Telling Stories by Savs

If you stand in front of a certain hotel in Midtown, New York City, and stare directly ahead of you will see in your immediate field of vision no fewer than three Starbucks coffee shops. The entrances of the two most prominent of them will stare you directly in the face and are separated only by a used bookstore, as grey and dog-eared as the books piled up within it. The third is in a narrow side street. Its existence is revealed by the ubiquitous signage that hangs perpendicularly from above its door and the branding on the paper cups in the hands of the serious, unsmiling people walking briskly towards the crossing ahead of you.

The inhabitants of Manhattan take their coffee seriously and it would appear don’t like to travel a long way to find a cup when the craving strikes. In a world where the thoroughly mundane is infinitely customisable the ease with which they order their skinny smoked blonde butterscotch two-pump venti latte with legs is bewildering for a unsophisticated guy from Africa who just wants, without having to overthink it, a little something to knock the spangle off his jet lag.

Something tall, dark and strong enough to eat the enamel off an old tin mug would have suited me fine, but I couldn’t specifically find it on offer. With an eye on the overhead menu and an ear bent toward those in front of me in the hope of plagiarising the first thing that I could make sense of I didn’t notice when my turn came up.

“What’ll it be?”, repeated the barista for the third time, his eyes not once lifting above the register.

“Umm. Oh. A coffee?”, and then in an ultimately futile attempt to fill what was quickly becoming an uncomfortable void in our exchange I threw in a whispered, “please?”.

The guy behind the counter didn’t even look up. He shook his head, muttered audibly, rolled his eyes beneath his baseball cap, contorted his face in mock agony and asked me my name.

“My name?”, I pondered out loud as though it was the first time I’d ever been asked the question. “My name?”. The muttering turned to expletives and the feet of the line behind me started to shuffle threateningly. Feeling no small measure of performance anxiety I shouted out “Frank Sawyer!”, several decibels louder than was absolutely necessary considering that we were three feet apart. I do this when I need to conceal my embarrassment behind a veil of anonymity. Hardly anyone ever gets it and this guy sure wasn’t going to.

Pressing into his hand what amounts to a week’s wages for the guys actually growing, picking and processing the coffee beans I took my place in the by now quite small group of people waiting for their orders.

“Tom”, called out a voice that dripped heavily with whatever tone is the exact opposite of enthusiasm. “Tom! Americano. Black.” I looked around. “Hey, Tom Sawyer, your coffee” growled the barista. He placed extra emphasis on ‘coffee’ and had an unmistakably menacing tone in his voice. Honestly, hardly anyone ever gets it, but at least he tried.

Standing on the sidewalk I took a slug of the brown liquid and tried not to imagine h o w m u c h o f t h e b a r i s t a ’ s m o s t immediately accessible bodily fluids it might contain. The effect of the caffeine was almost immediate and the fugue resulting from the twin horrors of modern intercontinental travel and an alarmingly rapid change in time zones dissipated. I raised my head to orientate myself and set my sights on the hotel lobby across the four lane avenue of death that lay between where I stood and my sanctuary.

The cacophony of the morning commute had reached its crescendo and the road heaved with honking yellow cabs, cubist sanitation vehicles, seventies school busses, restless construction vehicles and sundry other unyielding forms of transportation. As someone who cut his teeth gaming on classics like Frogger the nature of my predicament was as ugly as it was obvious. To make it worse all of the traffic was coming from the wrong side. The invigorating effects of my first sip wore off and I felt a relapse coming on.

Sure, I could have remained on my side of the street from the get-go but there wasn’t a proper coffee shop to be found. My hotel served only that abominable stuff that comes out of a push-button machine and into a small plastic cup. The machine purports to offer six unique coffee formats whereas it’s really all the same liquidised plastic. It could as easily be warmed margarine as anything else.

I did indeed try to find something better on my block. Walking around earlier I discovered on the corner a small tearoom owned by a nice enough Lebanese gentlemen. He clearly seemed to specialise only in lotto tickets, $13 a pack Marlboros and $3 a giant-slice pepperoni pizza. Between the pizza and the cigarettes it was hard to determine which would kill you first and so, with the New York lotto having rolled over that Wednesday to $113 million, I spent my long saved and meticulously budgeted lunch money on two quick-picks. (I didn’t win, in case that’s not obvious, and write to you from a dining room table in a modest home in a very middle class neighbourhood rather than from the deck of a yacht in the Florida Keys.)

Now, given what we can extrapolate from the visible number and geographical dispersion of America’s favourite coffee outlet, I might have, given a long enough period and extraordinary patience, simply stood in front of my hotel and waited for one to open alongside me. You can be absolutely sure that this would have happened, too. Sooner or later.

The point of this anecdote should by now be entirely obvious. It serves to illustrate how ‘dry or die’ flyfishers approach their world.

Do try to keep up.

Where I live trout do not rise to a dry with any sort of regularity. Hatches are sparse, infrequent and, I’m led to believe, happen mainly while we’re drying our boots and preparing our dinner around a fire. Despite this there are those that persist in standing on their side of the road and waiting for their order to come to them. Even more confusing is that they claim from this some sort of aesthetic, if not outright moral, superiority.

The Sensei and I recently spent a long, hard day on a favourite local river. Conditions were good but when you watch a guy who has a cormorant as a spirit animal fish for an hour without reaching for his net the whole enterprise takes on a slightly depressing aspect. In the absence of any movement on our side of the flat reflective surface that divided us and the fish we went to them with moderately weighted nymphs. We eventually managed a to get a couple each but the action was at best intermittent.

Later that afternoon we independently stumbled onto midge hatches. Look, they were far from the ‘cosmic’ hatches that we read about in books but swallows were diving, fish were feeding and we were able to change patterns, extend our tippets and pick off a half dozen each by drifting dries to individual risers.

It’s at times such as these that I am almost tempted to throw in my lot with the dry or die brigade. The thrill of taking sighted fish on long, delicate casts is almost universally considered as being second to none. The only problem is that the opportunity doesn’t present itself too often and that, at least for me, one of the basic underlying objectives of flyfishing is that one should actually catch a few fish more regularly than just occasionally.

No, whether it comes to something as complex as catching trout on a fly or as simple as crossing a busy New York City street for a coffee you’re well advised to follow the advice of blues great Robert Johnson. Get up off your arse and come on in their kitchen*.