Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  Despite their magnificent smelling ability members of the trout and salmon family do not use smell to find food. They hunt by sight, which is why we fish with artificial flies resembling the insects they fed on in their natal streams.

  I remember being fascinated by artificial flies many years ago on a mountain stream in Wales when an experienced angler opened his beautiful nine-by-six centimetre aluminium fly box handmade by Richard Wheatley in England. This young man, a couple of years older than I was, carefully popped open a spring loaded see-through lid on one of the six compartments and drew out one of his collection of a dozen or so flies. I think it was a Coch-y-Bondhu, an imitation of a small beetle widely used in Wales. The water was fast and clear, and the small feisty Welsh trout were much more interested in his flies than they were in my bedraggled worm. He gave me one of his precious flies and I have been a fly fisherman ever since. For years I stuck my flies in my hat but just recently I have become more respectable and bought one of these expensive handmade aluminium boxes. It fits very nicely in the top pocket of my jacket or shirt.

  Anglers don’t fish just to catch fish; if we did, we would net them. We hunt fish, which are very smart, in order to outwit them, and we are less successful than we like to think. Many great anglers have said fishing is a ridiculous passion because fish cost far more to catch than they would to buy in a market, but we continue the pursuit because it enables us to think. The mystery of water fascinates us.

  Although I occasionally enjoy eating trout and salmon, I am not that fond of fish. The best meat I ever ate was from a wild sheep shot in the Arctic. It was infinitely superior to lamb from the butcher. But I only ate wild sheep once. Having grown up in the Great Depression, I eat only to live and have never wanted to be a person who did the reverse. I try to live simply and I believe the life of a gourmet would be boring. Perhaps this is why I usually just admire fish and then release them, but I do believe that if a person loves wild country like I do, he or she should always be capable of ‘living off the land’. It is a skill our ancestors had, and I do not want it to disappear.

  14

  The Pilgrims’ Final Day

  There were lots of things I wanted to tell my grandson, but I knew I had to let him discover them for himself in a magical way. Although we have imagined ourselves as created in the image of God and conceitedly named ourselves Homo sapiens, knowledgeable man, it has never been helpful to think of our species as being special and particularly different from other life forms. We are slightly different and that is all.

  The best way to pass on information to our offspring is to sniff around a bit and set an example, the way other creatures do it. That’s what I had been doing with Ned for the last few days; we called it fishing but it was really much more. And it wasn’t all one way—I learned a lot from him.

  Much of my life, like Walt Whitman, I have thought I could live with animals because they are placid and self-contained, but I am not an animal lover in the usual sense. I never pat passing dogs, I am not keen on cats and though I once enjoyed riding horses I don’t really like the way they smell. When I kept chickens I thought they were rather silly, but I was grateful for their eggs. I prefer wild animals like cougars and bears because they have been less affected by man. I think of myself as just another animal, and I thank my lucky stars I was born a man rather than a mouse.

  The greatest difference seems to be that humans think more than other animals and can understand more complicated things. I am always thankful for the existence of science, but I find that advances in technology irritate me, especially when they are called advances in science. Contrary to common belief, technology is not derived from science, it is older and has been around for thousands of years. Science is only two and a half thousand years old. The people who practised it a few years ago when we were paying more attention to the latest research are now being overlooked. Recently, we have become preoccupied with wealth, and have become enamoured with a pseudo-science called economics that seems to be only concerned with the ‘growth’ of a convenient but impractical thing called money.

  Most of us, including a growing number of university professors, spend a lot of our time perpetuating myths. The biggest myth is that we live in a new scientific age; if that were true we would be more careful about the things we do.

  Technology in the twenty-first century reigns supreme and it is our love of gizmos and gadgets that is rapidly destroying the planet. We use this extra energy every day, forgetting that every time we do this we contribute to climate change. Science taught us this long ago, yet most of us carry on ignoring, or blissfully unaware of, the cumulative effect of our actions. Every time one types in a search term on a personal computer for Google to find, an estimated seven grams of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. I don’t know how many Google searches there are per day around the planet, but it is clear the total energy used to transport information, a lot of which is incorrect, is now beginning to rival that used to transport people and goods, which is also increasing. To cap it all there is now lots of advertising transmitted at the same time adding to the load. When I checked just now I discovered there are half a dozen different search engines and together they make about 213 million searches a day. Multiply that by seven grams. We are producing too much greenhouse gas and have to slow down.

