The Longest Silence (28 page)

T
HE 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.

I put on a small bomber and began working the far grassy bank, enjoying the provocative wake the fly pulled behind it, enjoying the evening as the Darwin Chain receded into the stars. A kind of hypnosis resulted from the long hours of staring into this grasslands river. Suddenly, a fish ran my fly down, making an eight-foot rip in the silky flow of the river. I could feel this one well down into the cork of my double-hander. The fight took us up and down the pool, and the weight I perceived at the end of my line kept my anxiety high. Several times I thought I had the fish landed when it powered out of the shallows. In the end, netting the fish, Stevie said, “Look at those shoulders!” We weighed her in the net and Yvon came up for a look at this twenty-five pound female. To judge by her brilliant silver color and sharp black spots, she was just out of the ocean. I never imagined such a trout belly would ever hang between my two hands. As she swam off the shelf, she pulled a three-foot bow wake. In the sea yesterday, she was now heading to the mountains. We were glad to watch her go.

Yvon noted that with twenty-one sea-run brown trout, nineteen of
them over fifteen pounds, we had had the best fishing day we would ever have. We were tired and vaguely stunned. There was also a sense that wherever we’d been going as trout fishermen, we had just gotten there today.

Stevie contemplated all this, let his eye follow a flight of ashy-headed geese passing overhead, and said, “Twenty-one beats twenty.”

I
WAS IN
H
ELSINKI
, waiting for a plane to Russia, and had walked downtown via the agreeable strand along the Baltic. The coal-fired city electric plant and the old mercantile buildings on the shore looked out on the sparkling water of the northern sea. Numerous watercraft lay along the quay, along with small vendors doing an active trade. Farmers from coastal villages, moored stern-to, set up scales on the transoms of their vessels and sold vegetables. No bellowing, no casbah, no plucking at your sleeve, just quiet northern transactions between women of the city and big-handed, modest farmers. I was fortunate enough to see one of the heroic Finnish icebreakers, languishing now in summertime. I then went into a lovely old enclosed market, over which soared glistening seagulls and big gray and black Finnish crows, to look at the fish—salmon fresh from the sea and trout from Finnish lakes. The red-cheeked fishmonger beamed over his offerings and seemed to understand that I only wished to admire them. Outside, a businessman leaned against a fish stall reading
Firma
by John Grisham. A young man rowed past in a graceful wooden craft, carrying his girlfriend and a pair of gloriously matched boxer dogs whose elevated chins and half-closed eyes suggested a patrician abandonment to the moment.

I crossed through a residential area thronged by many of the young people who had adopted the ubiquitous Brit rocker look, learned from newsclips of soccer riots. Others wore T-shirts dedicated to the Hard
Rock Cafe, the Chicago Bulls, and the darling of northern Europe, Bruce Springsteen. A French youth sported a sweatshirt that read “Soft Ball Coach. Fifth Avenue.” Along either side of the street large signs advised the use of condoms, which were depicted as rocket ships heading into the stars. “What a voyage!” you could picture Little Willy saying. “I’d better be aboard!”

Beneath a poster advertising a bungee-jumping meet the following Saturday was an energetic Bolivian band, five young men in black hats and serapes, playing their native music and dancing as a Baltic cloudburst descended over them. Among the dark old buildings, an amalgamated architecture offering the occasional Eastern-looking onion dome, the little band seemed impossibly fresh (I didn’t yet know that Jerry Jeff Walker was playing down the street from my hotel that night). And so I subjected them to my bad Spanish. That we should fall upon one another as lost junketeers of the other hemisphere is beyond analysis. The Americas shrank to a neighborhood as we wrote down addresses under the falling rain. Once again their feet began to shuffle, the guitars to throb. The piercing Bolivian flutes seemed to annoy the Europeans. Across the street, a youth with long blond hair looked on, apparently eager to suck in whatever our little concert contained. His T-shirt depicted the skyline of a desert city, palm trees thrusting up through the searchlights. This pictorial matter was surmounted by a desolating, one-word message:

I wanted to see the Helsinki railroad station, designed by Eliel Saarinen, a leading example of the National Romantic style, and one of the most appealing public buildings in the world. I looked at it from the front of the Atheneum. The scale was wonderful; it seemed to belong to a city in the past, to a time whose scale was more human. It was cool and eccentric and appeared to serve the right number of people. I went inside and browsed among the flower sellers and newsstands, and watched the well-behaved people in ticket queues. Directly beyond the main hall with its easygoing throng, doors opened to the platforms. Outside, beautifully cared for trains sat on parallel
sets of tracks that shrank away into a distance that implied the half-lit solitudes of the North. Heroic white clouds towered in the blue sky. I sat on an iron-and-wood bench to watch the arrivals and departures, Finns in town to shop, Finns going to their lake cottages. There were seagulls in the railroad station, and from a waste basket next to my bench an amiable crow polished off a package of biscuits.

I wandered around, noting buildings by Alvar Aalto, and among the quirky neighborhoods, the art nouveau apartments and the quickly changing marine skyscape, I attempted to detect the spirit of Sibelius. A Finnish gentleman of a certain age took me aside and made it clear that Suomenlinna, Lorkeasaari, Seurasaari, and the great beach at Phlajasaari should not be missed. I assured him I would follow his advice. When I travel, there is usually one rhapsodic instance of telling myself, “I must learn the language!” It is an innocent impulse, resulting in no action, that I felt not once in Finland where even a sprinkling of words sound monstrously impenetrable. But pictures were another thing. I looked at rooms full of them in the Atheneum. Some of the sculpture was so conservative I thought it was Roman, but the painting was another matter, the best possessing a sequestered domesticity, a pleasing lack of European references.

There are beautiful public gardens behind one of the inlets, slightly unkempt, but every bit as handsome as English gardens sometimes are and as most French gardens are not. These were dominated by vast winter greenhouses that faced modest ponds and beds of replacement plantings. A very old woman, surely more than ninety, had been wheeled up to one of the ponds by her nurse. The nurse, you could see, hoped the old woman would take an interest in a family of mallards feeding on the pond. I noticed one of the woman’s legs had been amputated and it was clear she didn’t see the ducks. She seemed beyond indifference. Despite the nurse’s good intentions, this business with the ducks was insufferable. To grin at such a sight would spell defeat. I admired her refusal and watched this little drama by standing next to a wall of viburnum, pretending to be interested in the ducks myself, and stealing glances at the old woman.

She caught me. I averted my eyes. When I looked again in her direction, she was smiling at me in a sly way. The length of shore along the
pond dividing us seemed a tremendous distance. When she gestured for me to come over, I affected a saunter but my guilt betrayed me. Once I reached her side, I saw that her silver hair was in thick, complicated braids. She reached out her hand and I took it. She was from another century and her hand was cool and full of strength. The nurse shrank to the size of a pinhead and the wheelchair seemed poised for flight. We watched the ducks. Our eyes shone. We were flying.