The afternoon whiles away. There is the odd bite, a twitch of a line enough to keep people enthused into staying for just a little while longer to break up the monotony. I continually text the audience of the fishing trip, sledging my fishing partner for assisting in the loss of the big carp, but also regaling his efforts in now being a cod fisherman.
Like the soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To sleep, perchance to dream.” It is one of those lines quoted so often it risks losing its original weight, becoming polished smooth through repetition until its deeper meaning quietly disappears beneath familiarity. Yet lying there in the darkness, miles from routine and somehow still carrying routine inside me, the phrase feels less literary and more diagnostic. Sleep, in theory, should be an escape. Rest. Silence. Temporary relief from the machinery of thought. But dreams are strange things because they do not obey logic. They raid memory, fear, frustration, symbolism, and nonsense all at once, then stitch them together into narratives carrying emotional truth even when the practical details are utterly absurd.
And so the night becomes filled not with rest, but with frustration, because in one fragment I am standing on a golf course where every shot is duffed and every swing somehow worse than the last. The harder I try to correct things, the more impossible the game becomes, which any golfer immediately understands because frustration on a golf course behaves very much like quicksand. Anger tightens muscles. Tight muscles destroy rhythm. Destroyed rhythm creates worse shots. Worse shots generate more anger. The entire experience becomes self-perpetuating collapse masquerading as recreation. Even within the dream the feeling remains horribly familiar because it is not really about golf at all. It is about the sensation of trying harder only to become progressively less effective.
Then the dream shifts, because dreams care very little for continuity or practical explanation. Suddenly we are parking our caravan, although where exactly remains uncertain, and somehow the boat has ended up on top of it in complete defiance of both physics and common sense. There is no logical explanation for how it arrived there, yet dream logic never pauses to justify itself because explanation becomes irrelevant once symbolism takes over. The caravan moves unexpectedly despite the brake being on, the boat slides, and suddenly I am trapped beneath it. Oddly, there is no pain and no cinematic panic. Instead there is simply the overwhelming awareness of being pinned beneath something heavy and immovable while the world continues around me.
That feeling lingers far more powerfully than the imagery itself, because perhaps dreams communicate less through events and more through emotional states disguised as events. Being trapped beneath the boat feels strangely familiar in a way difficult to properly articulate. There is no visible catastrophe unfolding. Nobody is screaming. Yet I cannot move. I cannot free myself. I am stuck beneath the weight of something I cannot fully explain, and perhaps that sensation connects far more deeply to this trip than I initially realised.
Then come the faceless caravanners, anonymous men with no clear identity who quietly appear, lift the boat away, and free me without drama or ceremony. There is something deeply unsettling in their lack of individuality because they are not heroes in the traditional sense. Not friends. Not family. Not even fully formed people in the normal emotional sense. They feel more like manifestations of assistance itself, and immediately my thoughts drift back toward that earlier parable about the stranded man on the roof praying for miracles while repeatedly rejecting perfectly ordinary rescue.
I cannot help wondering whether the faceless men belong to exactly the same emotional universe as that story. Because perhaps one of the frustrations quietly threading through this entire walkabout is the inability to recognise help unless it arrives wearing the precise costume I expect. Perhaps answers have been appearing all along through conversations, encounters, reflections, and ordinary moments of connection, yet some stubborn part of me keeps waiting for revelation dramatic enough to feel unquestionably real. The dream almost seems to mock that tendency. I am trapped beneath the boat, yet assistance arrives not through spectacle or divine intervention, but through ordinary anonymous figures who simply lift the burden away and continue on without needing recognition.
Still the madness of the dream keeps unfolding because now, despite the boat only moments earlier trapping me beneath its weight, the narrative somehow shifts toward getting it to the boat ramp. For a fleeting moment we appear to be inside some sort of beachside caravan park, although even that certainty dissolves as quickly as it forms. Geography in dreams remains fluid, rearranging itself without apology or consistency. Yet those same faceless men carry the boat toward what now resembles a lake and gently place it into the water as though restoring it to the environment where it naturally belongs.
