Once (14 page)

What was that labour and what were the lives it commanded? What days? What talk? What stories? What pay? What nights and where were they spent? After a day's work what time to get home, what time to return in the morning? What Wales and whose? None of it on record, and oral memory of this place lost to mind?

How many steps have I taken now, how many more than the men, I can hardly bear to think, and every obstacle of rock or boulder, so much more to me to negotiate than to them. Next, it is a dizzy descent, taken at a slow steep step, and, approaching from the south as you are, by now you've glimpsed a corner of black water. And what time is it? And is there a breeze enough in that great cauldron, and are the fish on the move?

 

 
So this was it. This was Dulyn. This was the Black Lake.

Before me stood a rocky bay, the inky water in it joppling in the wind. So black it seemed unreal, this narrow southeast bay that runs up to the dam and overspill, with a small island of rocks in it. Round along the shore to the left were the remains of a boathouse of sorts, its corrugated iron roof all but rusted away, its timbers broken and caved, and no boat anywhere. I always wished it housed a boat still. There was said to be a boat across the little bay, in the little pump house under the slope opposite. The shepherd used to talk about it. But I never saw it. What a thing to steal it.... The idea of rowing out on the black waters in a small boat excited my imagination, and unnerved me too.

How I wished there was a boat to complete the picture, to swell the adventure of setting out. How much better the fishing would be, drifting towards those little bays, and along otherwise inaccessible shores. How scary it would be too, with a kind of vertigo to dizzy you, the lake being so deep, the black crag looming so high overhead. And when there were clouds blowing you'd not know were they moving or was it the crag. Who knows but you might feel compelled to slip overboard, into purgatory, just as up there on the crag you might be overcome by an urge to hurl yourself over the edge.

Behind me rose the steep way we'd descended and the gush of water from the Yellow Lake as it came slattering out of the pipe, to swell the Black Lake, provided a constant backwash to the immediate sound-scape. Farther to my left a few yards away rose a high crag and cliff and walls of stone and a lower terrace that stepped down to the water, steeply into the lake, forming a little bay within the larger bay, and a precipitous point of rock at which you could not round the lake on foot.

Underfoot were rough grasses and rocks and stones, in-between big boulders. Then all about a cacophony of lesser sounds and great, the enveloping sound-warp of the place. But though the place enveloped you in this way, its unrelievedness was so overwhelming it held you at bay in yourself too. It shut you out. It shut you in. It took you a while to acclimatize, always, to find the balance between inner and outer that is the dream-state where the world's your own.

After the exertion, you cooled down physically. Only on a rare summer day might you still feel warm after halting there a minute or two. I learnt the meaning of cold up there in my young bones. I learnt to get used to it and to endure, endure the cold rain, rain that might fall all day, with only a rare break if any. And rain at that height in the mountains is as cold and hard as granite. No concessions were made for me. None was possible, however many years I carried on my head.

What had I expected? I had heard so much about the Black Lake but I didn't hear anything like this. I had only known that it was, what? I hadn't known anything at all. It was a name merely, a word that in English was two words. I was a small boy. It was my father coming home with fish. It was the mountains and it was arduous to be there. But now this was what it was. The day began here, the quick day in the slow year of boyhood.

We set to, the men eager to begin and to disperse, my father greedy to drop a cast on virgin water, down in the little bay, out to the nearby point, round which you could bend a cast a yard or so, if the wind blew in the right direction and you were skilful. It was a spot where trout might be taken. (Where I once had two on at the same time, and lost both as Ifor tried to help me swing them ashore.)

My father had no after-you manners, no etiquette but first-come-first-served, as long as he was first. The others knew it in him. They knew their man and took no heed. So they waited for him at the end of a long weary day when he refused to admit defeat, last to leave last served, and he would cast and cast and cast into the evening, intent on showing us how to rise a fish. When by now all our thoughts were of home. As often as not he'd succeed, as if by sheer will-power but it was a combination of uncanniness and skill.

Up until then I had never cast a fly in earnest, except, up at the source of the Lledr. But I was thoroughly drilled in setting up and what flies to try, and so I too set to, the tea-boy still ten years old.

Like anti-social herons, the men went their separate ways. I'd follow my father all day. I had to be sure to keep in view or, sometimes, in sudden panic, he'd rant at me, so dangerous was the lake, so deep and cold and perilous the steep tumbled shore of glacial boulders. If you fell in your chances of getting out alive were slim to non-existent, slimmer than anyone ever said. My father, may I remind you, had a fiercely hot temper, as hot as molten larva, so I made sure not to drop from sight, if I could. He might fall from sight himself before I could realise it, before I could catch up. But the fault would be mine.

He could explode at the drop of a hat. So once at least I spent most of a very wet day in Coventry for leaving my hat behind. Though come early evening and the rain eased away, so did his mood, as if it had never been, and he'd joke about my being a dreamer, though my day had been a nightmare until then, the rain feeling my collar first, then seeping in, down my back and round my chest, to my waist, and my head plastered as if with Ifor's
Brylcream
.

I first cast my line where the stream from the Melynllyn pipe made a stir and did my best in the widdershins whirl of the winds. So this was it, and here the day began, an enormous day. It was a shock for me, I'll tell you, if you can have a shock on a slow fuse, a gradual, cumulative shock, an incremental shock in the accumulation of minutes into hours, a shock in slow-motion: hour one.... the beginning, again, to which the thread is made of filament, 3lb breaking strain (3lb to be optimistic), and you must feed it in that chop and bluster of the wind out through the eyes of the rod and tie your flies to the droppers and the end of the cast. Though I knew already all the knots to know and I doubt you do, the double blood-knot most testing of all, and could tie it blindfold, and in the highest wind, my back to the wind, like Trefor there lighting a fag in the cup of his hand even before he has put his rod together, melancholy Trefor surveying the waters.

