Slow Fishing the Fresh Waters of Italy Nicklas Laurentzson’S Fly Fishing Log Book
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Slow Fishing the Fresh Waters of Italy Nicklas Laurentzson’s Fly Fishing Log Book MICHAEL L. SENA Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 2 C OPYRIGHTED , 2017 B Y G R E E N H O R SE P U B L I S H I N G C OMPANY V ADSTENA , S WEDEN JULY 2017 Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 3 Dedication This book is dedicated to all my mentors who have helped me choose the paths I have walked and the rivers I have fished. Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 4 Prologue FLY FISHING LORE IS FILLED WITH STORIES about chalk streams in England and Pennsylvania, freestone brooks in Vermont, salmon rivers in Norway and Iceland, brown trout waters in New Zealand and wild rainbow streams in Montana. The literature is not populated with tales of catching trophy trout and grayling in the rivers and streams of Italy. I had never heard of it before I happened to be in Italy on 25 March 2011 when suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, and, as fate would have it, I met someone old enough to be my father who knew a thing or two about catching fish with a fly. He was also knowledgeable about food, architecture, politics and personal relationships, all subjects to which I had not given much thought during my thirty-one years, spent mostly in Sweden. That was five years ago. Fishing for me back then was the only way I could take my thoughts away from what had happened thirteen years earlier. I blamed myself for the deaths of my parents and nothing anyone could say could convince me otherwise. I wanted them back. I knew it wasn’t possible, but that fact did not stop me from wishing. After the funeral, an idea came to me of how I could keep other sons and daughters from losing their parents as I lost mine, and the idea was what got me though university and into my first job. My first and only employer promised to let me work on my idea for as long as I stayed with the company. I never imagined that the company would not always be there. Without a job—THIS job—I would not be able to do what I HAD to do. Sofi, the only woman I had let into my life after my parents died, believed I would work and fish less, and enjoy life more, if we had a child. She was, and still is, a wonderful and loving person, but I could never explain to her in a way that she could understand that I didn’t want to work less because there was something more important than anything, including our relationship, that I had to finish, and I needed to fish in order to give my brain a rest from the guilt. Even though we had not lived together since I rejected the idea of starting a family with her five years before, she was then my best friend, and Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 5 I continued to rely on her for support when I reached my deepest levels of exhaustion and depression. Catching fish using flies, which is the way I have always fished, rather than with bait or lures, requires your full concentration, from deciding where and when to fish, reading the water, selecting the fly—wet or dry, imitation or attractor—to presenting the fly, hooking, playing, landing and releasing the fish. It's like the difference between taking a walk in the woods and using it as a time to think about how to solve a problem with a co-worker or a friend or a partner, versus concentrating while you are walking on spotting birds or discovering where the mushrooms are hiding. In fact, I believe that most of us who fly fish intensely, as I did five years ago, do so to avoid thinking about anything else, especially thoughts that hurt, like the death of a loved one or separation from a partner, or thoughts that cause anxiety, like deciding whether to make a commitment to start a family. At least that’s what I have found. People who try fly fishing and give it up don't usually do so because they don't catch fish or feel it’s a waste of time; they leave it because they don't have a reason to block out the world. Or if they do, they find that drugs or alcohol are faster, more effective or just easier. It was pure coincidence, then, that led me that day in March, 2011 from a life that was destined to be an unhappy one to having a life today that balances work, family and fishing in a way that in Sweden we call lagom, just right. The process of change started with me having to take a forced vacation because my company could not pay my salary. I was working in the automobile industry, which turned out to be the wrong industry to be in at the wrong time. The worst global recession since the Great Depression had started eighteen months before, in the autumn of 2009. People had stopped buying cars. Large automobile companies like General Motors and Chrysler had to declare bankruptcy. My company, Saab, a small Swedish car producer, had been sold by General Motors in January 2010 to a Dutch businessman named Victor Muller, who owned another car company called Spyker Cars. Saab had not made a profit since 2001. After he took over Saab, Muller spent all the money he was able to scrape together to keep Saab running, but the money was running out and the bad news was arriving in a steady stream. Finally, Muller was out of options. We would all be out of our jobs. I had Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 6 tried hard to push the thought of Saab closing and me being unemployed out of my mind. When it finally arrived in a phone call from my boss, I definitely felt the only thing I could do was to go fishing. During those few weeks of fishing, with the help of my new companion, Alessandro, his friends whom we met in ten of Italy’s twenty regioni, and his goddaughter, Raffaella, an accomplished fly fisher who had her own reasons for fishing, I gradually began to see myself and the world around me differently, more positively. I was with people who were filling the voids that had been in me since that night thirteen years before when I became an orphan, and I was becoming a whole person. Fly fishing for me today has become a passion, not an escape, one that I share with my loved ones. I have other passions, too, like cooking, and I have a new vocation, which still involves helping people but not in order to mollify my own conscience. I invite you to come along with me to experience my transformation and perhaps learn a few things along the way about the food and the fishing in a beautiful part of the world called Italy. Nicklas Laurentzson Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 7 Nicklas Laurentzson’s Fly Fishing Log Book 25 March to 24 April 2011 Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 8 Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 9 Chapter One Unaware MY MOBILE PHONE RANG while I was eating a hard boiled egg in its shell. This morning was Friday, March 25, 2011 and I was also in the middle of a Maureen Dowd editorial in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE. A cup of hot water with a tea bag in it was brewing under a saucer holding an espresso cup half-filled with hot milk, itself covered with another saucer on which was perched a little breakfast portion jar of honey. The breakfast room personnel at the NH Hotel in Trieste had learned after repeated failed attempts to clear this tower of cups, saucers and jars, thwarted by my quick, firm, but friendly ‘No. It’s not finished.’, to leave it alone until I had taken it down myself, removed the tea bag, poured the milk into the tea cup, placed the used tea bag into the now empty espresso cup and spooned in a small amount of honey. Depending on how interesting the TRIBUNE was on that particular morning, and whether I was concentrating on food or thought, the brewing process, which I had learned during my very first visit to China four years earlier, might last the recommended two-to-three minutes or many more. I had certainly passed the five minute brewing mark when I pushed the answer button on my ringing Nokia phone. “Pronto!” I said jokingly. The caller line identification gave the caller away. “Nicklas?” asked the voice on the other end of the line. “Is that you?” “Si, si,” I continued. It was my manager, Lars. He was always so serious and easily confused, but never irritated, by my silly pranks. He was a really decent person who worked hard, supported his staff and did everything he could to make us feel like our work was appreciated. He had spent his entire life with the company, having grown up in Trollhättan. His father was an undertaker, just as his father before him had been an undertaker. Lasse, as everyone called him, decided he would do something else, so he studied automotive engineering at Chalmers in Göteborg, returned to Trollhättan with Slow Fishing The Fresh Waters of Italy Page 10 his degree in hand and went to work at the biggest employer in town.