And still the frustrations continue multiplying because now the anchor is missing and, somehow connected to the same emotional thread, my putter has vanished back on the golf course as well. Objects disappear between scenes as though stripped away by the dream itself, and each missing item carries symbolism difficult to completely ignore. The anchor, the thing designed to hold position and provide stability, is gone. The putter, perhaps the most psychologically delicate club in golf, the instrument requiring touch, rhythm, patience, and closure, has disappeared too. Nothing remains complete. Nothing remains secure. Everything essential seems lost somewhere between one unresolved scene and the next.
That, perhaps, is the true emotional texture of the dream, because it is not really fear driving the narrative. Nor is it danger in the conventional sense. It is frustration. Relentless, shapeless frustration. The feeling that every attempt to regain control merely creates fresh complication. The harder the effort to organise things, the more irrationally disordered they become. And perhaps that is why the dream feels so tightly connected to the underlying purpose of this trip, because if I am honest, much of this walkabout has revolved around questions I cannot even properly articulate.
It is difficult enough searching for answers when the question itself is known. It becomes infinitely harder when all you possess is the persistent sensation that something inside remains unresolved without being able to clearly define what that unresolved thing actually is. Perhaps that is why the dream feels emotionally truthful despite its absurdity, because the golf shots represent effort collapsing under pressure, the boat represents burden, the faceless men represent help insufficiently recognised, the missing anchor represents instability, and the vanished putter represents the inability to properly finish what has been started.
And through all of it runs the same maddening emotional current present throughout this entire walkabout, namely the sensation of searching desperately for meaning while simultaneously struggling to recognise it whenever it quietly appears. Maybe that is the true frustration buried beneath the dream. Not that the answers are absent, but that I may not yet understand how to properly see them when they arrive dressed in ordinary clothes rather than miracles.
I sit here in the early morning light and think. I think that there is so much to do and the time I have is fast coming to an end here in this place of a home “I have never been before,” to quote John Denver. I have never truly lived here, yet somehow it feels like a spiritual home, a place quietly calling me in ways difficult to properly explain. But clearly it is not calling with the answers I imagined I was seeking, unless of course I am no different to the man in the parable, standing stubbornly on the roof waiting for miracles while quietly overlooking the ordinary forms in which they arrive.
The morning itself seems to encourage that sort of thinking because dawn in the country possesses a completely different emotional texture to dawn in the city. In suburbia, mornings often feel like commencements. Alarms. Traffic. Coffee machines. Movement. The day immediately demanding participation before the mind has even properly assembled itself. Out here the early light feels contemplative instead, as though the world has not quite decided whether it intends waking fully at all. The silence is not empty. It breathes. Birds negotiate territory somewhere beyond the trees. Timber creaks as temperatures shift. Machinery coughs reluctantly into life in the far distance, muted enough to sound symbolic rather than intrusive.
And in that stillness the mind becomes difficult to outrun because places like this remove distraction in ways modern life rarely allows. At home there is always something demanding attention. Emails. Phone calls. Deadlines. Tasks. Noise. Movement masquerading as purpose. Here, however, there are moments where all that remains is thought, and thought has an irritating tendency to drift toward truths one has successfully kept blurred beneath busyness. Perhaps that is the real danger of stillness. It leaves fewer places for avoidance to hide.
I find myself wondering why this place feels familiar despite the fact I have never actually belonged here in any practical sense. There is no childhood bedroom waiting for me. No lifelong routine carved into memory. No deep personal history etched into the walls with my name attached to it. Yet emotionally the place feels strangely recognisable, as though some quieter part of me understands this landscape far better than my conscious mind does. Perhaps that is why people speak about spiritual homes rather than physical ones. Some places do not belong to us legally or historically. They simply resonate against something internal we cannot entirely name.
