The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  This year, we get to the airport, we get to Bella Coola, we get to our little cabin on the Upper Dean, we have all our stuff. I lie on my back the first night pinching a black Egg-Sucking Leech just behind the yellow lead eyes, making it do a little dance on my chest. “If the river comes up,” I say, “I’m putting this baby to work.”

  “Don’t be a pawn of the gods.” Yvon yawns from his bunk.

  The year before, I’d admitted to him my guilt about fishing constantly and going home mostly to do my laundry. I had decided that I had reached the time of life for less hesitancy in diving into the things I had always loved. Of my four fly rods, only one was left. The rest got siwashed on various rivers.

  “Your wife has worked hard,” Yvon said. “You deserve a vacation.”

  Our English friend, Bo, working on his duffel bag, suddenly sounds exasperated. “There goes the sodding zipper.” Through the haze of jet lag, he contemplates the ruptured duffel. “I bought this from the Iranian next to the office. It was marked down from fourteen quid to eleven. He said I could have it for nine. I said, ‘I didn’t ask for a discount.’ He said, ‘Six then.’ Good God, the same price as a prawn cocktail!”

  On the Dean again. What would I do without this river? I design my year around this week, these pools, these beautiful fish. Dean fish are always appearing in articles about steelhead fishing. These dream slabs are just better-looking than other steelhead. Fishing the Dean puts us in an extreme state of mind that encourages the refashioning of our sport every single day. Last year, after the river blew out, we went to the bottom with evil sea snakes made of marabou feathers and kept catching fish. They couldn’t see well enough to run and chugged around like big brown trout, afraid of ramming into something. Each night, one of us would rise to urinate under the stars, only to come back inside having reinvented the wheel of fly-fishing. Twice during the same day, Yvon waded out deep, only to be turned back to the beach by the need to take a leak. He surmised his prostate was gone, a condition associated with shooting heads weighing more than three hundred grains. For diversion, we discussed evil luck in steelheading, when your companion once again has a deep bow in his rod, and you are on cast 62,509 without an eat. You get a terrible feeling: you’re not a man anymore. And whenever we can’t hook up, we become concerned with our diet, which in this case was high-octane North Canadian all-day power food. “Maybe we’ve reached the point in life where we ought to travel with our own cook,” said Yvon. “On the other hand,” he said before I could disagree, “we’re still pissing off the porch.” He unceasingly takes the balanced view except when noting the fact that the world will soon end.

  Across the river, Bo is plying the run with regular strokes of his double-handed rod, single-Spey casting off his right shoulder and then, cigarette at his right hip between thumb and forefinger, watching the drift. One mend and the line comes up tight. Bo sets the hook, takes a last drag off the cigarette, drops it in the water, and witnesses a bright silver steelhead aerialize about sixty yards away while every drop of this mountain water hurries to the Pacific.

  This has been a wonderful trip, each of us catching fish at the same rate. Steelhead can be quite unfair. A couple of years ago, one of my friends, a fine fisherman, shared a camp on the Dean with a drunk and disorderly orthopedic surgeon, a blowhard who never cast a straight line or tied any knot but a granny, but he outfished everyone nevertheless. He had been sure these steelhead bums were ninnies before he lit into the joy juice and headed for the river, and now he knew it; he went home to Texas without ever seeing his bubble burst, and every fish a photo opportunity. A twanging Texan in English tweeds is a hard pill to swallow, but my friend chose to consider it a kind of acid test.