  Thales of Miletus was the first real scientist although he would not have recognised the term. He argued he was a philosopher who tried to understand the world not in myths but in terms that were subject to verification. We would do well to follow the wisdom of Thales today.

  Some of this was in my mind as I walked along the river with Ned. It is probably why I bought him the world’s most primitive tool, an old-fashioned knife. In an attempt to teach him something about science we made a spark with the knife and set fire to a handful of steel wool. I did this because it is generally believed that iron will not burn.

  Thales established mathematics as a science, but more importantly he was the first man to think objectively about nature. As I walked along the river with Ned I attempted to emulate this Greek. Thales objected to the common way of explaining the world through myths. He believed the world was essentially made of water—quite amazing really for in 600 BC there was no knowledge about the size or even the shape of our planet. He argued that water was the most important thing because it was the only substance that could be seen in three forms—solid, liquid and gas—and he wrote eloquently about the clouds in the sky as being part of a much greater sea. All those years ago Thales was right. Ned and I talked about these ideas quite a lot.

  Now we have discovered that the compound called water is made of the two elements hydrogen and oxygen, and we accept that there is a series of ninety-two elements starting with hydrogen and ending with uranium found naturally on our Earth. But we make new ones heavier than uranium, which last a few seconds and then disintegrate, just to show how clever we are.

  In talking to Ned I often thought about what the old philosopher would say if asked the same penetrating questions that came from my young grandson. I am not saying I gave answers as good as Thales would have given, but I always thought about Ned’s questions seriously and tried to answer with the truth. That is after all what science is about—the ultimate search for truth.

  Truth is evasive and is only found by examining fiction just as carefully as the supposed facts. Kris Kristofferson wrote a song about this describing a pilgrim as a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. The ancient Greeks were like that too and, as my grandson and I walked along the river, so were we.

  Time was now running short and Ned still hadn’t caught a fish, but he was proving to be an excellent fisherman because he kept trying.

  On the way home on that last day we visited one last lake. It was slightly larger than the one near the cabin. We found a fairly shallow bay with quite a lot of weeds and a rocky shore and decided to fish there. It was our last attempt and the time had come to try a worm suspended
beneath a float.

  We had only about half an hour left and while I was still fiddling with my tackle Ned caught his first fish. He used a float big enough to scare a pike because it helped him cast with the tiny rod, but nevertheless he got a fish on. He played it well and started to bring it in. It was a young trout, and Ned was bubbling with excitement.

  ‘I’ve got one Grandpa,’ he shouted.

  He decided it was too small for us to eat, so he carefully let it go. And I was very proud of him.

  It was a perfect end to our trip. Perhaps Ned will never see fish like I used to see in the beautiful valley, but it was important to discover that some fish are still there.

  My grandson and I had been exploring one of the outer layers of a ball of iron hurtling relentlessly through space. Although the locals called this piece of water the Cowichan and our species called this globe the Earth, the most obvious layer is water. The next most obvious are granite and air, and we belong to an even less obvious but ubiquitous layer of life. We had been gathering knowledge as we walked along the river; we called it fishing but it was more than that. We were trying to reconnect with our planet.

  When I was small the human culture presented to me by parents, parsons and pedants tried to make me feel unique, but I always felt happier recognising I was part of a larger whole. That is why I climbed mountains, wandered through wilderness areas, sailed lonely seas and fished remote rivers. Mostly I did it alone because if you are alone you are entirely your own man. I was searching for my identity for I was not happy having it defined by others.

  Our trip was now over, and I had to return to Australia. I reminded myself that all good things have to come to an end. It had been a success because Ned had landed a fish, but the really important thing was that we had experienced the river flowing through the trees and it still had mysterious and wonderful possibilities. We had gone out into the great forest and learned something new. We had asked questions and thought about all the different answers. We had learned to fish and think together, and together we had understood the goal wasn’t the fish at all. The log cabin on the river was excellent, better than staying at Meade’s old place today, and I decided all grandfathers should spend more time with their grandchildren living in the bush.

  I had done what Aksakov said and ventured into native waters in the cool shade of the forest and gone back to the years of my youth. And I had taken my grandson with me into this world of serenity and freedom.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the people of Lake Cowichan, the Land Conservancy in Victoria and David and Disa Jaye, to John Elwin, Dorothy Johnston and Bruce Sims, whose comments on early drafts were so encouraging, to my agent Mary Cunnane and to my editors Jane Pearson and Michael Heyward at Text.