And perhaps that resonance is precisely what brought me here because, if I am honest, the fishing, the timber, the practical projects, and all the visible activity surrounding the trip increasingly feel like acceptable explanations wrapped around something far less tangible. They provide shape and justification. They create outcomes that can be pointed toward when somebody asks what the trip was about. Yet underneath all of that sits a quieter truth that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the longer I remain here.
Because this walkabout has started feeling less like a holiday and more like a search for answers to questions I cannot even properly formulate and that resembles a chore as much as anything.
That is perhaps the most maddening part of the entire experience because most people imagine quests as purposeful things. A man seeks wisdom. Closure. Direction. Meaning. Something identifiable enough that success can eventually be recognised. Yet what if the deeper truth is simply unease? A vague but persistent awareness that something inside no longer aligns properly, even if the exact nature of that misalignment remains frustratingly difficult to define. That sensation has followed me for some time now, lingering quietly beneath ordinary life like background static.
Retirement, or semi-retirement perhaps more accurately, was supposed to create relief. Freedom. Space. The removal of pressure. Yet instead it has sometimes created something far more ambiguous. Structure disappears, but purpose does not automatically rush in to replace it. Responsibility softens, but identity does not necessarily adapt with equal speed. The days become less frantic yet strangely heavier because stillness creates room for thoughts previously drowned out by movement. Perhaps that is why this place feels important, not because it directly offers answers, but because it strips away enough noise that the questions become harder to avoid.
And perhaps that is exactly what the parable keeps trying to teach me because the man stranded on the roof was never denied miracles. He simply failed to recognise them because they arrived looking ordinary. That possibility unsettles me more than I would care to admit because what if the same thing is happening here? What if the answers I imagined would arrive in some dramatic lightning-bolt revelation are instead appearing quietly through conversations, frustrations, dreams, observations, and ordinary encounters I keep dismissing because they lack spectacle?
The encounter with Ann keeps returning to mind for that very reason. So do the conversations with Aunty Kerre. Watching Mitch quietly repair machinery because standing helplessly is not commercially viable. Trevor and I, laughing like children over chainsaws and undersized fish. Even the faceless men in the dream lifting the boat away rather than some grand cinematic rescue. Individually they all feel disconnected, almost trivial in isolation. Yet perhaps meaning does not arrive as a singular revelation. Perhaps it assembles itself slowly through fragments only recognisable once enough pieces accumulate.
Still frustration lingers because part of me wants certainty rather than interpretation. I do not particularly want metaphors. I do not especially enjoy emotional archaeology requiring endless analysis. Some part of me wants the helicopter from the parable. The unmistakable miracle impossible to misread. The obvious answer standing clearly in front of me declaring itself beyond doubt. Yet life rarely behaves with such theatrical generosity. More often it whispers instead of shouting, leaving us to decide whether we possess enough stillness to actually hear what is being said.
Perhaps that is why this place feels simultaneously comforting and unsettling because comfort comes from recognition while unease comes from uncertainty about what exactly is being recognised. Something inside me responds to this place even while my conscious mind struggles to explain why. That tension creates its own strange emotional pull. I feel called here, yet I cannot confidently say for what purpose. I feel connected to the place, yet remain uncertain what the connection itself is attempting to teach me.
So I sit here in the early morning light and think, aware the time remaining here is already beginning to shrink, aware that soon enough I will return to ordinary routines, obligations, responsibilities, and the familiar distractions of everyday life. Yet perhaps the real fear is not that I will leave without answers. Perhaps the greater fear is that the answers have already begun appearing and I still do not fully understand how to recognise them when they stand quietly in front of me dressed as ordinary life rather than miracles.
So another day is starting with the darkness slowly turning to dullness and then eventually the weak early light of another country morning. A fox is barking somewhere in the distance, the sharp cry carrying strangely clearly through the cold air, and immediately the old instincts stir inside me. Part of me craves the hunt for the pest, the ancient rural response that sees foxes not as romantic creatures from children’s stories but as opportunistic killers forever circling poultry yards and native wildlife. He cannot get to the chickens or the turkeys from where he is, the pens secure enough for now, yet still the thought arrives that perhaps I should go looking for him before he grows bolder.
