Fishing the River of Time Read online

  TONY TAYLOR

  * * *

  FISHING THE RIVER OF TIME

  To Sara

  Contents

  MAP

  1 The Fluid World

  2 The Beautiful Simplicity

  3 Going Back in Time

  4 The Duty of Memory

  5 Living in Meade’s Cabin

  6 Big Arthur

  7 The Secret Coast

  8 How to Fillet a Fish

  9 The Arrival of Ned

  10 The Mad Swede

  11 Teaching a Boy to Fish

  12 Mistakes

  13 Fishing Little Lakes

  14 The Pilgrims’ Final Day

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright © 2013 by Tony Taylor

  First published 2012 in Australia and New Zealand by The Text Publishing Company, Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne 3000, Australia

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-77100-057-4 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-77100-058-1 (epub)

  Cover design by W.H. Chong

  Cover illustration by Tony Taylor

  Map by Kat Chadwick/The Jacky Winter Group

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  Greystone Books Ltd.

  www.greystonebooks.com

  1

  The Fluid World

  Life is an adventure searching for answers. They are best looked for in remote places where civilisation hasn’t taken hold. High in the mountains, on wild rivers, in the sea. Water, the stuff we are made of, is everywhere; it flows tumultuously, eddies around, twists and turns, slows down, speeds up, then returns to its source. But it can be elusive and mysterious, like truth. Mountains rise to make the rivers, water wears the mountains away, and both give a deeper meaning to time.

  Rivers search for the sea and each drop of the magic gets trapped on its journey, moving against the flow at times, before it fulfils its destiny. It is then drawn into the clouds, it rains or snows and the cycle starts over again.

  More than any water anywhere else, the water of a young and wild western Canadian river appeared at a critical time in my life, changed a lot of my thinking, and helped show me the way.

  Eric Taverner, one of the many fine writers on angling in the twentieth century, used to say to his friends on parting, ‘Watch the water.’ It was good advice then but it is even better advice today. An angler not only catches fish but also learns a lot by carefully watching water. That is perhaps what angling is really about. The water teaches the watcher about insect life, the way erosion takes place, what the weather is doing somewhere else, how quickly a mountain range is being worn down hundreds of kilometres away and many other things all well worth considering even though it would be tedious to write them all down. That is what we anglers are first: we are water watchers and, because of this but perhaps without realising it, we are prescient about nature and often have a sense of what is going to happen next. We have become guardians of our future simply by sitting by, or walking along, a river. We are not just takers of fish; we are lovers of nature first.

  It is May 2008 and, having just separated myself from a slow moving silicate called land, I am travelling through an invisible mixture of gases we call air, crossing the great expanse of another fluid that is the very stuff of life. I am high above the world’s largest ocean, flying non-stop for thirteen hours in a twin-engine aircraft from Sydney to Vancouver. The Pacific is so big that if all the land in the world was dropped into it there would still be sea left over. Australia is so far from anywhere its people feel marooned and probably travel more than most. We do it to connect our lives.

  I am trying to ignore this contribution to global warming because, if all goes well, in just a few days, I am going to meet my eight-year-old grandson Ned for the first time. I am eighty years old, ten times older than he is, and I figure that if I don’t do it now I may not get another chance. I have always been a keen fisherman and I am hoping to teach him to fish.

  Fishing, despite its name, I have long understood, is not really about fish. Recently I discovered I was in good company, for about a hundred and fifty years ago Thoreau is supposed to have said, ‘Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.’

  Nevertheless it has been good for me to follow rivers, to cast into their depths and occasionally draw out a fish. I have discovered so much more about life and my time on this planet by being footloose with a fishing rod. I hope becoming acquainted with a very special river, quite near his home in British Columbia, will do the same for my grandson.

  Ned knows practically nothing about his grandfather except that he lives far away in a place called Australia. Our family has not been good at communicating with one another, but that’s a different story. This boy’s own adventure I hope will give him something to remember. For it to succeed part of me must go back to being an inhabitant of the bush again, and I have chosen to do it in a place I once knew well.

  I rented a log cabin from the Land Conservancy in Victoria, British Columbia’s capital city. It was halfway up the Cowichan River and it was remote, but it was more than a cabin, for it had beds for at least a dozen people. But it had no electricity and a pit toilet. The cost was four hundred dollars for the week. I had a set of complicated instructions on how to get there, and despite jet lag and the lack of an adequate map I made it. I was pretty tired after getting off the plane, and driving the small rental car on the wrong side of the road over the fairly long distance to the river right away didn’t make a lot of sense. But I was anxious to get to the cabin and settle in.

  I left the car, with all its electronic gadgetry, at the end of an old logging road, picked up my swag containing sleeping bag and fishing tackle, and started the walk backwards in time.

