The Longest Silence
Page 25
A gyrfalcon—Ludwig called it an Icelandic falcon—appeared in the distance, coursing over the land with extraordinary power, certainly the most impressive bird of prey I’d ever seen. It intersected the river about a quarter of a mile above us and turned down the bank, searching. I could hardly believe my luck as the bird rode right down the bank opposite me, the heroic falcon of dreams, a stark medieval-looking raptor, every bit of its shape refined to heraldic extremity. It hovered slightly as it passed us, swept downstream thirty yards or so, banked up to slow the velocity of its turn, then came right up the same bank. Directly in front of me, the falcon crashed into the deep grass of the far bank. A bleak cry issued from some creature and the falcon lifted off with a duckling in its talons. When it soared off to a spire of rock with its prize, the mother duck tumbled into the stream and, pushing her two remaining babies ahead of her with urgent, plaintive, heartbroken quacks, paddled away. Ludwig was holding his heart; it was really very sad. I felt an ache until that night when our English companion, David Hoare, said, “That falcon has a nest of babies to feed.”
Time was running out and I didn’t have a fish. I suppose that, technically, this was a streak of bad luck, several half-day sessions without a take, when all others in camp were doing fine. I was even mourning the duckling who would never be a duck and its mother, by now down to two babies out of what had probably been eight.
I tied on a Red Francis, a horrible tube fly that looks like a carrot with feelers on one end. Certainly it is a shrimp imitation but fish react to it strangely. Often they ignore it, yet sometimes it seems to drive them crazy. In the last minutes of daylight, the latter obtained. Every fish in the pool ran around violently—if it’s supposed to be a shrimp, why would they do that?—and one large fish won the race. A bite! I fought this very strong fish in a most gingerly manner up and down the pool and landed him, a fifteen-pounder, with the clear understanding that my bad luck streak was over. I don’t know how you know this, but you do. Ludwig’s pent-up emotion boiled over too as he, at about 150 pounds, lifted me, at about 190, into the air with my fourteen-foot double-handed rod waving overhead. I had played this fish so carefully that reviving him took a bit of time. I was glad to be back in a realm in which I greedily put green fish on the bank with all their strength intact. One swipe with the hemostat and they were free to go.
BO WANTED ME to see several other rivers in Iceland and took me next to the Selá River in the northeast. There I spent a day with Orri Visguffson who grew up in a family of herring fishermen but now leads the effort to save the North Atlantic salmon. We discussed Halldór Laxness, the great Icelandic novelist, whose Independent People everyone in camp seemed to be reading. “He lived just outside Reykjavik,” said Orri. “We saw him often. At some point, he began to think of himself as something of a gentleman. There was an ascot tie, a house in the country. But we never held this against him. We had no idea why he did these things. Certainly he had his reasons.” In Iceland, a thousand years of freeholding farmers have created a specific culture within what is the world’s oldest democracy. Taking on airs is perceived as fabulously exotic and inventive. In Orri’s patient account, Laxness’s ascot tie floated like an enigmatic object in a surrealist painting.
Orri was helping me to fish a run that was not easily understood. A stream flowed into the main body of the Selá, which flowed from right to left. Orri had me stand in the stream thirty yards above the juncture and cast to the outside of the seam caused by the stream. He continuously adjusted my position with push-pull gestures of his hands and monosyllabic instructions about the cast itself. Then he had me wade across to the inside of the small stream, changing my angle slightly on the drift, then directed me downstream for a cast or two until I had reached the beach, the stream now entering the river to my right and the drift swinging acrosss the seam of the incoming water. Orri watched the drift, indicated that I must move several inches to my left, then returned his hand to its sweater pocket. He nodded solemnly and the salmon struck.
No expression crossed his face as I fought and landed a very hardy eight-pounder fresh from the sea. I released the fish and stood up, enormously pleased with everything. Orri made a forward motion with the back of his hand. “Back to work. This is not a vacation.”
