A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  The president, questioned about this, has an excuse. Is it a knowledgeable explanation of bluefish migratory patterns, a normal fisherman-type rationale, a shrug at the wrong kind of weather or the fickleness of fate? No, not at all. The president, having used “environment” as a buzzword during his election campaign, having tried his hardest to open the Gulf of Maine to offshore drilling, having done everything he can to sabotage international efforts to come to grips with global warming and the devastation of acid rain, having placed people in charge of this country’s wilderness who are dedicated exploiters of that wilderness, having, in short, done everything he possibly can do to destroy the natural world in which the bluefish swims, now voices his displeasure at not catching one by blaming the press boats, which, in his words, “Come too close and scare the fish away.”

  I feel bad for the president. But not to despair; two days later, on the last afternoon before he’s due to return to Washington, he manages to catch a solitary bluefish, which is then held up for the despised press to record on film.

  It’s an angry-looking fish, like all blues, but seems angrier than most I’ve seen, even in death; it’s sharp bullet mouth is drawn back in a contemptuous sneer toward the aging man that lifts it. Perhaps it’s my imagination at work here, but I see that bluefish as heroic—as the agent of the natural world the president and his cronies have declared war on in their greedy crusade . . . a fish sent on a suicide mission to penetrate the circle of Secret Service boats and press launches and the barges of the president’s flunkies—to penetrate and deliver to the president as it’s removed from the hook a sharp nip on the hand. Not a fatal nip—nature is too generous for that and there are laws forbidding anything greater—but just enough to make him pay attention.

  Did it succeed? Well, in the newspaper pictures the president looks just as inattentive as ever. But it’s a sign of rebellious stirrings, a straw in the wind, and makes me feel better about the future of this country than I have in a long time.

  Glory and honor onto you, O noble blue!

  Two Places Well: Notes from the West Highlands

  That Scotland has a secret becomes apparent to any traveler driving north from the Great Glen. The way the landscape is held back under the serene mist, the hills with their convoluted folds and cloud-draped summits, the open heather that both exaggerates distance and diminishes it, the one-track roads that seem to swallow up cars, literally erase them, the abandoned crofts with their missing roofs, the odd sensation, all but unique on this overcrowded planet, of being in a place that for two centuries has been losing population. It’s a secret kept by offering so many possibilities it’s impossible to determine which holds the key. Not for nothing is Loch Ness situated in the Highlands—this is a place where surfaces, alluring as they are, only make you want to plunge deeper to grasp what’s beneath.

  It’s a familiar note to any New Englander, at least one who can remember the old days before the interstates when the abandoned hill farms and overgrown meadows suggested both a great loneliness and a great calm. Montana would be the closest you could come to it in the States today—that high, sky-drenched plateau fit for ruminants and ruminators, philosophers and sheep.

  Introspection, of course, can be a troublesome thing. There are those who hate the Highlands, hate the way the hills seem to offer something they immediately—the weather being what it is—take back. There are still others who are sensitive to these moods, but vaguely afraid of them; the endless gift shops with their tartan plaids and heather sprigs and shortbread tins seemed designed just for them. “My God, Willa, will you look at that sunset!”

  “Yes, Donald, but shall we bring Alice home the porridge or this box of Edinburgh Rock?”

  But not to laugh at these tourists—the emigrant Scots among them are homesick, the Sassenachs merely confused. Even someone sensitive to landscape has a tough enough time of it here. The weather and terrain change so fast it’s possible to read into Highland scenery any conclusion you want. Life is this, life is that, and so many in-betweens it makes you dizzy.

  So much weight for a land so small! But it’s exactly the West Highlands’ charm, this association of opposites, the intimate grandeur, this cozy expanse. Take the road south along the coast from Ullapool and you’ll see what I mean. There to the right is the ocean, wild and cold-looking; there to the left, mountains even wilder and colder; in between along the roadside, a jungle of lush rhododendron that seems lifted from Henri Rousseau. Better yet, screw up your courage and drive the Pass of the Cattle inland from Applecross farther down the coast, glancing up at the scenery in those brief intervals when the road straightens from its switch-backing descent. Hills on one side, sea on the other, lochs in between, the three elements repeated in endless superimpositions of color, line, and plane.

