Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

I thought of my host’s father sitting one previous evening deep in a chair on the screened porch above the river, reciting Izaak Walton: “When the sun is bright and the moon is right, the fish will bite. Maybe.” And the great proverb of my Celtic forebears: “It’s better to be lucky than to rise early.” All sorts of things run through your mind when you look at new water, especially great new water with all its manifold concealments and prospects. This really was a fine pool, cut out of stone and the roots of old trees, with a long, deep run trembling down its center. The water was tea-dark from alder stain but clearing rapidly.

I cast my fly, a Green Highlander, in widening arcs, extending one arm’s length of line per cast until I’d reached my longest distance, all under Wesley’s hawklike gaze. I reeled up, thus signaling Wesley to resume his crouch at the gunwale with his paddle and Jeff to lift the killick, as we moved to the next drop. The current here was different and Wesley kept his paddle in the water to control the yaw of the canoe.

We resumed conversation. I had, for example, noticed a small valley that stood at an angle to the river. “Oh, a tough life there,” said Wesley, “more mealtimes than meals.” I murmured — I thought compassionately — but did catch a glint in Wesley’s eye. “There’s an old feller up there so poor he has to take his dog down to the gate in a wheelbarrow to bark at strangers.”

While I burned a hole in the river looking for a moving shape under my fly, Wesley told me about a Frenchman who lived nearby, a high-spirited man whose wife had twins. When Wesley inquired after the babies, the Frenchman replied in a heavy accent as imitated by Wesley, “Oh, they’re cute little things but they’re an awful bother.”

I fished this drop very slowly, thinking we were in the heart of the matter. Every so often, a seagull flew overhead reminding me of the ocean not so far away but somehow unimaginable in this beautiful sweetwater stream. At the bottom of the pool, the river went through a cleft in the rock and I thought that must be the end of it. Wesley stared at the pool as my line moved on top of the current. “What’s the matter, Mr. Salmon? A hot day like this, we’ll put you in the cooler and save you the trouble of swimming all the way upstream.”

We discussed life in Cascapedia, a small place which, like all places, had most of the world’s problems, even drugs. “Fine young fellers,” said Wesley, “good fellers get on these drugs. Couple of months they look like they crawled through a knothole.” And, of course, nature: “The Old Indian says the hummingbird goes south by getting into the feathers of the wild goose.” He looked at me and shrugged: maybe, maybe not. Then he apologized in case the bowman seemed a bit sleepy. Late night with the girlfriend.

At that moment, an astonishing thick shape sucked a section of water down around my fly and I hooked a salmon. My reel screeched at the first run and then with wonderful power as the fish vaulted high over the surface of the pool. I got my fingers inside the arbor of my reel to slow things down, though it was clear the fish wasn’t going to be entirely under control for some time. Another jump, this one sideways in a real rip. Without my noticing, the killick had been weighed and now Wesley was slipping us over to the gravel bar opposite the pool. I got out to fight the fish while Wesley readied the net and Jeff slid the canoe ashore. Then the fish jumped again and broke the leader. Wesley walked over to me, looked at my straight rod. For a moment all was silent. Then he asked, quite coolly I thought, “What happened?”

Now he wanted to examine my tackle. The leader, a finely tapered thing, he actively disliked. I buried my own views of leaders and took one of his, tied on another fly, and began fishing the drop below the one where the salmon, a big salmon, had taken my fly. I knew how it was. The next take could be a week away. There was a cavernous silence in the canoe. I resumed my methodical fishing of the drop, cast, lengthen, cast, lengthen. The waterspeed was picking up lower in the pool and required more careful mending of the line. I kept seeing the fish in the air, hearing the erratic screech of the reel, feeling that slump as the dead rod straightened.

But then I hooked another fish, a hard-running ocean-bright fish, and this one, after several wonderful leaps, ended up in Wesley’s net, a big deep-hanging silver arc. With a wide smile that confirmed my absolution, Wesley said, “A fresh one, right from the garden!”

We bounced along the river toward camp, tall ferns thrust through the gunwales to announce our fish. When we landed, Wesley shook my hand and said he’d see me in the morning. “You can’t leave us now,” he told me. “We’re well acquainted from fighting the salmon together!”

I headed back up through the banks of wild strawberries considering a nap, the river poems of Michael Drayton, considering the notion that no one owed me anything.

ABOUT THE TIME the Administration decided that the problem with our economy was all these welfare recipients, I decided it was a sovereign time to go trout fishing in Argentina. The long flight south was half empty, and in order to avoid the in-flight movie, I tried to read the pile of magazines I’d bought at the airport which, whatever their subject, had a movie star on the cover and inside culture, politics, and sports, in pellet form. Reaching into my “hospitality kit” past the little elastic stockings and mouthwash, I produced the eyeshade which, pulled over my head, must have made me look, like the other passengers, as though I was facing a firing squad. Contemplating the rivers that drain the Andes — the Andes! — I quickly slipped off into a pleasant sleep while my feet swelled and my body dehydrated without me, the elastic of the eyeshade embedded in my hair and the soundless film, a stylish getaway item with perky bankables, played on. On a night flight, much is left in the form of the long vapor trails that follow the aircraft in the darkness: imperfect dreams, vanished childhoods, the residue of souls. The envoy, the coke whore, and the basketball player in the Japanese league alike fly from country to country on this basis alone, sharing an armrest, taking only that portion of the overhead bins to which they are really entitled.

Some time later I tottered into the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires and in a kind of twilight zone turned on the television set and watched a documentary about a black rock ’n’ roll band from Oakland, I think. I tuned in too late to get the name of the band but dully marveled at their apocalyptic music and hyper-athletic antics. Halfway through this thing, the band did an extended “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” with my contemporaries, the Rolling Stones. I looked on in startled gloom as a rickety and wooden Keith Richards tried to stay out of the way of these rocketing negroes. Jagger showed less mother wit in attempting to hold his own with the lead singer, who filled the air around him with chaotic energy. After singing his part of the chorus, Jagger tried to steal away in his patented “Little Red Rooster” strut, yet managed only a melancholy impression of a formaldehyde-injected yard chicken on its very last legs. I watched with subdued dread as Mick and the gang tried to find someplace on the stage to be safe from these exploding rhythm meatballs from California. I knew I was jet-lagged, but it seemed I was witnessing Whitey eat dust as the Third World thundered past. I wondered if this was behind the Administration’s fear of welfare recipients, the sense that by hoarding all the items on the Keynesian wish list, we had let Others make off with the things that actually mattered.