The Importance of being Absent

   ‘Upon these thousand acres of waves there is freedom’

-from ‘Angler’ by Li Yu (937-978)

The concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ – the idea that we, as individuals, can be linked to anybody else in the world through a string of no more than five acquaintances – has always fascinated and horrified me in equal measure.

It is, on the one hand, quite an exciting prospect that, even in some distant, seemingly implausible way, I might have some tenuous bond with the President of an emerging foreign superpower, an Italian shoemaker huddled over a pitted wooden bench in a tiny workshop heavy with the aroma of leather, or even a warrior monk perched on some distant, windswept peak far to the east.

On the other hand the idea loses its appeal somewhat when I consider how much smaller this makes the world, the relentless march of technology only heightening this, super-accelerating it to the Nth degree. Now that those six previously flimsy strands have been swept away by e-mail, online forums, chat rooms and social networking sites (and no, I haven’t missed the irony in the fact that I’m writing about this in an online blog), they don’t seem to have been so implausible after all. It is a sobering thought that almost anybody could reach me at almost any time in some format or another.

*

I have fished since the age of eleven, when my Grandfathers performed, completely independently of one another, a perfect pincer movement. Armed with a solid glass boat rod, spinning fixed spool reel and a head full of fantastical, esoteric stories, I was hurtled headlong into a world I have never really left since.

Between the ages of eleven and eighteen I fished as though my life depended upon it – all seasons, all weathers, all times including the ‘stupid o clock hours’ usually only seen by alcoholics and shift workers. Because of these irregular hours spent either in the company of my Grandfather or later, alone, I developed a kind of unsociable streak which I actually learned to love. Any time spent angling became more than just the sum of its parts. The hours I spent in my own company became something sacrosanct, an untouchable alter-reality all of my own into which I could disappear at any time.

After the age of eighteen, things began to change. Like the fat thunderheads that so often threaten my horizon, other priorities began to loom large  - University and Teacher Training, work, starting a family – all highly rewarding and wonderful experiences in their own way, but all things which demand their own share of the day’s ever dwindling hours. And so, with time at such a premium, angling became less of a priority, fading away to half a dozen or so sessions per year while life picked up the slack.

After a couple of years, routines were established, life began to bob back to an even keel and I began to look for something, anything, to do in the little bit of spare time that I now found on my hands; something for myself.

It is a universal truth that once you’ve found angling, you can never lose it. There will be periods of weeks, maybe months or even years when it may slip from view, disappearing back into the aquifers of life, but this doesn’t mean it’s no longer there. It still exists and flows, and eventually there must come a time when it bubbles to the surface to resume its course which, like all others, eventually leads to the sea. And so it was that fishing came back into my life. And the solitary streak came with it.

Despite the online stores, e-mailed correspondences from these stores, online forums and YouTube clips centred around how to cast, how not to cast, how to catch this fish, what it ate for breakfast, and the look on its face as it was slipped back into the waves, I managed to find the kind of fishing I once knew, carving out a few hours every Friday night to leave a me-shaped hole in my life, wandering alone in the night to some deserted beach whilst my family slept.

Suddenly, no-one was sat at the dining table correcting essays at ten o’ clock. Dad wasn’t in his usual chair, tuning out to mindless TV programmes or flicking through a Wilbur Smith in bed. For a few hours each Friday I was absent from my own life.

Now, I realise that this might seem slightly maudlin, even downright depressing, to many. This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the beaches I fish aren’t that popular as tourist hotspots.

These are not the beaches of spring which lure you out for a leisurely stroll along the promenade, blind you with the clarity of their waters and blue skies then leave you tottering into the nearest beach front cafe for a quick latte. Nor are they the quick-game-of-footie, slather-on-the-suncream, sand-in-every-orifice, lie-down-on-a-towel-resembling-a-bad-acid-trip kind of beaches.

The beaches I’m talking about could out-Brontë the Brontës.

Miles of uninhabited, almost desolate sand or, perhaps, some moonscape of rocky terrain resembling a primordial nightmare tumbling down like dragons’ teeth toward the water, are often the places I am to be found on a Friday night, the silence broken only by the surf jackknifing up the strand.

So what makes this so appealing? Nothing. Nothing I have to do, nothing I have to say, nothing I have to think. Here, I am anonymous; there are no expectations and no obligations. I enter the world of angling and become a nonentity in the real world; as soon as I take a fishing rod in hand, to all intents and purposes, to everybody else, I simply cease to exist. Please hang up and call again later. Separation here is no longer a matter of theoretical degrees, but a physical reality of minutes and hours, yards and miles.

