On the third cast a bang shoots a tremor through the rod into my forearm and I know that all hell will break loose. The salmon leaves the water, a streak of silver framed momentarily between two white futuristic windmills on a crisp azure backdrop, then crashes back into the river and holds himself in the heavy floodwater in the middle of the pool. I am roughly three kilometres from my car and have seen no one and heard not a vehicle since parking my own, three hours before.
How long since he took the fly? Am I stuck on the bottom? I see a huge tail as his back arcs through the water; then he takes off like a hunted U-boat through the next pool, above and to my right. There is no way past the bushes with the rod in my hand so into the water I slide. He leaps again, 10 metres beyond me, and I haul myself up the bank and over a barbed-wire fence.
I stumble down into a deep drainage ditch, then up and out and a full sprint along the bank. I find myself among pine trees I don’t recognise, and I realise that I have followed the fish into uncharted territory. Are we in the North or the South, Mr Salmon? It’s all right for you; you don’t need to show your passport. Neither do I, not yet anyway, but in 18 months’ time, who knows? There is a loud splash, and the tension in the rod releases like a gunshot in reverse, and I fall on to my back among the rushes.
The wind has dropped, and midges jig through my roots to get to my scalp. Beneath the bridge I pause and behold this season's graffiti: 'Up the RA. We're still here'
Daydreaming. Lost the focus. Lost the salmon of a lifetime. I stay where I fell for a couple of minutes. It’s good after all the excitement to let the acid flow out of my muscles and the water flow out of my boots. The shock of losing the fish is quickly replaced by the sheer joy of the day and the fight and the rush along the bank that left me feeling more alive than anything inside a building ever will.
I rise and push on through the pine trees and follow the river upstream. Eventually I will hit the road, and it will be easier to tramp Tarmac back to my car. Co Tyrone or Donegal? I have no idea. The Border criss-crosses the river here all the way to its mouth at the lake beyond the big forest. In many parts the river itself is the actual Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
I catch a glimpse of stone and concrete up ahead. The wind has dropped completely, and a swarm of midges jig through my roots to get to my scalp. Beneath the bridge I pause and behold this season’s graffiti: “Up the RA. We’re still here.”
During the conflict this bridge became a canvas for painted reminders to anyone likely to forget that they were passing from the North to the South. Messages were not the only thing to be left here. At least twice a missing “informer” turned up on this road. It was a numbingly familiar Troubles image: top half of the body covered by police blanket; jeans and trainers on display for fertile young imaginations to fathom as they finished their chips in front of the news. That was the reality of this Border not so very long ago. The Border that the bad men crossed when they ran for the hills.
As I set off along the side of the road I pass the big black scar in its middle where the crater used to be. Like many small Border roads, this one was mined by the British army in the 1970s. The dual purpose was blocking cross-Border IRA escape routes and trying to curtail some of the vast smuggling operations that took place between the two countries before Britain and Ireland joined the European Economic Community, in 1973.
As kids we were captivated by the romance of the smuggling stories. Butter, sugar, guns, cattle, petrol, nappies, cigarettes, sheep and booze. There will always be a black market between two states with different economic realities. As I cut uphill, and my thighs begin to burn, I laugh at current chat of a possible “porous” border.
Five kilometres of road and two litres of sweat later and I am in the car, my feet beginning to revive on the pedals. I pull over on a long straight road through a burnt-brown bog and take in the Bavarian eyesore that is St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg.
Apart from the windmills on the horizon, nothing in my field of vision is different from how it would have looked to travelling pilgrims 200 years before. Still they come in their droves for the three-day purge in the large imposing building on the small windswept island. Black toast, tea and prayer. Sacrifice paid out in full over God’s counter in return for something I will never understand.
The thought of their efforts kicks my stomach into life and I am on the move again, chewing through the remaining bog like an industrial turf-cutting machine.
In the village of Pettigo, Co Donegal, I pay for my Guinness and my ham sandwiches with a £20 note and receive my change in euro. I will get rid of them at the Linnet Inn in Co Fermanagh later, when I have no car and can enjoy more than the one pint. It wouldn’t be accepted in a Belfast pub, but this fluidity of currency is one of the realities of cross-Border life. It has to be, when people live on one side but work on the other. The pub I sit in hosts another famous Border quirk. The bloody thing runs through the middle of it. It is said that you can drink half your pint in the Republic of Ireland, then walk across the floor to a friend and finish your drink in the United Kingdom.
The roaring flood of the river cuts through my reverie and I salute my grandfather and his comrades, whom I never met but yet somehow grew up with
It has long been rumoured that Pettigo was the inspiration for Spike Milligan's Puckoon. His comic novel is set in a small town split literally down the middle by the bumbling border commission, which fought over the pencil, thus pulling the dreaded line through the middle of pub and graveyard alike.
Back out on the street I wander into the village square to complete my own personal pilgrimage. Underneath the monument to those who fought the British here in 1922, I think of my grandfather and his mate breaking into the shoe shop somewhere behind me in the dead of night to steal new boots. Over my left shoulder is the graveyard where they dug in and where my grandfather’s friend died in his brand-new boots the next morning when the British artillery opened up from across the new Border.
The monument depicts the now classic image of the early IRA man, head to toe in “flying column chic”: puttees, trench coat, reversed flat cap, short-barrelled Lee-Enfield rifle. These weren’t the only combatants on the Irish side over those fateful few days, though.
My grandfather and his volunteer friends fought side by side with troops from Michael Collins’s fledgling Free State Army. These regular Irish troops fought shoulder to shoulder with the IRA anti-Treaty men whom they would soon face in the Irish Civil War. Together, about 100 badly armed young men kept the might of an empire at bay for more than a week. My grandfather joined the Free State Army himself not a month after Pettigo. Like many, he joined for a wage and a bed, not on account of any particular political vision. He wouldn’t even keep a shotgun on the farm in Fermanagh after the Civil War and rarely spoke of his experiences.
The roaring flood of the river not far behind me cuts through my reverie and I salute my grandfather and his comrades, whom I never met but yet somehow grew up with. I retrieve the car and head for the Waterfoot, where the river runs into the majesty of Lough Erne and where the IRA dug trenches and fought the British in a defined battle line.
A flood like this could have the big harvest trout running to spawn, and I might as well give it a throw while there is still some light left in the sky. But when I shove through the dense hazel thicket, the chocolate-brown torrent tells me there will be no more angling today.
Back behind the wheel again I turn the news on and head for home. Brussels, Barnier, Boris, Brexit. Nothing has changed since I stepped off the world for a day, then. I wonder if my future excursions to my favourite river will be so straightforward. The quickest route home from here means crossing the Border at least twice more before I get my hands on that lovely second pint.
Ciarán McMenamin is the author of Skintown, published by Black Swan Ireland
