Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

My siesta was a torment. I actually felt sick. I thought I was throwing strikes but it wasn’t working. I was now thinking only of escape, perhaps to the seafood cafes in Buenos Aires. No Belgian couplets for me. I stared at the ceiling of my room and tried to imagine what I had in mind in four decades of throwing a fly line, and counted up how I’d lied to myself about it not really mattering if you actually caught a fish. But these were such great fish, the biggest brown trout in the world. It was a tormenting paradox.

That night I fished the Polo pool with Kevin. He was a guide but first he was a fisherman. He said, “It happens when it happens.” As the eventless evening wore on he showed me the lies, the green bank, the fallen bank, the beaver lodge, the gravel bar. It was a readable run. I couldn’t daydream, couldn’t cast automatically. Each one had to be placed, and the water covered had to be continuous and steady. I released myself into my bad luck and felt a kind of liberating indifference. The moon started to come up and I watched the line straighten on the water. Mend, drift, retrieve, cast again. The full moon rose again. The line flowed across the pool, angle to angle, an easy slide.

And then it stopped. The curve in the line straightened and I hooked a fish, a big fish. The long rod bowed deeply and then the fish soared into the air, wild and rattling in the silver light of the moon, then fell back into the water. I backed up onto my bank and fought the fish downstream. Kevin got in the river with the net but couldn’t see the fish. I was trying to tell him where it was when another fish jumped out in the darkness, and Kevin started toward it until I persuaded him that my fish was coming down the bar. Kevin put a flashlight in his mouth and illuminated a circle of black water in front of him. Suddenly the fish was there, its spotted back breaking the surface, then up showering streamers of silver from the mesh of the net. I leapt like a guanaco off the riverbank and danced Kevin around the shallows. “I’m a human!” I shouted. When I held the fish in the water, the hook simply fell from its mouth. He was a big male, over eighteen pounds, the biggest trout I had ever caught, to put it mildly. I stood in the river for a long while, holding him into the current and feeling the increasing strength in a kicking tail I could barely encompass with my grip. To the north, the Aurora Austral raised a curtain of fire in the cold sky. My trout kicked free and continued his journey to the Andes.

THE CONTEXT FOR ANOTHER TRIP to South America was building outside my window: four feet of Montana snow, thirty-five degrees below zero and the very special familial tensions produced by constant confinement and small things gone wrong, a condition of late winter known locally as “the shack nasties.” The dogs wanted to go out and then come in and then go back out in some sadistic drill they decided to impose on us. Furthermore, the decorating scheme of my house seemed like the set of The Little Shop of Horrors: piled books, windrows of family photographs, unanswered mail, too many chairs, too many rugs, an always-lost cell phone, a channel changer especially lost during football playoffs, every doorknob a coat hanger, every bedpost a clothes peg, the ominous rings of ice around the windows, the mud boots, the snow boots, the coveralls, the mismatched gloves, the face mask in case we’d like to go for a little walk that usually began with one spouse dropping the other off in the car, well upwind so that the elements could shove you a couple of miles back to the house for health purposes. But it was a remark of my wife’s that sent me halfway around the world in search of sea-trout. “None of my friends has a home so underfurnished as ours,” she said.

Hasta la vista , baby.

Flying into Ciudad Río Grande is an arresting experience. The winds are generally gale-force and rather alarming as the plane bucks and surges toward the long tongue of concrete runway. Aircraft already on the field, though tied down and unoccupied, surge against their restraints. Even our big Buenos Aires jet continues to lurch about as the passengers unload. Experienced locals grab tight to everything that is loose — from packages to their hair to the bottoms of their dresses — as they emerge onto the runway, barely able to free up a limb to wave to their friends and relatives waiting inside. One thinks immediately of the uncertain destiny of the fly line liberated in these latitudes. In Tierra del Fuego, anything disturbed is soon airborne. I have fished while the wind carried the gravel off the bars and streamed it into the air. If you smile too often, your lips will hang up on your teeth in the dusty grimace that distinguishes a new angler. The old hands have a sort of pout that’s not so much an indicator of mood as an attempt to keep dirt out of the intake.

Sea trout are enigmatic fish to be polite. They are brown trout and therefore subject to that species’ notorious moodiness. Sea trout have inflicted compulsive fly changing, night fishing, pool stoning, and further extreme belly crawling measures upon their devotees. That they bring an oceanic rapacity to the smaller world of the river makes them no easier to understand.

We had favorable full moon tides which we thought would send us new waves of fresh fish. Winds which had been gale force for weeks began to abate. There were several generations of fish in the river at the same time, ranging upward from superhot little jacks that would be the crown jewels of a sea-trout fishery anywhere else and ranged on up to sizes we could only dream about. Our host, Estevan, was by now an old friend. “Stevie” loved to fish, knew his river well and kept us amused with his detached sense of humor wherein anglers and all their passions were regarded with the objectivity of a top researcher closeted with a houseful of laboratory mice. If one party returned with six fish while another returned with four, Steve would note, “Six beats four.” Later, this took on a life of its own and Stevie was heard to note, “Eighty-one beats eighty” without any explanation as to what this referred, though it had to be something other than fish. For mishaps, he had an elegant South American shrug which meant, “What can you do?” and contained no hint of condescension. The strongest negative emotion he ever revealed was occasioned by an angler who made every mistake possible in order to lose a fish that would have been a world’s record. Stevie spent the rest of the day staring through the windshield. When I asked him about his rage, I learned that it wasn’t the the loss of the great fish that disturbed him, but the fact that the angler had resumed casting after the fish got away. “That,” said Stevie, “was too much. I went to my car.” This particular vehicle is a low mountain of caked Tierra del Fuegian mud, rod racks on top, rap tapes on the front seat, and a United Colors of Benetton sticker in the rear window. In it we rumble across the grasslands, sheep fleeing before us in flocks, condor shadows racing from the Andes and, to a deep, throbbing beat, the Fugees ordering Chinese food in a New York restaurant. Stevie looks around, takes it all in. “Thirty-seven beats twenty-nine.”

My friend Yvon Chouinard believes in going deep. I go deep only when utterly discouraged. When Yvon notices me reacting to the sight of his four-hundred-grain shooting head landing on the surface of the river like a lead cobra in its death throes, he states, “To save the river, first I must destroy it.” This Pol Pot style remark fired my determination. On the Río Grande, he got into a pod of bright sea trout and caught one after another with devasting efficiency. Some yards above him, I held a cold stick and consoled myself with the cries of my success-gorged partner, “I feel like a shrimper!” Fish must have been running as their silvery rolls and huge boils were increasing and at last I began hooking up. These fish were beyond big. They were heavy and violent, taking the fly with a brutish malevolence. By the standards of two lifelong fishermen — and we had a hundred years between us — we were so far into the zone that not even approaching night could drive us out.