Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  Steadman and I would have been good friends without fishing, but we are much closer because of it. What we were hoping to do this week was to put an end to the bane of our fishing lives, what we call the Week-Before Syndrome. This refers to our tendency to arrive at some fabled lodge the week or month after it had had the greatest week for fishing ever and the fish had all gone elsewhere. The manager of the lodge is always apologetic when he breaks the sad news of this to us—it is not his fault, and certainly not our fault, but nonetheless, he implies, if we’d had the good sense to come at almost any other time, the quality of the fishing would have been guaranteed. The truth is, it is hard for him to bring himself to say this, but they have never had a week this poor in the lodge’s history. Would we, by the way, he adds, like to see the lodge’s register to see how many fish were caught last week, month or year?

  When I was a younger man, I thought of fishing as an end in itself; you went fishing because you wanted—needed—to catch fish. The more and bigger fish you caught, the better fisherman you presumably were and the better man you were. Now, much later in life, in a world greatly changed from that of my young manhood, with gender lines much more blurred in most professional and social situations than in my youth, with fishing still a primarily male pursuit (or at least the way my friends and I pursue it), I am intrigued by the relationship of fishing and friendship and the social dynamics of these all-male trips. I have found that the men I know talk more openly and candidly with one another about personal things on these trips than they do back home.

  On most of my fishing expeditions, the people I have gone with have all been close friends. This trip would be somewhat different: There were ten of us in our larger group, and we were only loosely connected. We had been put together by my friend Richard Berlin, and most of us tended to have a link with him rather than with one another. Thus there was among us as men, as it had always been, even when we were boys, the hidden, unannounced matter of male shyness and uncertainty: Would we be good enough at this, or would we somehow fall short of our expectations and the expectations of others? As such, the social dynamics were intriguing: Would the social order be dominated by the man who catches the most or the largest fish, or would other factors emerge? Would we be more macho than normal because we were in a new and uncertain social setting, doing something that some of us were not that confident of? Would we be unusually successful on the water, and if we were, would that create an unspoken competition in terms of the number and size of fish being caught? I had seen that happen on occasion, if not in our group then in other groups at lodges we have stayed at—men becoming truly unacceptable in their behavior toward others because they have had several very good (or very bad) days on the water. Or would it, if we are unusually successful, make us more comfortable with ourselves and thus with one another? I looked forward to seeing how all of this would play out on this trip.

  The new social order surfaced at the end of the first day of fishing. Jock Miller, a newcomer to the group, had caught two huge fish, each more than twenty-seven pounds, and he was, not surprisingly, in a somewhat expansive mood at dinner. He is an old friend of Berlin’s; they had known each other as boys, when their fathers worked for the same New York company. Miller is a truly sweet man, and he would emerge by the end of the week as the gentlest—or kindest—man in our group. We, of course, did not know this yet. What we knew was that he had caught not just one but the two biggest fish of the day.

  Then, in a celebratory mood, he talked about a competition he’d had with his father when he was a boy. At issue had been the question of who had caught more fish in terms of poundage over an entire summer. On the last day of the summer, trailing his father slightly, Miller had slipped a three-pound stone into one of his fish as it was weighed. That had put him ahead in the competition. We were shocked—shocked!—to hear this confession. We were, after all, on a fishing trip, men behaving like boys, and so we acted accordingly. What Miller did with this self-mocking story would be momentarily hard on him but exceptionally good for our group dynamics.

  Just by chance, a few minutes before, a friend of mine named Ken Aretsky, who owns three restaurants in New York, had volunteered his story of being arrested for selling Cuban cigars at Patroon, his midtown-Manhattan steak house. The charge was trading with the enemy. For a time, Ken faced the likelihood of a year in jail. In the end, he dealt with this threat with considerable grace and came to regard it as an experience not without its upside (part of his probation was training young people from underclass neighborhoods for work in the restaurant business). It was also a quite terrifying experience. A good many of his friends, myself included, thought the passion with which the U.S. government went after him was truly scabrous, given modern-day geopolitics and the open way many powerful politicians from both sides of the aisle, as well as leading corporate executives, somehow manage to have access to Cuban cigars while also helping to sustain the embargo against Cuba. If anything, these thoughts were certainly reinforced after September 11: Did this country have so few real threats against it that its prosecutorial energies could be used so carelessly against something that presented so little threat to the public good?

  By chance both these stories—the Cuban-cigar story and the stone-in-the-fish story—were told near the end of the dinner, when several members of the group were about to light up cigars, Cubans, of course, bought a day earlier in Buenos Aires. The juxtaposition of the two stories became irresistible for us as a group. Almost immediately, someone asked which was the greater crime: weighing a fish with a rock hidden inside to win a family fishing competition or selling Cuban cigars in your steak house? A vote was called for. Suddenly, Jock Miller was facing a hanging jury: twelve men, all of them, of course, fishermen who had traveled a great distance to be here, at least six of whom were serious cigar smokers. It was, given the democratic nature of the group, to be a secret ballot. Fat chance of an acquittal here. Miller was judged to be the greater offender by a 12–0 count. This was a bit hard on Jock at first—later he had to be convinced it had in fact been in good fun, that we were not angry that his first two fish were so much bigger than ours (well, it is quite possible that this information did factor in a bit in our vote) and that, most important of all, he helped us to bond.

