Geoffrey had to return to Auckland for a couple of days and Latham, with impressive presentiment, decided to take the day off—so it was only Tom and I who drove up the next morning with Bob South to a two-thousand-acre Maori-trust sheep station called Whangaipeke, about an hour west of Turangi. There we had a cup of tea with Wayne Tonks, manager of the station, and discussed how we would spend the day. There was, said Wayne, some fifteen kilometers of good, easy-access fishing on the Whanganui both upstream and downstream, but he understood that we, being keen, wanted nothing to do with such fishing but desired to try instead the isolated middle section of the river including the gorge, was that right?
“That’s us!” roared Southie, who had wanted to fish the middle section for some time, believing that in its isolation it might harbor some trout bigger than the river’s average of two and a half to three pounds. He asked Wayne how long he estimated it would take us to fish down through it, taking our time, and Wayne said four to five hours. Then I told Wayne that I had a pair of replacement hips and explained that though I had no problem walking all day on fairly level ground, a lot of up and down gave me trouble. It was all pretty flat, he said, easy wading, plenty of crossings. Which taught me later, after I reflected on it, that the deeply keen do not see things as you and I do. Wayne also said it was a wild, rarely fished, and beautiful piece of water we were going into, and he wished he was going with us—that it was like chopper fishing without the chopper.
In a near frenzy of optimism, Bob and Tom and I packed our daypacks with fishing and camera gear, a sandwich, a drink, and a sweater. Then we grabbed our rods and climbed behind Wayne and one of his ranch hands onto two four-wheel-drive ATVs and rode for thirty-five minutes over rough hills to a high, steep bluff overlooking the river.
“Here you are, boys. Good luck,” said Wayne. “If you’re not out by dark, I’ll come upstream looking for you.”
It was eleven-thirty by the time we scrambled down a nearly perpendicular bush-clad track to the river. We came out at a pretty place called the Paradise Pool, where Tom immediately caught two trout between three and four pounds apiece, a brown and a rainbow. Convinced now that we had hit the jackpot, we worked downstream, hopping around each other, spotting when we could and fishing blind when we couldn’t. It was a perfect, windless day, bright and warm. The high cliffs on either side of the river were covered with an old growth of beech, rimu, and tree ferns that could have played the forest around Adam and Eve’s garden. KIWI KEENNESS WINS OUT read the headline: we were in a glorious place having glorious sport on a glorious day. For about an hour and a half—and then we entered the gorge.
I have neither the space nor sufficient stomach for recalling it to do that ordeal justice, but here is a synopsis. The charming little river we had been on narrowed, steepened, and commenced to run as if trying to escape a mugger, convulsing through crooked chutes and around car-sized boulders. Walking in the river was all either up and down those boulders or wading around them in fast water over stones that were as slick as grease-covered bowling balls. The crossings were almost nonexistent. After I fell on a rock and badly dinged my knee, I tried taking to the shoreline, which was, on the bank I was confined to, a precipice of sawgrass, nettles, and thorn bushes that I was happy to clutch frequently, fly rod in mouth, to pull myself along.
As we clambered and stumbled and climbed our way through the gorge, we also fished a bit, though impatiently, since we had no idea how much farther we had to go or how long that going would take. In a pool little bigger than a bathtub, I saw my indicator twitch and set the hook on an honest monster of a rainbow, well over eight pounds, that jumped once within ten feet of me, then powered over the downstream lip of the pool, ran out all the fly line, and broke off, leaving me with both legs wedged between boulders. It wasn’t that the fishing was bad that made it disappointing (we released ten or twelve trout between us—most of them porky rainbows with lipstick-red cheek patches and lateral stripes—and lost more), it was that it had to be an afterthought to getting out of the gorge before dark and in one piece.
Which we managed to do, but only. We came out at six-thirty and there was Wayne casting from a rock, waiting on us. Delivered, I started wading to the first flat shoreline I had seen in almost five hours, slipped on a stone, and fell on my favorite trout rod, breaking it emphatically in two.
