Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  I bought a few other fishing ‘necessities’ including a bone-handled knife for my grandson. The knife was twelve centimetres long when folded, weighed about a hundred and fifty grams and had a large single blade. It was deliberately too big and heavy to carry in a pocket and was to be kept in his pack. A knife was, I told him, man’s most important tool and must never be abused. It was great to see Ned’s face: he knew then he was being treated like a grown-up and was now a real fisherman.

  Next I had a yarn with the owner, Gordy. Like all tackle-shop proprietors he was an interesting and knowledgeable guy. Just as we were leaving the store he wished us good fishing and showed me a small jar of orange paste. He told me that when moulded around the hook it was the best bait ever invented and was used by all the local fishermen. I laughed and said I was familiar with its magic, as forty years ago I used to fish with the guy that probably invented the stuff. I told him about Big Arthur. He was amazed and said that his supplier was the same man. ‘Would you like to see him again?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. But when he tried telephoning there was no answer, and when he rang Arthur’s son it turned out that Big Arthur was away for a few days and would not be back until the day after I flew back to Australia. I would have loved to have seen the old rogue and I thought about what might have happened if we could have fished together once again.

  As I left, Gordy gave me his card and later when I looked at it more closely I noticed his last name was March. Was he descended from Henry March, the first settler on the lake who built his place at Honeymoon Bay out of hemlock logs? I made a mental note to speak to the tackle dealer about his ancestor when I returned to the store.

  We then drove to the Robertson River. It was always a much more ordinary and friendly river than the Cowichan. Negley Farson called it the Robinson. I know he fished it quite often so he should have got the name right, but he was a bit like Humpty Dumpty and was both imperious as well as careless with names. All these years later it was no surprise to me that he eventually fell off his wall.

  Since I last saw the Robertson the geography of the river had changed. There was a new road bridge and I think it was in a slightly different place so it took quite a time to find the old logging railway line. All the rails and cross-ties had been pulled up, and when we reached the place where the railroad crossed the river we found the old trestle also was gone. However the log posts that supported the bridge were still in the river, and at the base of the nearest one on our side there were a few rocks and a small patch of weed. The water was absolutely clear, and I could see the nose of quite a large trout just sticking out from this excellent feeding position. The gravel bar I had fished from all those years ago had shifted to the other side of the river and without the trestle we could not get to it. And at the bottom of this clear, apparently slow-moving stream, there was now a lot more sand.

  Well out of sight of the fish we had a council of war. As far as we could see there was only one fish in the river and we had to decide if we should fish at all. I was fairly certain that there were probably quite a few cutthroat in Bear Lake lower down but, because there was only one fish in sight, we faced an ethical question, and I thought it was great for Ned that we had a serious discussion first.

  Although I had spotted the fish I was not interested in fishing for it because I wanted my grandson to catch a fish, but my son decided he was probably the only one who could cast that far. So the boy fished the edge higher up dapping his fly wherever there was a possible lie for a trout under a rocky part of the bank, and the man tried to get his line down deep enough for the fly to interest the fish. Neither was successful because the flow, although it didn’t look it, was too fast. The intermediate line that Matthew was using (always the best plastic line to use) couldn’t get down to the fish so this nice cutthroat lived to fight another day. If there had been a good lie where the boy was dapping he might have found something, so along the bank there were probably no other fish.

  Eventually we gave up for the day, but a valuable lesson had been learned. To reach a fish in a position like that in that kind of flow, the angler needs to be further away. If it had been possible to reach the end of the gravel bar from which I had fished forty years earlier, then by free lining instead of casting that fish could have ended up in our frying pan. We had an interesting discussion about conservation and in the end we decided that if we had managed to hook and land this fish we would have let it go.

  12

  Mistakes

  Learning is about recognising mistakes and then being able to remind yourself when faced with a similar situation of your former stupidity. During my walks along the river and talks with Ned I told him that I had made a lot of mistakes and that sometimes I thought I must have had something lacking, a screw loose as we used to say at school. I would tell him these things whenever he felt he had done something silly, and I tried to explain that even grandfathers feel stupid sometimes and slightly out of phase.

  I said that in the late sixties, when I had been living in Meade’s cabin for nearly two years, I felt more lost than ever. I was becoming like a lonely long-distance runner, which is what I most enjoyed when at school. We had physical training every day (now called physical education because it sounds better) and games twice a week, but there were only three compulsory activities. They were cross-country running, boxing and chess. Every boy had to participate in these three activities but in everything else there was a choice—if cricket bored you, you could play tennis or run. In winter, you could play rugby or soccer or run. I preferred to run.

  Thankfully, my school did not glorify team sports, it accepted the herd instinct in boys but felt it more important that we became individuals. It believed in self-reliance more than anything else and encouraged us to be ourselves. It was probably this kind of training, where teachers trusted their charges, that enabled me to become a solo mountaineer and eventually to sail north alone in my boat.

  I told my grandson that I thought regimentation had never been a good idea because it encouraged individuals to be too dependent on others. Doing things alone forced one to think in order to survive. So, I said to Ned, whenever I went out into the great forest in western Canada in the past, which was every day, I learned something new and this was the important thing.