  Suddenly, instead of being a group of several smaller factions, we started to come together as one, a raucous, rather joyous group. There was no homage to the man who had caught the biggest fish—if anything, his catch made him something of a target. Everyone seemed infinitely more comfortable with the others; it was as if we had been together in the past.

  This was what Richard Berlin, our group leader, wanted. He and I have been friends for eight years. His daughter and mine were in the same class at boarding school and were among suitemates who, on the first parents weekend, decided that since they were all friends their parents should be friends as well. As such they took us all to a dreadful Chinese restaurant in exurban Boston, where we were all on our most proper behavior—all political and religious and other potentially controversial subjects went unmentioned.

  At that dinner, Richard—exuberant, joyous, a true man-child—emerged as the glue that held a number of couples together in a loosely formed group for the next four years; he is a man able to get across the normal borders of reserve in embryonic social situations—no small skill, I think. He is, I soon learned, a man of wonderful enthusiasms, chief among them fishing. I like to fish, too. But there is a difference: I fish; he, by contrast, is a fisherman. Richard technically is the founding partner of a New England–based insurance brokerage, but in truth fishing is at the core of his being. Much of his life seems to be governed by the habits, moods and peculiarities of various prime game fish; as they migrate, so does he.

  Our gear reflected our relative fishing status. Both last year and this year, I arrived at the lodge with one rod, one reel (albeit two spools) and about thirty flies; he arrived with four rods (“only four,” he noted later, “all eight weight�
�), five reels (“but eleven spools”) and 1,200 flies (“but I gave away at least 200”). He owns every fishing toy and gizmo ever sold in any tackle shop, he knows every good trip to every distant trout or salmon river and every worthy lodge, and he knows the guides—he would invite Alberto Molina Gomez, his guide from Argentina, to fish for salmon in Nova Scotia with him later this year. He spoke a language of wooly buggers, bitch creek nymphs and gold bead prince nymphs and 200-grain and 300-grain lines, a very different language than the one I use. When he started out in the morning to fish the Río Grande, he looked very much like one of our Special Forces men ready to take down an Al Qaeda base camp.

  In the world of Richard Berlin, the pleasures of fishing must be shared to be enjoyed, and his enthusiasms have a certain communal quality. As such, there are absolutes: You have to go to Argentina, all the way down to the tip of Patagonia, to a lodge called the María Behety, because it is the best lodge there, with the greatest trout fishing in the world, and the fish are the biggest trout in history, and late January and early February are the best two weeks, because the fish are just coming in from the ocean and there are lots and lots of them. Some run as big as thirty pounds! Two years ago, when we were making plans to come here, he was nervous that I might pull out. Just to make sure I did not, and to be sure I had the right equipment, he called the Fly Shop, which runs the trip, and ordered all the clothing and fishing gear for me, using, of course, my credit cards. It became quite clear to me that if our friendship was to last, I was obligated to go to Patagonia. The remarkable thing about Richard as a group leader, Ken Aretsky noticed, was that his only concern was how well the rest of us did, not how well he did. His particular anxiety this week was that the less experienced members of our team, like Steadman and me, would do better than last year and that the newcomers would do well.

  He and I did not seem, early on, destined to be close friends. Richard Berlin, I thought at the time of our first meeting, Richard Berlin. The name struck something of a bell. I remembered the early Vietnam days, when I was a skeptical reporter in Saigon and among the people making my life a small hell were the Hearst writers of that time, who seemed to want to use me for target practice and to distort everything I was writing for the New York Times. These attacks were quite systematic. Some years later, when I was working on one of my books at the Lyndon Johnson presidential library, I came upon a number of memos to and from the Johnson people about Vietnam and their press problems. One of them said that Dick Berlin, the top Hearst official and a close ally of the Johnson administration’s, would take care of the dissident reporters in Saigon. A few months into our friendship, I asked Richard what his father had done. “Oh,” he answered, “he was a top executive for Hearst.” Still, the political struggles of the father should not be passed on to the son, and we have become very good friends over the years.

  If the first day started slowly for me, there was redemption during the evening session. The evening shift also started slowly. I had a few strikes and landed one very good fish of about eighteen pounds around 9 P.M. Although Steadman and I were both working hard, the results seemed marginal. Last cast was scheduled for 10:30. The moon started to come up about 10:05, and then came the fish, obviously summoned by the moon. The water exploded. All of a sudden, I was on fish after fish. Every cast resulted in a strike. I hooked a big one, busted off it, hooked another and brought it in, a seventeen-pounder, and then on my next cast caught a fifteen-pounder. I lost one of comparable size and then caught one more of sixteen pounds. They were all ferocious—and they challenged all my skills, especially fishing in the high wind in the dark. Steadman had comparable luck. Our jinx was broken. For once we had arrived on exactly the right week.