  My latest view of fishing, one I believe to be the evolutionary product of forty-five years of fly-fishing, is that everything has to do with smoothness, and that constant changing of one’s mind results only in not catching fish. Lee Wulff once said, along these lines, that the last thing to change is the fly. I have especially tried to practice this in steelheading, despite the fact that the available methods are all, at any given time, extremely tempting. Still, there is no better way to fish across and down than with a double-handed rod and a floating line; that’s how I fish steelhead. My exception to this is that, for summer fish, I usually switch to a sinking line when the sun is on the water; otherwise it’s the floater. Bo fishes the floater, stroke after elegant stroke. Yvon reaches deep into his toolbox and, unless forcibly convinced he’s on the wrong track, eases that fast sinking head right on down to the pebbles, further enlarging his prostate by trying to put the fly in a place where not much of a decision is required of the fish. At winter fishing, Yvon is far more realistic than I about how deep one must go, always fishing while I am sometimes merely casting. Sometimes I forget that a loop is an empty thing as compared with a tight line jumping off the surface and showering water drops.

  Bo fishes the way he wants to, floating line, sheer, good-natured steadiness. When he fished Tierra del Fuego, he fished the same way, even though some of the dredgers in his camp were having more activity. Though it didn’t get to him, it would have gotten to me. I’d have dredged. Bo calls Tierra del Fuego the land of the T-300 and the black Bunny Leech, a place to be fished “no more than once in ten years.” He has a tolerant but persistent approach to his fishing. I spent a week with him a year ago on the Sustut River in British Columbia and in all our conversations he neglected to mention that just before we met he had caught an Atlantic salmon of more than fifty pounds. I had to read it in The Atlantic Salmon Journal, where it was given the same emphasis ordinarily accorded land speed records.

  Therefore, when Yvon and I came upriver to pick up Bo, waiting with Spey rod furled at his side, we responded to his beaming statement, “I just caught a huge fish,” as if to a joke. I said, “Are you sure it was a steelhead?” Mildly exasperated, Bo told me that of course it was a steelhead, with a big red stripe down its side. From his description, it was indeed a large fish, well over twenty pounds, a big male that never jumped but crossed the river at will more than once, which made me wonder if I’d inadvertently deprecated his moment of triumph. All steelheaders are cruelly incredulous about fish caught “around the bend,” even if the catch was witnessed by Mother Teresa.

  There were anglers on the other side of the river. On a steelhead river, fishermen one doesn’t know are more or less the enemy; these made a great point of not observing the fight. Later, when Bo bumped into them, they wanted to know if it was a dying chinook he’d snagged. I was beginning to see why he hadn’t mentioned the fifty-pounder. On the great rivers, salutes can be rare.

  THE FIRST TIME I fished the Dean was more than ten years ago, when El Niño conspired with the gillnetters to reduce the run to a smidgeon. A friend had invited me to join a group of what at first sounded like angling conceived on an imperial scale. It was and that was the problem. The first issue was finding a way to load his cases of wine and foodstuffs, his PVC sewer pipe filled with rods, onto the plane to Bella Coola.

  We stayed on a sort of ministeamer in the Dean channel with a helicopter on deck. We had three-wheelers on the shore. We would ride in the helicopter up the river to the pools. Below us, the Totem anglers and other groups of real fishermen jumped up and down and gave us the finger. I cringed in the chopper and was afraid to get out when it landed. Anyway, never mind, there were no fish. So we persuaded the young pilot to take us about the countryside. We descended upon a grizzly bear who jumped up as though to catch a giant moth. Every living thing hated our alien technology. Finally, we went fishing for the lowly pink salmon, caught hundreds, and the pain began to lift. Back at the ship, our leader, a manic-depressive director of angling tours, tied hundreds of Green Butt Skunks, awaiting the run; he could no longer speak. We set crab traps from the side of the ship and pretended that a seafood dinner was all we were after, up the Dean channel with all this gear. The leader tied flies; the helicopter pilot suggested crazy side trips to r
un up some billable hours; the real fishermen were poised on the beach to kill us; the steelhead waited around the Queen Charlottes without any immediate plans. Finally, a friend and I talked the helicopter pilot into flying us back to Vancouver. No one had the heart to go upriver again, soaring over the countless fists and fingers.

  The coast swam by under our plastic bubble windshield. As the sun shone in, the tension began to leave me and I fell asleep. The other anglers joined us at the hotel later that night. When I looked in on them, they were all in their underwear surrounded by Chinese prostitutes; it didn’t seem the right time for fish chat.

