The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  On the drive up, through Ohai and Nightcaps, Mossburn (“deer capital of New Zealand”) and Athol—through rolling, grassy ranching country surrounded by distant mountains, where every truck carried two to six herding dogs and every paddock was full of sheep and deer, deer and sheep—Geoff and I gave the young guys the thrill of their lives by singing along with Elvis, Frankie Avalon, Dion and the Belmonts, Dean Martin . . . This was not a sudden inspiration, nor were we unpracticed. Thomas and I have made a habit of singing along in cars laden with good things to eat and drink and headed toward fishing or shooting somewhere in New Zealand, Australia, Montana, New Hampshire, and eastern Canada ever since we met.

  That was in 1983. Geoff, who was then as he is now a sort of jack-of-all-trades sporting-media entrepreneur, invited my wife, Patricia, and me over, sight unseen, to appear in two segments of a program he was producing for New Zealand television. We came back the following year to be in a tape he was making for Air New Zealand and the New Zealand Tourist Bureau, and for five years running after that, when he and I were in the travel business together, to scout new fishing and shooting locations. During all those years we sang in practically every car we got into. We also drank our way into song and sometimes sang ourselves drunk on riverbanks, in bush huts, in bars and in restaurants—including the one in the old Marlborough Hotel in Russell, where we closed the place down from sheer heartbreak following our versions of “How Great Thou Art” and the haunting Kiwi national song, “Pokarekareana.”

  One cannot help but worry about the passage of time, of course—the erosion of prowess and talent and the power to move people. It had been almost a decade since the Possum and I had joined forces on “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Earth Angel,” and others, and . . .well, you never know. But by the time we pulled into the pub at Garston it was clear from the nearly ecstatic faces of Latham and Tom when they exited the car that the old magic wasn’t entirely gone.

  We shook hands with Ron Stewart, sixty-five, and his son Geoff, forty, and followed them a few miles down a dirt road to a mountain-ringed meadow through which flowed the storied Mataura River. Near its bank we were served up a refined tailgate lunch by the Stewarts of homemade bread, pâté, vegetable relish, fruit, and cheese, after which Latham and Tom and I wandered upstream, guided by Ron and his son, for a little refined upstream nymphing in the blue waters of the upper Mataura.

  It was so suddenly the absolute other side of the coin from that morning’s angling that it was a little dizzying. Like most professional trout-fishing guides in New Zealand these days, Ron and Geoff Stewart are cultivated, charming men—outfitted with American equipment and neoconservationist ethics, and with almost exclusively American clienteles—who would rather drive back and forth over their new Sage rods with a pickup truck than harm a fish. As a neoconservationist American who would love to see New Zealand trout fishing continue to be the best in the world, I find myself aligned with these guys and thanking God for their majority in the country now. But they often put Thomas to sleep. While he napped beside the cars, Latham and I fished for a couple of hours to a few sighted fish, including one of six or seven pounds that I had to go very deep and fine to tempt and finally broke off on the take (without hurting his mouth, I hope). Then we followed Ron Stewart back to his lodge.

  Kiwistyle Lodge is located in the town of Glenorchy, population 120, on the northeast shore of giant Lake Wakatipu, forty minutes north of Queenstown. Its setting of young, jagged, and snow-capped mountains bucking out of the lake is so startling it seems like a slap in the face. Kiwistyle holds only four guests, along with photos and fishing books, crystal decanters and mounts and good sporting prints, comfortable furniture, a broad hearth, and a kitchen from which Ron’s wife, Ann, turns out consistently memorable meals. But though the lodge is small, the fishery it offers is big and diverse: six premier rivers running into the lake within twenty minutes of the lodge; three spring creeks; three alpine lakes holding brown trout, and river mouths in the big lake; the Mataura; chopper fishing to the west, sea-run brown trout fishing to the south during the whitebait run in December; and camp-out fishing on the Greenstone River.

  Unfortunately, virtually all of that was blown out the next morning by a heavy rain that went on all night. But we were able to stalk a little spring creek and spot a plummy cruising brown trout in the turquoise water.

