Back
here I posted about John Steinbeck's comments on the status of fishing in America. Immediately after those, he tells what he describes as 'the ideal British fishing story' and it goes like this:
Under a submerged log in a stream meandering through a beautiful meadow lies an ancient and brilliant trout which for years has outwitted the best that can be brought against him. The whole country knows him. He is called Old George. The fact that Old George has lived so long can be ascribed to the gentlemanly rules of conduct set up between trout and Englishmen. Under these rules, the fisherman must use improbable tackle and a fly Old George is known to find distasteful.
In our ideal fish story, the angler rereads Izaak Walton to brush up his philosophic background, smokes many pipes, reduces all language to grunts, and finally sets out of an evening to have a go at Old George.
He creeps near to the sunken log and drops his badly tied dry fly upstream so that it will float practically into Old George's mouth. This has been happening to Old George every summer evening for ten or fifteen years. But one evening perhaps Old George is bored. Then the fisherman, with tears streaming from his eyes, pulls poor Old George out on the grassy bank. There, with full military honors and a deep sense of sorrow from the whole community, Old George flops to his death. The fisherman eats George boiled with Brussels sprouts, sews a black band on his arm and gains the power of speech sufficiently to bore the hell out of the local pub for years to come.
I love the idea that sportsmanship requires the use of 'improbable tackle and a fly Old George is known to find distasteful'. The fish has to have sporting chance, after all - otherwise the chase would not be gentlemanly.
The perfect accompaniment for a much loved old trout. By Eric Hunt (own *work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/ fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.
I told some wonderful stories in this comments section but both times they slipped away, as the internet failed just as I was posting. This is also the subject of my comment which is 'the one that got away'. When I was fishing on Tuesday there was a moment when the water went quiet, and the man said watch for the fish, and I tugged and a massive weight was felt on the line. 'This is a big fish' he said. But ofcourse, by the time I got the line to the shore it was gone. In my head, it was huge. The story of landing a huge fish is common - at the end of our fishing Steve told the story of the huge fish in Doncaster museum, and how a farm worker speared it with a pitchfork like a harpoon and rode it down the river. I wonder if fishing relies on these 'huge fish' stories to make it meaningful - like Bloch's chinks of light or hope in Traces these are the chinks of life. the water holds massive beasts and we fail to catch them.
ReplyDelete