Telling Stories Keep it tidy by Savs

My personal mission, not all that long ago, was to be the guy with the worst tackle who caught the best fish. I made it halfway too; my gear was atrocious.

It was slapped-together junk of indeterminate age that, even in its heyday, would have been considered of significantly more utility in hand-tohand combat than on a trout stream.

This period found me cultivating myself in the self-imagined mould of a Discerning Country Gentleman (a DCG).

I bought books on birds and spent as much time squinting up at the skies as I did looking down at the river. I carried a neat zinger with a compass built into it in order to note the direction of the river relative to the passing of the sun so that, someday, I could say something brilliant about azimuths and valley orientations and how all this ensured that the straps of my creel frequently cut deeply into my shoulder. I pinned classic patterns into the sheepskin band of my equally classic hat and I faithfully memorised their burlesque recipes. In my truck resided a hermetically sealed folder of topographical maps and I would record onto them with red asterisks anywhere where a contour line on a water course looked vaguely different from those around it.

I wore through the knees of a pair of heavy khaki trousers as I turned over rocks on the stream bed to look at the bugs that sheltered under them and I would save an ecologically sustainable sample of each of them in small glass vials so that I could on my return home identify them. My pocket reference guide to common trees would be extracted under a comfortable bower as I took my midday tea and I would reference the illustrations in the book to the shape of the foliage above me and the pattern of the bark against which I reclined.

I was working hard to cultivate an aesthetic and, despite some paltry wins, I was entirely pitiful at it.

To this day I can’t tell a tit from a toucan. The maps went with the truck when I sold it and it never crossed my mind to ask for them back.

The compass fell off the zinger and the zinger itself came loose, taking with it a blunt pair of nail clippers. All that I found under the rocks were things that looked for all the world like pheasant tail nymphs, only smaller, and with not a single one of them looking anything like a thunder and lightning. The vials surfaced recently in a spring clean, their contents a goulash of noxious bacteria. All I know about trees is that if it’s got acorns on it then it’s an oak and if it has a few flies in it then it’s probably an ouhoudt.

It was hopeless. I’m just not wired that way. The only thing that remains of this period is my inexplicable affinity for wide-brimmed Englishmade hats. But my real problem, you see, with being a DCG is that catching fish isn’t the object of the aesthetic. Everything around me was designed to fill in the time between not catching a fish and not catching another one. If you think that consistently catching fish can get boring you need to experience the exhilaration of repeatedly not catching them, but it’s an act that I wore as a badge of pride. Call me boorish, tell me that I worship at a false alter, but I love more than anything else in this word the actual physical act of catching a trout on a fly. It consumes me. It keeps me awake through quiet nights. If it continues to run this course I fear that one day, through sheer distraction, it will cost me my job and my family. This doesn’t mean that I simply want to stand at the water’s edge predictably reeling in one predictable fish after the other. I am satisfied to catch only a single fish when they’re being particularly difficult, a mess of easy fish and I’ll trade the coordinates to Zippermouth Creek to have a slight outside chance of maybe having the experience of being taken apart by a hog of nasty temperament and disturbingly psychopathic demeanour. I do however have a Rubicon that I haven’t as yet crossed. The vestigial remnants of what was once an ostensibly noble DCG aesthetic dictates that I still cast a fly line in the traditional way.

My friends who fish competitively have all embraced the “leave no fish uncaught” tight-line style of nymphing. This technique is as amazingly effective as it is monotonous and it is no small wonder that it has gained in popularity. I’ve spent hours explaining to these competitors the delight of a graceful loop and a perfect presentation, but they just stare back at me without even blinking.

Competition anglers are so damned serious. So laser-focused. So single-minded. Uncompromising. Artless. Un-poetic. They do not know the names of the best pools and have read not one of the good books. When they speak, a set of red crosshairs becomes visible in my heads-up display and a voice in my mind squawks "target acquired”.

I’m not competitive. I don’t really care that you caught more than me - I rarely remember exactly how many I did catch. When I was told that the international scoring system can have someone with 11’000 points beating someone with 14’000 points I rolled my eyes and muttered off to the bar.

The thing is though, that they’re right and I’m wrong. Or I’m right and they’re wrong. Or (for any excuse to misquote Bob Dylan) “they’re right from their side and I’m right from mine” . It doesn't matter. It doesn’t matter in the same way that it doesn’t matter that the unusual contours on my maps never amounted to anything but an occasional nice walk. It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter. We are a bunch of ordinary people sharing a common passion but expressing it differently.

In a half an hour on a riverbank just last Saturday afternoon I learned a new respect for the Sensei. When I rather wryly called him “exacting” as to his choice of gear he simply smiled. He took no offence because he understood the real truth and value of my flippant statement and the nature of the idiot behind it. The lesson has taken a full week to finally permeate my thick skull.

Ultimately, our differences are just a statement of personal style. Of preference. The remains of a hazy underlying aesthetic handed down over generations like the family silverware and which, like that baroque candlestick, are largely useless.

Even when we feel compelled to comment on someone else’s aesthetic lets not be mean about it. As in most things, there is an inherent virtue in keeping it tidy.