The primary time I traveled to Poland I used to be 11 years outdated. It was a couple of yr and a half after communism had fallen and my aunt, who my mom had not seen in fifteen years, was getting married. My brothers and I had been taught no Polish rising up, however by the point we landed in Warsaw we may every repeat a token phrase. Mine was to be delivered to my 92-year-old blue-eyed great-grandmother: “My mom says I’ve your eyes.” Extra helpful would have been: “Please don’t allow us to die.” The journey practically killed all of us in numerous methods. My brothers and I, kids of the antiseptic suburbs of the antiseptic ’80s, weren’t prepared for milk sloshed straight from the cow or water cranked straight from the nicely; we spent many of the journey making an attempt to not soil ourselves, then, when this proved inconceivable, making an attempt to not soil ourselves once we had firm. My father fell in poor health with a fever that peaked to 105 the evening of the marriage and rendered him unable to defend himself from the groomsmen who pulled him from mattress for vodka and dancing. One would possibly suppose my mom would have loved some kind of home-field benefit, however she actually got here closest to demise, struggling a third-degree burn on her leg after mishandling a bath of boiling laundry water, then contracting hepatitis C from the only needle the native clinic used to deal with everybody that got here in that day.
Elevated above my recollections of struggling are these of watching my uncle fish the oxbows of the Wisła River on calm evenings after the marriage festivities had ended. He was tall and tremendously mustached and, regardless of being skinny as a rail, had arms so chronically swollen from farm work he typically broke his cigarettes as he pulled them from the pack. My mom had spoken of his fishing prowess for years, and consequently my fish-obsessed brothers and I regarded his each motion with nice reverence. Whereas he purportedly had some precise rods stashed away someplace, his most well-liked technique of fishing was gillnetting, which he practiced from a home made picket boat that took on water simply slowly sufficient to permit him a single out-and-back expedition. He would row out throughout the black water to put his web, then again off and smoke just a few cigarettes earlier than pounding an oar violently on the floor of the water. The percussion despatched any fish within the neighborhood fleeing straight into his lure: pike, chubs, zander, carp. My brother and I might assist carry the fish dwelling—all the things was stored, irrespective of the species or measurement—then watch our uncle reduce off their heads and thumb out their guts and halo their our bodies with loops of onion; or pack their cavities tight with marjoram, onions, and salt; or put them to sleep within the oven on a mattress of purple peppers and recent cream. A subsistence angler via and thru, he had no use for a fishing license, and had you given him one thing as inefficient for the taking of fish as a fly rod, he would have traded it for vodka and cigarettes. As such I can’t assist however surprise what he would consider me now, again in Poland twenty years later, about to spend fairly a bit of cash to get licensed to fly-fish only for enjoyable.
“Fishing license.” Driving previous a coal plant towards what my American mind needs to name housing initiatives, I’m starting to surprise if license is the proper phrase. The documentation Arek has instructed me to deliver alongside—Polish passport, American passport, notarized beginning certificates, 4 black-and-white 2x2s that make me appear like a younger Stalin—suggests one thing an excellent deal extra critical than the flimsy scrap of plastic that grants me entry to any physique of water within the state of Michigan. And since I’m nonetheless lacking the ultimate required doc—proof of Polish tackle—we’ve to take advantage of a connection within the type of Aga’s father’s buddy, who serves as president of a neighborhood fishing group. And so my entrée into Polish fly fishing begins in a Soviet-era housing complicated and the presidential chambers of the Decrease Silesia Catfishing Membership.
“Do you see the doorway?” Arek says after we circle the complicated twice.