By the time we reached the vehicles that Wayne had brought up, it was seven-thirty. Tom and Bob and I had been on the river for eight hours and had spent maybe three of them fishing. Southie was limping on his bad knee. Tom’s bad back was sore. My hips felt like they had gravel in them, my knee was swollen, my rod broken. We were cold, wet, and, temporarily at least, all out of keen.
But not Wayne, who said he reckoned there were plenty of Americans who would pay top dollar to do what we did today.
Could be, Tom and I agreed.
Wayne gave us a few beers for the road and a whole roasted leg of mutton. After falling on the sheep back at Southie’s house—in good company and with three or four good bottles of wine—and after a soak in the hot tub and a soupçon of port for a nightcap, I went to bed actually feeling grateful for the harrowing, young buck’s day—and even more grateful that with Hughie McDowell we’d be very unlikely to have another one like it.
Hughie is an Irishman, well started on his fifties, who loves fishing and life with a poet’s ardor, but has been a little put out over the past few years with the latter. When I first met him in ’83 and for quite a while after that, he was an enjoyer of strong drink and an untiring teller of jokes and stories, with the bright sun of his bilateral Celtic personality out more often than the moon. He fished and tied flies, as he still does, on a level of his own, and he guided angling clients that he liked on that same level, mostly around his hometown of Rotorua and into the sublime backcountry rivers of the Urewera and Kaimanawa mountain ranges. As we sat one day beside the most beautiful of those rivers, he invited me to have a sup from a silver pocket flask he carried with him everywhere. It had a funny, intimate message engraved on it, signed by “Knuckles,” which was what he called his wife and best friend. Five years later, Knuckles was dead, and Hughie was neck-deep in debt and his moon came out and stayed out. He quit smoking and drinking and even guiding for a while, and some of his friends said he wasn’t the same old Hughie and disappeared from his life. But he never quit fishing, and it didn’t quit him. In fact, it may be what kept him around—arguing with him, bargaining—during some of the worst of his bad times since ’89. And now that he’s better, with the big hole in him sewn up, fishing goes with him everywhere the way the flask used to—in the car, to restaurants, home—like a calm old physician who did the sewing.
Latham and Tom and I met Hughie at noon at Rainbow Mountain on the road between Taupo and Rotorua and followed him to a tiny spring creek with lime banks of cress and duckweed that ran through a little Shangri-la of a dairy farm that belonged to some friends of his. The owners were blond, shy, happy, handsome people with three blond sons and a picture-book farm, house, and flower garden. From the house we drove down through a fat paddock full of dairy cows to the little creek—as different from the gorge of the day before as any place to fish for trout could be—and I saw immediately why Hughie liked to come here. It was tranquil and cheerful at the same time, the creek flowing daintily between a high, brushy bank that was good for spotting, and it was technical. The water was slow and impeccably clear; casting would be hard from the bank, and you couldn’t get in the creek without spooking whatever you were fishing for: the place was a little graduate seminar in trout angling.
And Latham was ready for it, I believed. He had been fishing well throughout the trip, particularly during the last week, and I wanted for him now a trial trout, one he had to sweat over to catch. Hughie spotted it near the upstream end of the creek’s fishable water—a good rainbow, finning under some cress near the opposite bank with just his nose sticking out. Latham had already caught an easy, smaller fish and he be
lieved this one would be easy, too, but he had a hard time getting a drag-free float over the trout, and it ignored two or three different nymphs. Hughie and I were watching from the high bank above the creek. We were talking, but Hughie never took his eyes off Latham and he was grinning as he talked. Latham tried casting from farther downstream and then with yet another nymph, and still the fish showed no interest.
Latham looked up at us and shrugged. “I’m going to try a dry,” he said.
“I think the fish knows you’re there. I don’t think he’s going to eat,” I told him, remembering numerous times in New Zealand when I have overfished a trout, including one spring creek brown on the South Island that Ray Grubb and I put more than twenty different flies over. It never spooked, but I believe now it could have told us what brand of waders we were wearing.
“Try a dry,” said Hughie.
“How about a big Royal Wulff? It might make him mad.”
Hughie chuckled and said, “Cast your line up here to me. I’ve got a great bloody ugly fly for you, and if it doesn’t piss him off, nothing will.” He caught Latham’s leader and knotted a big, bushy, overbuilt red and white thing onto the end of it. “I tie this for the backcountry,” he said. “I call it the Rough-as-Guts Wulff. You can bang it around for years and it won’t come apart.”