  There ought to be a big sign where you first come through customs at the Auckland airport that says, G’DAY AMERICAN TROUT ANGLERS. WELCOME TO THE NFL. In some places and at odd times, trout fishing can be easy in New Zealand; but typically and essentially, it is more technically challenging and butt-kicking difficult there than anywhere else in the world. There are a number of reasons why that is so, but chief among them is that much New Zealand trout fishing and all the best of it is done by what the Kiwis call “stalking.” You walk quietly and slowly, well back from the bank of a river, stopping every fifteen seconds or so to study through Polaroid glasses the usually air-clear water for fish holding on lies or feeding. First you must be able to see the fish; then you must see it before it sees you; then you must put a fly in the only place it can be put to drift naturally over the fish without spooking it. One of the many challenges of fishing in this way for the first time in New Zealand is that the trout you find are, almost always, monstrously bigger than any you’ve ever caught before, and just looking at them can make you forget which end of the rod does the casting.

  “That’s the biggest trout I’ve ever seen,” said Latham without glee about the spring creek brown. “Why don’t you try him, Dad?” Though my elder son has lived in Auckland for over three years and has fly-fished for most of his life, this was his first time stalking New Zealand trout, and the brown simply gave him the willies.

  “No, you’re up,” said Tom, who understandably preferred Latham as a photo model over me whenever he could get him.

  Permit me just a bit of bragging here. There were two dozen ways to blow that fish, and Latham didn’t exercise any of them. Instead, he made his way up to the bank in a crouch, false-cast across stream out of the fish’s vision, then turned the cast and dropped his parachute hopper with a nymph tied beneath it exactly where it needed to be. The trout porpoised languidly and ate both flies not two feet from where Thomas and I hunkered in the grass watching. Latham fought the fish neatly and released it. It was a male of around twenty-three inches, and my perennially happy son looked as happy as I have ever seen him when we all shook his hand.

  We had another fine picnic lunch after casting Wooly Buggers at the mouth of the Greenstone. We looked at the Routeburn and Dart Rivers, and we drove up the long valley of the braided, bouldery Rees, then got out and walked to a high saddle looking upriver to nine-thousand-foot mountains that surrounded the valley like an amphitheater.

  We were standing in a huge, tilted meadow leading up to a steep and gorsey hillside where merino sheep were grazing. The sun was just beginning to emerge and it fell through the clouds onto the valley and across our meadow like a rain of bright arrows. It was a place to make you want to pray, or find new hope, or pledge yourself to something, or break into “The Hills Are Alive . . .”; a place where the frangible preciousness of life blindsides you like a rogue wave. There are motives and motives to fish. For over forty years one of mine has been to see with my own eyes what lay in the next valley over. Blessedly, fishing allows you to believe that every time you throw a hook in the water something outrageous, as big and bright as your hopes, might swim up out of the unknowable dark and eat it; and traveling to fish allows you to entertain the notion that the next valley over might be the ultimate one, the one finally commensurate with your ability to fantasize it. For fifteen years I have known that if such a last valley over exists, it does so in New Zealand, and now I believe I may have glimpsed it.

  Dave Hern stopped his Trooper on top of a hill, took his rifle off the backseat, and scoped the valley and forested hills for a deer.

  “It’s too hot,” he said after a wh
ile. “The mongrel cunts are all bedded down.”

  He and I got back in the vehicle and followed the steep, rutted dirt road down into the valley to his hut on the Mohaka River. Geoff Thomas, Tom, and Latham pulled in right behind us in Geoff’s Toyota truck. Geoff had flown from Queenstown to Auckland the day before and driven through most of the night to Napier to meet up with Tom and Latham and me. In the back of his truck, under a camper top, he had provisioned wine and beer, duck breasts and fish from his freezer in Auckland, all kinds of fishing tackle, sleeping bags, waders . . . enough stuff to get us at least started off right on the North Island leg of our trip. We had met Hern near Napier and convoyed north on a hot, clear, breezy day through the tan hills, apple orchards, cornfields, and vineyards of Hawkes Bay, then by dirt road into the foothills of the Kaweka Mountains and onto the 1,400-acre block on the Mohaka that Dave and a group of his friends lease for hunting and fishing.

