The Longest Silence

Fly-Fishing the Evil Empire

I WAS IN HELSINKI, 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:

SCREENPLAY

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.

Back to my hotel for a snack of perch soup, reindeer, and cloudberries in the dining room, then dreams of Atlantic salmon in Russia.

THE TARMAC AT MURMANSK was under repair and so our small group of Americans and Brits were diverted into a military airport. We stood near a plywood shanty, awaiting transport to the Soviet helicopter, its red star painted over. It would carry us to sixty-seven degrees north latitude, above the Arctic Circle, to our camp on the Ponoi River, three hundred fifty miles of wild Atlantic salmon water springing from a tundra swamp and flowing to the Barents Sea.

We took the time to inspect the pale blue fighter planes parked in front of bulldozed gravel ledges. They looked like state-of-the-art military equipment, but canvas had been thrown over the canopies, there was at least one flat tire, and they now belonged to a discarded chapter of world politics and other cerebral fevers. The hearty, cheerful Russian woman who was our translator for the moment gestured to the airplanes and said, “You like some military secrets?”

We boarded the enormous helicopter and put in our earplugs, sitting on benches amid duffel bags and rod cases. The Russian crew nodded in that enthusiastic, mute way that says, We don’t know your language. The helicopter lifted off to an altitude of about two feet. I looked out the window at the hurricanes of dust stirred by the rotors and then the helicopter roared down the runway like a fixed-wing aircraft and we were on our way.

In very short order, the view from the window was of natural desolation, rolling tundra, wisps of fog, and alarming low-level whiteouts. Even through my earplugs came a vast drumming of power from the helicopter’s engine. As I often do when confronted with a barrage of new impressions, I fell asleep, chin on chest, arms dangling between my knees, looking like a chimp defeated by shoelaces.

After an hour and a half, we stopped at a rural airfield and got out to stretch while the crew refueled, a task they performed with cigarettes hanging from their lips. Parked on this airfield were enormous Antonov biplanes built in the 1940s. A Russian mechanic told us that some of them had American engines. These were great cargo-hauling workhorses in Siberia, and from time to time we would see them flying over the tundra at a snail’s pace.

We reboarded, joined by a very pretty Russian girl carrying an armload of flowers. She smiled at everyone with the by now familiar mute enthusiasm while the helicopter once again roared into flight. We all mused on this radiant flower of the Russian north, working up theories about her life and dreams. Everything was so wonderfully foreign that later we were slow to acknowledge that she and her husband were our talented cooks from Minnesota.

Landing on a bluff above the Ponoi River, we could see both the camp and the river. The camp was a perfectly organized congeries of white tents of varying sizes, and once I was installed in mine, I briefly stretched out on my bunk to take in that bright sense of nomadic domesticity that a well-appointed tent radiates. In this far north latitude, I knew that the sun would be beaming through my canvas day and night. In one corner was a small Finnish woodstove that in our sustained spell of warmth would never be used.

We were instructed about the angling at the first dinner. An amusing and slightly imperious Englishman named Nicholas Hood picked the first pause between syllables during the official briefing to forgo dessert and descend to the river with his sixteen-foot Spey rod. I was impressed by his deftness in effecting a warp-speed fisherman’s exit without getting caught at it. I had just given an old household toast of ours, “Over the lips, over the gums, look out stomach, here it comes.” To which Hood responded, “Cerebral lot, your family,” and was out of there. One of my companions, Doug Larsen, a superb outdoorsman, remarked that Hood slept with one leg in his waders. I do like to hit the ground running in these situations, but by the time I could disentangle myself Hood was stationed midway down the Home Pool cracking out long casts and covering water like one who’d bent to this work before. “Any sense of the protocol on fishing through here?” I asked.

“Go anywhere you like,” he said, far too busy to get into this with me. So I went, I thought, a polite distance below him and began measuring several long casts onto the tea-colored water. English salmon anglers think that our single-handed rods are either ridiculous or inadequate or simply bespeak, especially when combined with baseball hats, the hyperkinetic nature of the people who use them. One Englishman fishing here earlier in the season had stated plainly that he didn’t think Americans should be allowed to fish for salmon at all.

