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The Angler:
Keeper of Rivers
Ehor Boyanowsky
Ehor O. Boyanowsky holds a Ph.D. in
Social Psychology and is an Associate Professor at Simon
Fraser University. Positions held in the past include
President, SFU Faculty Association and President, Confederation
of Faculty of B.C. Ehor is interested in environmental
protection, photography and travel. He also enjoys fly
fishing and freelance writing.
Abstract
This presentation outlines the aesthetic,
spiritual, technical and physical recreational values
of sport fishing. The focus is on the total angling
experience and the pleasure that it brings to every
angler, from the youngster with a bent pin to the sophisticated
veteran.
…I heard this pool
whisper a warning.
I tickled its leading edges with temptation.
I stroke its throat with a whisker.
I licked the moulded hollows
Of its collarbones
Where the depth, now underbank opposite,
Pulsed up from contained excitements-
Eerie how you know when it's coming!
So I felt it now, my blood
Prickling and thickening, altering
With an ushering-in of chills, a weird onset
As if mountains were pushing mountains higher
Behind me, to crowd over my shoulder-
Then the pool lifted a travelling bulge
And grabbed the tip of my heart-nerve,
and crashed,…
From Milesian Encounter
on the Sligachan by Ted Hughes
Angling is the oldest river recreation.
Although its origins are shrouded in the mists of time,
references to sportsfishing can be found on Egyptian
temple walls, on ancient Greek tablets and in medieval
Spanish and English texts. Lest one think that angling
is one more obscure activity tantamount, say, to truffle
gathering, butterfly collecting or telemark skiing,
let me hasten to point out that any other single topic
with the exception of mathematics.
This tradition has been generally marked
from the publication in 1496 of The Treatise of Fishing
with an Angle attributed to Dame Juliana Berners whose
apology for the angler returning home fishless "because
there be nought in the water" rings as true today…
…he hath his wholesome walk and
merry at his ease, and a sweet air of the sweet savour
of the mead flowers, that maketh him hungry. He heareth
the melodious harmony of fowls, he seeth the young swans,
terns, ducks, coots and many other fowls with their
broods. Also, whoso will use the game of angling, he
must rise early, which thing is profitable to a man
in this wise, that is, to wit, most to the heal of his
soul. For it shall cause him to be whole. Also to the
increase of his goods, for it shall make him rich. Thus
have I proved in my intent that the disport and game
of angling is the very mean and cause that induceth
a man into a merry spirit, which maketh a flowering
age and a long.
I do not wish to pretend that to the
angler, the actual catching of fish is of little value
in itself. In fact the acknowledged father of angling,
Izaak Walton, in his classic book, The Compleat Angler
published in 1653 stated that he envied not the man
who was richer, nor who caught more fish then Walton
himself. This envy notwithstanding, a truly sporting
angler, as he becomes increasingly successful, will
proceed through a series of stages during which, paradoxically,
he imposes greater handicaps and restrictions upon himself.
That is, as a child or neophyte, the ultimate thrill
is to connect with whatever species is available via
whatever means: snagging, spearing, bait or artificial
lure, that is at hand and condoned. Soon, however, one
strives to catch as many fish as possible; then one
focuses on increasingly more powerful, glamorous or
wily species. Then, penultimately, upon the biggest.
In my boyhood in Northern Ontario the progression went
from northern redhorse suckers to northern pike to walleyes;
from there to lake trout and finally, to muskellunge.
I caught dozens of suckers on tiny doughball bait as
soon as I started after them as a boy of eight. Beginning
as a young man of sixteen, it took me almost three seasons
of fruitless casting and trolling to hook my first tiger
of the lily pads - a muskie of some six or eight pounds.
Once the angler has developed some feeling
of efficiency in being able to catch many, although
perhaps, never quite as many of one species as he wishes,
he begins to long for a truly large fish. I remember
the day it happened to me. In my third season of muskie
fishing when each exceedingly rare encounter with a
muskie of 4 to 8 pounds was still experienced as a primal
thrill, my father, my brother-in-law and I went out
on a blustery September day. Etched in my memory are
the birches crowning the ridges in trembling fold and
fragments of cloud scudding across the sky. WE were
elated to discover that the muskellunge were on a feeding
frenzy: we landed and released more than a dozen. Since
then, the goal has been to capture a truly gigantic
specimen, especially if it could be done on the fly.
In British Columbia, a child may begin by snagging spawning
suckers or even salmon in tiny creeks. While pursuing
the spawners he may be alerted to trout feeding on salmon
roe, dew worms and insects. Almost surely he will go
on to pursue them, perhaps inadvertently putting a serious
dent in a local population before, either through example,
or through reading articles, catalogues and books, he
becomes captivated by the magnificent array of tackle
and lures extant in the fishing world. I using bait
a child discovers how to become a deadly fish catcher.
He finds out what is most effective and how to fish
it in certain depths, currents and habitats, he learns
a little how to think like a fish.
When he (or, less often, she) turns
to artificial lures and flies, however, his universe
expands. Not only is he a fish catcher who knows that
as a bottom line live prawns, salmon roe, live stoneflies
or grasshoppers will catch fish, but he comes to experience
the thrill of creation in using his own imitations of
these creatures rendered in metal and plastic and feathers.
Then he becomes a scholar. He must look more closely
to determine what life form occurs naturally on that
specific stream: in what size, colour and shape, in
its multitudinous possibilities, is the creature that
the fish feeds on manifested in that environment. Once
he begins to learn this, he explores more carefully
each stream, turning over rocks, peering under cutbanks,
experiencing a thrill when there are many caddis cases
about, suppressing a chill when he finds fewer or none
where previously they were plentiful.
