Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

The buildings of the town were rugged and pretty, sided with brightly painted corrugated iron, the windows and fascia of the roofs decorated with fanciful designs and ornamental carpentry. Streetside windows had their shades drawn for privacy but the window ledges were filled with small objects and souvenirs their owners thought might amuse pedestrians: a little horse, a soldier, a German postcard, magnets in the shape of small black-and-white-dogs.

We stopped to bring a couple of salmon to a priest, a popular man, perhaps forty years old, who served four congregations in old rural churches whose steeples pointed sharply in this big green landscape. The stated passion of this man of God is salmon. My host inquired of the priest and his jolly, bohemian-looking wife as to the well-being of their son. Very well, very happy, apparently. Does he still have the bright blue Mohawk haircut? Yes, yes, says the priest. The son was in a band and that, somehow, was part of it — his eyes playing continuously over the bright sea fish. Yes, all the lads in the band had mohawks, what a lovely fish. Leaving the vicarage, we stopped on a narrow bridge high over the stream to look at salmon. This is still something of a miracle to me, peering from country bridges at sea-run fish. We used to have more of these fish in America than anyone so we killed them off. In the bend below us, a pair of swans sailed along slowly. The fish held steady. Sooner or later, something would make them move decisively but we are not sure what that was. Without doubt, a specific moment of departure would register and the salmon would move up.

I was fishing with a young man named Steini on the Haffjardara River. Early in the season, he had had a hard time being away from the Internet. Most of his friends are out in cyberspace and he hated leaving them. When I first asked him about himself, he said, “I’m a Knicks fan.”

We talked about the agonies of Karl Malone, the helplessness of the Utah Jazz in the face of Michael Jordan. I told him about a new biography of Isaiah Thomas just out and he made a note to himself to order it when he got back to Reykjavik.

The evening was quiet, the beautiful river whispering in its rocky banks. We were fishing at a narrows where one of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas, Grettir, a sort of Viking outlaw, leapt the Haffjardara to make his escape. The Sagas, the NBA, the Internet, and the thousand years of trying to catch a salmon, all had the effect — and a rather cheerful one — of making these disparate times seem simultaneous.

Steini, I learned, had just broken up with his girlfriend of many years. In fact, she had driven up to our salmon camp to inform him of her decision. He was unashamed of his sadness and Ludwig, one of the older guides, took him for long walks to discuss his heartbreak. There was in this a human simplicity I noted in many things Icelandic. That and a widespread competence. Ludwig disliked paying expensive gas bills for his old Land Rover, so he plucked out its engine and installed a Nissan diesel. “What about all the fittings between the Japanese engine and the English drivetrain?” I asked.

“We machined new ones.”

“Have you had any problems with it?”

“I’ve only put thirty thousand miles on it since we changed the motor. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Ludwig and I fished a couple of long and unproductive sessions, one in the pools below a beautiful falls, a beat that had not been fishing well. You stood on a sliver of rock, deep water on either side, and fished to the left and the right. I didn’t like the kind of drifts I was getting but the fish were there. The falls was just to my left a few feet and every so often a salmon went airborne burying himself in the curtain of falling water, making it impossible to determine whether he made it over the top or not. Less often a sea-run char, resplendently colored and resembling a huge brook trout, would make the same heedless vault at the face of the falls. They either surmount it or vanish at the base, you never really know which; but the magic of these pure sparks of marine life is acute.

Ludwig was formerly a schoolmaster. He had once been a Fulbright Fellow in the States. He was a fine-boned, handsome, weathered man of around seventy, a fly fisherman and ptarmigan hunter, a driven golfer, and a navigation instructor. When I asked where he sailed, he said Greenland, Poland, different places. He taught for thirty years beneath the glacier to our north, and when he moved into Reykjavik to be near his six grandchildren, he chose a house with a view of the glacier in the distance. Ludwig loved every season of Iceland, even the long, dark winter. The weather seemed to me to be remarkably varied, impacted as it was by many seas, the Gulf Stream, and the high latitudes. “In Iceland,” said Ludwig, “we don’t have weather. We have examples.”

Our cook, a man of rare talents who presented us with marvels of local provender — langoustine, sea fish, lamb with wild icelandic berries, still-living scallops, regal salmon, char gravlax — had a very short fuse and was intolerant of things going wrong at any level. “Our cook explodes ,” said Ludwig, “and we love him for it!”

We took in all this fishing with the blithe purity available only to those who are guests. We were guests of my dear friend Bo Ivanovic, who too often impedes his superb angling abilities by looking after his friends. At a fleeting moment of semidespair, he allowed that it was hard to “keep these gears and wheels turning.” This looking after other people is trying to anglers as serious as Bo, who are happiest as solitary wolves intent on enmeshing themselves in the skein of signals and intuitions that tie the angler to the fish. Triangulating wind, tide, and weather isn’t made easier when a guest totters up in his robe and asks if you “haven’t a little something for the Hershey’s squirts.” The social savagery of anglers is such that they are liable to point out to the very host who has seen to their food, shelter, and transportation that they’ve caught more fish than he has. That the host rarely passes among his guests with a heavy sword is a testament to the depth of character in those who take on this role. The day comes, however, when they tire of all this and tell some repeater-sponge, unhappy that the staff is late in changing his sheets, to go fuck himself. One instance of this, after years of benevolence, and the host necessarily acquires an indelible reputation for being a short-fused spoilsport. By now, most any host realizes that he can turn this to his advantage. Fish camps are filled with dour former hosts who stay to themselves, read in their rooms, and push off early for the best pools.

My luck might have been better had I quit plying Ludwig with questions. I may have been more interested in him than in the fishing. But I did want to catch a salmon, and he was anxious that I succeed. We went to a beat where low water had almost brought the current to a stop. While there were plenty of fish, it was necessary to stay well back, lengthen and lighten the leader, and strip the fly. As I fished, Ludwig told me the story of his childhood. His mother died when he was a boy, and since it wasn’t possible for his father to keep him at home, he was sent to his uncle’s farm on the north coast of Iceland. He and his father missed each other tremendously and throughout Ludwig’s boyhood they wrote to each other at every opportunity. His father saved Ludwig’s letters and years later gave them to him. We talked about his idea of using them to write a biography of the boy who wrote them, the boy he’d been, tilting this idea around a good bit but then, still without a fish, drifted off into a chat about Pablo Neruda.

A gyrfalcon — Ludwig called it an Icelandic falcon — appeared in the distance, coursing over the land with extraordinary power, certainly the most impressive bird of prey I’d ever seen. It intersected the river about a quarter of a mile above us and turned down the bank, searching. I could hardly believe my luck as the bird rode right down the bank opposite me, the heroic falcon of dreams, a stark medieval-looking raptor, every bit of its shape refined to heraldic extremity. It hovered slightly as it passed us, swept downstream thirty yards or so, banked up to slow the velocity of its turn, then came right up the same bank. Directly in front of me, the falcon crashed into the deep grass of the far bank. A bleak cry issued from some creature and the falcon lifted off with a duckling in its talons. When it soared off to a spire of rock with its prize, the mother duck tumbled into the stream and, pushing her two remaining babies ahead of her with urgent, plaintive, heartbroken quacks, paddled away. Ludwig was holding his heart; it was really very sad. I felt an ache until that night when our English companion, David Hoare, said, “That falcon has a nest of babies to feed.”