FISHING AS LIFE
A rod, a reel and poignant memories wrought in the quiet pursuit
The lures are all still there — the Mepps #5, the Spin Hula Dancer, the two-inch Rapala, the Jitterbug, the rubber crayfish, and a personal favourite, the Heddon Dying Flutter, with the price, $1.65, permanently inked onto its underbelly.
Nearly all of them I’d bought as a small boy, saving my weekly allowance and collecting discarded pop bottles in the ravines that surrounded our east Toronto neighbourhood like veins, bottles that brought pennies’ worth of riches when returned for their deposits.
Whenever I felt sufficiently flush, I’d troop through the factory district on the other side of one ravine to the sporting goods section of Canadian Tire, carefully avoiding the Peek Freans bakery, from whose trucks we kids used to steal cookies. None of the lures ever worked, unless you started with the weird conceit that their chief purpose was ensnaring weeds or getting caught on Precambrian rock under the water out front of the family cottage in the Kawarthas.
For decades, those lures have sat in the same tackle box, just inside the door of the log cabin that my father built almost single-handedly. I can still picture him carrying huge logs on his slim shoulders, relying mostly on his massive hands for stability, as if acting out some primal Scottish need to build in a new land — with cabers, if possible — just as generations of Scots had done before him. As if in punctuation, the cabin door even has a keyed iron lock of truly medieval proportions, an immigrant, like my father, from the land of oatmeal and whisky.
I have scant memories of ever fishing with my father, fishing being just another one of those things we didn’t do together. He had a cabin to build, and later a threebedroom cottage farther from the lake, where the land rises steeply. There would have been the odd venture with him across the bay, to where a river flows into the lake and the fishing was reputedly good, possibly even home to the six-foot muskellunge said to be lurking somewhere, the fish one neighbouring boy’s father insisted was so large it had to be caught and milked once a year. Like most tall tales told by adults, this was never fully explained, much less questioned. But still, it would get any small boy’s imagination going.
That particular muskie, of course, never rose to one of my lures. They were so much wasted allowance and pop-bottle money. If you wanted to catch fish, in my case mostly sunfish or yellow perch, worms were the way to go. But the dirty secret about worms is that the supply on any one occasion never seems to be enough, no matter how much you try to stretch things by cutting each critter into many morsels. So there I was, 8 going on 9, 9 going on 10, or in some other shortpanted season of life, sitting at the end of the dock, bereft of worms. Legs over the side, there was nothing to do but swish a bare hook and lead sinker back and forth through the water, which must have seemed a delectable imitation of something, since that’s when the muskie struck.
“Dad! Dad!!!” It was the biggest fish I’d ever caught, albeit technically hauled in by my father. If he’d been a fishing dad, like others on the lake, he would have known right away that it was an inch and ahalf short of regulation, but he wasn’t, so it fell to the local taxidermist to impart the bad news.
As I write this now, sitting on the big cottage deck that my octogenarian father recently rebuilt solo (as always), there’s a small boy out on the lake, fishing with what must be his father.
I don’t really have similar memories. As a wee lad, fishing was mostly a solitary affair by default, given all the property’s construction challenges, against which I was then too small and too unskilled to offer much in the way of assistance, though I would soon enough build my own little roofless log cabin, perhaps four feet by eight. This, too, was a solitary pursuit, as was much else in those days before the lake started truly filling up with cottages.
But our family never seemed much different from the others around us. As much as I now adore and revere my father, I cannot say this was always true, though I’m not sure how much this stemmed from our own faults and failings and how much from the general milieu in which we both found ourselves. Growing up, I don’t recall any boy being close to his father. It just didn’t seem the normal course. Fathers then were a kind of Doric pillar, always working long hours, doing chores, issuing commands from on high; and if they decided to go off and do something recreational as their reward, sans famille, then that was the way of the world.
Nor was my father much versed in any kind of child-rearing, having been an only child in a place like Scotland, the Depression-era deprivations of which would not have ameliorated a culture whose treatment of kids tends to vacillate, at the best of times, between giving them sweets and giving them a clout in the lug.