At the end of one quiet drift, a salmon took, ran off with the fly line and, well into the backing, cartwheeled into the air. He put up a strong, fast fight and I had to follow him down the beach to a small cover, where I tailed him. I looked down at the salmon, at eight pounds not large, but a wonderful, speckled creature, a pure and ancient product of the Russian arctic. I slipped the barbless hook from the corner of his mouth and this brilliantly precise fish, briefly in my hand, faded like an image on film, into the traveling depths of the Ponoi.

When I returned to my spot on the pool, there was Nicholas Hood, beaming and fishing at once. “Well done!” said Hood, showing surprising pleasure at my catch. As we would see, Hood was much too able a fisherman to be insecure about anyone else’s success.

So was the talented Doug Larsen, who fascinated me with his expansion of the carp family: the specklebelly geese so popular among Texas gunners were “sky carp,” the grayling with their tall dorsal fins that darted out after our flies were “sail carp.” I know he wanted to place the enormous salmonid of the Danube and other waters, the taimen, into some remote branch of the carp family. But it wouldn’t go. The Russians who fished for them, he explained with ill-concealed disgust, waited until the taimen made his first jump, then let him have it with a twelve gauge. The only way to land them, really, and one that put aesthetically pleasing or even polite tackle out of the question. You would be at one with the shark assassins of Montauk and other brutes.

Larsen had brought with him our third companion, a Mr. Duff, who listed among his shadowy achievements giving investment tips to Mookie Blaylock. During the course of our week’s angling it became clear to me that the suave, well-dressed, and neatly coiffed Mr. Duff, introduced to me as having warmed up for Atlantic salmon by float-tubing for bluegills on their spawning beds, was a werewolf. His attempts at angling innocence, like asking whether a Near Nuff Frog would be a good fly to tie on, didn’t fool me even in the beginning. Something about the space between his eyes put me on the qui vive. He was into fish all week and stood on the banks of the tundra river at evening and howled like a Russian wolf to commemorate each catch. Not quite physically powerful enough to pinch down the barb on his hook, he had other strengths. Setting off on my middle-of-the-night excursions, I realized that when I reached the river, the wolf would be there. In the end, we accepted Mr. Duff as he was, a wild dog, saliva glistening in the corners of his mouth, chastely marcelled waves of blond over his forehead, and a gymnast’s ability to fish up to, around, and past you, nipping continuously at your water, as well as an unswerving, otherworldly need to catch the most fish. In other words, a werewolf.

Larsen and I were no longer comfortable with our considerable experience in angling for sea-run fish. We were being hunted down by this bluegill jock and had to exhaust our reserves of strength and knowledge to stay ahead of him. And the Ponoi rewarded him frequently as he gazed reflectively through his cigarette smoke. Incidentally, while he always had a cigarette smoldering between his lips, I never saw him light one. This primeval or eternal cigarette ought to be a final clue for any reader who needs one.

After a few days, you imagine you will be on the river forever. This is one of the few places I have ever fished where salmon seemed truly eminent. One fished with ongoing concentration, trying to throw strikes with every cast, mending as exactly as possible and looking into one’s fly book like a fortune teller. The world of the river became more enclosing, the hurtling power of the fish ever more emblematic of the force of wild things and the plenitude of undisturbed nature.

One afternoon I fished in the trance state of repeated casting. The river was so comfortable, I did without my waders. The clouds were long, thin streamers on the northern summer sky. On the cliff face above me was a nest of arctic gyrfalcons; the parents wheeled around the nest bringing food while the pale, fierce youngsters’ screams echoed across the canyon.

We had passed a place where villagers had come out and built a fire. The ground was trampled and there were empty vodka bottles and pieces of roasted reindeer tongue. These people had been here for thousands of years and had some old habits, not readily discernible to our eyes.

A fish came with a slow rolling motion and started back to his lie with my Green Highlander in the corner of his mouth. I let him tighten against the reel and raised my rod. And now we were off to the races, me running over the round rocks in wading shoes while the fish cartwheeled in midriver, the thread of Dacron backing streaming after it and the reel making its sublime music. We had earlier noted Nick Hood bounding like Nijinsky behind a fish, springing from stone to stone, and I felt more than the usual pressure to stay on my feet. But this fish was landed in a slick behind boulders. I released him without ever taking him out of the water and he flickered away into the depths of his ancestral river.

