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Authors: David Adams Richards

Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fishing, #Sports & Recreation

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BOOK: Lines on the Water
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“There were people who fly-fished of course, but none of the young lads I knew bothered. The rods were a lot heavier than they are now. We had old rods, one a them was my father’s twelve-foot rod, and he never used it but he won it on a raffle.”

He showed me his diary—most of it written a decade or more before I was born.

I took a fish today from Dr. Wilson’s
, his diary read.
Cool and cloudy, water just right, after dinner wind come up
.

His diary was old—so you were talking of old fish,
generations ago. Winters that covered up those pools and turns on the river, in a deep bed of indolent white sleep, and springs that came and opened those rivers once more, with the ferocious crack heard for miles. When thousands of tons of salmon moved through our tributaries, where small rocks and eddies were remembered as “the hot spot” in a pool for a few years before the pool changed. When the sounds of men’s voices changed with time, and the sound of different canoes coming around the bend changed, and the fly patterns changed too—they became more accommodating to the fish perhaps, or more utilitarian.

And it was a generation ago when Mr. Simms showed me his diary. And an old cane rod that was splintered with years of use now forgotten about—the moment of ballet and battle on a cloudy day around a corner somewhere far away, when he was not much more than a boy. Yet, in some sadness, I relate a million fish have come and gone since then, and bears have crossed those rivers in silence, and moose have fed in the lily ponds, and salmon have jumped the sea lice off, in the splendid dusk coming into a pool, with no one in the world to see.

When I was twelve or thirteen, and since my father didn’t fish salmon, and my uncles who did were all on the Matapedia
some 250 miles away in the big woods of Quebec, I was at a loss over how to go about learning.

I wanted to fish and hunt. Being able to use only one arm didn’t deter me. I just had to learn to compensate. I’ve been good at doing that.

I didn’t start off fishing salmon. Not many do. Perhaps those lucky individuals who are born very close to the salmon pools can recount taking fish at six years of age. But I was not able to do that.

So when I was young, we went down to Burnt Church, which was so named because General Wolfe on his way to Quebec fired a volley at the French Catholic church standing on Micmac ground and hit it. The wharf has the sea smell of salt and saltwater fish, and of course what I always associate with wharves near the sea—dried-out seaweed and tar.

Sometimes on drowsy days, I would walk up to the Church River, alone, past the great cow pastures of downriver farmers, fishing for trout, in the little darkish pink pools, and looking for—and being somewhat wantonly cruel to—frogs.

If it was August, I would get nothing but chub on a hook, and spend the day looking at the clouds moving haphazardly across the sky, already tinged with the feelings of fall. And now and again I would see some leaf seared by an early cold draught of air. On other days, for more excitement, I would
walk to the wharf during the changing of the tide and fish for perch and eels, in the black tossing water of the Miramichi Bay.

The perch were wonderful to fish with chopped-up pieces of discarded meat I got as bait from the general store.

The eels were great fighters too, and since I never ate them (I had eel soup once, and once I had some eel in paella in Spain), I would take them off the spin hook and toss them back in. Some of them seemed as big as pythons to me then.

Eels don’t die until sundown. That is when their body stops moving. It may be an old wives’ tale but I’ve witnessed it a number of times. If I happened to be fishing beside someone who kept his eels, I had to move my position because I couldn’t stand to watch them all day long, writhing and twisting and wanting to get back into the water, and not understanding why I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t tell the man to put his eels back because he was going to have them for dinner, so I would have to go down to the far end of the barnacle-strewn wharf to fish alone.

At the far end of the wharf I seemed to be staring out towards a water-filled world alone. The waves here were darker and colder, the breeze sharper. Far away I could see the point of Portage Island.

One hot day when I was fishing there, I decided to jump
in off a tying pole and swim to the ladder about twenty feet away. I had seen my brother and his friends do it. And I felt it couldn’t be that much trouble.

The swells were wonderful, the water was very green and deep, and because of the salt the sun dried you very quickly.