Neither of us was in a position to choose who we were. I do, however, have an idea of what it might be like to learn fishing from one’s father, especially fly casting, since a variant of that teaching relationship has marked my entire life.
Like most of his peers, my father left school in Wishaw, Scotland, when he was 14; he worked briefly in steel and cement factories before becoming an apprentice plasterer. It was better than working up t’mill, but still not the brightest future amid Britain’s postwar malaise, so he eventually decamped for a new life in Canada, met the gal, began a family, and started his business.
There are pictures of me in tartan shorts, not much more than a toddler, and if my father wasn’t playing jazz on the phonograph then it was bagpipe music, especially a record from what must have been a military tattoo, the voiceover announcing, “Here come the MacGregors.”
Dad was bigger than life in those days, not least when we wrestled, which is maybe where the trouble started, since it invariably ended with me pinned to the floor. So when my own daughter and I started to play-wrestle, I always made it a theatrical event, complete with me as Monty Pythonesque announcer introducing her (“The Great Bardinio”) and me (“Meadow Muffin”), the obvious loser of the match.
Freudians can have their field day, I suppose, but however unwittingly, my father taught me an invaluable lesson that perhaps he had never had the chance to learn on the unforgiving, grimy streets near Glasgow.
So the two of us, my father and I, carried
Freudians can have their field day, I suppose, but however unwittingly, my father taught me an invaluable lesson that perhaps he had never had the chance to learn on the unforgiving, grimy streets near Glasgow.
on through my childhood, with not a very great deal in common save familial ties. Fishing certainly wasn’t for him, but cycling was — a personal passion he’d imported with himself from Britain. Cycling was another one of the things we didn’t do together, though as a very young boy I was hauled off to country roads to stand in the sun and watch races. These seemed to involve a lot of Italian men with shaved and oiled legs, which just didn’t seem manly somehow, especially not next to hockey, the sport I adored, murder and poetry on ice.
What we did come to share — although at first “share” wasn’t quite the right word, my position being so clearly subordinate — was construction work. Weekends would find me on Dad’s job sites, fetching, cleaning, eventually mixing plaster or perlited gypsum, for 50 cents an hour, then 75, then a dollar.
Until I bolted to work instead for another boy’s father, who owned a chromium plating company in the black-hued grimness of Corktown — a part of the city best remembered for its ancient taverns with names like The Derby, their floors covered in sawdust, an incongruous separate entrance for “Ladies and Escorts,” and a very liberal interpretation of the province’s liquor laws with respect to minors.
For $1.25 an hour, I had the privilege of sweeping leaden dust from floors and gangways, from which you’d climb down into massive iron tanks to slop out the remaining liquid carbon with a bucket. No matter how much you scrubbed after work, it was virtually impossible to get the smell of the factory out of your hair and skin, much less remove all of the carbon blackness seemingly fused to your fingertips.
I can’t imagine this much pleased my father, which is perhaps why he kept asking me whether I’d been paid yet. When I admitted the answer was no, Dad duly marched off to demand his son’s wages from the other boy’s father. I can imagine that scene, Dad on the doorstep with his huge hands, accent now menacingly thick, the ex-boxer, ex–British Army, looking like a belligerent Sean Connery, whom he’s always resembled. I got my money, which is little wonder.
And so I drifted back into my father’s employ, serving a kind of ad hoc apprenticeship as a plasterer. The genius of that arrangement might not have been apparent to me then, but it is now. By teaching me a trade, Dad was giving me portable skills that would ensure I never went hungry, or that would put me in good stead if I ever decided to take over the business. But his real, unspoken message was this: You don’t want to do this backbreaking work for the rest of your life.
