The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  We were a true phalanx of trout bums, since dispersed as far away as New Zealand and as near as wives and families, that quicksand into which a troll’s share is taken, generation after generation, spitting bamboo fragments and blue dun hackle, to join—with some decency—another of sport’s secret mothball fleets.

  Finally, at the bottom of this hot canyon, the river is a terrific surprise, the switchbacks jutting in to trail along its sides. The river seems quite literally a crack in the earth, here so exposed as to be principally rock. While our home stretch of the same river is still brown with spring runoff and irrigation, slough-connected and meandering among old ranches, here it is a lightning fissure in rock, empyrean blue and slightly unearthly.

  In the canyon the trout’s range of travel is bounded by falls, sudden declivities or change of altitude in the slab rock. The blue river turns green-white in a right-angle downward turn, a long ribbon of falling water, roaring and blowing away. The trout live above or below such a place; these are separate civilizations.

  We cast our big, visible dries on the glossy rush, and quickly trout soar into focus and vanish with our offerings. Rods bow and lines shear through the water. Handsome cutthroat trout are beached and released in the gravel, wriggling back into deep water and flickering invisibly into the pale water curtain.

  A mile below the trail’s end, we found a feeder creek that dropped almost vertically from pool to minute pool. And each pool held handsome cutthroats that took flies readily and leapt down the plateaus until they were in the river itself. To hook fish at eye level, watch their descent, then finish the fight under your feet seemed unfathomable. Many of these fish were in their spawning colors and shimmered in the current as brilliant as macaws.

  We ended the afternoon’s fishing in time to save an increment of energy for the climb out. A great blue lid of shadow had started down one wall, and the boulders and escarpments bore eccentrically long panels of shade. Above us, a few impressive birds of prey sorted the last thermals. In two hours they were below us, turning grave circles in polite single file.

  At Tower Falls we stumbled out of the woods. It was getting dark and someone fumbled for the car keys.

  MIRAGE ON THE ROAD CROWNS as I spring along under sage-covered ledges, pools of water on macadam hills. Blackbirds scatter before my truck.

  All the grass that seemed to indicate something about possibility, that turned up in mountain edges full of yellow-blossomed clover, was sun-dried like hard wire, annealed and napped in one direction or in whorls like cowlicks and distinctly dun-colored on the hard hills.

  When the sheep yarded up in the orchard, their fetor hung slowly downwind with an edge that was less organic than chemical. In the heat of broad day I saw a coyote on a yellow grassy bench digging along the length of a pocket gopher’s workings, throwing up a stream of dirt behind himself as industrious as a beagle.

  In midsummer big streams like the Missouri headwaters can come to seem slumberous and unproductive. The great sweeps of river are warm and exposed, and the fishing can be perfectly lousy.

  Then there’s evening fishing on the spring creeks, streams that jump full-grown, quite mythically, from under ledges or out of swamp ground and flow for miles before joining a river, often at some secretive or wooded confluence. The stub ends of such streams are seen by passing fishermen, who seldom suspect the trout network lying beyond.

  The angler parcels out the midsummer months with pocket situations, good for a few amusing visits. I always make two or three trips to my nearby beaver ponds, wallowing through swamp and chest-high grass to the beaver houses, beyond which stands water full of small brook trout. In the still ponds are the gnawed stumps of trees, big enough in diameter to suggest the recently solid ground which the advanced rodents have conquered.

  If we fish here in the fall, we bring back wild crab apples for baking along with the easily gathered creel of brook trout. The fish in these ponds live on freshwater shrimp and their flesh is salmon pink on either side of their pearly backbones. The trout themselves are as surpassingly vivid as fine enamels, and the few meals we make of them are sacraments.