Jack Hemingway joined us for a day. He was going from river to river and would continue to do so, he said, until every source of funds had dried up. Few people who were parachuted behind German lines in World War II would’ve thought to bring a fly rod, but Jack did. To this superficial observer he seemed a happy man. In any case, something contributed to giving a seventy-five-year-old the enthusiasm and energy of a boy. I kept thinking of Jack as “Bumby,” the infant of his father’s Moveable Feast, baby-sat by F. Puss, the cat, and imagining the tempestuous times in which he’d grown up in France among the century’s most evolved characters. Jack turned out great, and a real fisherman. He called his most recent birthday party The Son Also Rises. It was a pleasure to sit near one splendid river and talk about others with someone who had lived so fully for such a long time. We each have Gordon setters who are related to one another, so we tried to fathom their clownish and not entirely comprehensible personalities. Jack trained his on chukars in southeastern Washington; I trained mine on huns in Montana sagebrush; but we both could marvel at the cooperation we’d had from these grouse dogs. So many things you love to do: the best combination, we here decided, was hitting the Bulkley in British Columbia for steelhead at daybreak and sundown, and hunting roughed grouse through the day, with a little nap somewhere in between. But now we were in Iceland. How good. How utterly good.
My companions, David, Bo, and Tarquin, were well acquainted with the Selá and went to each day’s fishing with a purpose. I went forth rather more uncertainly with my tiny map of the river. Bo usually sent me off with a small disquisition about the nature of my beat, and then I was on my own. It is surprising how much a steady current of the unknown adds to the excitement of angling. One knows what salmon-holding water looks like, generally. But “generally” doesn’t get it. In streambed hydrology the fabulous secrets known to the fish are revealed to us only by experience. On the Selá I fished with continuous puzzlement but a kind of excitement that may not survive familiarity. I walked among small bands of sheep very unlike the bland animals of my home country. These are more wild, more alert, and probably haven’t had the brains bred out of them in the genetic search of some economic edge like thicker wool or leaner mutton. I clambered down through a shattered granite slope among wildflowers and deep grass to a long run beneath a falls where the sparkling slicks and runs, ledges and boulders, were thrown before me like a complex hand laid down by a demonic bridge player. For a long moment, rod at my side, I was overcome by the richness of the possibilities and the sense that this opportunity could be wasted in the many beckoning but probably fishless runs.
There were wading maneuvers that enabled one to fish the pool which involved following rocky ridges out into the torrent and covering the water in a series of overlapping casts. I’d had good coaching on this from my companions, but a river, once you are out in it, has several kinds of sorcery that make you wonder if you are truly doing things as you should. Further, you cannot follow instructions very well, except to make a beginning, because it shuts off the faint pulse of intuition, the cutting for sign, the queer alertness that comes when you are fishing suitably. Coming to know water offers the prospect of crossing what Conrad called a “shadow line,” beyond which a profoundly satisfying sense of where you are, even what you are, enters your soul, and you begin to fish with such simplicity and doubtlessness that it is of little consequence if you fail to catch something.
I remember a conversation with Bo when we were in Argentina, the inevitable contention as to what makes a good fisherman. I think Bo had grown tired of anecdotes about effective fishermen, anglers on what the permit wizard Marshall Cutchin calls the “production end” of the sport. Perversely, I took the position that a good
fishermen should be an effective catcher of fish, citing, as an analogy, the case of a man at a driven shoot who, though enjoying himself, never hit anything. Would we call him a great shot anyway? At this Bo politely folded his tent with the gracious comment, “I see I’m going to lose this one.” But actually I prefer his argument. My analogy would have held up if it had concerned hunting rather than shooting, where the feathered targets and other aspects of the malady obscure the very real differences. Shooting has more in common with golf than it does with hunting. There are great hunters who kill very little and great fishermen who never kill anything. And it’s a kind of greatness that not only doesn’t require recognition but one which recognition tends to discredit. A great fisherman should strive for equanimity in the face of achievement, and this cannot be trafficked. Probably all who write about fishing should be disqualified, except those who, like Walton, Haig-Brown, Kingsmill-Moore, Aksakov, Plunket-Greene, are celebrants. Most fishing writers have tried to show us how much smarter they are than everybody else, creating an atmosphere of argument and competitition.
