Originally Posted by
Surly Ghillie
DATELINE; NATAL WITNESS 29/12/2007
©Wolf Avni 21/12/2007
The notion that teenagers can be taught to fly-fish, or anything else for that matter, is entirely absurd; they already know everything. - The Unpublished Epigrams of Surly, the Ghillie
“Look at the hippos,” says Teenager pointing to a cluster of rounded shapes on the hillside across the lake. “They are rocks,” I reply softly, “remnants of a basalt cap fractured aeons ago and tumbled into the valley, where they have lain for millennia, shaped thus by no more than times’ ravaging.”
“Well they look like hippos,” Teenager retorts. “ I’d rather they were hippos. Rocks are boring.” A look shot my way, refulgent with implication, insinuates that old farts with threadbare imaginations are boring too.
“Things are always boring if you do not scrutinise them adequately,” I counter in parental fashion. Teenager, gazing intently through slitted eyes at the outcrop nods, as if in agreement and then says “I’m all scrutinised out this morning and I still think they look like hippos.”
“That is as may be,” I offer apropos of nothing, but with what I hope will be interpreted as suave authority. It is all I have to mask my impotence in the face of such youthful goopishness. “And those storm clouds building above the mountain,” the teen continues, “ don’t you think that they look like a bunch of purple-turbaned Turks?”
We are out on the lake in a small boat drifting in the breathlessness of dawn, brought there by nothing more remarkable than my inability to resist an insurmountable challenge; a few days earlier, Teenager, watching me roll a 2 weight floating line over a pod of fish feeding close inshore had said, “Hey that looks cool. Can you show me how to do it?” And in a moment of bravado I had replied, “Sure! Nothing to it.” And so it came to be that we were sitting out on a boat practising the mechanics of casting. Later, when Teenager had absorbed the fundamentals, we would move down to Smuggler’s Corner where the Umzimkulwana chortles through riffles and down Lilliputian rapids.
In no time at all the teen has the hang of things and is throwing as clean a loop on a short line as one could hope for, but cannot be prevailed upon to curtail the false casts. “You don’t need to wave the line around in the air so much,” I say patiently, “ You’re not conducting an orchestra. A couple of false casts is all it takes to aerialise the line. Your timing is spot on, but you want to get the fly in the water pronto, with as little disturbance as possible. All that brandishing around is just obtrusive, and anyway, most fish are caught when the fly is in the water,” I convey firmly, lightly bruising a brittle teenage ego.
It bristles back at me; “ Whatever became of ‘more to fishing than catching fish’ ? I thought you told me that the fish were incidental? And I like watching the line. Check out the pretty patterns the loop makes overhead,” Teenager commands imperiously.
“Oh Boy! What have I got myself into?”, I whisper into the abyss.
Some days later, once the novelty of the ‘pretty patterns’ that a line etches against sky has paled in the passage of time, I collect the teen and head down the Umzimkulwana for a session on the river.
In thigh-deep water, with one hand waving free, Teenager makes first acquaintance with the river, with its substrate as slippery as razor blades and with the shrubbery, which leaps out to snatch at every passing fly. “Hey, keep that cast high,” I call jocularly from my camera position at bankside, as for the nth time Teenager snags a bunch of vegetables and for the nth time, wades forward against the current to free the fly. Against all odds, and far more so that I ever came close to back in my learning years, the teen gets the fly in the current and soon shows the beginnings of mastery over the drag-free drift. I say little and am frugal with compliments, yet suspect that I am witness to the genesis of what may yet turn out to be a glorious fly-fishing career. And as the teen slowly gains in confidence and becomes one with the river, I focus my camera and record the moment. Soon enough it is time to leave, but the teen is disinclined. I insist and Teenager reluctantly spools the line and wades out to join me on the bankside, saying. “Hey that’s so cool. I think fly-fishing likes me. I think I like getting my shoes wet!”
My job is done.
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