  Because the South Island has so much more wild country than the North, there is a common perception that the North Island has very little. This perception is as wrong as the one that has there being exclusively rainbow trout on the North Island and browns on the South, when in fact world-class fishing for both species exists on both islands. The Mohaka, for example, is in some of its stretches primarily a brown trout river; and some of those stretches run through country as remote and wild as any on the South Island. At Dave Hern’s hut we were eight miles from the nearest upstream road and fifteen from the nearest one downstream, at the bottom of a steep valley flanked by pine hills. Out in the “wop-wops,” as they say in Kiwi—in red deer, wild pig, and big-trout country.

  Hern is a sometime guide and part-owner of Hamill’s Hunting and Fishing Shop in Hastings. An ex-beef-boner and rugby player, one of the country’s best sporting clay shooters and a top dry-fly angler, he is a big, strong lad of thirty-nine years, about 250 pounds, and excellent Kiwi humor and energy. We ate cold chicken sitting on little plastic chairs in front of his hut, then wadered up and started stalking the bank a few hundred yards downstream. There were lots of fish, some of them big. There was also a gale-force wind tearing down the gorge directly into our faces, making the fishing—with fifteen-foot leaders, weighted nymphs, and indicators—a pain in the ass, frankly. We all caught a few trout nonetheless. My best and worst was a slabby twenty-one-incher who wouldn’t get out in the river and tug. Dave threw a rock at him, loudly calling him a mongrel cunt, but it didn’t help: the trout just stayed in a little backwater finning geriatrically and looking up balefully at me until I took the nymph out of his mouth. It is at such times that someone who fishes as much as I do can wonder where his life has gone astray.

  But by seven-thirty we were all standing around outside the hut in the windy dark drinking from a jug of Italian red and watching Geoff cook mallard breasts and snapper fillets on the grill, and I had decided she’ll be right. The lights of Thomas’s truck were trained on the grill, and its tape player was blasting out Chubby Checker, the Beach Boys . . . Geoff was shaking his shallow butt, wearing a head lamp of Tom’s, his sneaker laces untied as always, his shirt open and little possum belly spilling out, flipping fillets on the grill. “Mariaaaaaa,” he crooned along in his good baritone, reaching his arms up to the starry heavens.

  While killing the jug after dinner, we learned from Geoffrey—in a passionate argument the details of which I couldn’t for the life of me remember the following day—why the biggest threat to New Zealand was the Indonesian Navy.

  “The Indonesian Navy?” Tom asked him about halfway through his harangue. “I didn’t even know they had one.”

  “Yehyehyeh,” said the Possum. “Shitchyeh. The second largest navy in the world, mate. You see, that’s what I mean: the sneaky little bahstads even have you Yanks fooled.”

  The five of us finally turned in to sleeping bags on double bunks in a back room of the hut that was the size of a servicestation bathroom, and despite the threat from the Indonesian Navy I never slept better.

  We fished downstream again the next morning in less wind, and Latham was high rod with five good trout. Around eleven we came back to the hut for a brunch of venison tenderloin, eggs, snapper, and wild boar and duck sausage that Geoffrey had stayed behind to cook, then went upstream for two or three hours where the fish were sluggish and unhungry in the low, warm water.

  We left the Mohaka that afternoon, spent the night back in the endearing art deco town of Napier, and drove northwest the following day to Turangi on the south end of Lake Taupo, New Zealand’s largest lake. On the way, we stopped for a picnic lunch and a two- or three-hour fish with Tony Hayes on the Rangitaiki River. It was a bright, handsome day, with just enough breeze to stir the tall clumps of toi-toi grass. We ate a picnic beside the river, then Latham, Geoff, and I took turns fishing a few pools and I got a chance to catch up with Tony, who owns the Tongariro Lodge in Turangi, one of the best fishing lodges in New Zealand or anywhere else. We talked about a magical afternoon we had spent together on the lower Tongariro, and a day of helicopter fishing on the world’s best rainbow river when he and I watched but couldn’t bring to the fly the biggest resident rainbow I ever expect to see, a fish that dwarfed the nine-pounder I had just caught.