So, having fished my way through the enchantments of perfectly clear Icelandic sea-bound water and the myriad puzzles of its movement among submerged boulders and right down to the tailout without so much as a pull, I retreated to the shore and took the spit of raised bottom out to the last position in the lower pool. Against the pale yellow of the slabrock in the tail, I could see two small salmon holding. They were at the end of a long cast, and to get a good mend it was necessary to make the cast and then immediately strip the slack for the mend. I covered these fish for a good while, several changes of fly, and failed to interest them. I reeled up and tried to decide if I should fish the run through again or go downstream. Leaving such good-looking water is never easy. As I looked at the two uncooperative grilse in the tailout, I noticed a dark shape slightly below them. I tried to recall if the bottom was discolored there but the shape moved up beside the grilse, which it dwarfed. This was a terrific salmon.
I went right back to what I had been doing on behalf of the smaller fish and had as much success. I was really feeling driven about this, not having seen a fish anything like this one all trip long. There was no shift of movement, no ardent elevation, much less a boil, when my fly crossed the fish’s window. I did note that the grilse were getting agitated, either to move up into deeper water or to simply depart this atmosphere of disturbance I’d created. Perhaps the big fish would go with them, too.
I decided to change the game entirely, before I wore out my welcome. I put on a 120-grain sink tip and tied a small, black Madeleine to the end of my leader. I made the same presentation, except that the whole ensemble was a couple of feet down, slap in front of the fish. He moved slightly. I had to assume something had happened, so I lifted the rod and concluded I was either into the fish or the bottom. My line bellied out downstream briefly, then tightened as the leader sheared upstream.
The salmon took a hard left onto the shallows where he made a fearful uproar. I told myself that I would never land this fish and I was right. Ploughing around in the rocks, flinging water everywhere, he liberated himself as decisively as he had taken my silly little fly.
But I was so jubilant because for a moment at least we had agreed about something! It was like a brief truce in a marriage, following which one partner says, “I’m out of here.”
I felt oddly content as I sat at the bottom of the canyon, and willing to wait to fish again until I absorbed it all, the idea of the streamlined shapes coming in from the sea, by the moon, by the tide, by whatever mystery, up through the sheep pastures, bent on some eternal genetic strategy. They know what they’re doing.
Roderick Haig-Brown
FOR MANY WHO REGARD angling as the symptom of a way of living rather than a series of mechanical procedures, the writing of Roderick Haig-Brown serves as scripture. He is a genuinely famous fisherman in an era when famous fishermen scramble to name flies and knots after themselves with a self-aggrandizing ardor unknown since the Borgia popes. Anyone who has sat in on the bad-mouth sessions at fly shops and guides’ docks will welcome the serene observations of a man more interested in fish than fishing, and in the whole kingdom of nature rather than holding water and hot spots.
There is scarcely an angler so avid that he doesn’t spend most of his time not angling; much of the time, because of the inclemency of weather or the demands of work or the inferiority of actuality to fantasy, he pursues his sport in what is called “the armchair.” There are any number of armchair anglers who do not own armchairs and often are harmless creatures whose minds have beaten out everything else for the control of things, and for them the theory of the sport lies heavily upon the sport itself.
Others use the armchair, actual or not, selectively, to read and to think, and at such times they’re susceptible to the guidance of men who have written about this peerless sport which affects the world’s fortunes not at all. For them there is no better place to turn than to the work of Roderick Haig-Brown.