  I first came to the Cowichan, one of the loveliest rivers anywhere, in 1968 when I was forty. Back then I lived in an abandoned cabin about sixteen kilometres from the cabin I rented now. The wildness of the valley, which was only a few thousand years older than I was and still youthful as natural features go, helped me understand that my years spent working in stodgy museums and university laboratories in England and Australia had been largely a waste of time. Just being in that magical place changed everything for me.

  I had worked in the geological section of Britain’s wonderful Natural History Museum and had a degree from King’s College where, under Charles Lyell, the science of geology had begun. I had taught geology at both Melbourne University and the Australian National University in Canberra and was still passionately interested in the science of the planet, but a prickly feeling under my skin was telling me I had found a modern Garden of Eden; the youthfulness of the river had taken this remote part of the world back to the beginning of time. Here, I thought, I might find some of the secrets of life.

  For more than twenty years I had examined the granite cores of mountain ranges in all the great orogenic belts. These deep-seated rocks are known as batholiths and are usually found at the edges of continents where the acid granite pushes up against the more alkaline sub-oceanic basaltic plates. I studied the ancient Caledonian orogeny that, along the line of the Moine Thrust, had finally been torn to bits during the break-up of the world’s original continent Pangaea. Parts of these ancient Palaeozoic mountains ended up in Norway, Scotland and Ireland and the rest on the other side of th
e Atlantic in Greenland, Newfoundland and the Appalachians further south. At the same time I had been studying younger batholiths, more rugged mountains like the Alps and Himalayas. Now I was in part of the world’s largest chain forming the rim of the Pacific. This young chain surrounds the world’s greatest ocean but the highest parts at the moment are on the eastern side in North and South America. Somehow I knew, deep down inside my bones, the answers were here, where Reginald Daly had discovered the Coast Range Batholith, which stretches from Alaska through British Columbia into Washington State.

  Continents are made of granite and there is only enough of this acid rock to cover twenty-nine per cent of our misnamed Earth. They rest on top of an underlying layer of more basic basalt. The remaining seventy-one per cent of this basalt layer is covered with what is actually another more neutral layer, the one that is the source of all life and yet wears all the other rocks down. We call it water.

  The highest mountains are usually at the edges of continents where the continual pushing against the hard sub-oceanic basaltic plates causes the granite to thicken upwards as well as downwards forming batholiths, which are the roots of all great mountain chains.

  It was not until the sixties that Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift began to be accepted, although his idea of how the movement came about was incorrect. Nowadays geologists understand the mechanism of plate tectonics and continental drift and can measure the movement very precisely as I did when I went to Greenland in 1957 during the International Geophysical Year. We geologists also understand the importance of the drifting of the different plates of crust in this business of mountain building. The Himalayas and the Alps seem to be exceptions, as there is no ocean near them, but the process is the same: these inland mountains have formed where granite has collided with granite instead of basalt.

  I have always been interested in wild places and the connection between rock, water and life; I think of all three as slightly different layers on the surface of our world. It was in estuaries where life originated so the water layer attracted me first. I caught my first fish, with the help of bigger boys, in 1931 when I was three. Fifteen years later I became interested in the fundamental continental material and led a climb up Europe’s highest mountain. Mont Blanc is a huge mass of granite. It is very reliable stuff on which to climb. This experience provoked my life-long interest in that rock.

  Later, studying the chemistry of mountain roots, I realised the highest peaks occur in the great batholiths where the granite is thickest. Deeply seated granite mountains and stretched granite plains float on the underlying basalt that completely surrounds the nickel-and-iron core of the Earth. The mountain ranges as well as the thinner parts of continents float just like blocks of wood do on water with about two-thirds submerged and a third sticking up.

  All life forms are based on carbon combined with water, but bacteria, trees, fish and mammals including ourselves, are closely connected to the silicon-based granite, the seemingly infertile mother rock, for life began at the edges of continents in river estuaries. Some species colonised the land and others migrated to the depths of the oceans.

  Living in Australia I became interested in Australian rivers and their oxbow lakes, or billabongs, meandering across the dried out silica plains. They were the rivers that had worn the granite away and covered the place with sand. On the west coast of North America I was centrally placed on the Coast Range Batholith where most of the rivers were youthful and straight. I needed to understand why North America was so rich and fertile while Australia was the Earth’s most barren continent.

