mackerel is held aloft. It’s still wriggling as the bird carefully maneuvers it down its gullet. We hear voices coming from behind us, back inside the apartment complex. A second later my phone buzzes. It’s a message from Rupert. Back to the car, it says. RUPERT HARVEY has been tying flies since he was 10 years old. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to an English father and an Irish mother, both of whom were brought up in what was then Rhodesia. When he was 2 years old, the family moved to a ranch in the middle of the Amazon. Despite photographs he has of his mother with local tribespeople, and of him and his brothers lying in hammocks in the jungle, he doesn’t remember that part of his life. The truth is, he hardly remembers his mother, either. It was while they were in the Amazon that she became ill. Her cancer diagnosis prompted a move to Pittsburgh so that she could receive treatment; when she died six months later, his father took his three sons—all of them under 10 years old—to England, where he found a job working on a dairy farm. Three years later, the family moved back to South Africa. When you meet Rupert today and hear his story, it’s tempting to think you can detect the aftereffects of this early life. There’s a quietness about him, a sensitivity. He’s intensely camera shy, yet in conversation he’s strik-ingly open. His willingness to connect—and particu-larly to laugh—with others makes him good company. (“There’s a name in South Africa for guys like me,” he says. “I’ve got one foot in England and one in South Africa, and the bit in between dangles in the sea, so that makes me a soutpiel. It translates as ‘salty dick.’”) He gives the impression of not taking anything too seriously except for his role as husband and father. And then, of course, there’s his tying. Perhaps as a 10-year-old who’d only recently moved back to the country of his birth, he was bound to latch onto something. So it was when he saw another boy at school tying flies. He sat down beside him and watched, fascinated. A few weeks later he asked his father to buy him a starter kit. THE FLYFISH JOURNAL 055
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 15.4: Page 53