While Larsen continued to catch fish steadily, Mr. Duff started showing some of the deficits of his otherworldly auspices. He would catch fish at a good clip, then become possessed by a “hoodoo.” By this time we’d become well enough acquainted that he could share some of the special problems he experienced. A hoodoo evidently is some sort of bird, or possibly a bat. When it settles, imperceptibly, between the shoulder blades of the unsuspecting angler, it becomes impossible to catch a fish. One can hook them, but they always get off. So, for a while, the wolf’s echoing howls were less frequent. Sport that he was, though, he finally shook it. From time to time the hoodoo settled on Larsen and me. We also began to acquire some of his other problems; by midweek, for example, Larsen had begun taking great pains to precisely part his hair.

That night, when I left the dining tent with its many pleasures of good food, pleasant companionship, and a fly-tying table where the silliest notions may be brought to life, I knew I had to keep fishing. However, it had been a long day and a small nap was in order. Larsen and Mr. Duff, now transmuted into a bon vivant, refilling drinks, telling golfing stories, and smoking the very cigarette I had watched glow all week long, were in the dining tent for the foreseeable future, actively being corrupted by an English farmer, James Keith, who promoted late-night card games and a general shore-leave atmosphere.

I awakened at three, gulped the cup of cold coffee I’d left beside my bunk, and soon was walking through the sleeping camp with my rod over my shoulder. Snores issued from several tents and the sun was shining merrily. Wagtails had seized this time to hop among the tents looking for food. I noted Hood’s sixteen-foot Spey rod leaned up in front of his tent. Hood was in for the evening and there was every chance I would have the magnificent Home Pool — one of the great salmon pools in the world — to myself. I climbed down the path along a small stream, waving away the mosquitoes, and was soon casting out onto the great river and discovering how tired my muscles really were.

I caught a small grilse right away, a silver-bright fish only a day or so from the ocean. Then it got still and not a fish was rolling. Though sleep kept rising through my mind, I was in the river and the casts were still rolling out. About halfway down the pool I felt a jolting strike. After ripping forty yards into my backing, a terrific salmon made one crashing jump after another well out in midriver. Then it started back toward the ocean. I put as deep a bow in the rod as I dared and began following the fish downstream. I beached this big male on a small point, beyond which I might not have been able to follow. His lower jaw was so hooked it had worn a groove in the upper, and I was delighted to make certain this individual could make his contribution to the gene pool. I’ve always thought that it would be nice after landing an exceptional fish to go straight to bed. And so I did, drifting off in my glowing tent to a dream of sea-run fish.

We stopped in Murmansk for a couple of hours on the way out. I went to a small museum and looked at some wonderful paintings of submarines — some in the open sea, some in remote ocean coves with snow on their decks — and the portraits of their captains. This glimpse of military glory was at sharp odds with the beleaguered municipality all around us. As I looked at the cheerlessly monolithic public housing towering over raw, bulldozed ground, I remembered that the leading cause of domestic fires in Russia is exploding television sets. But no one in the world has wild, open country like the Russians, a possible ace-in-the-hole on a strangling planet. Poets and naturalists could have understood this so much more comprehensively than I did, dragging my fly rod, but without it I probably would never have gotten there or stood for a week in a river coursing through the tundra to the Barents Sea.

Mr. Duff gazed at me with the faintest of smiles as I dragged my duffel to the boarding area. A thin plume of motionless smoke extended vertically from his cigarette. Then he looked away, resuming his scrutiny of a back issue of Golf Digest. I was conscious that the weight of my duffel had come to seem tremendously heavy as I dragged it from boarding area to boarding area that day and night, in Murmansk, in Helsinki, in New York, in Salt Lake City. By the time I got to Bozeman, I apparently had become so weak that I could barely lift it. Finally home, I dragged it out of my car like a corpse. I hated it so much that I slept a full day before unpacking it. When I did, beneath the soggy wading shoes and dirty laundry, I found the most beautiful round river rocks and heard a distant howl from the shadows along the far shore of the Ponoi.