Off the end of the wharf there had been mackerel moving all day—you could see their silver bodies about ten feet beneath the surface, charging along. They are wonderful fish, mackerel are, as wonderful (almost) to fight as a grilse. But I couldn’t catch one that day. I would try to touch them when I dove in, and I would come up to the surface, feeling exhilarated.

But once I felt something swimming beside me as I came up. I turned towards the ladder, and this huge head popped up and stared at me. It was a seal. He calmly looked at me, blinked, barked, and lay back on his shoulders to eat a mackerel. He was about three feet away, and he must have thought that I was probably fishing like he was, and he wanted to brag to me about how it was done.

Once or twice a summer I would get out with the drifters, jigging mackerel. These were small boats, twenty-eight to thirty-four feet long, that drifted at night for salmon. During the off-season or during the day, some fishermen would rent them out for tours or mackerel fishing.

This was when I was between the ages of ten to thirteen. We would start off in the morning, but never seemed to make it anywhere until after lunch. The small open lobster boats were painted white, had small wheelhouses (sometimes not a wheelhouse—the wheel being open on the starboard side—but it had a tiny forward cutty, which always had the peculiar scent of soiled blankets, wine, and oil). It must have been a hard and at times lonely existence for some of the men who lived along the coastal shores.

We would have two or three lines down off the side of the boat, fishing off the far side of Portage Island, which was about five miles offshore. I remember now that the man who owned the boat would always manage two things. He would manage to be drunk, without any of us seeing him take a drink, and swear to us that he hadn’t, and he would almost always manage to foul up the engine, and spend an hour tinkering with it, as we drifted towards the open sea.

Still it was good fishing. We would use lures or bits of herring and perch for bait, and ride the swells most of the day, with the point of Portage Island visible.

I loved fishing mackerel in the big boats in those early days, in shorts and bare feet—feet that had become so toughened I could run along the rocky Shore Road for a mile to get a loaf of bread. At night in our little cottage, when I was eight
or nine, I would lie in bed and listen to the wind whistling off the dark and fearsome bay. I was going to become a fisherman and know the sea. And then perhaps my ancestry, or some other mysterious inclination, would draw me to the fir- and spruce-armoured woods, the sound of the river rushing around suicidal bends and cedar swamps. This, of course, was not so much a love of nature, I was to discover, but a response to the love of mankind. It might be sought in solitary ways, but in all ways that counted searching far-off places to fish seemed always to carry with it a love of humanity.

The sea and the river are both laden with traditions—absolutely proud, fearless, and different. I have come to know men who had grown up on our river and could canoe, blindfolded through rapids, but never saw our bay; and I have met men who spent their lives fishing lobster in ten-foot swells, but became claustrophobic when they could see the other side of a stream because everything was closing in on them.

This happened to a man I know who came down to my cottage, at the mouth of the bay, to collect the driftwood that had washed up on our beach. He was an older man, about 70, from Bellefond who worked most of the day with a chainsaw, cutting the huge logs and carrying them over to the one-ton truck. He looked out at the great water, shimmering in the
July sunshine and leaving in its mist mirages of old ships and islands that weren’t really there.

“So this is the bay,” he said. “By God, this is where the river runs to, and the salmon come from. I never knew it was like this.” What surprised me is what always surprises me about these meetings. In a real way, in an ultimate way, I who had by that time travelled the world had seen not much more, or had not too many more experiences, that could count for anything than he himself had, who had lived almost all his days in a four- or five-mile track of woods, with a trap line and a bucksaw.

Three

THERE ARE THOSE WHO
live near the woods, within a hat’s throw of a stream or a fine salmon pool, and never discover them. My father’s father died when my father was four years old. And in the truest sense my father was an orphan. He never knew about the woods. He didn’t own a camp. He had no knowledge of the great empire of the northern woods that spread in all compass readings on all sides of him.

In the late spring, I watched as other kids got ready to go fishing or came home from fishing trips. In the night air they would bring the trout out of their fishing baskets and
lay them on the cool grass. Sometimes hearing them come home I would run out in my pyjamas to see these trout laid out, signifying the mystical and haunted streams far off in the distance.

