Joe Bennett: What fishing for teeth taught me about valuing time

Joe Bennett happened upon a man fishing for his teeth and a lost model yacht. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

The man had hauled the dinghy off the trailer and was dragging it over grass and gravel towards the lake. Despite a small wheel attached to the bow it was clearly hard going, and the man looked to be in his 70s. I offered him a hand.

“Thanth,” he said.

The lake is one of a series linked by streams and culverts, all of them dug just a few years ago to drain the Heathcote Valley. They have since matured into a pretty waterway with an abundance of birds and reeds and insects.

We dragged the boat to a little wooden jetty from which, a couple of times a week, a group of enthusiasts launch their radio-controlled yachts. Older men, most of them, they sit side by side in folding chairs, consoles on laps, and race their yachts around a series of buoys fixed to the lake bed. Often I used to walk this way of an afternoon with my old dog, and while Blue sniffed about I’d stand at a distance and watch these old men with their boats and come close to envying them.

It was Larkin who observed that, however we use our time, “it goes”, and that “days spent hunting pig or holding a garden party advance on death equally slowly.” And it would seem to me that the gentle skill of radio-controlled yachting is as good a way as any to fritter the long days of retirement.

There was a spinning rod in the floor of the dinghy, tackled up with some serious sinkers and treble hooks. I’d once or twice seen small trout in the shallows slashing after cockabullies and have even thought of wetting a line, but I’d never seen anything to justify this sort of tackle.

“What are you after?” I said, nodding at the fishing rod.

“My yoth.” Not only did the man lisp, he made a sort of whistling noise as he spoke.

“I’m sorry?”

“My model yoth.” I looked straight at him for the first time and saw that all his top front teeth were missing.

“Your model yacht?”

“Yeth, it thank. Took me two yearth to build.”

So the man was going fishing for a yacht. And they say there’s nothing new under the sun.

“How deep is it out there?”

“A couple of metersh,” he said. “I went out schnorkelling yethterday. That’s how I loth my teef.”

“You lost your teeth snorkelling?”

“Yeth. When I took the mathk off the play fell ow.”

“The play?”

“The dental play,” he said pointing at the missing incisors.

“So you’re going to fish for a yacht and a dental plate?”

“Yeth.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and turned away from him briefly to compose myself.

“Thatth all rye,” he said and smiled his toothless smile.

And I knew immediately that I should offer to go out on the lake with him. I’d row while he fished, or vice versa. I was in no rush, could easily spare 20 minutes. And though the odds were long against fishing up the yacht, and longer still against hooking the teeth, imagine the delight if we hauled either aboard, all swathed in weed from the lake bed. Imagine the high-fiving.

Better still, even more intoxicating, was the absurdity of it. What a way to start the year. Fishing for teeth. What a fillip of random wonder. World is incorrigibly plural, said Louis MacNeice, but it’s a truth that’s all too easy to forget as we sink into the quicksand of habit. Here was a splendid reminder of the arbitrary.

But even as I knew what I should do, I decided against it. I could readily afford 20 minutes, but what if, as was probable, after 20 minutes we’d come up with nothing. He was invested in the rescue of yacht and teeth. I would be invested only in the novelty of the moment, and novelty wears off.

“Good fishing,” I said.

“Thanth,” he said, and pushed off in his dinghy. I walked away, nursing a slight regret, but still feeling that 2024 had got off to an encouraging start.