The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3
THE A.V. WEIR MEMORIAL CLOUSER
Words and Photo: Ben Mackereth 2024-04-16 08:15:03
Usually surrounded by myriad drying trout flies hanging from hook bend and bucktail, like a mother spider supporting her progeny, the A.V. Weir Memorial Clouser clings tight to the rearview during a rare moment of solitude. Looking forward, looking back.
The hook has no practical place in any fly box. Possibly it’s designed for long-lining cod in the stormy waters of the North Sea or, perhaps, destined to impale squid to lure tuna off some continental shelf.
It was his father’s. That’s all I knew of it before it ended up in Granddad’s magical trinket box. During childhood visits he sat me down, regaling me with stories of the past. Some of his childhood, some of the farm, but mostly of the war. He would take me fishing too.
The stories continued by the estuary while my cousins and I pursued myriad species with crabs gathered at low tide. We giggled and shrieked as one would nip at our fingers. Granddad laughed with explosive guffaws, spraying biscuit crumbs into the afternoon sunlight.
At day’s end, if we were lucky, he would pull out the coveted trinket box. It contained everything a boy could want. Coins, badges, pins, rifle shells, hunting and fishing knickknacks, precious stones and war memorabilia. If we were luckier, he would choose an item for each of us to keep. Granddad could see that I was becoming an incurable fishing addict, and so one time he gifted me the hook.
It’s 5/0 in size and Kendal Kirby in design, both the eye and barb disproportionately large, enough so that the English manufacturer’s name is stamped into the shank, legible beneath 100 years of pitted patina. Too precious to rust away in the saline stew of my tackle box, it lived in my bedside drawer where, at night, I would study it under flashlight, imagining the behemoths I might, someday, catch with it.
Through Granddad’s vibrant stories, war sounded like a big adventure. I was in my teens when the sugar coating wore off.
During a tour of his memorabilia-festooned garage, he pointed to a painted sign alongside a picture of the queen that stated: “I complained because I had no shoes, then I met a man who had no feet.” Reading it aloud, 50 years after the war, he burst into tears inconsolably, remembering a friend who died after his legs were blown off by a land mine on the infamous Kokoda Track.
He spoke of being shot during combat, and of marching through desert with empty canteens and plodding through deep snowdrifts for days, with holes in his leather boots. Of weeks in muddy trenches, being fired on day and night. Of the time he finished sentry duty only for his replacement to be shot dead seconds later. He never outlived the atrocities of the war, waking in terror most nights until his death in 2014 at the age of 93.
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “A cloud never dies.” The metaphor, transcending the elements, suggests immortality, life stretching far beyond concepts of birth and death. Such a life, then, cannot be contained in a handheld urn. Humans, after all, are mostly water.
Named for Grandad, the A.V. Weir Memorial Clouser now hangs from the rearview mirror of my aging Subaru, its chartreuse bucktail faded by years of unrelenting sun, yet somehow retaining life’s vibrance in hair and mylar tied to that ungainly hook.
It travels with me everywhere, and as I cast into clear waters tumbling from the mountains—public water, kept free by Granddad’s sacrifices—it resides in my chest pocket, close to my heart. Here I feel his presence most deeply.
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