Passion and the Gray Man
Turtle-shelled by two backpacks and with a four-piece rod in my free hand, I set my mind to Isle of Skye browns and not the armpit I faced in the London Underground. If there was an art to nonchalance, I had not mastered it.
I had come to the United Kingdom to visit my brother, who at the time was a conflict-management and peace-building specialist for war-torn areas. Glen had spent only three of the preceding 90 nights in his rented London bed, the remaining divvied between East Africa and the Middle East. Three days prior to my arrival, Manchester was bombed: 23 fatalities, 119 injuries. This was Glen’s world, a world of attacks and strategic response; lockdowns, evacuations and hostile-takeover training. Riding the Tube from Heathrow Airport, he told me whom he’s trained to be: a Gray Man, inconspicuous in dress and behavior, a tactical apparition and, in essence, the opposite of me. I was ruddy-cheeked in magenta merino and a floral scarf, schlepping odd-shaped luggage. Attuning to the shifty crowds and armed bobbies, I leveled my own anxiety by ruminating about whether or not I would hold a trout in hand.
This trip was tripartite: a stint in London (allowing Glen, finally, an excuse to learn his metropolitan base camp), a jaunt to Edinburgh, Scotland, and a flash trip to Skye, the