 

More than two seasons would pass before I caught a fish, towards the end of my third. As to catching trout, here I don't include the Glen stream, the source of the Lledr, Dulyn stream or Llyn-y-Foel.... I mean at the Black Lake. But you'll know why I loved the stream, and how it saddened me if the men were too keen to get home and wouldn't delay for me, though they'd delay for themselves, or for my father whose stamina or sheer determination outstripped theirs, until night was almost upon us, if it suited, and fish were rising, or might just yet rise, though none had done all day.

Let me pour into your mind all those blank days, at least half if not the majority of them bleak days, wet and cold, and ask you to think of what my tale is told: of stoicism and endurance beyond whose years? Not beyond mine then, resolved into my own invisible self, if beyond them now.

I was too small, too slight, however wiry, to do more than I did by way of fishing the Black Lake, and for safety's sake too bound to fish in my father's wake, where the water was disturbed. I did my best, struggling to cast without my back-cast hooking me up behind, without my line splashing onto the water, without falling in. But really everything was against me. A less determined or peculiar boy might well have decided after a few Sundays that he'd had enough of fishing at the Black Lake. Bugger that, he might have said, for a game of soldiers. But not yours truly. I could absorb any amount of such punishment, being captive to the dream and standing oblique to the everyday world already, maimed by it. As my life at school had shown. So much for ‘Schooling':

 

Pay attention at the back there.

But the back of the mind knows better.

If it didn't where would I be,

and who, empty of all poetry?

 

 
People who don't know tend to think all fishing is sitting on a bank waiting for a fish to bite. But fly-fishing is one of constant activity, of casting and retrieving, and re-casting, zipping the line back out, through the full 180° of the shore, or as near to that as obstacles, in this case the rocks, allow. There was not a single stunted shoreline thorn or mountain ash to hinder you at Dulyn, or for a trout to feed under either. So you work methodically through the arc, eighteen inches by eighteen inches, or yard by yard, as you judge or the winds permit, retrieving the line by drawing it back in short lengths, letting it fall at your feet, or coiling it in your hand. Then by mounting motion, flicking the rod to and fro, you let the line shoot out again, with a minimum of casts.

You don't want to thrash the air, or whip the water. That will disturb any fish that might be in the swim, near the surface, feeding perhaps, or hunting for food, or hanging with minimal motion in mid-water, at some preferred place, where natural food washes by, or is stirred up by a feeding streamlet. The little flies dart forward as you draw the line back a few inches at a time, or at whatever speed you feel is ‘lifelike'. Their movement catches the trout's eye. The trout ‘rises' to take the fly.

Or so it goes in theory. But circumstances alter cases: time of year, recent weather, weather on the day, weather in the moment, water temperature, wind temperature, wind-direction and force, the flies you chance to try, to stick with or restlessly replace, the delicacy with which your line settles on the water, the speed you retrieve at, your ability to sustain concentration, to cast methodically, at the right range, in the right place, for which you need an eye to know, and practice, to identify, to read the water. Then you must do that all morning, moving along from place to place, as the arduous terrain permits; all afternoon, all evening. For if your line is not on the water, what will you catch but thin air?

To do so much as begin, for the first hour, you must find your rhythm and measure and minimise your effort, until you discover you are on automatic pilot, in a trance of motion, your own casting motion and the motion of the waters in the warp of the weather and the turning day, yet vigilant and ready for a trout's sudden swirling take.

Like the waves in the water you have your peaks and troughs, your fallings off and your rising up, especially if you see a fish rise nearby, but mostly without such encouragement. You must manage your mind and your body, as you'd do in a race across country. But at ten years old, at eleven and twelve, in torrential mountain rain and whipping wind? Or even on a fair day of ideal conditions? With no encouragement from the fish, not a sign or a chance all day? Minute upon minute, hour upon hour? And every discouragement as your father catches his first and then his second and his third, and Ifor, when you meet up, has six fish in his polythene bag, and you are no better than Trefor, except your line isn't out and sunk from view with a worm on the end of it. For there is also competition in it, for the sake of self-esteem. Such strife is good for mortals, as someone said. If hard on ten-year- olds?

 

 
How many trips it took me to become a philosopher in my apprenticeship, I cannot say. For boyhood hope springs eternal, and when its spring has sprung, disappointment follows hard on it, and crestfallen sorrow settles in. Presumption is ever followed by despair. But little by little unconsciously I displaced it. The present became my experiment, the discovery of the present.

I became a conscious and unconscious naturalist in one. My fishing bag and even Scotia became props in another adventure, my cover story, to serve a parable-maker one day; and perhaps this was why I didn't catch a fish sooner? I spent more time fishing half-heartedly while staring into the soul of things, of sight and sound, as the unmeasured hours blew across the bowl of sky above the rocky cauldron and its black, black-hearted lake.

In such a place it would be profoundly wrong to say nothing happens. A wilderness lake is like a wild island inside out. For me it was a training ground for Inis Mór and the incantation of reverie. As no-one knows better than I do now, what happens in such places happens differently, at another pace, on a different plane. The seasons rotate. Days lengthen and shorten but the prevailing direction is round like the shore of the lake – longest way round, shortest home – and sometimes up and down. Our day is only a day and not the devil but the bounty is in the detail.

Winter fills what summer drains, or at least so it was in the old dispensation. Water temperatures rise a degree or two and fall. Trout rise. The ring-ouzel haunts the heath on the cliff and flits up to perch in the rowan to sing, if song you'd call it. Mist descends. For half the day it hangs and drifts mizzling about the cliffs. What happens is of that order. In time your mind registers, weathers in it, as a stone weathers and records its weathering.