  The stream that flows through our place is lost in irrigation head gates by August, so it has no trout. Obliviously, my young son fishes the pretty pool next to our cattle guard, increasing his conviction that trout are a difficult fish. Morbid friends say he is a sportsman of the future. I will explain to him as an acceptable realpolitik: if the trout are lost, smash the state. More than any other fish, trout are dependent upon the ambience in which they are caught. Whether it is the trout or the angler who is more sensitized to the degeneration of habitat would be hard to say, but probably it is the trout. At the first signs of deterioration, this otherwise vigorous fish just politely quits, as if to say, “If that’s how you want it …” Meanwhile, the angler qualitatively lapses in citizenship. Other kinds of fishermen may toss their baits into the factory shadows. The trout fisherman who doesn’t turn dangerously unpatriotic. He just politely quits, like the trout.

  IT’S OCTOBER, a bluebird Indian-summer day. Opening day for ducks, it will be over eighty degrees. You’re going to need your Coppertone.

  Standing on the iron bridge at Pine Creek, I look upstream. I suppose it is a classic autumn day in the Rockies; by some standards, it is outrageous. The China blue river breaks up into channels that jet back together from chutes and gravel tongues to form a deep emerald pool that flows toward me on the bridge with a hidden turbulence, a concealed shock wave. Where the river lifts upstream on its gravel runs, it glitters.

  The division of the river makes a multiplicity of banks, but the main ones are shrouded with the great, almost heartbreaking cottonwoods that are now gone to a tremulous, sun-shot gold, reaching over the river’s blue rush. Where the pools level out, the bizarre, free-traveling clouds with their futuristic shapes are reflected.

  I can see my friend and neighbor, a painter, walking along the high cutbank above the river. This would be a man who has ruined his life with sport. He skulks from his home at all hours with gun or rod. Today he has both.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Trout fishing and duck hunting.”

  Only fishing, I feel like a man who has been laid off.

  “As you see,” says the painter, gesticulating strangely, “I’m ready for anything. I spoiled half the day with work and errands. I have to pull things out of the fire before they go from bad to worse.” Across the river, the Absaroka Range towers up out of the warm valley with snowcapped peaks and gold stripes of aspen intermittently dividing the high pasture and the evergreen forest. My friend heads off, promising a report later on.

  The last chance you get at overall strategy in trout fishing, before you lose yourself in the game itself, is during the period called “rigging up.” I stand next to my truck, looking upstream and down, and remove the knurled brass cap from the aluminum tube. I am deep into the voodoo of rigging up. I draw the smoky-colored bamboo shafts from their poplin sack and join the rod. I fasten the old pewtery Hardy St. George reel my father gave me to the cork seat and knot the monofilament leader in place. Then I irritate myself over the matter of which fly to use, finally darting my hand blindly into the fly box. I come up with one I tied myself that imitates the effect of a riot gun on a love seat. I swiftly return it and take out a professionally tied spruce fly and attach it to my leader. I get into my waders, slipping the blue police suspenders onto my shoulders. Rigging up is over and now there is angling to be done.

  Once my friend is out of sight, I scramble down the bank to the river, which here is in three channels around long willow-covered islands. By cautiously wading the heads of pools in these channels, one can cross the mighty river on foot, a cheap thrill I could not deprive myself of. Regardless of such illusions, I am an ordinary wader and usually have to pick my way carefully over the slippery rocks, my heart in my mouth. I have friends who are superior waders. One of them, a former paratrooper, glides downstream whenever h
e loses his footing until he touches down again, erect as a penguin all the while. At any and all mishaps when wading big rivers I tend to feel that I am too young to die, then fob off this cowardice as “reverence for nature.”

  This late in the year, the first channel crossing is child’s play. I practically stroll over to the long willow island that is decorated on this shore by a vintage automobile, a breakaway bit of Montana riprap, high and dry, with river sand up to the steering wheel.

  The brush willows form an interior jungle, all the details of which contrive to slap you in the face over and over again as you bushwhack through them. I come to a small clearing where a shallow sandy-bottomed slough has penetrated. A school of fry, a couple of feet wide and maybe ten feet long, dominates the end of the slough. With my approach these thousands of fish scatter toward the river; this is as fertile a nursery area as it is possible to imagine, dense and dark with infant fish.

