wasn’t a good place for fish. I knew that but, just like Juliana Berners would have done, I put the fly in the water hoping I was wrong. I cast a few times hoping to pick up a stray trout. My river of course was very different from the River Ver. It was much younger and faster and wilder. The good Dame could never in her wildest dreams have imagined a river quite like this one. But she would have told me, if she had been there, that it was quite impossible to fish.

  With her advice in hand I decided to move upstream to see if I could find a more suitable place for my young grandson to fish. He would probably arrive at the cabin the day after tomorrow and I needed to work quite a lot of things out. But water is such fascinating stuff, I didn’t get round to them.

  I was looking for seams in the stream, those lines that separate faster from slower water, but in the main part of the river the water was so fast it all just seemed to boil. I dipped my hand in and the sheer power of the current nearly sucked me into its powerful flow. The water was icy cold. There didn’t seem to be any other backwaters where trout might be getting out of the force of the water. I imagined they were all snugged down on the bottom, hidden behind the larger rocks. The rocks would have to be large, I decided, to withstand the force of the water. This part of the river had recently uprooted some large trees and a bunch of these were lying in the water along the bank, quivering visibly as the river hurtled on. The tops were pointing downstream. A little more time or a little more rain I reckoned and they too would be rushing towards the sea.

  The first thing I would have to get across to my grandson was not to go too near the water, so how was I going to help him catch a fish? I wanted to do as much as possible on foot but if the river didn’t fall rather rapidly I knew we would have to go further afield. We would have to use my rental car and try other places, the slower rivers that drained into the main lake, and if that failed we would have to fish one of the smaller lakes in the valley. I am not keen on fishing lakes, even though some of them are beautiful. I am not sure why that is so but perhaps
it is because I have a roving spirit and identify more with wandering rather than the gentler lacustrine existence.

  I went further up the river. I always seem to go upstream rather than down. In some ways it is harder to fish this way especially when the river is so full and so fast. But fish always lie facing the current. They have to do that in order to breathe. The oxygenated water passes in through the mouth and the deoxygenated water passes out through the gills. True, fish often hurtle off downstream when they are hooked or trying to escape another predator like a large pike or an otter, but powerful escape movements like this deoxygenate the blood and when the fish needs to get more oxygen it has to turn back upstream.

  I tried to imagine where the fish were hiding in this turbulent water. I knew exactly where to find the steelhead because I had devoted most of my fishing time over the last forty years to the study of this magnificent fish. But it didn’t look like steelhead water today. Even though these fish can be found in the rivers of the west in any month of the year and we know where they sometimes feed, they are the most elusive as well as the most glorious fish of all. If there had been any steelhead in this river today they would have been in the slackest water, no further out than a metre from the bank. So as not to scare them I kept well back.