Latham’s first cast was short. On his second, the rainbow drifted up from the cress, followed the fly for a moment—perhaps pissed off, it was hard to tell—then ate it. And Hughie whooped.
Latham had hooked bigger trout on this trip, but none that he fought as carefully. When it was nearly ready, Hughie made his way down the bank with his long-handled net, bringing up in me a rush of memories of other times with him on other rivers. Like a lot of us, he no longer moved as lightly as he once did, but he was laughing as he helped himself down through the brush, this Rough-as-Guts Hughie—his sun full out, hurrying toward a fish.
Latham flew back home to Auckland the following day, and Tom left on the morning after that. I met Geoffrey at Lake Tarawera, thirty minutes from Rotorua, on the morning Tom left so that we could drive back to Auckland together in Geoff’s truck and end this road trip as we had all the others, singing together in a vehicle.
The Possum didn’t look at all up for singing, though, when I got to John Donald’s house on the lake around 8:00 A.M. An old mate of Geoff’s, Donald is a retired farmer who now takes clients fishing and pig and deer hunting from his Tarawera home. He and Geoff and an undercover cop named Roger had partied hard all night long with a group of Aussie doctors after fishing the lake in the evening, and now—fourteen days after we had sallied out to catch the last blue cod in New Zealand—Geoff was a little pale around the gills and looked, for the first time, partied and road-tripped out. So we did what life has taught us to do for that and almost any other condition: we took a few beers in a cooler and went fishing. Roger and Geoff and I took Geoff’s boat onto Lake Tarawera and threw streamers on sinking lines, unsuccessfully trying to tempt one of the big, zippy rainbows that live there into becoming Geoff’s dinner that night back home in Auckland.
Almost a decade and a half ago, on my second trip to New Zealand, I had spent most of a day from dawn onward doing this with Geoff and Hughie McDowell. I was fairly new to Kiwi keenness, and I remember marveling at how long and well and indefatigably the two of them cast the full sinking lines, and with what fervor they caught and killed the big lake fish. I was still astonished then at how hard the Kiwis went at their pleasures—drinking, laughing, hunting, and fishing harder and with less guilt and fastidiousness and fewer calls back to the wife or the office than anyone I had ever run into. It felt as footloose and unconstrained as living for outdoors pleasure felt when you were a boy. It felt to me like hunting or fishing with your grandfather when you were young and didn’t know or care what a computer was or how the stock market was doing, and could give yourself wholly and without second thought to waters and fields that were replete and uncrowded and promised to stay that way forever.
The regal black swans with their white cygnets were still on the lake. The volcano still reared above it like a movie set. The brush, with its bellbirds and tuis, was still as thick and deep at the national park end of the lake as it was fourteen years ago, and the jade water as clear and cold. Geoffrey and I cast into it with concentration for about an hour, not needing a fish, and when we reeled in he had come right.
We put the boat on the trailer and an oldies tape on the deck, and pointed the Toyota north toward Auckland. The truck had been given to Thomas for promotion. The boat, full of promotional tackle, was replaced every year free of charge by a company also looking for promotion. In 1991, after the business we started together failed, and while I was picking up various pieces of my own life and trying to put those pieces together into something different, the Possum made a tape called “Snapper Secrets” that became the second-best-selling video in New Zealand history. Then he made “Kingfish Secrets,” “Shooting Secrets,” “Surfcasting Secrets,” “Seafood Secrets,” “Trout Secrets,” “Catch More Fish,” “Bluewater Magic,” “More Snapper Secrets,” and tapes on bungie jumping, aerobics, cricket, and rugby. He got burned on some of the latter, nonfishing tapes and was now back to minding his knitting. He had six new tapes coming out in the next eighteen months, including “Snapper Secrets 3,” and said he reckoned he might do a very short one called “Blue Cod Secrets,” containing the following dramatized advice:
1. Put boat in water.
2. Put hook in sea.
3. Reel in cod.
He had a weekly column called “Gone Fishing” in the New Zealand Herald, the country’s biggest daily; a weekly hour-long talk show called Fishing and Outdoors on the largest nationwide radio station; and he was developing a new outdoors show for TV New Zealand. He was also working on a series of fishing guides to follow the seven books he had already published, was a senior writer for Bob South’s magazine, and was even doing some organizing of sporting side-travel for the sailing fat cats who would be coming into Auckland in 2000 for the America’s Cup.
