Everything They Had (38 page)

Because it was my first marlin strike, I became a little boy once again as the fish made its first casual run with my bait, my heart beating too fast, the doubts about setting the hook properly all too real. I grew up fishing every day of the summer as a boy on a fished-out lake in northwestern Connecticut, always optimistic, but catching, if I was lucky, a couple of legal-size bass a season; then, in my mid-30s, I bought a house in Nantucket and became reasonably adept at light-tackle saltwater fishing just offshore. In addition I've done some trout fishing in the Rocky Mountain area, but I grade myself as a competent, if somewhat marginal, fly-fisherman. For most of my life big-time deep-sea fishing was, if not beyond my reach, certainly beyond my imagination. But in recent years that has begun to change, because of the democratization of travel, the drop in the cost of long-distance travel, and the transformation of once private homes into hospitable commercial fishing lodges.

I had caught sailfish in the past, and properly encouraged by the size, strength and beauty of the fish, I even went out and bought a fly rod strong enough to cast for a sail (though in truth it is more like trolling than fly-casting), and a few years ago I caught my first sail on the fly rod. But I had never caught a marlin, nor had anyone else in a boat in which I had fished, and the excitement of it, why it seemed to move other fishermen so much, had so far eluded me. Yes, I had thought, they are bigger than sails, but I still wondered what all the fuss was about.

On this day I found out. Our first visit to Pinas Bay had been several years ago, and it had not gone all that well. We had liked the lodge very much, but the fishing that year was quite poor. The people who ran the lodge had been very apologetic; our fishing had been way below normal because of that year's El Niño, a major change in the normal weather that had thrown the temperature of the water off significantly and driven most of the big fish away. Pinas Bay, otherwise famous as a game-fish base camp, we were assured, was undergoing the worst fishing it had offered in several years. It did strike me that I had heard variations on this theme before: if only you had been here last week, or, for that matter, next week, the fishing was/would be far better.

But, as I say, we had liked the lodge very much and were delighted to be back. It is simple and clean, carved out of a mountain-side in a gorgeous spot on the west coast of Panama. It was built in 1961 by a Texas oilman named Ray Smith, who used it for a time as his personal preserve; for the last thirty-four years it has been open for sportfishermen. A flight of about an hour in a chartered Twin Otter from Panama City gets you there. It is located in a beautiful setting, and the view is always spectacular as you work your way up and down the Panamanian coast. Of the different resorts I have stayed at as a fisherman, Pinas Bay strikes me as being by far the best, extremely well run, and the courtesies, befitting the simplicity of the location, are greater than the amenities. The people who work there are all very nice, and the food is quite good to very good, particularly, it seems to me, if you order the fish every night (grilled fresh yellowfin tuna, grilled fresh mahimahi, grilled fresh snapper). As my fishing partner Dick Steadman says, everything they have control over, they do very well. The one thing they do not have control over, of course, is the quality of the fishing.

That certainly wasn't a problem on the morning I learned what the fuss about marlin was all about. The fish was flerce, unspeakably strong, and with a mind of its own. It began as a match of strength, his against mine. To my strength, of course, we added the skill of the captain, who readily maneuvered the boat to take up the line every time the fish had made one of its long and powerful runs. When I was a boy of about eight, the first lesson of fishing taught me by my Uncle Moe (who was the most serious fisherman in our family; indeed it was said to be the only thing he was serious about) was never to horse a bass; that is, never try to overpower a fish. With a marlin that rule remains true, but also absolutely unnecessary—there is no possible way to overpower a fish of that size and strength.

And so the battle began, my job, it seemed to me early on, to survive, and to keep reminding myself that all of this was a good deal harder on the fish than it was on me. It was already hot by that hour, and within a few minutes I was soaked with sweat. Although I am in very good shape and my arms and hands and wrists are all strong from working out and rowing a single scull, some twenty-five minutes into the fight I felt a weariness in my arms, and for a brief moment I wondered whether it was worth it all; then I thought of all those fishermen whom I had heard about who had battled giant marlins for five and six hours and more, and I wondered whether in fact after a certain point it was fun.