But that would involve effort, noise, movement, and purpose, all things that seem strangely absent from me this morning. The body feels weary in ways difficult to entirely explain because some of the exhaustion is physical while much of it sits somewhere deeper and far harder to reach. Yesterday’s labour certainly contributes. Timber, lifting, walking, bending, loading, chainsaws, cold mornings, uneven ground, and all the ordinary physical realities of country work leave their mark on a body no longer young enough to recover without negotiation. Yet the heavier fatigue seems to come from somewhere else entirely, somewhere less muscular and far more emotional.
That, perhaps, is the true danger of apathy because it rarely arrives dramatically enough to announce itself properly. It does not kick the front door down declaring collapse. Instead it seeps quietly into the cracks of ordinary life, gradually and patiently, like damp creeping through walls unnoticed until one day the entire room smells different and you cannot quite remember when the change first began. The frightening part is not sadness exactly because sadness at least possesses movement. Anger possesses movement. Frustration, grief, fear, disappointment, all of them contain energy of some kind. Apathy is different because it feels like the slow draining away of movement itself.
Things still matter intellectually. You know they matter. You understand perfectly well why action should occur. Yet somewhere between thought and action the circuitry begins quietly disconnecting. The fox should be hunted. The fresh air would probably do me good. The movement would likely loosen the body and perhaps even the mind. Purpose, focus, and engagement are all things endlessly recommended for mental wellbeing. And still I remain sitting here because the problem is not incapacity. It is not physical inability. It is the gradual erosion of urgency itself.
The world does not stop asking things of you, yet your emotional response to those demands begins flattening out as though the machinery responsible for engagement has quietly slipped into some low-energy survival mode. That sensation keeps dragging me back toward the image of those four walls I spoke about earlier, the invisible room slowly inching inward around me. The frightening thing about those walls is not speed. It is subtle. They do not slam shut overnight. They move millimetre by millimetre, thought by thought, retreat by retreat, with a thousand tiny concessions accumulating quietly until one morning you realise how little emotional space seems left.
Perhaps that is why apathy unsettles me more than sadness ever could because it disguises itself so effectively as practicality, ageing, tiredness, or even wisdom. You’ve worked hard. You deserve rest. It can wait until tomorrow. The fox cannot get in anyway. Each individual thought sounds perfectly reasonable in isolation. That is how the walls move. Not through catastrophe, but through a thousand perfectly defensible permissions to disengage slightly more today than yesterday. And life, frustratingly, adapts to whatever level of participation we offer it.
The fox continues barking somewhere beyond the paddocks. The chickens remain safe. The world keeps turning. Nothing catastrophic occurs because I remain sitting here instead of reaching for the rifle and stepping into the frost. Yet something inside me notices the retreat regardless, and that may be the most exhausting part of all because the mind becomes both participant and observer simultaneously. One part understands exactly what is happening while another part simply lacks the emotional ignition required to meaningfully resist it. It is like watching yourself slowly withdraw from life through increments too small to justify alarm individually, yet collectively large enough to alter the entire emotional landscape.
Perhaps that is why this walkabout matters more than I initially realised because places like this remove distraction. At home busyness disguises apathy remarkably effectively. Emails answered. Tasks completed. Meetings attended. Responsibilities met. Functionality becomes camouflage. Out here, however, with fewer moving parts and longer silences, the internal withdrawal becomes harder to hide from myself because there is simply less noise available to drown it out.
The fox barks again somewhere in the distance, and part of me still wants to answer the challenge despite the heaviness pressing down across both body and mind. Perhaps that is the important thing, at least for now, because the desire has not entirely vanished. It has merely become muffled beneath fatigue, routine, uncertainty, and the slow encroachment of those invisible walls. And maybe this trip, more than anything else, is forcing me to confront whether the remaining task is not finding some grand revelation, but preventing those walls from finally touching altogether.