  Back at the lodge, the group seemed unusually compatible. Last year had been very different: Of the twelve people at the lodge, three of us—Berlin, Steadman and I—had come together and formed a small group, but the larger group had had no central social focus or order. There had been a couple of Brits, as well as the Howertons, John and Jason, an attractive father-son team from California, and some people who were not connected to any of the others. We had all gotten on reasonably well, and near the end the Howertons had seemed to blend in with our threesome, but we hadn’t had any sense of community. The conversation at night had been pleasant enough but hardly rich, and we had remained somewhat shy and tentative with one another for the week.

  Of the twelve in this year’s group, ten of us were in some way or another Berlin connected. In the off-season, Richard had been in constant contact with the Howertons, and they’d been annexed to our group by E-mail and the sheer force of Richard’s personality. They made an easy fit—John, it turns out, was droll and funny, and Jason, thirty years younger than most of us, was a wonderful athlete. I think the rest of us took an additional delight in seeing a father-son team so comfortable with each other. It was a reminder for some of us of the all too rare shared moments with our own fathers.

  Richard was also determined to fill as many slots as he could with people who he felt would be amenable to the larger family he wanted to form. When two of his original choices had to drop out, it was not enough for just any fisherman merely to apply through the Fly Shop. He had to clear it with Berlin as well. A man named George Lee, who is a brilliant fisherman and a genuine eccentric, wanted to take one of the slots, but first he had to be screened by Richard. If it was the equivalent of a job interview by phone, Lee was well prepared in advance by mutual friends as to what to say, since Berlin had just been through (1) a divorce and (2) a mild heart attack. “George, tell me a little about yourself,” Richard had asked him. “I’m recently divorced, and I just had a heart attack,” George said. “Well, George, I think we just might have a place for you,” Richard said.

  Among the others in our group of ten was Bob Kruse, a formidable figure and a friend of Berlin’s from Dartmouth, a powerfully built man (he apparently captained every team at Andover before going on to college) who turned out to be a very good fisherman and who had worked as a charter captain in the Key West area for many years. Even better, he was smart and funny, with a uniquely rich laugh that seemed to ring through the lodge early in the morning when we went to bed and early in the morning when we got up. Before we met Bob, we had heard Berlin talk about him with his usual excitement; it sounded as if they had been fishing together twice a year since the day they’d left college. Instead it turned out—to my considerable surprise—that they had not seen each other in more than twenty-five years. This turned out not to be a problem: Bob, open and joyous, was perfect for our group.

  Berlin, as group leader, added a number of colleagues, including his childhood friend Jock Miller. When there had been a last-minute vacancy, I had suggested Ken Aretsky, a longtime pal. Like Berlin, Aretsky is something of a fishaholic, and he has almost as many toys—he arrived with, among other things, a sixty-year-old classic bamboo rod and an antique fishing tote bag that looked like it was left over from the time of Zane Grey.

  Ken was an immediate success with the others: He is a subtle man, an instinctive sociologist who reads people well—he had better be, running three restaurants in New York, where people’s egos and wallets are often vastly greater than their internal comfort zones. He all too often hears the magic words from some millionaire and now billionaire disappointed with his table assignment, “Do you know who I am?,” a phrase uttered not as a question but as a statement of fact. Over the years, I have come to understand that Ken knows all too well exactly who these people are; he often knows more about them than I suspect they know about themselves, and this week his dissection of some of the more prominent but grotesque financial types and social lions of New York was quite wonderful.

  When another rod slot had opened up, Ken had arranged with Berlin to invite a friend of his named Ted Buchanan, a man so successful on Wall Street that in his early forties he had pulled back from the rat race, moved to New Mexico and committed himself more to a life in conservation than in
finance. The two of them frequently fished together on the Beaverkill in upstate New York.

  Added to George Lee and Jock Miller, that made eight, and add the Howertons, that made ten. The two outsiders were patent lawyers from the Bay Area, Gary Aka and Charlie Krueger. They are both relatively quiet by temperament, and given the rather noisy nature of our group, one where everyone else seemed connected, they were for the first few days quieter still.

  It soon became obvious that we had hit a great river with giant fish at an almost perfect moment. Even fishermen of no demonstrable distinction, like Steadman and me, caught five or six fish a day. The average size was fifteen pounds. We considered a nine-pound fish to be small. Over twenty-two pounds was large. More important, it was not just the catching, it was the ongoing pleasure of it all. The fish were so big and strong, and we were obviously going to land enough that we took as much pleasure from the big ones that broke us off as we did from the ones we brought in. On my third day, I hooked up an enormous fish and kept it on for a long time, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, and it made four beautiful jumps, all of a piece, all very high at exactly the same angle, all against the current, each done perfectly as if by instruction from the Argentine Bureau of Tourism. The fish must have weighed between twenty-five and twenty-eight pounds, and when it finally broke off, I felt no sense of disappointment, just awe.