  Quite how I came to live in an abandoned cabin in the Canadian wilderness in 1968 still puzzles me, but it turned out to have been the best thing I ever did. I had recently separated from my first wife and maybe I felt that a sojourn in the deep woods would give me time to sort things out. I had just left a job working for the Countess of Sutherland in the northernmost part of the Scottish mainland. Elizabeth Sutherland, head of clan Sutherland, was desperately trying to right the wrongs of the English duke who had married into this most ancient Scottish family and who had been one of those responsible for the highland clearances in the previous century. She wanted to re-populate the highlands so she moved out of her huge castle, opened the place to the public and set up a school similar to Gordonstoun where Prince Charles was being educated. I was given a magnificent house, called Sportsman’s Walk Cottage, and salmon fishing rights on the local rivers. I led mountaineering expeditions and fished with the great Scottish fly fisherman Rob Wilson and the giant Willie Gunn who was faithful servant to Lady Sutherland and in charge of her rivers. I taught Earth science and was also offered the job of curator at the castle’s huge wildlife museum which was full of stuffed animals that Elizabeth’s childless uncle, the late duke, had shot all over the world. It is one of the world’s most beautiful places, but having tasted that kind of freedom I decided I needed to be in an even wilder place.

  I knew at once the Cowichan was an exceptional fishery but I had no idea when I first got there it had other claims to fame. Early in the twentieth century the southern end of Vancouver Island had been a favourite stopping place for travellers rich enough to circumnavigate the world. I should have guessed because, only a few months earlier, when I was climbing mountains in Assynt examining the remains of the great thrust, I told the Countess of Sutherland where I was going next and she told me Vancouver Island was a lovely place and that I would like it very much. She wished she could have spent more time there. She had been unable to stay long because when she arrived in Victoria Harbour, in September 1939 as a young girl on the duke’s yacht, the war broke out in Europe. They had been planning to go bear hunting but the old duke decided to give the huge vessel to the Canadian government as a troop ship. So they took the train across Canada to New York, and travelled home on the Queen Mary.

  Many British expatriates had returned from India via the Pacific, visiting other parts of the empire, like Australia and Canada, on the way. Many settled in the south-eastern part of beautiful Vancouver Island because the climate was similar to but slightly warmer than chilly England and, more importantly, the cost of living was much lower. Labour was cheap and it was easy to get domestic servants, even if they were more independent in spirit than their British counterparts. Victoria had all the required amenities, and the little town of Duncan, fifty kilometres up the island, was another favourite place to settle. At Duncan they established a lawn tennis club and I was told it had the first grass courts in North America. The British were so successful in establishing an English-style culture that nowadays Canadians refer to Oak Bay on the southern tip of the island being ‘behind the tweed curtain’.

  I didn’t go to Vancouver Island because of the English settlers. If anything the British nature of the place put me off. I was fascinated by the beauty of the area and could not imagine a better combination of mountains and sea. Vancouver Island is a quarter of the size of England but its population was less than that of a small English town. The island was almost all mountains and trees.

  The Cowichan River enters the sea at Cowichan Bay, and the town of Duncan is on the river a few kilometres inland. It was in the estuary of this short but powerful river that most of the fishing was done. Salmon would assemble close to the mouth and wait until conditions were just right before running upstream to spawn. At the beginning and the end of these spawning runs the fish are most vulnerable, but in the early days of Europeans on the river few were bothered by that. Not far from the estuary, but still in the bush, was a cabin where the great poet of the Yukon Robert W. Service had lived for a few years as a young man. I don’t know if he fished but I am pretty sure he chose to live where he did because he loved to see the great runs of salmon.

  I was more interested in the native people than in the English, and I discovered two very different groups. The Cowichan, part of the Coast Salish, lived in the lower country on the eastern shore of the island and they were more involved with the new s
ettlers than those on the mountainous west side. They had a fierce reputation. They hunted grey whales, one of the biggest animals of all, and were knowledgeable about the dangerous tides in the area.

  During the next two years I got to know these natives well. I think they appealed to me because they had absorbed little of the culture of the invading Europeans. These brave people were part of what was then called the Nootka (now the Nuu-chah-nulth). In the years that followed Captain James Cook’s landing in 1778 they were decimated. There was no war; they died because of European diseases they caught by meeting a few white men. These diseases were unknown to them and included measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, small pox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis and syphilis. Of the 8000 people who had lived at the Nitinat village on the west coast, the Royal Fellowship census of 1863 reported only thirty-five remaining.

  About the time of the first world war, a decade or so before I was born, some of the more adventurous European newcomers to the eastern shore of Vancouver Island moved thirty kilometres up the Cowichan Valley. Logging was beginning in the upper part of the valley and a small settlement sprang up at the end of the new logging railway where the river ran out of the huge wilderness lake. Syd Scholey set up a small store and post office at the new settlement and the community came to be called Lake Cowichan.

  One of the first to move into that wild country was an old Irish doctor, Dick Stoker, who had retired from the British India army. He was one of four brilliant brothers. They were Bram Stoker who wrote Dracula and was also Henry Irving’s manager; Sir Thornley Stoker, President of the Royal College of Surgeons; and Thomas Stoker, Chief Secretary of the North West provinces of India. Dick was perhaps the most eccentric of the four. He never returned to Britain, possibly because the fishing in the Cowichan estuary was the best he had ever seen.