  I continue across the island, sweating in my waders, and end up at a broad, bright channel. The tenderloin of the spot is a 150-foot bevel of current, along the edge of which trout persistently hang. I wade into position, false-casting the necessary amount of line to get under way. Then I make my first cast, up sun, and coronas of mist hang around the traveling direction of the line. I mend the line, throwing a belly into it to make the streamer continually present itself broadside to trout holding upstream in the current. I have a short strike early on but miss it.

  Then nothing except the steady surge of the river against my legs until I can feel it bending with enormous purpose toward North Dakota and its meeting with the Missouri. In the green of the river, ghostly orbs of white boulders are buried in running channels. The river is a fluid envelope for trout, occasionally marred by the fish themselves rising to take an insect and punctuating the glassy run with a whorl that opens and spirals downstream like a smoke ring. The boulders are constant, but the river soars away to the east.

  After a period of methodical fishing, I finally come up tight on a trout. He holds throbbing for a long moment, then without any run at all is suddenly aerial. Four crisp dashes later and the trout is vividly alive and cold in my hand. As I return him to the river, I bend over and watch him hold briefly in the graveled current between my feet. Then quick as light he’s gone.

  I stand up and can feel that mild, aching joy of the first fish as I look to the long river moss in the crystal gravel channels, streaming and wavering like radio signals.

  My trout memories precede any actual sighting of a trout. They go way back to a time when, inflamed to angling by rock bass and perch, I read hunting and fishing magazines and settled upon the trout as the only fish worthy of my ability, along with the broadbill swordfish. I had examined the Rockwell Kent illustrations in my father’s copy of Moby-Dick. I didn’t for the moment see what I could do about the white whale. Among my friends a rumor persisted of giant squid in the Humboldt Current that assaulted cabin cruisers and doused anglers with black ink before sinking a parrotlike beak into their brain pans. Not even this enormity could compete with the trout for my attention, though putting the gaff to a wilderness of tentacles had its appeal for a bloodthirsty child.

  The sun roosts deep in the aspens and spruce. Chickweed and wild roses flow down out of the forest carpet, around the garden, and up the sides of the compost heap. A sleeping bag floats on a clump of laurel, sunning out. You can walk in any direction of the compass from here and sooner or later you’ll run into a trout. And you see, at some point, that you will keep making that walk.

  The Indian-summer day ends with an edge, and during that night the temperature falls forty degrees. In the morning you squint out the kitchen door into a snowfield. The orchard looks like a corsage, and the poles in the corral are snowcapped in stillness. Trout season is over.

  Southern Salt

  I THINK THE IMPULSE to wander between northern and southern fisheries for as long as decency would permit came as a result of my boyhood reading of what I still consider a masterpiece of world literature, the catalog of the Paul Young fly rod company, More Fishing and Less Fussing. This delicious, slim volume of prose treasures, besides describing the virtuous Paul Young rods, hinted at styles of living I could only dream about. But one rod in particular was prescribed for the angler who, at the end of trout season, “went south with the birds.” Even when I was explaining to the good monsignor who oversaw my little grade school, and who took a special interest in my graduating class of eight, that my dream was to be a Jesuit missionary—a ploy to defuse his annoyance at my disruptive behavior and drain a pint or two of blood from his weirdly livid face—my real dream was not the saving of souls but to go south with the birds, rod in hand, once winter had driven the trout into their winter holes. In the great Young book, luminaries such as Ted Williams found themselves “tickled pink” with rods that had “all the boys singing” down in the Keys. And in fact, getting away from baseball to fish, all he could say was, “Gee!” I had what Young described as “the finest all around daytime trout rod” and I thought the two of us just needed our walking papers for my life to be perfect. I would supplement my double-tapered fly line with the new “torpedo” line. From my remote angling venues, I would write testimonial letters to the Paul Young Company as to the quality of their products and sign them, as the others did, “Satisfied.”

