Interview with Wolf Avni

CATCHING UP WITH WOLF AVNI

"I get to sit like an old yogi under a banyan tree, plotting the lines of latitude and longitude of the human navel. Turns out it is as marvellous or mundane, as inspirational, or as depressing, as fine or as futile as one chooses to experience it."

I walked through to the lounge to find my father sitting on the couch holding a copy of Wolf Avni’s first book, A Mean-Mouthed, Hook-Jawed, Bad-News Son-Of-A-Fish on his lap. He was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “This guy”, he told me, “is clever. He can really write.” That stayed with me., the fact that we recognised the same thing from the writing - a sense that while it was entertaining it was challenging and, well, clever.

Wolf has been a part of the South African flyfishing landscape for as long as most of us can remember. Some will know him as a newspaper columnist and others as an angler, host, photographer, writer, ecologist, trout war campaigner or breeder of quality fish.

He has a mind and a wit sharper than a Minora blade and doesn’t suffer fools. We are however grateful that he made an exception and suffered this one over a conversation that lasted several days. It left me profoundly touched by his wisdom, intellect and authenticity.

SAFFM: Hi Wolf, I need your help, or at least a little of your time. In every edition of Flyfishing we profile someone involved in the sport. We would really like to include you in this issue. We can meander where it takes us?

Wolf Avni: Y o u r c o n t a c t s e t m e reminiscing. When did It start? 1954! It started in 1954. Fuck me! Never thought I’d live to be a million. Sure. Let’s weave another narrative of it. Never read one yet woven tight enough yet to keep the inside in and the outside out. Nothing but the facts. Make ’em up as we go along. Change them to protect our innocence. The teller, the listener. We travel through time in circles. Round and round and round we go.

Think we are up for challenge?

SAFFM: I do enjoy a challenge, but let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. Have you ever put a rifle round into the bank above a chubby Greek guy who was poaching the Umzimkhulu on what he thought was a quiet weekday?

Wolf Avni: Was that a chubby Greek? Could have sworn it was a rabbit. That scope must need replacing. And anyhow, m y s t e w a r d s h i p h e r e i s o n t h e Umzimkulwana, a mere tributary of the river you speak of. It’s miles away, downstream. Out of range.

SAFFM: Umm. Ok then, let’s move along.

You’re a farmer, photographer, fisher, writer. I first ran across you through your first book and I was gobsmacked that someone could write of fishing so differently. I think of you as a writer but I’m also a weeping, screaming, panty-throwing fan of your photography. Are you all things at once or do you have to consciously break from one to the other? Do they talk to one another?

Wolf Avni: D o y o u r e m e m b e r t h a t number... “every day in every way, learning more, the more I learn the less I know about before“?

I’m not sure the stuff we do necessarily defines who we are? At its end, what we did probably counts for less than the how we did it. All those things you name are merely arenas in which creativity, for its own sake, chose to play.

I wish I could offer a meatier substance. Some fairytale of clear intent. Lifelong vision of high purpose. But the fact is most of what transpires along the way is more the result of grace than any real mastery.

We travel in circles and right now photography is proving very satisfying. I left commercial photography back in the 80’s, to come to the farm. But back then, the mysteries of trout and their proper husbandry were the things.

SAFFM:

1954. Where did it all start?

Wolf Avni: I caught my first fish from Mayden Wharf in 1954. A spotted grunter, Kyphophus bigibus or something. There is an account in ‘Meanmouth’ - "Politics of Fortune”? Can’t remember, but it actually started before that, on Oupa’s farm in the Zeerust, trying to catch goldfish in a cement dairy dam, still a toddler.

I don’t fish too much now. Got to a place where felt I’d caught anything of value I was ever going to by pulling a hook through the water. That hoary old chestnut? The fish are incidental? Turns out they really are, but it took me a couple of lifetimes to get it, viscerally. Being there is the thing. Whether by fly rod, camera or keyboard, they really are just devices. Pretty crude ones at that.

Fishing of every kind has served me well in that it provides a wormhole between the mundane and the magical, a portal by which to enter into a rich universe of the broader ecology, which we are integral to, and yet, somehow deeply alienated from in our material lives. In an age of obedient consumption and industrial efficiency as measures of aspirational value, fishing is one of very few avenues of connection with ancestral, genetic memory.

But then I guess you could say the same about photography. Or writing for that matter?