But contrary to being some kind of solipsistic wet dream it is, in fact, quite the opposite. And it is this paradox which brings me back to one night in particular, sometime around the twentieth of December three years ago.

I had decided to fish Rest Bay, a small cove surrounded by low cliffs and rock platforms that open out onto a longish expanse of bare sand at low tide. There is little in the way of development upon this beach save for an old peoples’ home and golf club set a couple of hundred yards back from the sand so that, in the dead of night, there is very little ambient light, leaving the beach and anyone upon it wallowing in darkness. I blended right in.

The session had been a miserable one. It had been meticulously planned -  a range of baits including half a pound of fresh, wriggling ragworms, a packet of frozen sandeels and squid that would be cut into strips to wave enticingly like a white flag in the tide; one rod cast out no more than thirty yards to pick off any lone predators lurking behind the dwindling surf line, and one rigged up with the latest in bait clips to make the rig more aerodynamic, cast around a hundred and forty yards from the beach to reach the smaller, more uncertain shoals of whiting and pouting loitering in the safe harbour of deeper water.

Despite my best efforts it’s not going according to plan. Four hours faced with no bites, occasional rain and a biting easterly wind to match anything out on Heathcliff’s moor. I’m freezing cold, damp, and seriously debating the merits of darts and snooker. Suddenly the rod tip trembles…then taps down. There it goes again!

No matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how quiet the session, the angler will always clutch the tiny flame of hope to his chest, hoping against hope, just looking for that one more cast that might change his fortunes and snatch victory from the jaws of despair. There is a fine line between madness and inspiration and at this moment I’m pirouetting upon that line on one toe.

A third, more determined, rattle tells me that in what little tide movement there is, the short snoods have done their job. The fish has grabbed at the bait and hooked itself, pulled up short against the resistance of my breakout lead as it tried to swim away with my worm.

I’ve caught thousands of fish over the years, but even now each bite is no different. I practically jog to the waters’ edge, the beam of my headlight flicking to the water, to my reel, then back again to the water, finally coming to rest on the whiting which slides from the sea to lie like a bleb of new solder glimmering through the darkness.

This fish is smaller than the worm it has just eaten. At eight ounces, it would barely be enough to get caught in Captain Birdseye’s teeth, yet all I want to do is share this minor triumph with someone…anyone! Knowing that my house will be in darkness, I decide it’s probably better not to wake my partner and our grizzling two year old to share this momentous event. Not if I want to live to see next Friday.

All that’s left to do is re-bait, re-cast (just one more cast)and huddle back in against the wind which, by now, is making me question the whereabouts of my genitalia, as my seated shadow tries to curl into itself like a squat black zero in the middle of nowhere.

Then, through the darkness, I hear it. At first it’s just a few faint snatches passing by then tossed away on the wind, barely there. I think I’m imagining it, but there it is again, fading in and out, a dozen or so voices in chorus, singing. It’s indistinguishable at first but gradually, ever so gradually, the lone voices begin to knit into what I finally recognise as O come all ye faithful.

There isn’t another soul in sight, the nearest buildings are hundreds of yards from where I’m now standing at the low tide line, and it’s extremely late but here it comes again, clear as a bell and I can’t help but crack a slight chapped smile as I listen to this these hushed, almost ethereal tones.

I finally get it. No other episode in my angling “career” ever has or ever will so reinforce why I go fishing.  It has run in my blood for so long that it’s taken for granted – picking up a rod and scouring the surf line for hidden features now comes as naturally as breathing, so I had never really thought about why I go fishing. I have come to love the fact that I can disappear from one world into another, but over time, I have come to know the true importance of being absent.

It’s not really about distancing myself from anything else; it’s more a case of distancing myself from myself. Angling allows me to step into another existence, to look at the space I’ve left behind, albeit temporarily, to see where I will fit so neatly back in and, like so much in this other world I inhabit, find the balance.

I decide I won’t have that final cast after all. Instead, I pack up and make my way back to the car, shaking off the sand before cranking the heating up and trundling off into the night. Behind me, the voices waver and flicker still, even as they fade, reaching out like strands of marram in the wind. Perhaps, if I were to listen long enough, I’d recognise one of them.

© copyright Simon Smith 2011