That much has been clear for some time: Haig-Brown’s prominence in this fugitive literature is seldom doubted. His series Fisherman’s Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter is an integral part of the bookshelf of every angler who thinks about what he is doing. Measure of the Year, Return to the River, and The Western Angler amplify that great series and lead to increasingly broad preoccupations within his sport, until the reader shares with Haig-Brown a continuity of perceptions from the tying of small brilliant flies to the immeasurable and celestial movements of fish in migration. Finally, he accounts for the ways the angler holds his fishing grounds in trust, because I suppose before anything else Haig-Brown is a conservationist.
He lived in Campbell River, British Columbia, and one summer I decided to pay him a visit, not, I hasten to admit, without some trepidation. Sportsman, magistrate, prose stylist of weight, Haig-Brown seems artfully contrived to make me feel in need of a haircut and refurbished credentials. I wanted to withdraw my novels from publication and extirpate the bad words, reduce the number of compliant ladies by as much as 96 percent.
As I winged my way north, the Rockies, in my present mood, unrolled themselves beneath me like skin trouble. A drunk boarded the plane in Spokane and was assigned the seat next to mine. He wore a shiny FBI drip-dry summer suit and a pair of armadillo cowboy boots. He told me he couldn’t fly sober and that since he was doing emergency heart surgery in Seattle that afternoon, he certainly didn’t have time to drive.
“At three o’clock,” he explained, “I’m going to thwack open a guy’s heart and I’m already half in the bag. I may have to farm this mother out. I’m totaled.” He leaned over to look out the window. “Aw, hell,” he said, “I’ll end up doing it. It’s my dedication. Think about this: when the hero of Kafka’s Metamorphosis wakes up and discovers that he’s been transformed into a giant beetle, the first thing he does is call the office and tell his boss he’s going to be delayed. Where are you headed?”
I explained about my trip. As a reply, I suppose, my seatmate told me he’d seen matadors in the Plaza de Toros fighting a giant Coca-Cola bottle as it blew around the arena in the wind; ultimately it was drawn from the ring behind two horses and to resonant olés, just like a recently dispatched bull. “Tell that to your buddy Haig-Brown. He’s a writer. He’ll like that story.”
At this point, my companion confessed that he wasn’t a doctor. He was an inventor. He’d come up with an aluminum ring that you put over the exhaust pipe of your automobile; stretched across the ring was a piece of cheesecloth. An antipollution device, it was already patented in twelve states. “If you kick in twenty thousand,” he said, “I can let you have half the action when we go public.”
“Well, I don’t know—”
“I’ve got a friend who sold ten million smackers’ worth of phony stock and got a slap on the wrist from the Securities Commission. This is free enterprise, pal. Shit or get off the pot.”
“I just don’t see how I—”
In Vancouver, I spent a long layover waiting for the small plane to Campbell River. There were a number of people whose small luggage suggested a weekend trip to Vancouver, an enormously muscular girl in hot pants, and a number of loggers. At one point I looked up from the book I was reading to see a familiar face. It was Roderick Haig-Brown, lost in conversation with the ordinary people around me, many of whom seemed to know him.
I introduced myself and we flew north together, Haig-Brown describing the country of mountain ranges and fjordlike inlets beneath us with great specificity. Everything we saw provoked further instances of his local knowledge, and despite his modesty as a storyteller (and he is a meticulous listener), I was reminded of his two great strengths as a writer: his command of anecdote and his ability to reason.
When I told him about the surgeon-inventor I’d just escaped in Seattle, his chin dropped to his chest and he laughed convulsively. I began to be able to see him.
Haig-Brown is British-born and somehow looks it. Though the great share of his life has been spent as a Canadian, you think instead of the “county” English for whom culture and sport are not mutually exclusive. To say that he is a youthful sixty-three suggests nothing to those who know him; he is neither sixty-three nor, it would seem, any other age. He is rather tall, strong, and thin. He is bald on top, and the prelate’s band of hair that he retains sticks out behind like a merganser in profile. His eyes are intent and clear and suggest such seriousness that it is surprising how quickly he laughs. He has a keen appreciation of genuine wit, but will accept whatever is going. He relished Mister Hulot’s Holiday.