SAFFM: I get what you mean. Where somehow the things that one does are not ends in themselves but are vehicles for something else. I think that creativity generally, music or art are like that. Fishing certainly. The process is more revealing than its outcome.

Maybe this is some of the allure in trout fishing? Trout have an aura or something about them that is deeply captivating. I mean, a lot of it is bullshit, but there is something there. It’s not like many carp fishermen feel compelled to compose flowery prose about them - and they’re a lot harder to catch.

Wolf Avni: Outcomes are unpredictable and destinations are over-rated in the sense of where we focus. If it is true that I only can see what I look at, can only find what I look for, then surely it follows that the further down the road I fix my point of focus, the more my immediacy is filtered right out of awareness, and into superficiality.

As to why trout? How do they become a metaphor for all the aspirational longing of the essential inner savage? And..... GO!

Tom has had his say. I’ve had my say. In fact, every Schmutz who ever wafted a fly has thrown a hat in the ring, some with a soucance of wit, some poetic, some lyrical. Mostly it’s hyperbole and plagiarism though. Intimately we all tell a same story, be we anglers or be we not. Just that each of us tells it in an own unique language, as individual as a fingerprint, no two identical.

In its own way flyfishing is just a quixotically elegant act of civic subversion.

SAFFM: Yup. I, for one, know that I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said a thousand times before by a thousand guys far more competent than I am.

Wolf Avni: Things change. I remember one of the better Dylan interviews, when looking back on the influence of his music on the environment, he made the point that whatever individual works may, or may not have meant, with the passing of time and the warping of space, the meaning changes. Creativity is not unlike Higg’s boson. It cannot be pinned down, its appearance in one or other place cannot be predicted, but its path can be followed by measuring the influence of its gravitational waves on the particles whose orbit it cannons through.

Wolf Avni: Of course. Which is why dictatorship always comes with censorship. It’s a futile attempt to perpetuate itself in the face of subversion. What makes it subversive? Its insistence that freedom of thought exists sovereign unto itself. You may attack its manifestation in one or other entity, but though you destroy the material entity, the energy of it cannot be contained or undone. Nothing of itself is significant beyond the significance we imbue… which brings us back to that we do this shit not because it is so terribly important, but because the range of available options presented as worthy of e n g a g e m e n t , a r e a l l s o t e r r i b l y unimportant.

In its own way flyfishing is just a quixotically elegant act of civic subversion. Like the fish itself; regenerating by swimming against the flow?

SAFFM: Do you think that you’ll ever find the perfect photon or arrangement of them? Your recent images, those mistdrenched landscapes are breathtaking in their simplicity. You’re using a lot of technology. Does this change the process?

Wolf Avni: As to the perfect photon? Same as the perfect note. Will you ever strike one perfect, pure, eternal note.... or will you only ever reach for it?

Every photon is already perfect. Every note too. One reaches for it through the experience of one's own circumstance of less-than-ideal. It is the reaching itself, rather than any grasping of it.

SAFFM: The trout wars. The fight seems to have been re-framed as a contestation of ideologies. Is this all it ever was? It must concern you more than most. For me it’s just a form of recreation but for you it’s a livelihood.

It’s part of a broader thrust of ideology which intends to vest all rights of all resources in government. Each and every activity will be by way of licence, which, while ostensibly available equally to any citizen, practically will be by way of patronage and affiliation with structures of power.

The trout war is just a little preliminary skirmish in what is actually a concerted attack on the essence of the constitution. How it ends I don’t know. That it must be resisted with every available resource, completely independent of whether the

fight is being won or lost, I do know.

The biological purists present constructs based on emotive and ideological interpretations with no basis in evidence. Of course there are elements of truth in the PC construct. Nothing is ever entirely one thing or another. Layers, nuances, contexts are dynamic. Where there is evidence of destructive impact of course responsible stewardship demands action, but all the so called evidence for the invasiveness of trout in South African water is based on work done in foreign places which in no way translate.

© wolfavni

Do trout have an impact? Undeniably. But any impact trout have had in the streams and catchments they were put into happened a hundred years ago.

Are they responsible for the destruction and denudation of riverine habitat and ecologiy? Sure! But on the scientists own list of ecological factors, alien predator fish appear as number eight on a list of ten prioritised threats.

In and of themselves their presence is neither good, nor bad, but as an indicator of associated human activity which brings changes to the ecology of a system, in the context of recreational angling... behaviours and associated activities all contribute to aggregations of change in utilisation, which may be destructive.

