LochTor

The wind had dropped after some fierce gusts in the night and the most torrential showers of rain. We sallied off to Loch Tor above Dervaig as I now had been bitten by the fishing bug.

There is a nice hide and the Principal spent two hours scanning the loch for otters and eagles. I went stumbling off into the most ridiculous old forestry along the south side of the loch with bracken above my head, a tangle of rotting logs to ensnare my clodhopping boots and rowan, hazel and willow to block my every advance.

Only when I reached the end of the loch and the small dam there did I see that I could have walked along a wide forestry road to reach my destination. Even then I decided to wade through the loch-end outfall river  to try fishing where my flies would not be tangling with trees every other cast.

My technique was, to say the least, rusty. As was most of the gear - still kept from those 'glory days' with the old man and a most fantastic fisherman from the local dairy - Will Tyndrain (the habit in that part of Wales being to to use farm or house names as surrogate surnames) - on the Afon Crawcwellt in the mountains to the south of Trawsfynydd in what was then Merioneth.

The wind was all wrong and seemed to be blowing in every way but the right one. My graceless, expletive laden casts would land in a great, shattering pile of green line.

But it was fun in its own fisherly way. Just good to be out and by the water.

On the way we saw this flock of Oystercatchers (with a Godwit?) on the little bit of machair at Calgary Bay.

All this fishing activity brought to mind a poem I wrote about my dad and me in the year after he died. It seemed to come, almost unaided, from the turning of my grief from anger and outrage to sadness and the richer moments we spent together in pursuit of fish. Here it is,


Me and him: a fishing story
 
We are connected
By frying pans, omelettes,
Corned beef hash,
Carving knives,
That splendid sand-splattering
Dash across the beach
To land a catch
And hold the ball. 
 
We are tied together,
a likely and unlikely pair,
bound round each other,
feather and hair:
the flies we threw at fish.
 
Teal and Silver,
Greenwell’s Glory,
Bloody Butcher,
Our sodden fishing stories
Of water
Cascading over the leat,
The net pulled out,
Our sliding, wading feet,
Slipping the sea trout
From beneath the falls,
Our high moral stance
Turned to bugger all
In the swirling,
Mad, excitement
Of the Cracwellt’s headlong spate.
 
We are tangled
By place and time,
By miscast monofilament line
Snagged in hawthorn.
 
Our lives grounded in places shared
A clumsy language to essentials pared:
Cwm Nantcol, Ty Gwyn
Gelli Goch and Wales to win
At the Arms Park
We made our communal, absent home.
 
We stand together
Like ditches dug in sheets of rain
Like lobster boats that ride the
Buoys in Maine
Pulled together like sea urchin’s quills
Scrub alder to be cleared
The smell of sap,
The name Blue Hill,
The Red House,
A passing time of wonder. 
 
We are interleaved,
Pages in a book
Uncomfortable, afraid to look
Too close in our proximity.
 
This handing down from dad to son
The glue gone hard,
Our binding cracked, undone.
 
The books I found
Above the summer living-room
Or collecting damp
With bucket and broom
In an earth-floored cupboard
Long forgot.
 
Dreams chafed us.
Evening smoke through a freezing winter light,
Wine like blood,
Easing the darkest, longest nights.
 
We were drawn together by Italy.
Sea and heat,
A turn of ankle, breasts,
Nut-brown sandaled feet
Padding through the expectant sand.
 
Mountains, more like hills,
Earth, artichokes, the land
In all her piggish muddy glory.
This twisting back and forth,
Forged wire that rusts and breaks
Our story.
 
Linked  by weather and rivers
rising,
By hopes undimmed of finally
                                                prizing
That bigger, better fish from the stream.
 
The long trudge home.
Our brief language spent.
The bond the charging water lent
Weakening with each gate we passed.
Until we clanged, tired,
Through the last,
And found ourselves in Cae Rhys’ bright lit rooms.
 
No answer was the answer
To news of fish that night
A guarded smile, a muttered:
‘Well, at least we got a bloody bite.’
 
29.12.1993.