  And if the land is dense in scenery, it is even denser in history, so that the past in Scotland is as exposed and palpable as the heather and rocks. These human associations are always poignant, often tragic—too many seem to memorialize farewells. The plaques in village kirks commemorating soldiers dead in foreign wars; those shortbread tins showing Bonnie Prince Charlie bidding a respectful adieu to Flora Macdonald; the marker indicating the spot Mary Stuart left Scotland on her way to being axed; the emigrant ports with their sad reminders of the Clearances, when crofters were forced off the land by their lairds to make way for sheep. . . . Travel through these glens and you’re never far from a goodbye that was forced.

  Clearance, war, emigration, neglect—such has been the Highland lot since the Jacobite insurrection and the bitter Culloden defeat. Bad enough in the past, there is a new round of clearances under way today, the so-called “Second Clearance” as the current lairds (who when it comes to insensitive greed could teach American developers a thing or two) clear the sheep off the hills in order to plant more profitable spruce.

  The one who would know about this cycle best—the man around whose bronze shoulders the secret of Scotland seems to drape—stands with an old model Lee-Enfield rifle on the outskirts of Glenelg, his kilted legs planted firmly on the pebbly marge of the shingle, his mustached face, tarnished by salt water, looking out toward the mountains of Skye across the narrow, whitecapped Sound of Sleat. He stands there for a reason—to commemorate the final chapter in the Scots diaspora, the half-forced, half-voluntary emigration to the trenches of Flanders and France in what is still known in the Highlands as the Great War.

  Never was a statue better placed. Remote, solitary, its loneliness set against scenery that is almost unbearable in its perfection, it evokes as no words can the tragic loss of those years 1914–18, when the Highlander, the man who had withstood all history could throw at him, was all but destroyed as a separate proud being by the wicked expediency of Maxim machine guns and coiled concertina wire.

  Glenelg is neither an easy place to find nor to drive to—it’s as if to approach the statue you must first traverse enough Highland landscape that it settles deep into your understanding. The stoic and bitter—these are plain enough in the erect way the soldier stands there, the simple inscription on the plate. But there’s beauty in it, too, the other half of the secret, and if you stand there long enough, waiting for that slow summer sun to get below the Cullins, you’ll see the secret toward which everything in the Highlands seems trending—the dark bittersweet shadow of a place history has blessed by leaving behind.

  I visited Glenelg last year, spent my hour at the base of the statue, then wandered down to the water to see if I couldn’t skim a rock all the way to Skye. Celeste was with me—I had spent the first years of our marriage attempting to describe to her the beauty of the Highlands, deciding in the end the only way to do it was to let her see for herself. And though we spent a lot of time at it, we weren’t there simply to define what it was we found so alluring in the landscape, but to actually immerse ourselves in some. For the first half of our trip this meant climbing, or as they more correctly call it in this part of the world, “hill walking.” We�
��d gone up Lochnagar from the Spittal of Glen Muick on a brutally hot afternoon, and had been rewarded at the top by a view of the famous Black Spout gully and the silvery lochan nestled below its sheer walls. We hill walked around Glencoe, too, getting lost just long enough in a snow squall to be able to laugh about it later as we nursed some Courage in a Fort William pub.

  Now here we were in the West Highlands turning our attention from hills to trout lochs—the lochs that had, on my earlier visit, both enchanted me and, having neither the time nor means to fish them, tormented me as well. We made our base at the fishing lodge in Shieldaig near Gair loch; situated right on the ocean, they have the rights to the fishing on a dozen hill lochs scattered back a good ten miles inland.

  It’s beyond expectation that a place that suits me so well in every other respect should have trout in it as well. The Highlands are full of fish, browns brightly colored and wild. Such is their abundance that bags over a hundred are not uncommon, at least up in Sutherland, and nobody thinks the worst of you for keeping all you want. Add to this the salmon rivers, sea trout streams, and hill burns, not only on the mainland but in the Hebrides, the Shetlands, and Orkney, and you have a place where the fly-fishing opportunities are endless. Read the Brit fishing magazines (which are wonderfully chatty and specific compared to ours), and you can get a quick overview of all this and the names of generous fishermen who are more than willing to help you with advice.