  All winter long I received upward-revised bills from the manic depressive. But that wasn’t the true debt. For years, I ran into visitors to this beautiful river. “You were on that goddamn ship?” they’d inquire. “In that helicopter?” Ever since then I’ve been trying to treat the great river right, trying to get out of its debt. I was the guy who’d farted in church. It would be a year before I was restored to grace.

  THE SHOOTING woke us up. A grizzly sow and her three large cubs had come into a camp and they were fighting over something in the yard, cuffing each other into the sides of the cabins. During the rest of the night, the guides tried without luck to send them on their way. Only sunrise sufficed, by which time the four seemed consumed by guilt from their all-night party. They slipped into the brush on the west side of camp and moments later were racing over the round stones of the river bar on their way out of Dodge.

  Bears are exhilarating. They’d been around before, and in a previous year had even chewed up the proprietor’s airplane. This year, more than a few were dining on spawned-out salmon: an easy life on the verge of winter, but grizzlies did not require ease. If necessary, they would ascend the high, exposed scree slopes and snatch a mountain goat who thought he could safely watch the passing seasons in the valley below. Their rare excursions into camp certainly gave new piquancy to late-night trips to the outhouse. But this was the British Columbian wilderness, and anything that starkly contrasted with our everyday world, like the grizzly bear, the raven, the wolf or the eagle, was welcome. To the robust cubs backing around the cabins with garbage sacks and low growls, I wished to say, Have at it.

  I was back on the Dean. As always with anadromous species, the question was whether or not the fish were in. These days, any delay in a run fills the angler with the fear they may not come at all. River fish that are subjected during part of their life cycle to the rapacity and lawlessness of high seas commercial fishing face a serious question of survival.

  The steelhead of each river system are separate races, their characteristics derived from deep time in a particular place. Dean River fish are known for their speed and wild strength and they will come to a dry-fly better than other strains, though the depth and clarity and prevailing temperatures of the river itself have much to do with this.

  I caught a small fish on the first day, then fell into a long dry spell. Casting from daybreak to sundown, wading deep in clear green water as it sweeps past the gravel bars and wooded foothills, is stirring exercise. And with a floating line, the pleasures of casting are alone fulfilling. But when the second day rolled around and I had not moved a fish, I could feel the slight clench start—the clench that suggests you might never hook another steelhead if you cast for a thousand years. Suspecting I’d sinned against the river with ship and helicopter, I sat down on the rocky abutment of an old logging bridge where tame winter wrens explored for insects in the sunny cracked stones. Half of the second blank day was over and I knew I was pressing. For some reason that’s hard to pin down, pressing won’t work on steelhead. Covering the water is all-important, but so is fishing out each cast, mending and controlling fly speed. Elements such as fly speed and the look of the fly making its small V-wake on the surface require a delicacy born of composure. An effective steelheader must control his temperament and master his touch through long hours of disappointment and the wild conditions of Northwest coastal rivers.

  The boat dropped me off at the top of the most beautiful steelhead run I had ever seen. I had a quiet moment to look the water over and tie on my favorite steelhead fly, the October Caddis. There was a sparkling chute of white, boulder-strewn water at the head that quickly dissipated in the deep, flowing pool. Across from me was a high rock wall covered with lichen. A ribbon falls descended its face and made a circle of bubbles in the water below. The tailout was a shoal of small stones where the entire Dean River rushed toward the sea, accompanied by impossibly rare music.

  I began casting, swept away by the radiance of this place and by the high sense of possibility this handsome water suggested to the angler. Very early on, a steelhead rose, took my fly lightly, released it and disappeared. I felt a bit sunk but went on casting in case the fish had not been touched and might move to my fly once more. Four casts later and the fish rose under the sparkling wake of the October Caddis, backed down a yard with it and vanished.