  My problem, I said, was not in absorbing new information, it was in putting the pieces together so that they made sense. I was trying to solve a geological puzzle, where many of the pieces were living things. I knew I was in a position to turn the key but I couldn’t find the lock, or perhaps it was the other way round—I was not seeing something so big and so basic it was like failing to notice your own nose. I talked to Ned about noses when I described to him how I wandered aimlessly through these woods as a young man, and we laughed a lot because we decided everybody could see their own nose quite well but ignored it as mostly it was convenient to do so.

  Ned proved how silly it was to keep noticing his own nose by bumping into a small tree. We concluded clowns had red noses like stop lights so they wouldn’t keep bumping into things. The odd thing was they bumped into more things than ordinary people did so, we wondered, what use was a red nose?

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ned, ‘they use it to attract fish.’ He had a good sense of humour. I told him that red was the first colour to disappear at depth. I said that probably accounted for the success of the metal Daredevil spoon which had a thin sliver of white in the middle with the rest of the spoon blood-red. It put out a lot of vibration and attracted the fish, and they hit it hard because in deeper water they only saw the white part and thought it was the right size to eat.

  We had elected to fish only with home-tied flies, but we agreed we would use bait perhaps towards the end of the trip if we got really desperate. We didn’t even consider the commonest modern way to fish which is to use weighted plastic metal or lures like the Daredevil spoon. With them we might have been able to get closer to the bottom of this wild river. Lures are much more expensive than flies a
nd get lost and snagged much more easily because they have several sets of triple hooks. Also, to use lures we would have to carry a heavy tackle box and specialised rods and reels. I wanted Ned to learn the old way first.

  Every month in this wild country there was something different to see and I tried to make it clear to Ned that it was not always what one expected and often differed from the common opinion. I now knew he was pretty sensible so I told him the story about Erik and the bear for it was clear he would not do anything foolish. And, I said to him, who would have thought that I would witness an unarmed man stupid enough to attack and drive off a bear? Why did the wolverine just snarl and not attack me, and why hadn’t I shot it even though I had a gun? Why was it that after perhaps a hundred casts George had hooked nothing, then after only two or three tries I got the fish of the day? I had hundreds of questions like these and didn’t have any of the answers. Why, if cougars were so dangerous and there were so many of them, weren’t more people attacked? Why do fish eat worms? The two of us, the old man and the boy, discussed all the possibilities as we walked from one fishing place to another along this wild, roaring river.

  I told Ned that when I finally left Meade’s cabin I was having all sorts of doubts because I felt I was no closer to solving the mystery of the great batholith. I used long words like this when talking to him, and when he asked I explained that this fairly modern word came from two older ones: bathos which meant deep-seated and lithos which meant stone. We picked up a piece of the batholith, a granite rock lying on the trail, and I showed him the minerals it contained: the hard, acid quartz, which broke down into sand, and some feldspar and mica, which broke down into clay. I then said we were standing on the largest body of granite in the world. It was the world’s most infertile and inhospitable rock, yet we were surrounded by a mass of life greater than anywhere else.

  I didn’t tell him about the conclusions I had reached after sailing north and watching the bears pull the salmon out of the river. I decided it would better to leave a lot of things for him to discover. We stood still near the river and marvelled at the mystery.

  I told Ned I had just read a scientific paper by a Canadian geochemist saying that in this valley there had been more than a thousand tonnes of organic material to the acre. We paced out an acre on the ground, about sixty-five by sixty-five metres, and then tried to imagine what it was like before it had been logged.

  ‘That’s not a lot of land,’ said the boy.

  ‘No it is not,’ I said. ‘But it’s more than enough for a family to live on. The acre was once defined as the amount of land one man, with an animal to help him, could plough in one day. In the old days families lived on acre strips that were one chain wide—that’s twenty-two yards the exact length of a cricket pitch—and one furlong or a “furrow” long which was ten chains.’

  We decided that when we had enough room to cast into the river we could cast about twenty-two yards, which was also about the width of the river. The chain seemed to be still used everywhere in the woods. Ned and I talked about this ancient unit and Ned said, ‘We could call it a cast.’

  The author of this article in the science journal didn’t explain any further, he just stated the fact. I said I had checked this against published yields from farmers and they were not nearly so large and I wanted to know why. Rice, I discovered, only seemed to yield about three tonnes per acre (7.5 tonnes per hectare) and it was feeding probably half the population of the world. What was going on? The culture all over the planet for the last two thousand years at least had been concerned with conquering nature and making humans supreme, so why was it that we seemed to be getting less and less efficient?

  Ned asked so many questions. He was drawing information out of his grandfather and filling his own head. ‘You know what, Grandpa?’ he said. ‘I don’t think we are very efficient animals. We waste too much.’

  Ned’s comment made me remember the Psalms. Didn’t they say something about wisdom and strength coming out of the mouths of babes and sucklings?

  ‘You know what, Ned?’ I said. ‘I think you have hit the nail right on the head.’