We are to be left to our own devices today because the residents are off to Orange for a medical appointment. A simple four-hour round trip for what is described as nothing more than a routine follow-up. There is no drama attached to it, no complaint, no theatrical sighing about inconvenience. It is simply accepted as part of life out here, another entry in the quiet catalogue of distances country people absorb without much discussion because distance itself becomes normalised remarkably quickly once you live beyond the orbit of major population centres.
That, perhaps, is one of the great dividing lines between city and country Australia because out here distance is not an occasional inconvenience. It becomes infrastructure. It shapes the rhythm of life itself. A medical appointment is not a quick stop between errands squeezed into a lunch break. It becomes a day. Fuel must be considered. Timing matters. Weather matters. Road conditions matter. Fatigue matters. And all of this occurs before the actual appointment itself even begins. Yet country people rarely present these things as hardship because adaptation becomes necessary for survival. Complaining about distance out here would almost feel like complaining about gravity because it simply exists whether you approve of it or not.
City people, however, often experience an entirely different reality without ever consciously recognising it as privilege because hospitals sit nearby, specialists are accessible, pharmacies remain open late into the evening, and public transport exists to bridge inconvenience. A second opinion can often be obtained within suburbs rather than regions. Services cluster together because population density makes such concentration commercially and politically sensible. That is not inherently wrong because governments naturally follow numbers. Infrastructure follows growth. Investment follows votes. The problem is that eventually a nation begins governing around concentration rather than geography, and those outside the concentrated zones quietly become secondary considerations despite their contribution to the broader functioning of the country.
The coast increasingly feels like one long congregation of urban centres stretching from city to city in an almost uninterrupted corridor of infrastructure, services, political attention, and economic focus. Roads improve where populations swell. Hospitals expand where voting pressure accumulates. Transport networks grow where congestion becomes visible enough to inconvenience enough people simultaneously. Meanwhile inland communities continue absorbing distance as though endurance itself were somehow an infinite and renewable resource. The assumption quietly settles in that country people will simply adapt because historically they always have.
And yet much of the nation still feeds itself through the labour of those same regions.
That is the strange contradiction sitting quietly beneath modern Australia because the further one travels from the coast, the more visible the mechanics of production become. Timber. Livestock. Grain. Fruit. Machinery. Transport. The practical industries underpinning everyday urban comfort remain heavily rooted in regional areas, yet the lived experience of the people sustaining those industries often remains almost invisible to those benefiting from them. Food appears in supermarkets. Electricity arrives through switches. Fuel emerges from pumps. Timber arrives neatly stacked at hardware stores. Because the final product reaches the city efficiently, the process behind it becomes remarkably easy to ignore.
Perhaps that is why country frustration often carries such a quiet edge to it because it is not usually loud resentment. It is fatigue. The fatigue of recognising that much of national conversation increasingly revolves around urban priorities while regional compromise is treated almost as cultural expectation. Country people drive further, wait longer, improvise more, repair more, adapt more, and absorb more logistical friction simply because the arithmetic of population density places them permanently behind the queue. The burden rarely arrives dramatically enough to generate headlines, yet the cumulative effect quietly shapes entire lives.
Medical care perhaps exposes that divide more clearly than anything else because a city resident might complain about traffic delaying arrival at a specialist ten minutes away. Out here, a specialist appointment becomes an expedition. Entire days disappear into travel for consultations sometimes lasting less than half an hour. Elderly people drive enormous distances because there is no realistic alternative. Families rearrange work schedules around appointments that city residents would barely classify as interruption. And still it is accepted with remarkable stoicism because outrage consumes energy while practicality gets people home before dark.
