Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

My reason for remembering Alfred is more succinct. Every time I hooked a fish — not so often by the way — he would tilt his head back and shout in that North Shore accent which sounds like and might well be Cockney, “Fuck, what sport!” Or as pronounced by him, “Fook, wot spawt!” I don’t know who taught him to talk like this, but he put a lot of lung to it while conveying extraordinary merriment and victory. More disconcerting was when I managed to put a fish in the boat and he thundered around in his drooping hip boots, baying “Blood!” I picture myself with a genial smile, rod crossed on my lap, waiting for Alfred’s fervor to pass, as it soon did, restoring my gifted boatman. I had never seen anyone quite so bonded to his environment, alert to the movement of birds and game, the movements of water, to the possible arrival and positioning of new fish in the river. I imagined I could see his entire life at a glance, steadily weathering in the sometimes terrible seasons of this rind of the North Atlantic to one day disappear into the very minerals of its decaying rock. I could imagine him at the very end, staring into the abyss: “Fook, wot spawt!”

One of our group, who later would try to burn our camp down, stood on the float wearing a blue blazer and a polka dot bow tie, waiting to board the great, battered seaplane. The rest of the group displayed the usual plumage of a fishing party, excepting only the Aussie Akubra hat sometimes seen on spring creeks these days and the cracker camo-jumpsuit of the angler-predator.

On the dock was an old friend of my companions. We reviewed the quality of fishing he’d just had, a usual mood-setting pretrip information plunge. He told us equitably about his catch, about good flies, water levels, the usual. Then he added that this trip, after a couple decades of regular visitation, would be his last. He was dying, he said, and would be gone by the New Year. “Tight lines,” he said, without a trace of irony, and boarded his outbound floatplane.

• • •

ON MY SEVERAL VISITS to the Whale, I took pictures in my usual haphazard way. My photography has a way of converting the beautiful expanse of wildflowers to a “before” shot from an acne-aid commercial, ocean liners to houseflies, and my daughters’ boyfriends to corpse-feeding zombies of some nonstop nightmare. But with the Whale my failures were different. The point-and-shoot camera seemed to choke on the light, leaving my fish-holding companions suspended in the shining fog of Nowhere, having apparently found their quarry in some astral spare parts depot.

This is a riverscape as from an Ingmar Bergman film, a lowering arctic sky, a braided riverbed, small old trees, and high rocky shores streamlined by the centuries of ice, feeder creeks that trotted noisily out of infinite backcountry to fall into the mighty stream. A head-swinging caribou cow appeared among our tents one morning, out of her mind with wolf bites. Close enough to touch, she never seemed to see us, then threw herself into the river and just kept going. The sun fell soon after and we imagined hearing the wolves move through our camp in the dark, still on her trail.

The Whale has been fished sufficiently to have had some of its pools named, although the process is recent enough that you know the people for whom the pools are namesakes. One time I had an indifferent guide, whose preference was to sit on the bank chain-smoking. I was unhappy with him for carelessly knocking a big male salmon off my line with the end of his net. When I caught another fish, a small grilse, standing on a small stone at the edge of the run, he came out, netted it and, in conciliatory fashion, pointed under my feet and said, “Tom’s Rock.” It looked like every other rock in sight.

MY TENTMATE, Dan, was the most spectacular snorer I’ve ever encountered. Given that there was no pattern or rythmn to his snoring, it was difficult to get used to it and drift off. One minute he sounded like he was sawing wood, the next like he was drowning in molasses. Each night he said, “Tom, I know I snore. When it gets unbearable, please just wake me up and tell me to roll over.” Each night it became unbearable, and each night I said, “ Dan , wake up and roll over!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re snoring very loud.”

Each night he took in my claim sleepily and replied, “Oh no, I’m afraid you’re mistaken about that.” And went back to snoring.

AT PRICE’S POOL you climb down a rocky embankment to where the river drops off immediately, then you must wade out among enormous, deeply submerged boulders to get a bit of casting room. At this rather vigorous range you can reach the mixed slick and broken water at the top of a long break in the river. Between your casting position and this ledge are many submerged rocks and an intricate skein of currents and submerged rips. Salmon will hold right out in this hard water; deep, fast, even broken, it is not too much for them, especially these fierce far-northern fish of the Whale.

I worked methodically through the upper part of this water, as methodically as the broken footing allowed. Sometimes it was necessary to wriggle through the current around a chest-high boulder, then to brace myself against it with one hand and somehow manufacture a cast. The Whale seems to particularly favor the riffled hitch, so it’s not just a matter of making a presentation from an awkward place and fishing it out. You have to make sure the fly continues to behave itself, by which I mean proper fly speed.

Of the many views as to how the riffled fly should be fished, I’m certain that finding a personal comfort level is first among equals, comfort level in this case being whatever produces conviction in the angler. I have a clear picture of what I want to see in order to facilitate the feeling that a take is imminent. I want the fly to be breaking the surface in such a way that it pulls a long, narrow, and serpentine V in the water, the effect of a little water snake making its way toward the shore. It does not sparkle along like a mackeral bait; it does not spit water; it does not sink and reappear. Instead, its movement ought to be seductive, which requires mending and back mending, line control to keep it working properly in various current speeds. One of my Whale River companions showed me how on my first trip. Nat demonstrated the whole business on a short line in about ten minutes. Though it’s not all that difficult, it does require a high degree of vigilance over long hours to make the most of it. When fishing is slow and one’s daydreaming escalates, it is sometimes more agreeable to return to the more conventional across-and-down presentation, the metronomic, two-step consumption of the river.

I found myself at the end of Price’s, the end I liked best. Here the fish, having come up through wild white water, pause in currents which have slowed enough to clear, forming a rapid slick. I made a cast and watched the progress of the riffled fly as it swung down and crossed this inviting patch. A salmon surged up under it and stopped without taking the fly. The boil appeared with something of the shape of a large fish visible within it, then opened and rolled into the white water.

Now the slick, until recently one of many spots that offered the mild likeliness of potential holding water throughout the river, was water which specifically held an Atlantic salmon. There was a difference. You feel all your senses training on this bit of moving water. There is a kind of anxiety that comes of knowing an interested fish awaits. The general unlikeliness of good hookups becomes theoretical even before you’ve had a take. You sense that fate has spoken: You asked for it, here it is. There is a slight feeling of dread.

Any tightening or interruption in the track of the fly results in a missed fish. This can be so subtle that I now asked myself if this boil might have been a take I had somehow fouled up. In this kind of fishing, as with fishing waking flies for steelhead, there is sometimes entirely too much visual information during the take. If the fish doesn’t come back, there is reason to assume I have been at fault; if it returns, I’m absolved.