  This was too much, and now almost technically hopeless, but since steelhead will come several times before they really line up on the fly, I kept casting. I tried to make the turnovers of the cast such that the fly always landed with a dead straight leader, and this turned out to be the right play because on what must have been close to my last cast, the fish instantly rose and sucked down the fly. I set the hook against a surge of power as the fish fought its way across the pool. It felt so strong that I recognized my chances of landing it weren’t particularly good. About halfway down the pool, the fish made a greyhounding jump and scared me with its size. I remember thinking it was like a picture of a jumping steelhead in some old-fashioned fishing book: parallel to the water, amazingly high against the dripping rock wall at the far side of the stream. By the time we reached the tailout, I had to make a stand. If the fish got into the rapids, it was gone. I raised the pressure until the rod was bent into the cork handle. The steelhead held in the pool for several long moments, then yielded. I felt it turn and then miraculously come my way. In a short while, I slid the fish into a small cove and tailed her, for it was a great big hen of about eighteen pounds, a beautiful slab of silver with a cloud of rose down her side. I removed the barbless hook and sent her on her way, daring to believe that I had received absolution.

  Snapshots from the Whale

  I HAD AS MY GUIDE that day a young man who was perhaps retarded, and whom we shall call “Alfred.” He lived on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence River where he crabbed, lobstered, fished for cod, and assisted in the building of pretty lapped strake inshore skiffs of about twenty feet. Each December, Alfred told me, he set out for a week or two in the black spruce forest with a sled, a twelve-gauge pump shotgun and several hundred rounds of shells. He traveled in the snowy forest until the ammunition ran out and the sled was piled high with grouse, which he trailed home for his mother to cook and can for the winter. His companion was a small Indian dog of a kind that fascinated me, as they were distributed mostly among the Montaignais who bred them carefully and held on to them against all odds, including the offer of significant monies. These dogs were small and mean, particolored, and loyal only to their owners. Anyone else who came near them, they bit. The Indians believed if they weren’t mean, they weren’t any good. They were too small to do much harm: in fact, as will be seen, they did much good.

  The North Shore grouse woods are so densely forested that to blunder around in them hunting grouse is futile. So the hunter who has surmounted the terrific difficulty required in obtaining an Indian dog walks the old loggers’ traces while the dog, well out of sight in the forest, hunts. Upon finding a grouse, the little dog flushes him up a tree, then sits at its base barking until the hunter finds him and shoots the bird. On they go, for long days. They are subsistence hunters. The fates of dog and hunter are intertwined, and there is something terrific about the way they work together in order to survive. The little dog never lets the Indian out of his sight and the Indian, though impoverished, will not sell the dog to anyone.
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br />   My reason for remembering Alfred is more succinct. Every time I hooked a fish—not so often by the way—he would tilt his head back and shout in that North Shore accent which sounds like and might well be Cockney, “Fuck, what sport!” Or as pronounced by him, “Fook, wot spawt!” I don’t know who taught him to talk like this, but he put a lot of lung to it while conveying extraordinary merriment and victory. More disconcerting was when I managed to put a fish in the boat and he thundered around in his drooping hip boots, baying “Blood!” I picture myself with a genial smile, rod crossed on my lap, waiting for Alfred’s fervor to pass, as it soon did, restoring my gifted boatman. I had never seen anyone quite so bonded to his environment, alert to the movement of birds and game, the movements of water, to the possible arrival and positioning of new fish in the river. I imagined I could see his entire life at a glance, steadily weathering in the sometimes terrible seasons of this rind of the North Atlantic to one day disappear into the very minerals of its decaying rock. I could imagine him at the very end, staring into the abyss: “Fook, wot spawt!”

  One of our group, who later would try to burn our camp down, stood on the float wearing a blue blazer and a polka dot bow tie, waiting to board the great, battered seaplane. The rest of the group displayed the usual plumage of a fishing party, excepting only the Aussie Akubra hat sometimes seen on spring creeks these days and the cracker camo-jumpsuit of the angler-predator.