A whistle shrills from the again of a loading space, and out from between a dumpster and a stack of damaged pallets emerges a bald, hulking particular person who introduces himself as Ryszard. There’s little presidential about him, until you rely his bandaged head wound as proof of some poorly sized crown. He leads us to a dank bunker workplace lit by a single bulb hanging from an extension twine. There are bobbers within the pen holders, lead pyramid sinkers for paperweights, a klatch of spinning rods within the nook, outdated throw-nets oozing from the ceiling. The one issues with out instant piscatorial utility are a plate of browning sugar cubes and two life-size posters on both wall, one a calendar that includes a completely siliconized brunette in a black bikini stating, “We’re going farther,” the opposite a closely airbrushed Bruce Willis standing in a discipline of rye carrying a face no American would acknowledge—a smooth smile like he’s about to ask you in for home made eclairs. He’s in that discipline hawking a vodka named for the Sixteenth-century Polish king who saved Europe from the Ottomans. The textual content on the backside of the poster is in English, and I can’t assist however suppose that somebody on the design staff outsourced the interpretation to Google: “It’s the very best vodka I’m aware of.”
The already ruesome getting-legal course of is additional difficult by the truth that Ryszard has solely ever processed licenses for what are referred to in Poland as “lowland rivers”—his is, in any case, a catfishing membership. Since excessive mountain streams, to not point out fly fishing itself, are topic to completely different legal guidelines which might be utterly overseas to him, we’ve to take a seat via countless telephone calls, internet searches, and consultations with dusty reference tomes. Stamps are wanted from this Ziploc bag, holographic stickers from one other. Almost each web page in one of many booklets I should carry requires the affirmation of a violently taloned Polish eagle, inked, blotted, and blown on with nice care. Common presidential cigarette breaks are required, and through considered one of these Ryszard asks, angler to angler, what it’s prefer to catch a fish on a fly rod.
Being the one fly angler in a household of anglers, I’ve a whole lot of expertise with this query, together with the suspicion that informs it. “It feels superb,” I reply, and provide to take him out someday. He accedes, however insists we first go after the Wels catfish of the Oder River, punctuating the invitation by making a chopping movement in opposition to his thigh, like he’s miming the amputation of his leg. It takes me a minute to grasp what he’s doing, however then I keep in mind it’s what my Polish grandfather used to do when speaking concerning the pike he had caught. Whereas an American will maintain his arms out in entrance of you to indicate the scale of a fish, a Pole reveals you the way far the fish would stretch up his leg if its tail had been positioned at his toe. To his provide I reply, “Bardzo podoba mi się”—I’d like to—and imply it, the Wels being one of many fantasy fish of my teenage years. I ponder how one would go about taking one on a fly.
Again on the street, we have fun my new child legality with beer—in Poland it’s authorized for anybody however the driver to drink themselves into any state of intoxication the scenario requires. “Curl your lips over your enamel in order that they don’t chip,” Arek advises. After an hour we cease to pee close to a bridge over a small stream flowing via potato fields. Arek explains that within the Nineteen Eighties the streams of this area ran a distinct colour on daily basis of the week, relying on which chemical dye the Soviet textile factories had been utilizing. “Even this colour,” he says, lifting just a few strands of Aga’s fire-engine-red hair. Every waterway was an ecological useless zone solely void of life—dwelling to not a single aquatic insect, not a single fish.
Picture credit score: Lyons Press.
“However look now,” he says. Within the smooth nightfall a mayfly hatch is underway, and the river seethes with the fleshy porpoises of feeding fish. “Grayling,” Arek smiles. “The massive one underneath that department.” Because of numerous grassroots conservation initiatives, lots of them superior by the small inhabitants of fly anglers within the nation, the rivers are slowly therapeutic. There’s even a twenty-year plan to revive a reproducing inhabitants of Atlantic salmon to Poland’s rivers, fish that haven’t seen their native spawning grounds within the mountainous south of the nation in tons of of years. Arek’s eyes water a bit of as he tells me all this.
“You’re right here on the proper time,” he says.
The sight of sipping grayling stays with me as we drink extra beer and acquire on the darkening mountains. A crescent moon has cleared the treetops once we pull into the farmyard of Arek’s uncle, a chronophobic bachelor who retains geese. I go to sleep on an air mattress in a room with forty clocks. None tick in unison. All rely down one factor: Tomorrow we fish.
“Cloud, fort, creek” is an excerpt from the brand new ebook Calling After Water by Dave Karczynski, obtainable now from DaveKarczynski.com and wherever books are bought.
