The Longest Silence

The Sea-Run Fish

I AM PASSIONATELY interested in Atlantic salmon, steelhead, and sea trout, all kin. More than any other fish, they have carried on their backs centuries of hare-brained theories and demented off-season reflection. Yet each of them have created different sport fisheries. Some are quite difficult, others are set up so that the well-heeled may be successful. Atlantic salmon fishers have fallen into several groups, of which the following is an incomplete list.

The Rich, Old and New

Awaiting a bush plane or gut-festooned aluminum outboard boat in flannels, cordovans, a signifying necktie or bowtie and the oddly imprisoning drapery of a J. Press blazer, these men often own the rivers they mean to fish. However, given the tedium of riparian owners’ meetings and unpredictable encounters with native peoples who are increasingly armed, if not with Kalishnikovs then with counsel, they sometimes have transferred ownership to the credulous and more recently well off, demonstrating once again how they have hung on to money for so long.

The newly rich aren’t discernible from the old by visual references. If they now often own the river, they seem left holding the bag by their predecessors who continue to exercise a sort of droit du seigneur through frequent visitation, on the theory that they add tone and continuity to the old camp. With experience at their backs, they can jubilantly outfish the new owners. Only loose tongues as to the odious rise of the Irish or the poor job done by land grant colleges can get their rod privileges pulled. So many of the children of the old rich have given up their club memberships and are now in rehab that this group of anglers is discovering a hard-won humility and is getting along with the new rich better.

Corporate Groups

These are growing more common. Say you’re on the edge of the tundra hoping to spot the great skua in his hunt of the arctic seas, when a Gulfstream jet, with the logo of a world-renowned widgetworks on its fuselage, lands in a cloud of jet exhaust, scattering caribou, penguins, and reindeer. The door opens, the stairway descends, and here they come! All hard-driving executives with new gear, they fly well below the radar of annual reports which do not reflect this use of the multi-million dollar aircraft. Shareholders know a G-3’s “out there” but they think it’s going to merger meetings or is being used as a kind of attack aircraft in hostile takeovers. Retirement-minded investors would be hard-pressed to imagine their benefactors at forty thousand feet, stretching nine-weight flylines in the aisle while Debbie Does Dallas plays in the little lounge area where the steward brings peanuts and cocktails, or relaxing in the always-open cockpit where you can sit with the pilots and study the gray seas below while pondering the mystery of salmon.

Time Sharers

Yes, people, they are condominiumizing rivers. With a group of angling writers, I was once invited to a Scottish river as a guest of the syndicate which was preparing to sell shares. I declined to attend, but the very able fishermen who did go fished hard and got one fish in a week between them. I don’t think these guests helped the owners’ cause, releasing as they did many sardonic reports that poorly concealed their hysterical boredom. Nevertheless, I am told the river “sold out.” The new owners, I’m confident, will be made to know that the Atlantic salmon, in addition to being the king of fishes, is a difficult fellow; and that while awaiting the bite it is advisable to reflect upon the advantages of services, cuisine, and clean towels.

Spongers

To this group, which is comprised of guests and writers, I belong. My wife, less flatteringly, says that I am a salmon-steelhead whore. When I have phone calls to return and she prefaces her listing of them with the suggestion that I get into my net stockings and high heels, I know that anadromous fish are at issue. I try to be a good guest. I save up jokes. Sometimes I have to bunk with a nincompoop and am thus made aware of the nature of the hole I have filled. I suppose I don’t care, not when I’m on the river. Yet at dinner, there are times when I am keenly aware of a great gulf. Here is where the early bedtime comes in. Still, it’s possible to feel the shame that makes the modern hooker call herself a “sex worker” and attempt to start a respectable union like the AFL–CIO. But when streetwalkers go on strike or writers refuse to salmon-fish unless every condition is met, that’s entirely less impactful than when airline pilots or teachers go on strike.

The Poacher

I find the rod-and-line fellow rather attractive as an amiable sort of buccaneer, not necessarily with a family to feed but more likely with a lack of sporting opportunity to redress. I used to fish the Blackwater River in Ireland with a local poacher. When we caught a fish we took it straight to the landowner’s door, generally an Anglo-Irishman, whom Brendan Behan defined as a Protestant with a horse. We would sell him the fish at a pretty penny, as it was so fresh as to be hard to hang on to, lurching about in our hands. The few shillings thus attained looked remarkably at home on the counter of the local pub, where the miracle of economics transformed them into foamy-headed black stout. In the words of the immortal Flann O’Brien, “A pint of plain is your only man.”

And so there you have it. To ascend this ladder in the salmon hierarchy is possible if you have the pluck and aplomb of Becky Sharp or Willie “the Actor” Sutton. Otherwise it is hard to maintain your salmon privileges and you most certainly must study the societal underpinnings of this arcanum or else will be banished to a high-volume bonefish camp in the Tropics, where guides, management, and local idlers alike will abuse you, steal from you, and say unspeakably nasty things about your mother, whom they haven’t even met.

Steelheaders fall into a very different set of troupes. The first group, distinctly, are the original California steelheaders emanating from the Bay Area. In fact, wherever you go in steelhead country, there will be a remarkably high number of San Franciscans, because their home fishery has all but disappeared. The situation from which these anglers emerged was unique and will never be seen on earth again. Mostly city dwellers, they had a casting club in Golden Gate Park that for many years was the cutting edge of fly casters’ technology and produced almost all of the world’s great casters from Jon Tarantino to Steve Rajeff. What can never be replaced is the steelhead run on the Russian River, a short distance outside the city, a run of over thirty-thousand wild, big, beautiful steelhead in public water. And not very far beyond were other great rivers, including the Gualala, Eel, Klamath, Trinity, all of them now pitiful remnants of their original selves. To put yourself in fishing anywhere near this quality would take a very substantial outlay and probably it can no longer be done, even with jets and dollars.

