Against the Flow by Tom Fort

Author:Tom Fort
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407057644
Publisher: Random House

The Otava near Sušice was no better. Unlike the Milava campsite on the Poprad, the Annin campsite where Tomáš, Standa and I had stayed was still in business, but its haphazard distribution of cabins, tents and caravans now struck me as scruffy rather than picturesque. Its main attraction, the river, had been ruined by someone deciding it would be a good idea to drag a dredger along it and dump the spoil in an unsightly levee along the bank. Dank and dreary weather added to my sense of melancholy. Families shrouded in raincoats wandered around under the dripping branches. Dads played soggy games of football with their sons. Radios tinkled from inside tents and caravans. I didn’t see anyone fishing.

I went up through the little village with its church and steeple in search of the bridge and the pool where the trout had obliged. The bridge was gone, washed away by a flood, leaving two jagged ends and chunks of masonry strewn across the riverbed. I stood on the new wooden footbridge that had been strung across the water, looking downstream, trying to work out how my picture fitted. There was a pool, but it was six times bigger than it should have been. There was no beech, no gentle curl of water, but a strong, deep flow the colour of stewed tea. There was no hatch of insects. Not a trout showed itself.

I felt I should go through the motions, so I pulled on my waders and spent half an hour covering the lower half of the pool. I caught nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. There was none of that sense of latent life that a fisherman draws from a river just by being in it, even when the fish are not feeding. The spirit I had found there before was absent; whether permanently or not, I cannot say.

I finally caught up with Tomáš by phone a few weeks after I got back to England. He and Jarka were living in a village a few miles east of Litvinov. They had both prospered since leaving the petro-chemicals industry. He was working for Ford, testing cars; she had a job in the electricity supply industry. They had built themselves a big house. Tomáš told me at some length about how big their swimming pool was. He still fished occasionally for pike and carp, he said, but had never been back to the Mže and the Otava. He had heard they were no good any more: too many fishermen, too much poaching.

I asked after the expert on Bohemian trout streams. Tomáš said they had lost touch. The last he’d heard, Standa was not well; too much smoking, probably. Tomáš said he came to England once or twice a year, on business. I urged him to give me a call so that we could meet up and have a drink, but I haven’t heard from him yet.

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