The Possum had been seriously scratching and hauling since the last time I saw him, and had even found the unspeakable energy and optimism to start a new family since then. He and his wife, Vicky, had recently added three children to the two now-grown ones they already had, one of whom has two children of her own older than Geoff’s youngest.
But my man had managed to keep his priorities straight.
Like many another Kiwi, Thomas seems to live by all the maxims contained in this Chinese proverb at once, but to pay the most attention to the bottom line.
If you want to be joyous for one hour, get drunk.
If you want to be joyous for three days, get married.
If you want to be joyous for eight days, kill a pig and eat it.
If you want to be joyous forever, learn to fish.
Elvis was singing, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and we were warbling along.
“Well, where are we going next year?” Geoffrey asked when the song was over. “They’re catching stripies by the bloody boatload out at the Three Kings Islands. And I’m in on this 1,800-acre multimillion-dollar game preserve ten minutes from Rotorua. Mate of mine is doing it. It’s got two Scottish gamekeepers, pheasant, quail, ducks, trophy stags, pigs . . .” He head was bobbing a mile a minute. “Pointing dogs, retrievers, big trout in the ponds . . .”
“How about fishing the country around Waikaremoana?”
“Yehyehyeh!”
“And there’s this valley I’d like to see again on the South Island.”
“Yehyehyeh, we’ll do it all, mate,” said the Possum. “Shitchyeh!”
THE RIVER DEFINITELY HAD TROUT IN IT
It was very hot and we stopped under some trees beside a dam that crossed the river. Bill put the pack against one of the trees and we jointed up the rods, put on the reels, tied on leaders, and got ready to fish.
“You’re sure this thing has trout in it?” Bill asked.<
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That is Jake Barnes narrating the beginning of a fishing trip he and his wise-ass Brit friend Bill take into the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain between bullfights and women problems in The Sun Also Rises. I read it for the first of many times when I was maybe eighteen years old, already a passionate, if ham-handed, trout fisherman. In the more than fifty years since then I have been fortunate and self-indulgent enough to have angled for trout in over a dozen countries and have read everything I could get my hands on about that noble sport and art, and yet those few pages from Hemingway remain for me not only one of the two or three most vivid evocations of trout fishing I know of, but the only mention I have ever come across of it being practiced in Spain.
Luckily, my life is such that I hear about outstanding trout fishing; but I had never heard about it in the Pyrenees until my friend, the angling book agent Richard French, sang its praises and then introduced me to a week of it in June of 2014. Once an indiscriminate glutton of sporting voyages, I am now of an age and appetite where I choose my travel repasts pickily. While angling of some kind or another is usually the main course, I now require side dishes such as lodging both comfortable and piquant, soul-pleasing land or seascapes, memorable wining and dining, and something more edifying for my non-fishing wife, Patricia, to do than sit all day in a flats skiff or on the bank of a trout stream.
When combined with extraordinary fishing, such menus are rare as feathers on a Labrador, and if our 2014 trip to the Spanish Pyrenees was something like Bill asking Jake if he was sure the river had trout in it, the answer was such that Patricia and I immediately made plans to return there this past September with a group of fourteen friends. Ten of us went to fish; six never wet a line; not one of us will ever forget the experience.
The first of the trip’s two venues was the village of Aren, which is dramatically sited in the foothills of the eastern Pyrenees on the border between Aragon and Catalonia. The four-hour drive from Barcelona to this remote and ancient village of three hundred hearty souls carried us first through a russet and sage-green flatland heavily cultivated in corn and fruit, then into quickly steeper, less-populated countryside of small villages, flocks of sheep, rocky gorges, and table-topped hills with the profiles of high saw-toothed peaks rearing behind them.
The Next Valley Over Page 21
