The Longest Silence (32 page)

I removed the size 6 Rusty Rat, replaced it with a size 8 Green Highlander, and kept the original length of line. Then it was just a matter of a roll, a pickup, and a cast before I was swinging through the slot again. This time the refusal was slow and considered, amazingly so in view of the current speed. I could more clearly see the size of the fish and knew it much bigger than the typical twelve-pound fish of the Whale. While these salmon are not large, their strength is such that they could drag the twenty-pounders of other rivers to death. In this kind of situation, you are aware that you have unsuccessfully played another card and that the number of remaining cards is uncertain but not unlimited. I made another cast with the Green Highlander and saw no sign of the fish.

I took my time tying on another fly, a Black Bear Green Butt, the fly I would fish if I were reduced to a single pattern, another number 8. While smoking down the imaginary cigarette, I thought about our host Stanley Karbosky, a member of Darby’s Rangers who had fought the Nazis virtually hand-to-hand everywhere they went, finally getting machine-gunned himself in Italy. After a long recovery he came to
Labrador as a professional explorer. And it was Stanley who discovered the salmon fishery of the Whale. Such thoughts made my fish-resting lull feel both brief and painless.

I had absolute faith, close to a hunch, in the latest change of fly. I tracked it toward the salmon’s lie with hypnotic attention and was expecting the sight of the fish, which came as a leisurely inspection and refusal. The fly trailed on past the fish into the slow water against the bank before I picked it up and held its soggy shape between my thumb and forefinger, feeling that this dismissal was perhaps final. When I tried it again the fish’s nonappearance seemed emphatic.

For the first time in this episode I gave in to impatience and a kind of annoyance at my fortunes, and promptly marched through six more fly changes, all the Rats and a small black General Practitioner, without getting another response. My attempts to engage the mind of this fish to my advantage had failed utterly. Using my own tackle, this simple creature had turned the tables and driven me crazy. When I looked out at the river and imagined beginning another long search for a fish, I was discouraged. So, like an old and chronic sinner gazing into his Bible in hopes of a last-minute reconsideration by God, I once more opened my fly book and peered within. It was a phenomenal mess of used and replaced flies, a week’s worth of arguing with fate, flies once in neat rows now pointing every which way, some with bits of leader still attached or riffle knots embedded at their throats, heads once lacquer bright now milky and dull, hair-and-feather brainstorms from Norway, Russia, Ireland, Iceland, Scotland, and Canada. All I wanted was one fish to bite one fly!

I took off the ten-pound tippet and tied on a six pound, determined to break out of the chain of logic that was causing me to miss this fish. My next challenge to the fish was to say, “Here’s one that’s way too small for your feeble eyes.” My inspiration was a tiny Blue Charm, an insectlike speck of wizardry on a single hook. I tied it to the tippet with a loop to assure maximum wiggle and cast it much closer to the lie than I’d been doing, so as to subject my small offering to fewer vagaries of current and fewer needs to be mended, fewer chances of refusal.

The fish went straight to it in a deep-bodied swirl. The line tightened
on the water before me and I felt the weight in my left hand. I lifted the rod and the fish was hooked. I remember only my conviction that things were completely out of control. I had waded deep among large, submerged boulders, then wedged my feet for the long time I had been casting. Behind me was a high bank. It was not possible to get to better ground where I could control the angles. The fish controlled the angles. I had to just stand there during the violent runs and ferocious, heedless jumps. It seemed marvelous that all the quasi-reasoning behind the fly changes, the fussiness over the line mending and the constant revision of my views as the fish and I moved toward closure would end in such an uproar. Though we were well inland here, this struggle had the power of the northern ocean. I wanted to cry out, Fook! Wot spawt!

Finally I worked the tired fish toward me, leading it through boulders and finally to the beach and the net. She was a powerful, heavy hen not long out of the sea, with subdued black dots on gunmetal and silver. I held her around the tail into the current, feeling the deep curve of belly and fat shoulders, running a finger over the small wonderfully shaped head. When I released her, she picked her way out among the boulders in an unhurried progress to deep water. I found myself at a great altitude yet with all of my life in which to come down. Indeed, as I write this years later, those moments are inescapable and vivid. What a thing to own.

O
NE OF THE CHARMS
of any trip to the Whale was the annual evening of ghost stories in which the anglers tried to frighten the staff with accounts of the supernatural. Many of the people helping things to go ’round are inhabitants of tiny, unchanged towns on the rocky North Shore of the St. Lawrence. Their traditions and innocence are remarkably preserved, if overlaid by information and images that fly through the air into their TVs and radios. But their culture allows them, it seems, an astonishing ability to suspend disbelief and enjoy stories told them, no matter how implausible. My observation was that
all
the stories were implausible and yet absorbed with a kind of thrilled and grateful credulity. Jackie, one of our country’s most outstanding
architects, delivered a dizzily mechanical version of the old chestnut
Skyborg
, which had the staff screaming with terror. When our host, who insists on being called “the Benevolent One,” came to tell his story, I noted that it was entirely plotless. Clearly the Benevolent One had little in mind when he set out, but in the growing awareness that he had an expectant audience he rather desperately, I thought, began to punch up the plot details of his feeble narrative with the sinisterly intoned repetition of the word “evil.” The staff, having listened to his maunderings in wild surmise, now invested all their energy into irrationally reacting to the repitition of this disconnected word.
“Evil,”
came the muttered imprecation, and the kitchen girls, guides, and cook screamed in terror. Few noticed that the Benevolent One had nowhere to go from here and indeed revealed, even through his mutterings, a look of hangdog creative defeat.
“Evil,”
he croaked once more to manifest success.