What was fun, of course, was watching the marlin, which began to jump and to make dazzling leaps in the air, sometimes jumping straight up, and sometimes hurtling through the air like some kind of low-flying luminescent projectile. The marlin is a simply beautiful fish, the beauty, silver and dark blue, shown to maximum advantage by these spectacular leaps. If I had been moved at first by the sheer strength and power of the fish, now I was moved by its innate beauty, and by the pleasure of watching the struggle of a fish that large, that strong and that handsome. It was the first time in my life that I had been in absolute awe of a fish that I was hooked into.

And that, I think, finally made it fun, the beauty and the explosiveness of the fish, and the respect that I immediately came to have for its lionhearted courage: Van Horn told me later that the fish jumped some eight times, and on every jump, he added, I let out a huge roar, cheering, it seemed, as much for the fish as for myself. So it was that the battle went on for some forty-five minutes. The fish, our captain said, probably weighed about 350 pounds, not that big on the Richter Scale of marlin, but quite big enough for me. In the end we brought it in, close enough for the mate to touch the leader, which made it an official catch, and then we cut the leader, and the fish seemed to give a lazy half-roll, and then swam away (the hook, we were assured, would eventually come out of the marlin's mouth on its own), leaving me in the boat, a man who had always heard about how marlin were somehow different, and was now a believer.

It had taken any number of phone calls to find out that the one place in Rio Grande, Argentina, which was showing the Super Bowl was the Posada De Las Sauzes, or as the gringos might say, the House of the Willowbrushes. There we could see the Gigantes of New York play the Cuervos of Baltimore.

Patagonia is home to both awe-inspiring scenery and outstanding trout fishing. For on the sports world's most sacred day, the Sunday of all Sundays, my friends and I were fishing for brown trout in what is virtually the end of the earth, the southern part of Patagonia, by dint of a trip scheduled nearly a year in advance. That is a trip agreed on well before the most unlikely of all scenarios had become reality: My beloved Gigantes, 7-9 last season, and a somewhat sloppy 7-4 in mid-November, had gone on a surprising roll, getting better by the week, ending up in the Super Bowl, their chances greatly enhanced by an amazing dissection of the Vikingos of Minnesota.

My friend Dick Steadman, who was also a serious Gigante fan (and a former football star himself, having played center for Punahou High School in Honolulu in the late 1940s at roughly 150 pounds), and I thus found ourselves caught between two formidable athletic pulls, the desire to catch some of the largest and most formidable fresh water fish imaginable, and the love of and commitment to a favored football team making a most unlikely championship appearance. For that tiny minority of my fellow Americans who take football more seriously than fly fishing, I should point out that fishing for brown trout in Patagonia is a kind of championship in itself, a rare opportunity, or perhaps more accurately a rare privilege.

The Argentinean Rio Grande is exceptionally difficult to get to, requiring almost two days of travel; the conditions under which you fish are extremely demanding, winds up to 40 miles an hour; and the trout themselves, which are sea-going, but which come back to fresh water to spawn, are well worth the immense effort, and can easily run up to 35 pounds.

Thus the choice between fishing and watching the Super Bowl was between one kind of madness in irreconcilable conflict with another kind of madness. When the shocking contradiction of our schedule finally manifested itself, Steadman and I had flagged our group leader, an ebullient friend of mine named Richard Berlin, to explain the gravity of our problem. Berlin, who lives in the Boston area, was not personally affected by the crisis—his Patriotas had disappeared from serious contention on about the fourth week.

Still, Berlin is a good pal, and he knows obsessive behavior when he sees it (after all, he owns some 20 fly rods), and he phoned Pat Pendergast of the Fly Shop, which was midwifing our trip, and explained the dilemma carefully. He had these two good friends, he said, both of them almost normal under most conditions, who were now caught between their conflicting obsessions. They wanted, in his jaundiced view, to do the unthinkable, to interrupt, however briefly, some of the greatest fishing on the continent in order to see a football game.