That stoicism can be deeply misleading to outsiders because people often mistake acceptance for absence of burden. They assume that because country people cope, the system must therefore function adequately. But coping and fairness are not remotely the same thing. Survival and equity are not synonyms. The fact people endure something quietly does not automatically transform the arrangement into a reasonable one. More often it simply reflects generations of learning how to function without expecting the system to bend toward you in the first place.
Perhaps that reflects something larger about the way modern nations increasingly organise themselves because governments naturally gravitate toward visible concentrations of people. Concentrated populations generate louder political consequences. Urban pressure becomes immediately visible. Congested roads create headlines. Hospital waiting lists affect thousands simultaneously. Public transport failures ripple publicly through entire cities. Regional hardship, however, disperses itself across enormous distances. The suffering becomes quieter, more isolated, less photogenic, and therefore politically easier to absorb because it lacks the concentrated visibility capable of forcing urgency.
Yet standing here watching people casually prepare for a four-hour round trip merely to attend a routine follow-up appointment, it becomes difficult not to recognise the imbalance embedded within the system. This is not adventure. This is not hardship tourism. This is administration. This is ordinary life. And perhaps that is precisely the point because city people often imagine country hardship in cinematic terms involving droughts, floods, fires, and heroic resilience against dramatic adversity. The real burden, however, often lies in the endless accumulation of smaller frictions. The kilometres. The fuel. The waiting. The planning. The quiet acceptance that services others take for granted simply exist further away from you.
Still they go because there is little alternative available to them. There is no expectation of sympathy. No grand declaration about sacrifice. No performance of hardship for emotional applause. There is simply another drive to Orange and back because that is what life out here requires, even while much of the rest of the country continues eating food grown by people whose own access to basic services remains measured not in convenience, but in hours.
For Trevor and I, though, it’s back to the wood heap. Logs need to be turned into slabs, and slabs loaded into the trailer. It’s almost ritualistic in its simplicity, yet the outcome is something to be held when you look at the internal parts of a piece of timber, ingrained in years of growth, now represented as something else.
And whilst the timber is far from raw, the resultant load on the trailer is a configuration of things yet to come. Even though we have released some of the magnificence of mother nature within the timber, being accessed as we bring the internal to the external, there is still going to be a lot of work to do to get it to that point that anything marketable might have been created.
The main log becomes four slabs before we consider our next step. We have several options for the next step – to lay the tools down, call it a day, and just go fishing. With the wind getting up and biting through our clothes, that might just be the right option. But there is a piece of timber, a log, that Mitch has moved from the back part of the paddock to where we are creating the slabs, and it would be very remiss of me not to attempt to saw this piece into some slabs.
The log, a burl-covered piece, is what I would like to use to make more of the decorative tables that I have become quite infamous for. When I first embarked upon this type of carpentry, I managed to procure a few planks of timber and turned them into coffee tables for anybody who wandered past. In fact, my wife, Robyn, was quite comical in suggesting that anybody who stood still long enough beside me ended up with a table. In those early days, Mitch would take a chainsaw to a burl and give me the raw material, which I then had to work out how to saw in my own man shed to make something that I could then turn into a tabletop.
That, in itself, had its own issues with Mitch, as good a chainsaw operator as he is, unable to keep the chainsaw perfectly straight, leaving gouges in the timber, which took lots of time to remove and then turn into something that I could use in a marketable sense. But here, with the mechanism set up to cut slabs in long logs, a burl as long as it fits between the distance of the blade of the chainsaw will be no match for the vagaries of handheld machinery.
Mitch himself is on a mission with the rain this week. He has to catch up on his lawn mowing, and he wanders past, leaving us with three sharpened chains and two receptacles of oil and petrol to keep us going for as long as we want. Then, for him, it’s off to his employee and an adjacent town where he has half a day’s work mowing lawns for various people.
