There was an old bloke who, for all we know, still lives in the mountain village and fly fishes and guides there. For all we know. We don’t know. He was featured. Once. There was a black and white picture of him, showing the contoured face of a man who has spent some years on a river. The magazine article embraced his individuality, his pioneering nature, his strength of character, his boldness as a lone entity. He hasn’t been featured again. The publication which featured him has moved on it seems. Advertisers will tell you that ‘The Camel Man’ doesn’t cut it anymore. The world has gone more gonzo and groupie.
The world is always moving on.
When I was new to this game of flyfishing we lived at the nexus of tweed and strike indicators. Of Invictas and floating fly lines, of graphite and priests. Not the high kind, I mean the thing you use to bonk a fish on its head. That was our culture. It was a very British based thing, and it was in transition. Television had exposed us to America, but only for a decade, and the echoes of the empire still rang strong. Tweed and tea.
Tea was big in our household but curry wasn’t a thing. My mother didn’t do hot food. Beef Wellington and Yorkshire pudding prevailed. My fly rod was fibreglass. Dad still used his father’s and it was “split cane” (not “bamboo”).
The rod was heavy and slow, and possessed an innate ability to cause enormous tangles in your “cast”. The lexicon was still evolving towards the “leader”, and back then our country’s leader wasn’t democratically elected in the fullness of the term. The family on the farm neighbouring ours were of Dutch extraction, but they left the country, because they could identify with neither the Afrikaners nor the Zulus. Neither fitted with their culture. They went to Tasmania, we stayed, and I acquired a graphite fly rod. You could probably catch a lot more Trout in Tasmania than South Africa, but our old friends never flyfished. Go figure.
I am told that I could catch way more Trout if I ditched the fly line, used mono with some brightly coloured pieces to boot, and exchanged fly casting for a lobbing motion, in which heavy flies are pitched into fast flow and conveyed to the very bottom of the river.
Kaplunk.
And if I would join a group of thirty or more enthusiastic anglers at a clinic, and if closely followed the example of some of flyfishing’s rockstars, I could learn to do this with absolute precision. My catch-rate would improve exponentially: this has been proven in the statistics, and at the competition winner’s podium.
Moving on.
I love curry. I rather enjoy making it too. My father never cooked. That is if you discount his Sunday suppers, which between my siblings and I is a rich and meaningful tradition which sets our hearts aflame with memories. He did scrambled eggs served with a freshly opened bag of crisps. Hey, you’ve got to hand it to him, he grew up in a household where the kitchen was the domain of Jumbo, the chef. Jumbo in his crisp white uniform with thin red lines in the trim. Perhaps his mother cooked, but his father may never have entered a kitchen. But just as my mother and father grew to be liberals and shunned the notion of a chef in white uniform, and a leader not democratically elected, so I frequent the shops in Indian town which my mother never knew, where I buy elachee and soomph, and no, I don’t call them Cardamom and Fennel. I typically make curry on a Sunday , when I have time to kick around the house. Saturday is my preferred day for flyfishing, leaving the Sabbath for drifting around in slippers, drying tackle, filling in the journal, and making curry. And if the truth be told, I like to push the heat of that curry upward almost as much as I punt the array of flavours. I shun store bought curry powder in a way not unlike Pirsig’s view of a BMW motorcycle. My wife, who is Afrikaans, skips the curry if I overdo the heat part, but I don’t think she is about to leave the country. Sometimes I am at risk of overdoing it in terms of my own heat tolerance but then we could abandon the curry and go Dutch and she could order in. It’s a fine line, but it is good to have a way out.
That’s what I tell myself when I tie on a fly designed to conquer a particularly robust river flow, and my casting efforts are reduced to a sort of lobbing action. Gotta get down, and embrace flyfishing in the fullness of the term. I doubt my grandfather would have approved. Unlike him I don’t fish in tweed, but I do have my late Dad’s flat cap, and I have been known to don that on special occasions. Think of it like a Sunday night supper.
But here’s the thing. Sunday night suppers, choosing an overly heavy nymph, and cooking a curry so hot that you need to order in, are private and obscure endeavours. In a world in which flyfishing media now rings the gonzo gong, and invites the throngs to public events: clinics and competitions, there are still men who live in mountain villages, and they flyfish. They are Individuals, and probably with ever more contoured faces. They grew up in the era of the Camel plain advert. They could fish glass, bamboo (which some might still call split cane), or graphite, and at times they may feel that they don’t feature. That the world has passed them by: moved on. But, despite no longer featuring in that magazine, they have their strength of character. For all we know they have elected to spend their years on a river and they have taken a decision not to heed the call of the gonzo gong. That is their culture. Their rich and meaningful tradition.
But how would I know.
