April 2006 – Lifelong working

Having spent the last week salmon fishing in Scotland, having caught a fish and put it back to start again, it was difficult to avoid some affiliation with the toils of Sisyphus, condemned forever to push a rock up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down where his labour would begin once more in a never ending cycle of toil, triumph and renewed effort.

Albert Camus, as a far as I know was never a fisherman, but I think he would have found inspiration in spring salmon fishing, particularly when contemplating the Sisyphus myth where he recognised that the ordeal, supported by a constant sense of hope, would have generated in Sisyphus a consciousness of happiness.

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night,” he wrote, concluding that: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

The Sisyphus myth does not tell us the things that went through his head as he pushed that rock. But, if my fishing experiences are typical, I would guess that he spent a lot of his time trying to work out how best to get his burden up the hill, working on his pushing technique, imagining the satisfaction of reaching the top and looking forward to that brief moment of joy before the whole process needed to be repeated.

Camus was fascinated by the emotions that Sisyphus would have experienced on his return to the foot of the mountain. “I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour, like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock,” he wrote.

Up to last week one thing that might have continued to puzzle me, is the question of whether Sisyphus had succeeded or failed in his task. Reaching the top certainly feels like success, but watching that stone roll down to the bottom looks a lot like failure. Sisyphus, I am sure, had reached a sense of equilibrium where he could, as Rudyard Kipling put it: “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”

In his essay on Sisyphus, Camus discussed the close relationship between absurdity and happiness. Again this was apparent when fishermen on different river beats retired to the local bar and began discussing their mixed fortunes. Most of these people were running their own businesses, spending large sums of hard earned money, standing day after day in a cold river, swishing an imitation fly over water that might or might not contain a fish.

The absurdity of this earning/spending cycle would be understood by golfers who are equally willing to spend large sums of cash whacking little white balls over grass towards a hole. Each hole is its own contest within the round and memories of the under-par triumphs soon eclipse the multi-putted disasters on other holes.

Some golfers are fortunate to have the assistance of a trainer or a knowledgeable caddy. The salmon fishing equivalent is the ghillie. I have come to know many ghillies over the years. They seem as ageless as the rivers that dominate their lives.

David, the ghillie who was helping our party last week, rarely betrays his emotions but he did admit to some frustrations about his future. “They’re knocking me off at the end of the year,” he told me. He was referring to the estate managers who are seeking to retire him now that he has reached the age of 67.

I was surprised to hear his age. I would have thought about 60 if pressed to guess. “They’re worried about what it would mean if I fell ill,” he said.

Unlike one or two gillhies I have known, David is not a drinking man. He is a fit and strong, accustomed to chopping wood and handling a heavy grass strimmer. His fly casting is masterly and, like most experienced ghillies, he possesses a river craft and understanding of the elements that you don’t find in a book or learn on a course. He is not the finished article, because that expression could never be applied to anyone who goes fishing. To fish is to learn, constantly.

But his store of relevant knowledge for parties of visiting anglers is far greater than that of his employers. He has moved with the times, equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology to register catches with the fishery website. His Land Rover is a mobile treasure chest of fishing equipment and flies that he sells to desperate anglers who never seem to have the exact fly that they think they need.

He first came under pressure to retire at the age of 65 but managed to secure an extension. Now, again, he is being told he has to go. Maybe there is something in that particular employment relationship about which I don’t know. But I was encouraged, all the same, to hear David making plans for a new career selling fishing goods up and down the river from the back of his Land Rover.

New legislation aimed at outlawing age discrimination that comes in to force in October this year is unlikely to be of much help for David. He has already had one extension to his career and his employer appears to have followed the due process. As Sam Mercer, director of the Employers Forum on Age, points out, “There is a duty of care element particularly with heavy work but it is difficult sometimes to avoid the impression that people are being forced out. The duty of responsibility that employers have for employees is difficult to balance.”

I can sympathise, therefore, with an employer who might be worried about the rigours of outdoor work on an aging body.

But we are all individuals who are as fit and as young as we feel. David loves his work and knows his job. Ironically I believe the most debilitating effect on his health and attitude will be retirement itself.

No amount of legislation is going to overcome the attitudinal differences between employer and employee when retirement approaches. Some people cannot wait to retire, but some, like David, find happiness and contentment pushing their stones ever upwards for as long as they have the strength.

Here, however, the analogy collapses because there is nothing in David’s work that resembles anything like the burden of that stone. Age discrimination, like work itself, is real but, underneath, it has much to do with attitude of mind. As long as we conceive of retirement we will place a limit on human endeavour, the capacity for learning and the opportunities for transferring the knowledge of a lifetime.

I hope I see David next year, if not in his ghillies’ tweeds, then in a new role as an entrepreneur, earning his living selling flies - those little feathery scraps of hope – to the Sisyphus-like anglers. He should have done it years ago.