  This was my first experience of British fishing, and I was more than a little intimidated by what I’d read of its tradition. Wasn’t this where you were guilty of terribly bad manners if you used anything besides the fly the trout were actually taking? Where people called river “keepers” lurked behind the boxberry, the better to catch you out? Where—for all I knew—you were expected to bow to other fishermen you passed, or maybe not bow at all, but put your nose up in the air and snort, “Good nymphing, what?,” failing which you were taken off the water and expelled to the rude place whence you came?

  Maybe this is so in England, but up north in the hills there’s a more relaxed ethic at work. In the Shieldaig lodge’s lobby is a list of all the lochs, and you pick out one that’s free, write your name down beside it, help yourself to the keys to its rowboat, and you’re in business. Arriving late in the afternoon as we did, we were too late to bid, but this was no problem either; Colin, the lodge’s owner, explained we were free to fish any loch we wanted, as long as we cast from shore and didn’t use a boat.

  Fine. I put our rods together, Celeste grabbed her pack, and into it we stuffed gammon sandwiches put up by the hotel’s chef, some scones, and—the pack having just enough room—a bottle of white Hungarian wine.

  We decided to try the closest loch first. It’s an uphill two-mile walk, and we took our time with it since the sun was as bright and hot as it had been our entire trip (at dinner that night the other fishermen complained bitterly about the weather being too good). Spring lambing was over, and the lambs were everywhere—they were just old enough to leave their mothers’ sides, but would stumble back in confusion the moment they saw us. Somewhere along the way

  I glanced down at my watch; it was four on the button, and to prove it the watch cuckooed.

  It wasn’t the watch, of course, but a real cuckoo, whose call, though we’d heard it often on our walks, we still couldn’t convince ourselves was real.

  “It’s over there,” I said, pointing.

  Celeste listened with her head tilted. “No, further away. Over . . . there.”

  “It could make you cuckoo playing this game.”

  “Cu-kooo. Cu-kooo.” This from the bird.

  The loch, once we got there, was larger than I’d pictured, the size of water that would have been crowded with cottages back home. Here, there was no sign of any human presence, nothing except a rowboat on the far shore with a solitary flyfisherman whose rod, enlarged by the sun, lay tilted like a stirrer in a punch bowl of gold.

  I was worried about the fishing-from-shore business, but there were no trees here, nothing but heather, and when it came to backcasting room the sky was literally the limit. On my second cast, a brown came up from the peat-colored depths, curled its body around the fly, then—just when I thought he had missed it—came tight against the line. He wasn’t big, perhaps half a pound at the most, but even from the distance I could see the butter-crimson blend of his color, and he fought in an exuberant, bulldogging manner reminiscent of smallmouth bass.

  I caught three more after that; initiated, I rock-hopped along shore to where Celeste was trying her best to keep her line free of the heather. It was hot, the fish were feeding just out of her range, my advice wasn’t particularly tactful, and between one thing and the other it was suggested I walk a little way off so she could fish alone. Meaning to save her the effort, I swung the rucksack up on my back; a little farther along, I bent over to tie my boots and out the opened flap of the pack directly into the water dropped Celeste’s favorite Nikon camera.

  I fished it out again, but the lens and viewfinder were soaked. Celeste, hearing the splash, came over to see what I had caught.

  “We can let it dry,” I said lamely.

  “It’s ruined. Absolutely ruined.”

  “I guess you should have tied the flap up.”

  Counterattacking is always a big mistake. Celeste dropped her rod into the heather, grabbed the camera, and stalked off in the direction of the lodge. Under any other circumstances I would have hurried after her, but behind me the trout were beginning to rise, and not just occasionally but everywhere. I was mad at her for leaving, madder yet at my clumsiness, but grateful, too—at least she had left the rod! Thus equipped, I could switch from a sinking line to a floating one without changing spools.

