In recent months and weeks I have found my mind wandering to the question of what links the blokes whom I choose to fish with. I mean there’s a lawyer, a researcher, a retired bloke….I could go on. They also vary in their fishing skill…from absolute masters, to those who are less so. Some own top-notch tackle, others scrape up whatever is in the cupboard and are content with that. One is in his twenties. Another is in his eighties.
These are the people whom I search out; whom I call to see if they have a gap to go fishing with me. There are other people….lovely people, who I fish with, but somehow I don’t pick up the phone to them to see if I can persuade them to join me. Why?
I keep looping back to that “Why”. I suspect I will continue to do so, but for the time being I think I have found one of the common threads. For now it feels like the most important common thread.
I was out to breakfast with friends, and they asked how the fishing had been. “Pretty crappy” I replied, but knowing my friends have dabbled in photography (and not fishing) , I mentioned that “hey, either way, I get out with the camera and if I get a few great pictures, its all worth it”.
I gave them the first example that jumped into my mind. “We were out on a dam, and my buddy was outfishing me in a way which would have gotten many people down, but you should see this shot I got of him. Just sheer joy!”
That was it!
Joy!
What a pleasure to come back from a totally blank day out, wet from the rain, cold, tired, and your buddy is not only un-phased: he is grateful. Happy. Happy to have been out for the day. And when he says it, you know that he genuinely means it. He is not just saying it. He really means it. That means that if you persuaded him to go on that day, to that place, in that weather, its okay. You can relax. He’s not your paying guest, but even if he was, he genuinely enjoyed the experience, warts and all, and he’s not grumbling, and along with that goes the fact that he is not holding you responsible for how it turned out. Not you or anyone else, because he’s happy about how it turned out. Think about that for a while. No passengers whom you have to worry about. Who wants a passenger anyway!
And what makes him ‘not a passenger’ is the fact that he is a joyful person.
Arnold Gingrich wrote a book entitled “The Joys of Trout”. Charles K Fox wrote “The wonderful world of Trout”. Traver wrote “Trout Magic”. “The Earth is Enough” by Harry Middleton. It is perhaps not coincidental that these are amongst my favorite books. Joy, Wonder, Magic, and Enough. Books and people.
Fishermen who rush from one water to another to find the hot spot, carry with them a dissatisfaction with where they are at any one time. They are looking over the shoulder to see who is catching more and where. They are searching for a water with more fish, bigger fish. Inherent in that is a dissatisfaction with the alternative, which is catching fewer or smaller Trout. Dissatisfied people surely aren’t joyful people….their joy is conditional. I don’t think I had thought that through when years ago I started to find that ‘rushing off to somewhere better’ just slightly distasteful. I remember being disdainful of someone who had discovered that huge trout were being caught somewhere in the cold veld where goats roam, and had apparently hired a helicopter to get there fast. Quite apart from the opulence of that story, there was something deeper that didn’t sit well with me, and I think now, some forty years later, perhaps I have identified what that is.