As he becomes alarmed, he looks for
explanations, hoping he won't find them: changes in
water colour and clarity, specks of scummy foam, proliferations
of algae, of silt where rocks once glowed under foot.
Finding nothing else he suspects invisible chemical
menaces. Are the stoneflies still there? They are the
first to perish when water quality declines. His eyes
scour the banks. Has a copse of trees been cut rendering
the stream bottom glaringly naked to the sun where once
a shady arbour protected? Has a hillside been denuded
where the roots of trees previously stood guard against
the savage runoff of the rainy season? Is the stream
itself thin and desiccated where previously it ran full-fleshed
over gravel and boulders? Does that suggest someone
somewhere is siphoning off the lifeblood of the river?
Do they have a right to do this? Who has permitted this
thing?
As the angler works his way along the
river, plumbing the depths with his lure or dropping
his fly across the current, in that special time when
everything is right, he enters into synchrony with his
environment. He experiences the thrill of rhythm sounded
out by the rising and dipping of birds, of rustling
branches reaching over river banks of slowly shifting
gravel and earth, and by the myriad life forms under
the panoply of moving water. He, himself, is the product
of a thousand year quest. To greater or lesser extent,
he is many things in addition to the hunter after his
quarry. He is, in the rod he uses deftly, an athlete.
If he ahs built it himself, he is an artisan. If he
has created the lure, or tied the flies, or communicated
his experience to many others, he is an artist. If he
has studied the stream to create these lures or flies,
he is a naturalist. If he is thrilled by the wildness
that remains, making certain his presence does nothing
to diminish the place, he is an environmentalist. If
he is outraged by any signs of despoilation he does
see and takes any action at all, he begins to repay
his debt to nature. He becomes the river's, and in a
small but important way, his brother's and his son's
keeper. Any one of these alone is worthy of a lifetime's
pursuit.
If he is suddenly jolted out of his
reverie by a bolt of silver flashing across the stream
to the sound of his reel whirring uncontrollably, he
becomes again the wide-eyed little boy who watched the
trout engulf his dew worm. If it is a wild thing, a
fish living and growing and procreating there, or a
salmon or steelhead returning to its native stream,
not at the sufferance of man,. But because this earth
is still working fine on its own, the river is still
pure enough, the ocean is still generous, and the man
can still come here and connect with this powerful,
wondrous creation of the forces governing the earth,
he is a happy man indeed. Should he successfully subdue
the fish, he may gaze upon its shimmering flanks in
the pellucid shallows to be overcome with the same awe
a father experiences when he first looks upon his newborn
child. A confirmation that all is well.
To close, I would like to take you through
four seasons of steelhead fishing. It is worthy of note
that the first, "Winter Solstice," describes
a place that may be unique. We take a trek up a river
that comes closer to providing the wilderness experience
than most one would find a thousand miles from the nearest
city, and yet it is only 15 minutes from Vancouver's
core. It is the Seymour. Such a place must be cherished
and preserved not just for the great fish that return
each year to spawn, though they are there and wonderful
to fish for, but for the startling, other worldly quality
one encounters as he enters its bower…
Seasons of the Steelhead
I. Winter Solstice
The rains of November have come and
gone
The river swelled and surged and
subsided.
We rose in the dark, stoked with coffee
and eggs and rashers of bacon
To head up, past the gate into the lost
world of the watershed.
Silence, but for the soft murmur of our
boots in the downy snow
And the rhythmic panting of the setters
forging ahead.
The last pool before the canyon is
suffused with cathedral lighting.
Here, I watch the fly fluttering, gaudy
as its Davie St. namesake
Caressed by the current, engulfed by the
gloom.
The sinking head wafts down to the
boulder waystations
Nothing.
So we push on, higher, into the remote
reaches.
Past rosehips glowing dimly like failing
Christmas lights
Past a mighty salmon, transformed by
death into a mid winter gargoyle
To the island pool, resplendent in a
filigree cloak of hoar frost.
Once more the iridescent Hooker vanishes
into the riffle
And halts.
A mailed fist bursts through the leaden
surface, brandishing a challenge.
The ratchet chatters, the rod arcs and
the river erupts again in the distance.
I stumble after, over icy stones, trying
its will, conceding line, winding hard
Down the run, past the cribbing, through
the chute.
A miracle; it is suddenly before me.
An argentine phantom suspended in the
stream
The fly glowing in its jaw - a
treacherous jewel.
My friend twists out the barb.
Back into the river, pause, vanish.
The light is fading too fast; the
gatekeeper will be miffed.
We trudge downstream, reliving the
winter run
Looking forward to an open fire, a
warming brandy and a hot meal.
II. The Rites of Spring
A time for the Island, thrumming with
the exultation of rebirth.
The hillsides are drenched bloodred with
salmon berries.
But too soon we are speeding through
the
ravaged belly
Averting our eyes, shamed by its
visage of the rain shadow.
The cavernous saloon resounds with the
clamour of subcultures.
Cowhands and Indians, a raucous gang of
railroaders
And a number of the Thirteenth Tribe:
Wanderers who mark the season by the
river they're on.
Wintle, Winters, Lemire, Kambeitz and
Maisonpierre
Gentle, jovial, taciturn, sage and
arrogant by turn
Skilled devotees f the art of
steelheading.
Last night's puddles splinter under
our
cleats as we approach.
Far out in the glide, colossal forms are
porpoising in the half light
Dawn cracks across the peaks
Igniting the yellow hills.
The hissing of lines caresses a silence
Shattered by an express train thundering
upstream.
And Hamill ululating above the din.
His rod high he is fast to an underwater
locomotive
Steaming downstream: an apposition of
forces.
The monster vaults clear far below him
I wind in and mince my way to shore
along the ball bearing bottom.
This river is unforgiving, and the
primal battle has begun.
Ehor O. Boyanowsky
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