  In time I did get there, and the first magic—so many years ago now—of walking across the palm fronds to the sea, lizards rattling in the brush, fishable water to the horizon, birds on the bait, is with me still. In the small west-coast Florida town where my family moved in the fifties, there were empty or under-construction CBS houses on saltwater canals whose roofs we climbed to sight basking snook in the shade of mangroves. One day, my brother and I spotted an alligator shaded up there. I got him to take a Lazy Ike plug and fought him, thrashing and spinning in the muck, and then landed him, whereupon he rose up on his legs and chased me into the brush. Half a day passed before I had the nerve to go back for my bicycle.

  We went every day to the pier where the public fished. This was one of the many rubble-rock jetties that jut from the coast of Florida, and they are great and successful places for producing happiness. In some ways, there is nothing like the society of a good jetty. The retirees, the down-and-out, the economizing housewife, the driven boys, the exposure to the whimsy of all weathers, the fickle divination of angling destiny falling where it would up and down the length of the jetty, all contributed to a soap opera wherein each hooked fish produced a mob of hopefuls casting across one another’s lines.

  KEY WEST IN THE SIXTIES and seventies. Good heavens, a great and corrupt gardenia of an island in a wilderness of shoals and mangroves where we sometimes went from old wooden bars, shuddering with dance music and the heaving of like-minded characters. In the backyard of the Anchor Inn, an old Jaguar sedan that didn’t run was used to store guns confiscated from the dancing fools. Closing time left four hours for the sleepy quiet of backyards and old streets before the sun came up, and once the engine of the skiff went down and several waves of sickness were fought back, we again were up and running—lust and booze banked down—off looking for fish in the glare. Nice to be young, though it was awfully hard work. Even today, when I am sure to go to bed early the night before a long day of fishing, I remember the special horror of fighting wild tarpon with a bar-life muzziness on my face and my clothes revealing beer stains, cigarette burns, and head shop perfumes. Looking back upon those days when nothing was expected of us and you could wait all day for a tide, live like dogs, and look for fish with an unreasonable zealotry, I wonder at the wisdom of making fishing “part” of my life.

  Each year, Jim Harrison came down for a long stay and lowered already abysmal standards of decency wherein the awful polarity of our nightlife and daytime striving on the sea placed us all within easy reach of professional custodians. Guy de la Valdene was almost always there to help us remember that the idea was fishing, though when finally struck with the general slea
ze he, too, became part of the problem, in the end challenging the limits of our sporting motto, “Nothing is too disgusting.” This fishery lasted for many years, brought low only by a vague fear of being nabbed, though by whom and for what we were quite uncertain. Among the early signs was the presence of fellow anglers in regional prisons or in states of permanent exile under assumed names. It was a long way from Izaak Walton. Offshore lizards headquartered in the Chart Room Bar or the Full Moon Saloon, rootless and occasionally dangerous tourists and escapees, a complete collapse of the city’s management of public services in a spontaneous crime wave, had begun to give our waters a sinister tone. We pined for cold water, the colder the better now that the real ghouls of Key West were coming out of the bag. The day-trippers on the Conch Train, we began to fear, might turn on the citizens in general butchery. We sold our skiffs and cleared out.

  When I went back to Key West ten years later, I was astonished. The disreputable and rundown Duval Street had become a glut of T-shirt shops and tourist traps. The end of the street was frequently blocked to the height of several stories by cruise ships, while the city itself smelled of spring break barf twenty-four hours a day. Half the writers of the East Coast had moved here to immerse themselves in the sort of cannibalism they’d learned up north. Among the towering hotels and condominiums, the marina where I used to keep my skiff was encrusted with petrochemical grime and operated by the sort of surly rednecks with catfish mustaches who seem to have proliferated in the charter-boat trade around the world. The man on the forklift sported a gaping tip jar on the front of his machine and if you didn’t take it seriously you were going to be a long time getting your boat. When I stopped in the bait shop to pick up a chart, uncertain if I could still find my way around these waters, waiting to be served by one of the several above-described idlers around the counter, a huge, drunken black man suddenly loomed in the doorway, gazed around the place and asked, “Which of y’all’s the Grand Wizard around here?”