Excerpt
“Come in,” a voice yelled.
Ken stepped over the threshold. He recognized Paddy McGelgan from
the description the Canadian ambassador had given him. “He looks exactly
like King George V”.
Ken handed him the letter of introduction.
“So how’s the old bastard doing?” the man bawled.
“Last time I saw him he was doing fine.”
“Yes he told me all about you – I’ve got a letter here somewhere. He
said you were a fisherman – you love to fish and that’s good. There’s a lot
of fishermen, you know, but there are hardly any anglers. Do you know
how to fly-fish?”
“No.”
Paddy made it his mission to teach him, and each morning and afternoon
for the better part of a week Ken spent several hours alone in the
boat struggling with the line until he had mastered the art. Then Paddy
showed him how to fish – which he called hunting, not fishing – for the
elusive lake trout.
For Ken the experience personified this new country. The trout were
like no fish he had ever encountered. They lived in an alien landscape and
yet he knew it as though he had been born into it. It was the home inside
his heart – a home that had always been there – but that he had come to
for the first time.
It is something beyond my ability with words to describe the comfort – it
is as though I had travelled the universe, and had walked back into my home
and sat down in my own armchair, and breathed a mighty sigh of satisfaction
and relief. Out of all of this came an understanding of life through fishing,
which sounds odd. The fish is a representative of the illusionary world
that we all live in. There is the trout, but the trout is not there – it is only
there by the virtue of its shadow. And then you put on your fly line, and you
put on a leader, and it gets thinner and thinner until it gets down to something
ridiculously thin that maybe has two or three pounds of breaking tension.
Then you put on a fly that is the size of two pinheads, and then you cast
it out when these trout are swimming by, but not when they’re there. Then
you let this minuscule thing slip down into the water very slowly – it takes
lots of time. And your heart is beating ninety to the minute watching these
fish coming by, and you are contemplating the hopelessness of something so
minute attracting them, in this water that is so rich with food, because this
lake is a food factory. It’s utterly hopeless. And then you watch the tip of the
fly rod, which is two inches above the water, and you watch the tiny bow and
when that bow comes up ever so slightly as though it might not even have
happened, you lift your rod up very carefully and all of a sudden that magical
shadow is on your minuscule hook. And you have now entered a realm
where suddenly the impossible is possible. Walking through that door was…
Libros Libertad 