He jokes about that even though he is going to a built-up area, he will be out of phone service for most of the day. If we want just to keep him updated and he wants back into range, we’ll see what we’ve been up to. Out here on the western plains, there is really only one option for mobile phone service, and that’s Telstra. But even then, the difference between Telstra in its own right and Telstra resellers is amazing. And when you think about the underlying provider, it seems that the main operator, with its monopoly, uses it to its own advantage, with the poor customer being the ultimate loser in a war where the Great Dollar is the only motivator.
It’s a huge satisfaction to think that the trailer is now full and probably overweight for its specifications, but having said that, we have done what we have set out to do, and there is absolutely no guilt in suggesting that it’s time for fishing.
Trevor, of course, is still yet to catch his first legal cod and is very vocal in site selection, given that we have most of the day to reconnoiter and then to wet lines chasing the elusive fish. I have some ideas as to where we might go, but Trevor is very insistent that we look around mockingly, not trying to allow me to simply take him to a place where we might catch fish, but rather we’ll catch fish.
The scary thing, of course, is that, even though I’m not a local to the area, we have managed to catch fish. All be it, I have caught some carp and 2 legal cod. He has yet to move the school board on anything legal since we have been here. And this today will be our fifth session in the week we’ve been away. He asks the question, backed by his form of logic, as to why we haven’t traveled many miles away from the built-up area to find places that, in his words, haven’t been ‘fished out’.
That question particularly comes in the form of “in what is west of the town?” In Condobolin, particularly, that means Red Gum Bend and the water ski park, but it also means a significant amount of privately owned land where access to the river is effectively trespassing, not that I know the lay of the land that well in any case.
For a start, we settle on the river just by the water ski park, finding a deep hole where the water is pumped from the river to the lake, and set about our chase for the elusive legal fish. During the night and into the morning, a southerly breeze has sprung up, making it uncomfortable to sit where the chilling breeze cuts through you, but here, on the u-shaped bend of the river, we can get out of the wind and sit down by the water, fishing in comfort.
Comfort is one thing, but results are what we are after, and here there are no results, other than we get to sit and watch the water go by, and that’s not a bad thing, but in the general course of what we are trying to do, it is imperfect in a perfect setting.
We appoint an hour on a clock to say that if there is no action by this time we will move on. That comes and goes; we pack up and we head on. “Head on” is actually the wrong word. We head back towards the town and to a weir on a creek not far from Chinaman’s Bridge. There are times when you have to go backwards to go forwards.
So now we sit and look at the weir, the water running over it and cascading across rocks into the upper reaches of the creek that we fished yesterday, looking for places where you could sit by the river and hopefully stir up a fish of the right type that would give you potentially sustenance but also give you a sense of a win against Mother Nature.
I settle into a spot just down from the cascading water, where the river, or creek in this case, has come back to some resemblance of normal flow after the white water of the rock-creating cascade just above me. Trevor is trying to work the rocks or just below them in a vain attempt to stir up some action.
My success is almost immediate, and soon I am into a very large fish. Unfortunately, it is a carp, but it is a carp of monumental size. I call for my fishing buddy to assist, and he gets to me well before I have the fish near the bank. Several times the fish comes to the surface and then heads back, hopefully, to fight another day, but in this particular case the fight is on at the tip of a rod and with a hook in its mouth.
I suggest to Trevor he grab the net for the final part of the fight, but his perversion of the species suggests to him in his mind that all he needs to do is grab the line and pull the fish out of the water. That might be all well and good if I was using heavy gear, but here in this place I am using lighter gear, and I worry that the size of this fish might very well be outside the parameters of the specifications that came with the line, hook, and sinker.
His insistence that it’s only a carp ends up in failure as the hook I am using, under the strain of the weight of the fish, straightens, and the fish gets away. This annoys me because I struggled with it. I got it to the bank. It was a big fish, potentially ninety centimeters. Now, that’s a big carp, even though it’s a pest, and to lose it was not something that I was in the mood for. But these things happen. That’s fishing, and we get on with it.