Surely you have followed the points of debate in this over the past twenty years? Cox has unpacked it, Lax has unpacked it, I’ve had a shy at it. Have you been under a rock, or what?

When the cumulative effects of catchment change, including logging, water extraction, nitrification via agricultural practices, i n d u s t r i a l i s a t i o n a n d i n f r a s t r u c t u r e development is when the rivers began the process of eutrophication.

Ironically enough, in this regard the trout might be said to be an indicator species. T h e y a r e a m o n g t h e f i r s t t o s h o w deterioration of stream ecology. Trout only do well in healthy waters

The crux of the battle with DEA is more about their complete disregard for constitutional process and good faith engagement with legitimate stakeholders and civic structures.

I’m so bored with that whole civic engagement role. Give me a day and I’ll troll through files and find you a quotable soundbite.

SAFFM:

Apathy is a powerful force.

Wolf Avni: We create narrative and then fall so in love with it, that we forget we are mere figments of our own imagination, made in the image of whatever it is we exalt. We exalt some weird shit.

SAFFM: H o w d i d y o u l a n d u p i n Underberg farming trout? Did it just happen or was it planned?

Wolf Avni: How does anybody land up anywhere? I guess an arbitrary intersect between opportunity and preparedness? I have plausible narratives, but in looking back, such things come to fruition not through any particular cleverness, but despite its absence. Grace, as always, plays a hand.

I had a vision of a life for myself and my family a little more meaningful and real than I could ever aspire to as a conceptual photographer servicing corporate needs for persuasive and manipulative imagery. Saw a half an opportunity and took the gap.

SAFFM: Yes, I saw a photo of your dam earlier this year and my heart shrank. At what point does it become unsustainable? Trout range in the Cape has diminished in the last decade or so. I don’t think in KZN that we’re headed yet to the stocking practices of some provinces?

Wolf Avni: T r o u t r a n g e h a s s h r u n k drastically, not just in the Cape, but KZN, Mpumalanga and everywhere else in Southern Africa. It gives a lie to claims of their invasiveness. In this country their survival range continues to shrink, not expand.

At its most narcissistic, the SA trout “product” is as plastic as a McDonald’s foot-long offal burger. An army of aspirants demanding manicured access to instant gratification is met by an army of willing sellers, not quite sure of what it is they are selling, but it is a space easily occupied by carpetbaggers and shamateurs.

SAFFM: Y o u r d a m i n G i a n t s C u p Wilderness Reserve is considered especially difficult.

Wolf Avni: Part of what makes our dam so technically “hard” is that it is not a dam at all, but merely a vast hole in a river. The fish respond to the perpetual changes, which occur on an entirely different energy budget to a usual water impoundment - more dynamic, over a wider spectrum. Food forms include all the usual suspects, but in broader diversity. Every time you think you have cracked a code it up and becomes something else.

SAFFM: How much has changed in your four decades in the industry? In terms of the fish as well as the angler.

Wolf Avni: That’s the kind of question it’s easy to throw a glib answer at and it would be equally easy to get entirely consumed by the devil of detail.

When I came here a lifetime ago, my own vision for it was pursuit of an ideal founded in an idea where perfectly wild fish would fin their lives away in a perfectly healthy, well balanced, natural ecology surrounded by unspoiled montane grassland catchment. Eland and oribi would roam the hills, raptors would patrol the skies and we who angle would gravitate towards the archetypal ideal so eulogised in a literature going back two thousand years.

The eland are still here and the hills are still roamed by an ark-load of wild creatures. Fish eagles, lammergeyers , black eagles, et al still soar the thermals and nest in the cliffs. Shadows glimpsed of yard-long rainbows still surface in tales taken away by passing anglers.

I digress. Nothing has changed, yet everything is different. The broader landscape has eroded into an entirely different planation along entirely predictable and visible fault lines. The opportunities are not the same, nor are the challenges. I look at our early visitor books and read entries from hands that are four out of five either dead, or now living in Aus, NZ, or Canada. Where once our guests were 90% angler and 10% ‘other’ we now have far more birders, hikers, photographers and trail bikers. (One would think cyclists are quite hated enough without needing to go vegan or infest the wilderness, but no.)

Trout have gone from hero to zero, from being a metaphor of nobility to a becoming a symbol of recidivism, invasive colonialism. In the national-socialist corridors of invasion biology the trout has become the Jew and DEA have their plans for a final solution.