But the best came last. John, a New York merchant banker, told a ghost story meant to be heightened at its denouement by the sudden rise of flames in the fireplace behind him. Achieved by covertly tossing a snifter of Calvados into the glowing coals, this had the unfortunate effect of introducing real terror into both staff and cynical anglers when the chimney caught fire. Fearing the worst, we all ran outside into the Labrador night. The chimney was blowing sparks and fire fifteen feet into the night sky. Fascinated, I watched John detach himself from these events and take a purely objective interest in what threatened to destroy our housing in the arctic. But gradually the fire subsided and as our evening wound down I heard our architect friend inquire of the Benevolent One, once the chief financial officer of a large movie company, as to the prospects of a film sale of the
Skyborg
project. While the B.O. refrained from throwing cold water on his hopes, he later confided to me that he thought an experienced studio executive like Sherry Lansing would find
Skyborg
“thin.”

N
AT
’
S FISH
was going berserk, not so much jumping as bouncing angrily off the water as though it were stone. Nat ran down the river past me, reel squalling, and said rather calmly, “Number ten light wire
Icelandic shrimp. I’ll never land this fish.” But I saw him a while later, bending to make his release. I photographed Nat with his fish but again the pictures came back with the high-latitude hoodoo, and Nat was transformed into an incubus holding a glowing reptile.

At the end of the day we picked up Dr. Hobie, who recited a rather morose saga. He had waded out to a thin spit of bottom where one could barely stand up and hooked the biggest fish he had ever seen on the Whale. After a long battle, the fish was within a rod’s length but would not accompany Dr. Hobie ashore, nor could he bring it to hand. At this stalemate, the man and fish faced off for a long time, the latter making no further bid for escape and the former unable to cross the deep trough to the beach. A prolonged acquaintanceship ensued, at the end of which the hook pulled and the fish went on to its next appointment. If there was a philosophical overview to grant this moment of closure, it was lost on Dr. Hobie. Fate had dealt him a heavy blow.

“Fook, wot spawt.”

T
HE
C
OMPLEAT
A
NGLER
owes much of its interest to cycles of turbulence, starting with the one within which Walton wrote. In the years shortly before the Restoration, social discord, especially among the literate classes, rose to a genuinely dangerous level. The austerities of Cromwell were undertones of an ominously gathering future. Quietist dreaming, gentleness and contemplation, rusticity and the ceremonies of country life, including fishing, beckoned compellingly. From the Restoration until now,
The Compleat Angler
has been renewed by turmoil, none more conspicuous than the Industrial Revolution, which produced an explosion in the popularity of angling and an idealization of the pastoral life. Its cousins, Gilbert White’s
Natural History of Selbourne
and Thoreau’s
Walden
and
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
, profited similarly. Armchair anglers and the various harried people of the western world have elevated these books to scripture.

Today’s faithless reader will be somewhat baffled by the long shelf-life of this unreliable fishing manual, until he realizes that it’s not about how to fish but how to be. Of this fact even Walton was unaware; thus its inescapable persuasiveness and the bright, objective picture the author has left of himself, without which all quickly deteriorates into the quaint or, worse, the picturesque.

Anglers, above all, have given this book a long life. Its lore and
advice are largely obsolete. Its spiritual origins, drawn contradictorily from pagan and Christian sources, may well appeal to the instinctive pantheism of bucolic dreamers, but anglers tend to be more persistently interested in methods. The greater number of them are less about capturing a truth than capturing a fish and eating it. Still, the sport demands immersion, from air to water, from warm blood to cold, to a view of the racing universe and all its stars through a river’s flowing lens.

Two things from Walton seem contemporary: the flies and the recipes. The first, hooks wrapped in bits of silk and songbird wings, reveal a poetic intuition for breaking down the watery walls. The recipes seem the product of avid reflection as to what a predator ought to do with his prey in a manner complimentary to the destiny of each. The sense of a holy sacrifice, benign and undoubted, subtends the making of these innocent meals in honest alehouses where the angler could expect to find “a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.”

Walton is one of our principal literary sojourners, with White and Thoreau. By comparison with White, he is unscientific; and by comparison with Thoreau, discursive and confident about his world, less challenging of his fellow man but also less wintry and intolerant.

Walton is the leading player in his own book and is helpless to be otherwise. Unlike the rather alpine, punctilious, and detached Thoreau, or the hyperkinetic White, Walton’s persona is one of equitability and such serenity of faith that his journey, in the view of one contemporary, from sepulcher of the Holy Ghost to pinch of Christian dust, spoke of an amiable mortality and rightness on the earth that has been envied by his readers for three-hundred years. But the three do share a conviction that the elements of the natural world are Platonic shadows to be studied in search of eternity, a medium in which man was presumed to float as opposed to sink, as in the present when eternity has been replaced by the abyss.

All three make note of the vast share of their fellows, getting, spending, and laying waste their powers, “men that are condemned to be rich,” in Walton’s words. He observes, “there be as many miseries beyond riches, as on this side of them.” The rich man, he thinks, is
like the silkworm which, while seeming to play, is spinning her own bowels and consuming them. One thinks of Thoreau “owning” the farms by knowing them better than their tenants; it is less that the meek shall possess the earth than that “they enjoy what others possess and enjoy not.” The subject of
The Compleat Angler
is, really, everyday miracles, friends, a dry, warm house, remembered verse, hope. Walton reserves but one spot for envy and invidious comparison: “I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.” I think of gentle, forgiving Anton Chekhov, who could not bear the slightest criticism of his angling.