But here again, that means we’ve dropped the first fish of the day, which is never a good omen when it comes to fishing with anybody as superstitious as I, when it comes to those things that will or will not happen based on imperfect thoughts. I take my frustration to re-baiting my line and resetting it, hoping the fish might come back for another round.
Shortly after Trevor returns to his spot, now a bit further down the creek, there is all sorts of commotion and him yelling to me to get to him in a hurry, as he now is into a fish. But unlike my carp, he is into a decent-sized cod. In fact, this one might actually put him on the board in the legal cod court scoreboard.
Net in hand, I go about the retrieval of this quite nicely sized fish, it has to be said, from the water. This means I have to lay down on the side of the bank because it’s a metre above the water level. Somehow get the fish in the net, and then keep it in the net as I try and grapple not just a fish but myself back up the bank to the waiting arms of my fishing buddy.
Somehow I managed to eventually get the fish in the net. That was the first thing. The fish a couple of times got out of the net and had to be re-wrangled, but eventually, with the assistance of the man with the rod, we got the fish in the net. We dragged the net and the fish up the bank, high-fived, and then went and got a tape measure because this fish was certainly legal in size. It was, in fact, well over the minimum size and scarily close to the maximum size for the species.
Trevor could now call himself a cod fisherman with a 72 cm specimen that he proudly held up so I could take the obituary photographs for prosperity. With the fish dealt with in the bag, we went back to fishing.
Not getting any bites after the monumental Carp fight at the spot where I started, I moved further down the creek looking for somewhere that if a fight began between fish and angler, I might be able to finish the fight without the need to lay on the side of the bank and try and reach down and net. The grass here is long, and the weeds give away their seeds into your pants, which need to be picked off. I eventually find a spot right on the corner of the creek that appears to actually have been mown and is a spot where I can position lines across the river with a heavy sinker or into the flow of the water with a lighter sinker and let it sit tantalizingly in front of the noses of our prey.
The afternoon whiles away. There is the odd bite, a twitch of a line enough to keep people enthused into staying for just a little while longer to break up the monotony. I continually text the audience of the fishing trip, sledging my fishing partner for assisting in the loss of the big carp, but also regaling his efforts in now being a cod fisherman.
All of a sudden, one of my rods bends alarmingly, and I’m into another fish. For me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cod or a carp; it’s a fish, and fishing is about catching prey, allowing them their chance, and, if needed, returning them to the water or dispatching them should they be the pest. My spot allows me to sit on the bank, use the net, and get what, at this particular point, is a 60 cm carp out of the water. Where I can take pictures of it and dispatch it up the bank as the law provides.
I rebait, replace the line in the water, and almost immediately it twitches again. This time, the fish is nowhere near as dark as the carp when it first breaches the surface. And I myself am into a cod. Unfortunately, though, this one is well short of the legal line and goes back. But both fish become subjects of my camera and head out into the ether to the audience who are many miles away, laughing at the escapades of two city idiots in a country setting.
We call it a day and head home, Trevor, ecstatic that he is now on the list of cod catchers. We settle into a meal of leftovers in the form of lamb fritters. A meal simplistic in its preparation, filling in its ability to fill the need of our hunger. But one which might be frowned on at a city level, where meals like takeaway can be the answer to the hunger question.
There is another football game on tonight, which the house will be happy to watch. But in the meantime, I talk my Aunty Kerre into sitting in front of the microphone and regaling some of the stories of her past, for the book The Unwitting Matriarch.
I have a list of questions and anecdotal memories that I have that I want to use as a prompt, but here I really want her just to talk in order to give me insights into a life well spent. It’s interesting that it becomes quite difficult to get her to think back rather than think the end of any particular anecdote, particularly where we talk about lost family members. The trip down memory lane, at many times, becomes a guilt trip she doesn’t really want to venture upon.
I get 45 minutes of memories before the football starts, which is a good start to this exercise. Hopefully tomorrow we can delve much deeper into some of the questions I want to really ask to build the book I am aiming to write.
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