  There is maybe nothing in the angling life as satisfying as tacking up memorable new experiences with friends with whom you have shared unforgettable old ones. In the first pool we fished on the Rangitaiki, an effusive adolescent girl of a pool, Tony suggested I try a parachute golden stonefly in the riffle at the top. I tied on this odd choice of a fly, threw it up to the head of the riffle, and caught a beautifully proportioned three-pound rainbow that jumped all over the pool. Tony calling the shot like that, and the memory of the fish hanging like a red comma in the blue air, would have made the entire trip to New Zealand for me if I had needed it to.

  In Turangi we stayed with Geoff’s mate, Bob South, in his comfortable home there. Southie, as he is called in his adopted country, is a fifty-year-old Californian who moved to New Zealand in 1969 to play and coach basketball. He shortly went from that pursuit to sportswriting for the Auckland Star newspaper, and for the past five years he has been the editor of Fish and Game New Zealand, a magazine that was named the best in New Zealand in 1996.

  In the all but monolithically male culture of New Zealand, keen is one of the most complimentary adjectives you can use about someone, incorporating as it does much of what is most valued in the Kiwi character. As it is used there, the word’s primary meanings are energetic and passionately engaged, but it also says obliquely that someone is rugged, durable, generous, game for anything, and of course, optimistic (which quite often among Kiwis means the same thing as game for anything, as in “Are those sharks man-eaters, you reckon?” “I dunno, mate; let’s jump in and find out.”). All of my favorite Kiwis are keen keen: so keen that being in their company is like carrying around a very sharp knife. And Bob South is as keen as any of them. It is hard to know whether he stayed on in New Zealand because he was already keen, or whether New Zealand made him that way, but either way he is the real thing in spades and even has by now the accent and the inflections to go with it.

  Good food and good wine are two things Southie is keen about, and he dined and wined us marvelously while we were his guests. Fishing is another thing, and he arranged some memorable angling for us, including a day for Tom and me and himself in the Whanganui Gorge, into which keenness took us and was barely sufficient to bring us out.

  The day before that particular travail, we floated for five hours down the Upper Tongariro River with Garth Oakden, a good young rafting outfitter from Turangi and a friend of Southie’s. The legendary Tongariro was one of the greatest trout rivers in the world when Zane Grey began writing about it in the second decade of the century, and it is even better now, with the average rainbow caught in it weighing over six pounds. It is also one of the most comely rivers anywhere—wide and majestic in its lower stretches, muscular and plunging in its upper reaches, six miles of which w
e rafted with Garth, stopping to fish five or six pools from the bank along the way.

  Between the pools were some Class III and IV rapids and lots of bouldery chutes, steep drop-offs and places where the current ran directly into sheer, moss-covered rock walls. The river was milky blue from volcanic sediment, and it ran through placid, inviolate country of native beech, moss, and tree ferns—a wonderfully shrouded and prehistoric-looking country, with candied green patches of sunlight lying throughout it like cobwebs. Wood pigeons and shags flew over us. A blue duck bobbed down the rapids just ahead of us, and swallows and fantails buzzed the river for insects. Latham caught a couple of silvery, vividly striped five-to-six-pound rainbows on weighted nymphs, and I lost one that might have been bigger. The fishing was slow because of an overabundance of sediment in the river, but it was as enjoyable a half-day float as I have ever taken. And we could have repeated it the following day after, say, sleeping late; but every road trip seems to require of me that I spend at least one day flailing around at something over my head, and I had not done that yet.

  We dined that night at Tongariro Lodge with Bob South and his girlfriend and Peter Church and his wife. Peter is one of the country’s elite fishing guides, one of the best fly-rod anglers I know, and unbeatable company on or off a river. And Peter knows keen. When he found out Tom and I were planning to go into the Whanganui Gorge with Southie, he grinned at me as I was declining dessert after an enormous meal and said, “If I were you, Charles, I’d stuff it in. I think you may need it tomorrow.”