I was a town boy. And my father owned a business downtown and went to work in a suit and tie.

His world consisted of approximately eight blocks. As far as serious fishing was concerned, I may as well have been living in downtown Toronto.

The boys who fished with their dads would look on me as someone who knew nothing, a neophyte. This angered me. It angered me because they were right.

There was an
idea
of salmon fishing, of fly-fishing, that their judgemental scorn allowed me to see at a very early age. I was practised enough in detection of ridicule, but there was also the scent in the air of patronizing knowledge and just a little money. Not that these boys had any more money than I. But they had come in contact at a certain level with the idea of fish, and the fishing men, and understood
this
: the idea that fly-fishing was linked at some certain level, from some place, England or Scotland, to quite a privileged world. Not just a physical world; a monied world where in the search for game fish money was never spoken about, or perhaps only whispered about, at the end of the day. It took money to be rugged and
get fish. Perhaps not for the people I grew up beside, but for certain people that they knew. Certain people who may have riparian rights to certain waters and pools. That did not d
iminish
these people at all, but it only said what is always said: there is an affordability by a certain class (in a country where class is supposedly obsolete) where fishing takes on the splendour of gaming—not unlike the fox hunt. And that these laws and associations and riparian rights are jealously guarded. In the long run this may protect the fish that spawn in those privileged waters. But then again it may not. It may cause more resentment and resistence if it is perceived to be an elitist sport by those who feel they are not a part of it.

This duality has always fascinated me. That is, this understanding of camps with waitresses and cooks in white uniforms (my maternal grandmother was one) and guides in ties (my uncle was one).

But it is quite complicated. It does not diminish these men who come in search of these fish, but it shows a tiered society in which activity functions—the cultivated man as fisherman.

Each man (more so a generation ago than now) who goes to a camp of this kind finds that he is expected to play the role, whether he wants to or not, of a gentleman. Even if it is as simple a gesture as being helped in or out of a canoe, the role
is somehow preordained. The guides expect the sport to play out his role, and he is driven not so much by privilege as by tradition to accept it. This is a generalization, of course, but all generalizations have a certain premise. This premise is as much a part of fly-fishing in camps like those particular ones on the Restigouche as anything else about fly-fishing. It is at times, and can be seen as, a wonderful parlour drama.

But this was really a later observation. In a more complicated way, those nights of running into the yard in my pyjamas to see the bountiful luck of other boys told me that friends of mine knew of another world—a privileged but
natural
world of the river that my father had been denied in his youth because of the death of his father; a knowledge that he was unable to share with me, even though he tried clumsily to do so.

He would take us fishing one Sunday a year in a dull green flat-bottom boat. And even now, in his old age, he remembers this with fondness. But he had no great notions or inclinations towards that world of fly-fishing. Still he offered us the best he could of the world he knew. Even a few years ago he admitted he did not know what a fly rod was. And how can he be blamed, never having seen or used one.

So, Mr. Simms, the next-door neighbour, older than my father, as old as my mother’s older brothers, became my
first link, my first real link with fly-fishing. The world of fly-fishing, the smell of the rods, the colour of flies, the tin boxes.

Mr. Simms worked in the woods in the winter, and lived in camps. In the summer he went off by himself with a tent. His hands were battered and his fingers twisted. He had one pipe and one tobacco pouch. He had one tin cup for drinking tea, commemorating the coronation of Elizabeth II. He carried it with him always.

He would go far up on the Sevogle and live alone, a life of a hermit, with a Coleman stove and tin cup, fly boxes and salmon rods. He would go into the woods for days and forge rapids, walk or canoe rivers, often without meeting a soul. The great dramas of his life would be played out alone. And then he would return with fish to boil, or smoke with hickory wood. He would study the river for one purpose—to find the salmon. He told me about the great pools—the square forks, the Big Hole at the mouth of the Sevogle, and pools far up on the Norwest that I was to see twenty years later—Moose Brook, American Pool.

BOOK: Lines on the Water
12.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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