So nothing has changed. I’d like to say that innocence has been lost, and while that is no lie it’s not the truth either. No one comes to the table with hands entirely clean, none of us gets out of it alive. Which brings us full circle - we have at best an illusion of control, or influence over how the winds blow but we do get to choose what sails we travel under, and how we shall set them. It’s not much. It’s only everything.

Wolf Avni: One thing has changed. I have. Turns out when I came here I knew next to nothing and little of what I thought I knew remains.

I have learned an extraordinary amount about the biology and environmental exigencies of teleosts in general and salmonids in particular. I have gained a working insight into aquatic ecology and the principles of how energy flows through and is stored in natural systems and I have watched how we each weave narrative based on an inner personal mythology, each unique in itself, populated with its own heroes and villains, inflated and conflated with all the hubris and nonsense we can breathe individually into the images we hold of ourselves.

Nothing has changed. We each come charged with an infinite potential, and we each come with an own arsehole in default working mode.

Now that the kids do all the heavy lifting and day to day grinding, I get to sit like an old yogi under a banyan tree, plotting the lines of latitude and longitude of the human navel. Turns out it is as marvellous or mundane, as inspirational, or as depressing, as fine or as futile as one chooses to experience it.

This life is perfection.... only never ideal. Long live DESPITE!

SAFFM: Do you think that social media is driving behaviour as much as mirroring it? Things change and it’s just a reflection of the change?

Wolf Avni: For me fishing has never been a particularly social arena. On the contrary, for me it plays at it purest as a solitary communion rather than from a pew in a church choir.

Seeing the narratives that others tell of filial bond and deep companionable experience it becomes evident that for some the benefice is in the sharing of it, rather than the experience itself. For me it was always more about unconditional immersion, presence in the present. Or at least, aspiration towards that.

Same with writing, same with photography. It simply is just not one thing with a clear identity, the rod, the fly, the camera... language itself... these are just devices which the universe uses to play with us. And we then elevate ourselves in terms of whatever mythology we base our telling on.

SAFFM: You getting out any time soon? The rivers will be wonderful into autumn, I would think.

Wolf Avni: You are missing Henry David Thoreau - “Many men go fishing all their lives, never knowing it is not fish they are after?”.

SAFFM: I’ve read Thoreau. He’s an interesting guy, in his way. I relate to a lot of it, not at all to some of it and the rest leaves me wondering.

Wolf Avni: one truth Just an agile mind. There is no

SAFFM: My philosophy of life has been distilled to “try not to be a dick”.

Wolf Avni: The delusion stems from a consciousness rooted in a perceived duality to everything. We want things specific, an either or an or, whereas the true nature of all things on the most material of levels is you don’t get one without the other. No light without dark, no good without bad, just energy caught in particulate dances. We are always the significance we so desperately strive to find. If nothing else the universe has a muscular sense of humour.

And don’t be so hard on yourself. Understand that dicks are very useful and can be highly desirable too. Just try and be the same dick so at least you don’t keep springing nasty surprises of despicable on yourself - It’s called integrity I think?

SAFFM: damnit? Are you fishing this autumn,

Wolf Avni: I shall watch others fish and blank and fish and blank and fish again. I shall even reach for my rod and think to subjugate another Leviathan, but in the end my hand will fall rather on a camera and I will cast my line at photons, I guess. It is a less predatory engagement, though the hunt just as fierce and the challenge, fiercer.

How many fish must I catch for it to be enough? Dunno. Lost count. Gave up trying to be smarter than a fish. Don’t have the cranial capacity for a fair contest?

We reach, whatever the instrument, for one pure, absolutely free, perfect note. The reaching is the thing... everything else is so arb... so incidental. Fishing really is a perfect metaphor for everything... down to the snap of fragile tippet in every mismatch.

SAFFM: SA trout is now an ‘industry’. It always was one, I suppose, but there are a lot of people with their livelihoods pegged to it now.

Wolf Avni: Nothing changes.

In 1598 by Thomas Bastard we read: “Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent. Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and what ye why? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.” - Seven Books of Epigrams

SAFFM: I love that one. We abhor crowding but see ourselves distinctly apart from the crowd. We forget that we are never in traffic, we are traffic.

Wolf Avni: More! Every poetic alliteration we let loose on the world serves to create and direct that traffic.