Except that, in a sense, I have — renovating my own homes and investment properties at night and on weekends and holidays since I was in my 20s. Which means that, for nearly my whole life, whenever I’ve held a hawk and trowel in my hands, and especially when I’ve used my lathing hammer, the kind that looks like a hatchet, I have felt my father’s presence, as if he’s somehow inside of me, inside my arm. Our movements are all the same, in sync. Had he been a fly fisherman, and had he shared the sport with me, I’m sure I’d now be feeling the very same sensation with every cast.
I might even be uttering whatever fishrelated expressions he would have had, just as I now parrot some of his construction sayings: “We’re not building a piano,” if the task at hand requires no particular fussiness. Or, “A blind man would be glad to see it,” if there is some unforeseen or unavoidable imperfection in the completed work.
As it happens, fishing of any kind pretty much left my life for decades, until a few work colleagues arranged for us all to spend a day on the Grand River in southern Ontario with Ian Colin James, the guide who used to talk about fly-fishing on Peter Gzowski’s old CBC Radio show,
Morningside.
Until then, I’d never even held a fly rod, but by a quirk I had come to possess one — an ancient eight-and-a-half-foot Montague Holloglass left behind in the thirdfloor cedar closet of my house in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood. And so, having picked up a cheap reel, I found myself in the water with Ian and three friends near Fergus, Ont., just downstream from what everyone calls the Humpty Dumpty bridge, a wry reference to some guy who reputedly fell off it and came to a bad end.
To say that Ian is a big guy doesn’t quite do justice to calves the size of country hams. He has a way of filling a river the way he does a room, with an accent that can’t help but draw attention. At first he said he was from Glasgow, but it turns out Ian is actually from farther up the Clyde, Viewpark, a kind of suburb of Motherwell, near my father’s hometown of Wishaw. In dad’s time, Motherwell was the happening place if you weren’t going all the way to Glasgow in search of the better dance halls. It’s also where my father served his apprenticeship, which in those days meant pushing a barrow around town and doing small jobs and repairs, along the same streets that Ian would later know as a kid.
My paternal grandfather used to walk the five miles or so from Wishaw to Motherwell to watch football matches at Fir Park, back in the days of seatless terraces. I have a photograph of him walking the streets as a man, looking very jaunty, and another one taken in 1920 — a group shot of workers at the Lanarkshire Steel Co. Ltd. 27-inch mill in Motherwell. My grandfather is the small boy sitting at the front with the other small boys, arms and legs crossed, his hammer and iron tongs in front of him, propped against his shins.
Like most of the men around him, he looks anything but jaunty under his newsboy cap. They all appear so grim, almost menacing, which might have been the expected pose in portraits of that era, but you can’t help wondering whether they’re not just angry with fate, seething over what it’s put all around them, what it’s done to them.
I only ever met my grandfather once before he died of Huntington’s disease, a cruel end for someone who so loved walking along the Clyde and hiking through the moors. I have no direct memory of him, being then but a wee bairn ferried across the pond by proud new parents. Nor do I have any memory of the council row house where my grandparents lived — he a Scot whose ancestors were mostly commercial fishermen from around Inverness, and she a Yorkshire bride who would never work herself.
In the wake of that visit, my Canadian mother always referred to Scotland in general and Wishaw in particular as a kind of Third World place, coarse and tough and covered in soot, a land of rain and glowing slag heaps and gas meters into which you’d have to insert a shilling in the middle of the night if you had any faint hope of getting warm.
It’s from that house, and into that world, that my father ventured out as a boy to catch rabbits with a ferret or tend to his pigeons or cycle the countryside. Or he’d climb Tinto Hill, as I would many years later, carrying a small rock to deposit on the ever-growing cairn at the summit. And it’s to that house that he would have returned, bruised and bloodied, after getting caught stealing scrap metal by the yard’s owner, who then instructed his own, much older boy to beat my father within an inch of his life.
Dad managed to escape all that, the land of hard men and council houses, which is how his own son would instead come to be standing in the middle of Ontario’s Grand River, a Montague rod in hand, being taught how to cast by another son of Lanarkshire — the first step toward what has since become a personal certainty. I’m going to have to fish the River Clyde some day. And imagine my father with every cast.