Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

After a few days, you imagine you will be on the river forever. This is one of the few places I have ever fished where salmon seemed truly eminent. One fished with ongoing concentration, trying to throw strikes with every cast, mending as exactly as possible and looking into one’s fly book like a fortune teller. The world of the river became more enclosing, the hurtling power of the fish ever more emblematic of the force of wild things and the plenitude of undisturbed nature.

One afternoon I fished in the trance state of repeated casting. The river was so comfortable, I did without my waders. The clouds were long, thin streamers on the northern summer sky. On the cliff face above me was a nest of arctic gyrfalcons; the parents wheeled around the nest bringing food while the pale, fierce youngsters’ screams echoed across the canyon.

We had passed a place where villagers had come out and built a fire. The ground was trampled and there were empty vodka bottles and pieces of roasted reindeer tongue. These people had been here for thousands of years and had some old habits, not readily discernible to our eyes.

A fish came with a slow rolling motion and started back to his lie with my Green Highlander in the corner of his mouth. I let him tighten against the reel and raised my rod. And now we were off to the races, me running over the round rocks in wading shoes while the fish cartwheeled in midriver, the thread of Dacron backing streaming after it and the reel making its sublime music. We had earlier noted Nick Hood bounding like Nijinsky behind a fish, springing from stone to stone, and I felt more than the usual pressure to stay on my feet. But this fish was landed in a slick behind boulders. I released him without ever taking him out of the water and he flickered away into the depths of his ancestral river.

While Larsen continued to catch fish steadily, Mr. Duff started showing some of the deficits of his otherworldly auspices. He would catch fish at a good clip, then become possessed by a “hoodoo.” By this time we’d become well enough acquainted that he could share some of the special problems he experienced. A hoodoo evidently is some sort of bird, or possibly a bat. When it settles, imperceptibly, between the shoulder blades of the unsuspecting angler, it becomes impossible to catch a fish. One can hook them, but they always get off. So, for a while, the wolf’s echoing howls were less frequent. Sport that he was, though, he finally shook it. From time to time the hoodoo settled on Larsen and me. We also began to acquire some of his other problems; by midweek, for example, Larsen had begun taking great pains to precisely part his hair.

That night, when I left the dining tent with its many pleasures of good food, pleasant companionship, and a fly-tying table where the silliest notions may be brought to life, I knew I had to keep fishing. However, it had been a long day and a small nap was in order. Larsen and Mr. Duff, now transmuted into a bon vivant, refilling drinks, telling golfing stories, and smoking the very cigarette I had watched glow all week long, were in the dining tent for the foreseeable future, actively being corrupted by an English farmer, James Keith, who promoted late-night card games and a general shore-leave atmosphere.

I awakened at three, gulped the cup of cold coffee I’d left beside my bunk, and soon was walking through the sleeping camp with my rod over my shoulder. Snores issued from several tents and the sun was shining merrily. Wagtails had seized this time to hop among the tents looking for food. I noted Hood’s sixteen-foot Spey rod leaned up in front of his tent. Hood was in for the evening and there was every chance I would have the magnificent Home Pool — one of the great salmon pools in the world — to myself. I climbed down the path along a small stream, waving away the mosquitoes, and was soon casting out onto the great river and discovering how tired my muscles really were.

I caught a small grilse right away, a silver-bright fish only a day or so from the ocean. Then it got still and not a fish was rolling. Though sleep kept rising through my mind, I was in the river and the casts were still rolling out. About halfway down the pool I felt a jolting strike. After ripping forty yards into my backing, a terrific salmon made one crashing jump after another well out in midriver. Then it started back toward the ocean. I put as deep a bow in the rod as I dared and began following the fish downstream. I beached this big male on a small point, beyond which I might not have been able to follow. His lower jaw was so hooked it had worn a groove in the upper, and I was delighted to make certain this individual could make his contribution to the gene pool. I’ve always thought that it would be nice after landing an exceptional fish to go straight to bed. And so I did, drifting off in my glowing tent to a dream of sea-run fish.

We stopped in Murmansk for a couple of hours on the way out. I went to a small museum and looked at some wonderful paintings of submarines — some in the open sea, some in remote ocean coves with snow on their decks — and the portraits of their captains. This glimpse of military glory was at sharp odds with the beleaguered municipality all around us. As I looked at the cheerlessly monolithic public housing towering over raw, bulldozed ground, I remembered that the leading cause of domestic fires in Russia is exploding television sets. But no one in the world has wild, open country like the Russians, a possible ace-in-the-hole on a strangling planet. Poets and naturalists could have understood this so much more comprehensively than I did, dragging my fly rod, but without it I probably would never have gotten there or stood for a week in a river coursing through the tundra to the Barents Sea.

Mr. Duff gazed at me with the faintest of smiles as I dragged my duffel to the boarding area. A thin plume of motionless smoke extended vertically from his cigarette. Then he looked away, resuming his scrutiny of a back issue of Golf Digest . I was conscious that the weight of my duffel had come to seem tremendously heavy as I dragged it from boarding area to boarding area that day and night, in Murmansk, in Helsinki, in New York, in Salt Lake City. By the time I got to Bozeman, I apparently had become so weak that I could barely lift it. Finally home, I dragged it out of my car like a corpse. I hated it so much that I slept a full day before unpacking it. When I did, beneath the soggy wading shoes and dirty laundry, I found the most beautiful round river rocks and heard a distant howl from the shadows along the far shore of the Ponoi.

THERE IS A MOMENT when you are waiting to meet a fishing companion, or you may even be by yourself, in the big lobby of a city hotel, the bellhop looking askance at your peculiar luggage, when you question whether this journey will really end in fishing. This is a frequent perception of today’s destination angler, whose often conventional background in angling hasn’t entirely prepared him for this approach. I like to compare it to the angling hotels that used to exist, especially in the British Isles. The best places, or those I like best, provide food and lodging in places where logistics are tricky and transportation specialized and indispensable. No one should ride a jet boat or bush plane if hiking would get it done. The serious angler, while no Luddite, likes to use the least machinery possible.

Yvon Chouinard, a real adventurer and great alpinist, has built his case on coolheaded coping; being unflappable has seeped into everything he does. Whereas I drag waders and rod tubes and carry-on bags into a corner like a sweating squirrel, Yvon, equally far from home in this Vancouver hotel lobby, merely appears ready to fish. My thought is, the airport shuttle may not go to the bush planes at Vancouver’s South Terminal at all. His thought is, we’ll get there. The first year we fished the Dean together his tackle and luggage never made it. He expected useful things to turn up and they did. I’d have broken my rosary over this one, spraying beads all over the Wilderness Air Terminal.