  It had been difficult for me when I was living in the deep woods forty years earlier to answer many of these questions. Doing any kind of research into what was happening in other places involved writing lots of letters. In those days I didn’t have a phone, personal computers were in the distant future and the library in Victoria was a day’s journey away. Instead I had to fish and think, and both are best done alone, although I was now enjoying the company of an eight-year-old with an enquiring mind and he was helping me, just as I was helping him, to understand the wonders of the bush.

  During the time I lived in Meade’s cabin I didn’t manage to find out much about the human history of the lake. The history of the place was not discussed. Enquiries were taboo. As the big logger had indicated the day he appeared in my doorway, writers were not welcome any more in this small rural community. It was therefore not easy to research anything, even though most of my work was in old-fashioned natural history, now called geology, geochemistry and biology. All my questions were treated with suspicion. Most of the locals considered enquirers to be some kind of loathsome pest that deserved to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Natural history was not well understood by most people round the lake, although there was the odd exception, like the old faller Swanson.

  Nevertheless I was perhaps my own worst enemy because I did not know how to encourage people to volunteer information. I knew an elderly lady who I think may have been the wife of Henry March. I even had tea with her on one occasion, but I did not ask a single question—this was a mistake. I knew even then that perhaps the first duty of a writer is to pry, but in those days I didn’t have the skill, I didn’t even mention I was staying in Meade’s old cabin. Now, I think that this lady would have enjoyed talking about the cabin’s former occupants.

  Negley Farson in The Story of a Lake called the March family the Treads and I wonder if he did this deliberately or just unconsciously made the connection between tread and march? He was drinking heavily at the time, I believe, and it is possible that he just didn’t care. I wanted to know more about Farson, but I didn’t like to ask.

  On another occasion, I walked across the peninsula from my cabin to fish at Marble Bay and I was invited into the old place just overlooking the water. I didn’t know then that it was where Doctor Stoker had lived, but an elderly lady who lived there in 1968 wanted me to help her move some heavy object. Now I think it was really because she needed some company or was curious about me. I had always liked the exterior of the old Indian-style bungalow, but inside it was an even more amazing place. It had big comfortable armchairs, lots of books and large counters in the centre of the room as well as at the sides, and under the long windows overlooking the lake. These benches were covered with all sorts of fascinating junk. The old lady shouted all the time as if I was deaf so I spoke loudly too. While I was there the telephone started to ring. I had never noticed a wire outside and there was no phone in sight. The ring seemed muffled and the old lady just ignored it. I spotted a vibrating tea-cosy at the far end of the counter and indicated that there must be a phone inside it that was ringing.

  ‘Oh that damn thing,’ she said. ‘I can’t hear it because I’m deaf.’

  She went over to the phone, removed the tea-cosy, lifted the receiver without putting it to her ear, slammed it back down again and replaced the cosy.

  ‘They installed it a couple of weeks ago because people worry about me, but it’s a damn nuisance.’

  She picked up a metal ear trumpet from the counter. ‘I’ve got this thing,’ she said, ‘but I find it is easier if people just shout.’

  Much later I learned that Doctor Stoker’s wife had used an ear trumpet. But this lady, I think, may have been Mrs Simpson. She didn’t tell me her name when she invited me in and I was too shy to ask. Possibly she was the widow of the Englishman that Farson called Swinton, the self-appointed ‘
game warden’ in his book. I learned later that the Simpsons moored their houseboat in Marble Bay to be away from the village and nearer to the Stokers. Perhaps later this lady had moved into the bungalow when the Stokers died. I still don’t know enough of the history of the lake to be sure.

  Socially I wasn’t doing that well, but I was beginning to understand what was happening to the surrounding forest, the fabulous fishing, and the granite—the mother material—that lay beneath it all. My brain was soaking up everything like a sponge and I knew that all I had to do was take the time to squeeze it out, and I would have the answer.

  The sojourn in Meade’s cabin had been particularly useful for I had grown up with the idea that salmon and trout were only to be caught by ‘gentlemen’. Going fishing with guys like Arthur got this idea completely out of my head. In Going Fishing Negley Farson writes about this strange English view and describes the whole social order built upon it. It had little to do with money, the English said. It was birth and your connections or, in a word, class.

  As a boy I was astonished to discover there were two kinds of people who pursued two kinds of fish: fish with an adipose fin were reserved for the upper class, and fish without that fin ordinary people were sometimes allowed to catch. Luckily, before I went to British Columbia I had lots of ‘connections’. When I worked in Scotland I was fortunate enough to know people who ‘owned’ rivers. I thought that was ridiculous, no one could own a natural feature like a river, but as it was the custom throughout Europe I kept quiet so that I didn’t lose the chance to fish. I remember one river I had permission to fish but only as far out as the middle because the other bank was owned by somebody else. I was told I had to be careful not to make too long a cast. Yet in Britain, even though the rivers were ‘owned’ by the rich, often ordinary people were allowed to fish for ‘coarse’ fish—that is to say, any fish that didn’t have an adipose fin. This rule reserved trout and salmon for the rich. ‘Game’ fish are identified by the presence of this small fin on the back just in front of the tail. Useless for swimming, it is used for storing excess fat.