  Despite the rises, the trout preferred taking the fly just as it became waterlogged and sank. Once I figured this out, I caught fish regularly. The sun setting so late in Scotland, it was tempting to stay long enough to bring the total up to two dozen or three, but I was worried about Celeste, and after my thirteenth I put the rods up and walked back to the lodge.

  Things smoothed out over a dinner of trout and the bottle of wine. We talked to Colin and decided to reserve the farthest loch for the next day. It was a two-hour hike, but supposedly the fishing was worth it.

  We got an early start in the morning, or at least tried to—when we went to fetch the key to the boat on our loch, it couldn’t be found. We asked Colin, who asked the night clerk, who asked the chambermaid, but without success—the key had gone missing. I suspect we upstart Yanks were being none too subtly bumped off a loch, but there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it. The only loch still available was the one we had already fished, but maybe, we told ourselves, the sacrifice of the camera would have propitiated the gods there in our favor.

  And apparently it had—our day there was perfect, from the moment I pushed Celeste out from the beach in the skiff and jumped in after her, to the moment eight hours later when we slid the boat back into the sandy impression left by the keel. We caught trout, a large number, and they seemed the vibrant, living underline to the generous blue sky and the easy June breeze and a waterscape set like liquid heather against the hills.

  The skiff was a heavy one of traditional design, with thick green planking, iron oarlocks, and a healthy amount of daylight showing between her ribs. She was heavy to push out, a lot heavier to row—a good heavy, I decided. It slowed down the drifting and got me thinking.

  “You know,” I said, digging in the oars. “This American fascination . . . puff . . . for lightweight equipment . . . puff . . . has gotten out of hand. There’s a lot to be said for old-fashioned solid construction . . . puff . . . as exemplified . . . puff . . . by this skiff.”

  “Hmmmmn?” Celeste responded, looking up from her fly. “Could you please row a little faster, dear? I think Scots trout prefer more speed.”

  “Certainly. But what I meant to say . . . puff puff puff . . . is that less is not necessarily . .
. Just let me rest here for a moment . . . phew . . . more.”

  With a boat like that, anchoring was almost redundant. I gave a final desperate yank on the oars and we glided to a stop in a cove where the shoreline dropped sheer in a mica-flecked cliff. Celeste immediately caught a nice one-pound brown that ran toward the rock as if to climb it. My arms ached so much from rowing it was all I could do to cast at all, but then I caught one, too, and immediately decided—now that the ice was broken—to tie on something I’d been wanting to try for a long time.

  It was a cast—a leader—of three wet flies. Once upon a time it was a common way to fish in the States, and there were passionate arguments concerning which order the flies should be arranged in and why. There’s probably not a Yank under the age of eighty-five who remembers this method, but in Scotland it’s still a common way to fish, and at a tackle store in Edinburgh I’d bought several of the dropper-festooned leaders and a handful of appropriate flies.

  I rummaged through them now, picked out three I thought offered the fish the most variety, thereby emphasizing their smorgasbord attraction. They weren’t easy to cast (not just for the wind do the Scots use those heavy rods), but I finally managed to get the slow, deliberate roll of it and work out line.

  The trout, as if to encourage me in my first clumsy attempt to speak Scots, immediately responded. A fat speedy fish came a fantastic distance to take the red fly at the end, and before I could bring him in, another had taken a swipe at the brown fly in the middle. Whether it was the processional quality of the flies, their resemblance to a school of baitfish, or simply the greater odds of the multiple offerings, the trout kept slashing at my rig with happy abandon. It was fascinating to see which fly caught the most; as it turned out, it was the red one at the end. The fish, having seen the first two sail by, couldn’t resist a shot at the shimmery third.

  At lunchtime, we rowed across the loch to where a burn spilled across a broken weir, and ate our sandwiches looking toward the grayish blue hills in the east. They were twenty miles away, but such was the transparency of the air, the treeless intervention, they seemed much closer. They had an airy, detached look, as if they were hovering above the moors; the sight, combined with the spray of the burn, took the place of the vanished breeze to cool us off.