I first arrived on that scene in the middle sixties, and by then it was on the way out. Many of the prominent anglers, exemplified by the peerless Bill Schaadt, had moved on to other things, from king salmon in the Smith and Chetco to stripers in the bay. What remained of the steelhead fishery was in the form of lineups, a string of anglers, shoulder to shoulder, moving at a prescribed pace down the pool. I must admit that I was unprepared for the competitive nature of California steelheading, the heaping of scorn upon one another, the invidious comparisons: it was very much an urban scene transported to the river. But they had certainly brought the craft of fishing fast-sinking shooting heads to its apogee. A more recent wave of Californians have introduced the dead-drifted nymph and Glo Bug techniques, and it is even more deadly than the shooting heads. In my view, both of these methods are inappropriate to today’s hammered fisheries. Happily, there are signs of repentance, and more and more steelheaders are returning to the floating line, accepting its limitations just as we accept the net in tennis.

Another group of steelheaders are the “locals.” Some of these are anglers of high refinement and exquisitely tuned sensibilities, people like Bill McMillan and the monks of the Skagit who pioneered for North Americans the rediscovery of the double-handed rod. “Locals” are now scattered more or less between Portland, Oregon, and Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and while they have an understandable level of turf consciousness, they are no match for the animals who oversaw the last days of California steelheading. If you are sufficiently self-effacing to soak up a certain amount of social abuse, and willing to accept that locals have utter contempt for any other kind of fishing you might have done, you might eventually be able to spend some time around them. Your next job is to outfish them, which they don’t think is possible; and after that, socially speaking, they’re fucked. Now you can lay all the bad stuff on them, early rising, persistence, and the rest of it. Locals often fail to see this coming or to realize that nothing is more abhorrent than an out-of-towner with a plan.

The lodge denizens form another group. I am sometimes one of them and I think this is often a good deal. The lodge has the unenviable job of maintaining living facilities, waterborne transport, and guides, as well as some level of communications and emergency medical capability in remote places. The logistics underlying this can resemble what in military parlance is called a task force, but it enables one to arrive with clothes and tackle only, and depart with no responsibilities for maintenance and other ordeals of the off-season, a real luxury. The downside is that it’s not cheap and you never know who you’ll be bunking with. By and large, you are housed with collegial spirits, some of whom will end up as friends. Still, there is always an element of risk and if you travel long enough to so-called destination angling, you will meet some unparalleled Twinkies and monsters. A Frenchman of our acquaintance had his trip to an Alaskan steelhead camp ruined by some bearded slimeball of a Denver lawyer who didn’t like the French and threw rocks into the river ahead of him while he tried to fish. My son and I had the depressed manager of an aluminum plant cast a glum shadow over a promising week of bonefishing. The CEO of a worldwide construction company dominated the services of one steelhead camp and treated the staff with painful rudeness. And of course, a certain amount of regimentation is necessary in the operation of a lodge, and so the usual eccentricities of the dedicated angler are not necessarily appreciated. Real fishing camps don’t like to be turned into love nests by philanderers and their dates. Vegans may starve to death, and while the companionship of men is a common thing in such places, drumming and hand-holding are thought to take the mind off the real work at hand.

Mostly, however, it works quite well. Besides, if you are not a “local,” some sacrifices must be made. You are free to camp near the fishery or work out little innovations with cheap motels or indulgent friends. If you take this latter course, plan to have plenty of time at your disposal; after arranging all the food, shelter, and transportation, you’ll have little time left for fishing. It is easily possible to get in sixty hours of angling in a week of fishing from a lodge or fishing hotel. It takes twice as long to get in the same amount of fishing if you are looking after yourself. Yet both options have their charms and place, and I’d never give up either one. It must be said, though, that it is nearly impossible for the out-of-towner to make much of a hand at Atlantic salmon fishing without lodgelike arrangements. While that is still possible in steelheading, it remains to be seen if the fish themselves can survive these democratic times. Certainly one sees little on steelhead rivers of the patrician ways noted on Atlantic salmon fisheries. In fact, only with the recent advent of double-handed rods have tony sport trappings heretofore unknown among steelheaders become apparent: single malt Scotch, good cigars, tweed caps, and the somewhat random use of the word “heritage.” And it is a great relief when these high-falutin’ new steelheaders continue to fracture the English language in their customary way, referring to MacAllan whiskey, for example, as “some good shit.” And when the Number Six Ring Gauge Upmanns are unavailable, the Lucky Strikes will do quite nicely, thank you.

The final type, a derivative of one already described under Atlantic salmon, and the classification to which I ardently aspire, is the roaming sponge. This angler, grinning, obsequious, excessively convivial, seems too stupid to have a plan. Sleeping in or next to the vehicle in which he arrived, he cuts such an unarresting figure that he has bored in past the ejection level before the locals are on to his game. Too late, they realize he has increased the pressure on their favorite water. I feel it’s the duty of the roaming sponge to make up for this to his hosts, especially in good works of river conservation. Consider it a form of life insurance. The sponge must acknowledge his indebtedness and work hard to pay it off. Only when he himself becomes the target of continuous sponging can he be said to have arrived.

However you accomplish it, every salmon, steelhead, or sea trout river you manage to get under your belt is something to be treasured. Obviously, it may be neccessary to put self-esteem to one side or to give remarkably inaccurate impressions of your character to people whom you like. A private agony may ensue — indeed may haunt your old age — but it gets you on the water.