One thought on “Brook Trout Base Camp

  1. That lad sat around with me and a girlfriend plus his several older and younger brothers and sisters watching a video of Groundhog Day (several times, during the day, we were in effect babysitting) plus other early 1990s cinematic offerings (gun ‘n’ muscles Steven Seagal movies blast across my dimly recalling consciousness) when we were staying with their Mum and Dad, Jane and Mike, at their reassuringly chaotic Esquel family home. We had met that marvellous, older than us by some, couple a few months earlier, just as their still-early years at the original Encuentro (beside the lovely, great Rio Futaleufu, pictured at the movie’s start) still in the Fishing Lodge Learner Phase season was starting.

    Oh, the fun we had there and hysterically funny (fellow souls) socialising with Jane and Mike!

    “You must come back early in the autumn, my darlings … after you have done TDF and the South!” Jane exclaimed. “Stop by here on the way down after Christmas if you like…”

    Biographical Note:

    Boote plus wild-haired woman companion duly did, jumping off a bus from San Martin de Los Andes or Bariloche (Al Pacino plus a very rude English Nun, “Hunters” and its “Top Drawer – Song of A Sinner” finale, anyone?) many dirtroad miles to the Patagonian Desert meets the Andean Cordillera north.

    “What? [The so-and-so’s at that famous fishing lodge] on the Island won’t answer your calls or faxes about a very brief, non-fishing and non-stay, look-around visit? Right, I’ll see about! I’ll phone my very old and good friends the owners in BA right away!”

    She did.

    Sorted.

    Terrific, take no prisoners, Anglo-Argentine lady with an Old Hippy mindset (plus hat complete with deerhair mouse that I’d tied and she fancied) and “I think I need to facepalm now….” fire and flair.

    Mike was English, very English, madcap hysterically funny English in a very understated, so dry some might need a half a minute, sort of way.

    There. I bwt you you hadn’t reckoned on the stuff above. Snapshots via a still very sharp fine memory from a few chapters of a book that I finished writing in the late 1990s (early 2000s, the second version, after a post-events rewrite) but thought, for lots of reasons, both personal and fishy, was probably best not to inflict on a fast-changing fishy world.

    Typed fast, edited little. Hope you got my drift.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *