Lines on the Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

Coachman.
    These feelings hung with me for a while, and still return now and again when I meet certain individuals who fish as if they were part of an academy.
    I didn’t tell Mr. Simms these complicated feelings at that time because they were not entirely clear to me, and because he loved the great assortment of flies he was showing me. Butthe flies in his fly box, with their wonderful deceptive dressings, did not seem to complement the great natural woods, the vast rivers that these men explored for fish. Salmon fishing was supposedly linking men once again with their natural self. It took me a while to realize that tying flies in order to salmon fish was not only, in the end,
natural
but an
art
.
    An art—far more than digging worms out in the garden. It is through this process of fly-tying that a person got to know the fish and themselves far better, and became more personally attached to the river. Through the fly they either trusted or had tied themselves, they faced a challenge that becomes quite philosophical, even if they themselves weren’t philosophical about it. The wonder of this is that no two flies tied true are ever the same. A Green Butt Butterfly on a number 8 hook tied by my friend at 7:45 on February 3, 1976 is never the same as the Green Butt Butterfly tied on a number 8 hook at 8:00 that same night.
    The fly becomes in all its ornate beauty of regulated simplicity an extension of the imagination, and knowledge of the fisherman in winter, for those fish he is seeking, in those months holed up in his basement or squirrelled away in his shed. He can see the fish in pools, and can guess how the fly will move in a forty-five degree arc towards them, how he will rest a fish that has just boiled, how he will shorten up his lineto fish down to it once again. This fly-tying process becomes, with snow over the window ledges and the river blocked and soundless for miles, an act of faith and will.
    Mr. Simms had a good deal of will and knowledge and a thousand flies. He had been stranded for days in the snow one winter. He dug himself into the snow, and waited the blizzard out drinking pine-needle tea. He had worked his way through many fine difficulties, had been trapped by a forest fire when he was a young man and stayed the whole night in the water.
    He missed a finger and had rough calloused hands. He wore, like old woodsmen of the generation gone, Humphrey pants and a checkered woodshirt, which always smelled of kerosene, spruce, and tobacco. He had known no other life. That people now flew off to Toronto or New York or Paris on a daily basis to do business would be as foreign to him as space travel. Nor do I think, except for the finger, he missed much. He was, and always will be, the embodiment of a Miramichier; proud, conscious of others, fearless within the bounds of a physical environment, filled with humour, and yet somewhat shy. When he worked in the camps years before, the average day would start off at five o’clock. In the camps and with the working conditions of a generation or two ago it is amazing more men didn’t go mad. Certainly some did.
    He liked to tell me about Saint John, N.B., and how high the tides were there—the highest tides in the world—and that some day he would get on a bus and go to see them. I did not want to tell him that I myself had been to Saint John with my family, had seen these tides, where boats rested on the bottom of the bay after the tide went out. Like most true rural men, he was proud of small gifts from God.
    He called me, in his gruff old voice, “the little Christ child” because of the pitchfork going through my left foot a few years back. He had made the mistake—just as many others in my neighbourhood had—of believing that this is how I had become lame. He didn’t know the real reason—my mother falling on her stomach when she was pregnant, and causing a brain haemorrhage—and I did not volunteer the information.
    So I always tried to be as modest