The trout in the Argentinian Rio Grande can run up to 35 pounds. Pendergast, a man who clearly had his priorities much better ordered—there was trout fishing and then there was everything else in life—listened patiently, as if to the counsellor for two madmen who was loyally carrying out the most undesirable of instructions, and then said he would do what he could to find some place where the game was on. Then he had paused and added his own view of things.

“Richard,” he said, “I think you're fishing with the wrong kind of people.”

That might or might not be true. But there we were at last, a mere 6,000 miles south of Tampa, hoping that somehow a television set which carried the game could be found. Even then there was, of course, a serious conflict in our schedules: the visitors to the Maria Behety Lodge fish twice a day, from roughly 8:30 to 12:30 in the morning, and then again from about 6:30 to 10
P.M.
at night. The game itself was to start at 8:30 Rio Grande time. The trip from the fishing pool to town was about an hour, which meant that we would barely have time to start fishing before we left the river for the game.

Nonetheless, the evening started auspiciously. Richard quickly caught two fish, and I caught one (a 10-pounder, which while not big for the Rio Grande, was big for me, since few of the trout I had caught in the past had ever gone above 2 pounds). Both of us were quite sure that our good fishing luck was also a harbinger of how the game might go.

So it was that we picked up and left one of the greatest trout streams in the world, the action clearly still hot, and driven by our guide Jorge Castro (gracious enough neither to say anything nor to show any obvious disbelief), raced for downtown Rio Grande. Never in my life had I left such good fishing so early with a promise of much more to come. But life is clearly full of sacrifices; besides there was still almost a full week of fishing ahead.

We got to the hotel with six minutes gone, the game scoreless, the Gigantes stumbling around on their own goal line, almost turning the ball over. As I pulled up a chair I was struck, not for the first time, by the contrast between the richness and privilege of my life and the particular era we live in, and that of my father, who was, like me, both a passionate fisherman and a committed football fan. (There was, I discovered years after his death, a note in his 1925 Tufts Medical School yearbook to the effect that getting Charley Halberstam to describe a football game was as good as going to the game itself.) He had loved to fish, but had largely been forced by finances, a lack of time, by service in two wars, and by lack of access to prime fishing water to spend his time casting to ghost fish in fished-out lakes in northwest Connecticut. His reward, one or two keeper bass a summer.

His ability to travel, after all, was prescribed in a different, much poorer age, when jet travel did not exist and those remarkable bonus miles which had enabled me to get to Buenos Aires had not been invented. His foreign travel had been confined to two trips, France and Germany in 1917, and France and Germany in 1944–45, both of them, at least, financed by his government. He died some 17 years before the first Super Bowl was played. The idea of athletes like these, so big and fast, playing before us on an immense television set, virtually an indoor movie theater, located so many thousands of miles from where the game was being held, would have been beyond his imagination.

The difficult journey to Argentine fishing spots is usually worth it. So even as I watched, I pondered the cumulative technological miracles of which I am the beneficiary, grateful for my good fortune, and wondering at the same time what it will be that my daughter will do and be part of in her lifetime which is beyond my own comprehension.

The game was on, live and in color and in Spanish. Clearly the Super Bowl was not that big a draw in Rio Grande. Steadman and I were the only people in the hotel den, other than a somewhat puzzled waiter, who seemed to have no special loyalty of his own, but who, in an engaging and warm manner, seemed to want our team to do well, and was quite willing to grimace whenever fortune smiled on the Cuervos. Nonetheless there was something absolutely charming about watching the ultimate football game from so great a distance in an environment in which no one else seemed to care.

There was, after all, a certain modesty to the setting that the game badly lacks almost everywhere else—it was almost as if we could think of it as being in normal numbers, rather than Roman ones. It was marvelous being spared the hype; I am, after all, one of those people who believes that the Super Bowl is more often than not a disappointment, in no small part because of the two-week layoff, so much of it devoted to the hype. (One of my cardinal rules as a journalist is that any event that attracts media people in regimental or division strength is almost sure to disappoint and is not worth attending.)