SAFFM: Music. Did you ever put some strings on that lovely old Yamaha 12 string?

Wolf Avni: Yes. It came in from exile and now lives in the bedroom. Indeed we travel in circles.

To be focused on the content, rather than merely skilled at conjuring an optic puts one at odds with modern currency. It marks you as a strange fish, ever swimming against the flow. The conflict arises in inescapable contradiction between the hardwired need to belong like any old sheeple, and yet to grow and feed the creative unique own godhood.

SAFFM: Belonging is a fundamental human need.

Wolf Avni: Yeah until go along to get along becomes life’s song. What price integrity? I see us in the plains Indian construct. Each of harbours two inner beasts. A wolf of light and a wolf of dark locked in a fight to the death. Which one wins? The one you feed.

SAFFM: Let’s get back on track. After the last drought you were outspoken about not reseeding rivers. As I understood it this was a natural selection type argument where the ‘fittest’ fish remained alive and are good for the gene pool.

Wolf Avni: Yes. The pattern is predictable. and if the river gets to a point where it cannot bounce back, well, it may not be appropriate to have trout.

My position isn’t exactly as you frame it, but in broad terms a system will support a biomass appropriate to the niche it fills. If numbers are increased the average biomass per unit will perforce decrease. If numbers decrease, the average biomass per unit must increase. Thus after a drought and natural reduction in numbers the remaining fish fill the available niche taking on the available biomass.

To phrase it differently; if my water can support ten kilograms of apex predator fish and I have ten fish the average weight will be one kilogram. If I have a hundred fish the average will be one hundred grams and if I have one fish it will average ten kilograms. This is a bit linear but it makes the point.

SAFFM: Understood. With the exception of what I think was called your ‘Gropper’ the one thing I can’t remember you writing about much is the tying of flies. Do you tie much?

Wolf Avni: I wrote a piece that was published in the first or second FOSAF 'Guide To” books. It was a bit of satire. I presented the WWWWW or Wolf’s Wonderful Weighted Wooly Worm. I get a bit irritated at all the derivation and adoption of styles and techniques presented as conceptually original and tagged with a personal claim.

SAFFM: I’ve designed dozens of new flies only to discover that they’ve existed for a few generations before me.

Wolf Avni: I tied some killer patterns, invoking principles rather that checklists of ingredients. I took a spectacularly pragmatic view of tying and tied not for any particular love of it, but because it was the only way to access the things I wanted to fish. These were the sparse, tiny creatures the fish were feeding on. I found bought flies mostly too bulky and disproportionate.

You can just look them up. It was volume one of ‘Favoured Flies and Select Techniques of the Experts’. The irony is they got someone else to tie the patterns for the photographs and his version of the fly was nothing like the samples I sent. The essence of the pattern is sparseness and proportion, which he entirely just did not get. He tied his fly.

SAFFM: I guess that’s creativity, you throw it out into the universe and need to let it find it’s own way.

Wolf Avni: As you say, you just have to let it go, find it’s own way in the universe. Generally opportunity is continuous. But without some kind of preparedness in anticipation, the opportunity may present, but is not recognised, except in retrospect.

SAFFM: I remember the articles that you did with macro photography of flies and bugs. Is this just a convergence of two interests or would you be interested in either of them independently? I ask because you speak of the essence of your fly patterns.

Wolf Avni: The photography was its own thing. It just wasn’t the only thing. Just all a muscular curiosity... I guess?

SAFFM: It’s a real deep dive into it for just a reflexive curiosity. I hear Latin words and run screaming.

Wolf Avni: I w a s j u s t r e s p o n d i n g t o opportunity. Trying to think of something insightful to say but I’m fresh out.

Wolf Avni: I k n e w I h a d m o v e d o n somewhere else when I gave my son my Orvis XLS, 3 weight, only ever fished once when I bought it early 90’s. I liked it just fine, but it didn’t stand a chance against my Orvis Western 9’3” 3 weight. Gave it to him last xmas

My favourite river rod is a 7ft Orvis Otter. That Western punched a full 3 weight line straight through the wind. Perfect for Natal still waters. Caught me a good couple 75cm fish on it. The Otter though, a different, delicate stick.

SAFFM:

Wait. Back up. 75cm?

Wolf Avni:

Yip! - once upon a when.

But I’ve given up on trying to make the case that the fish enjoy it as much as we do.