The Longest Silence

Iceland

THE VOLCANIC LANDSCAPE, the cool fog from the sea … this must be Iceland. I walked out of my small hotel on the northeast coast of the country. A large river, milky with glacier melt, flowed beneath us in a shallow canyon. From among a church and some houses around the hotel, an old man appeared, hobbling toward the estuary on ski poles and following a small black hen. They traveled at the same speed and eventually disappeared over a low hill, first the hen, then the old man, to the edge of the sea.

Another fellow came out of the hotel and struck up a conversation with me in English. A nervous sort, he kept touching his lips. “Of fish, I prefer their heads. I go to the store, I buy only the heads. I cook them and then I suck out all the little parts.”

That night, I found myself dining with some English salmon anglers. One, a florid, lively man in his sixties, was telling me of the recent death of his mother who had always been bored by salmon fishing. On the Alta, where his father had persuaded her to fish for one day, she caught a fifty-pounder and never fished again. This year, as she lay on her deathbed, her son sat by her side. She was only occasionally conscious as her life ebbed away. At the end, she opened her eyes and gazed at him. “You’ll never catch a fifty-pound salmon,” she said, and died.

The buildings of the town were rugged and pretty, sided with brightly painted corrugated iron, the windows and fascia of the roofs decorated with fanciful designs and ornamental carpentry. Streetside windows had their shades drawn for privacy but the window ledges were filled with small objects and souvenirs their owners thought might amuse pedestrians: a little horse, a soldier, a German postcard, magnets in the shape of small black-and-white-dogs.

We stopped to bring a couple of salmon to a priest, a popular man, perhaps forty years old, who served four congregations in old rural churches whose steeples pointed sharply in this big green landscape. The stated passion of this man of God is salmon. My host inquired of the priest and his jolly, bohemian-looking wife as to the well-being of their son. Very well, very happy, apparently. Does he still have the bright blue Mohawk haircut? Yes, yes, says the priest. The son was in a band and that, somehow, was part of it — his eyes playing continuously over the bright sea fish. Yes, all the lads in the band had mohawks, what a lovely fish. Leaving the vicarage, we stopped on a narrow bridge high over the stream to look at salmon. This is still something of a miracle to me, peering from country bridges at sea-run fish. We used to have more of these fish in America than anyone so we killed them off. In the bend below us, a pair of swans sailed along slowly. The fish held steady. Sooner or later, something would make them move decisively but we are not sure what that was. Without doubt, a specific moment of departure would register and the salmon would move up.

I was fishing with a young man named Steini on the Haffjardara River. Early in the season, he had had a hard time being away from the Internet. Most of his friends are out in cyberspace and he hated leaving them. When I first asked him about himself, he said, “I’m a Knicks fan.”

We talked about the agonies of Karl Malone, the helplessness of the Utah Jazz in the face of Michael Jordan. I told him about a new biography of Isaiah Thomas just out and he made a note to himself to order it when he got back to Reykjavik.

The evening was quiet, the beautiful river whispering in its rocky banks. We were fishing at a narrows where one of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas, Grettir, a sort of Viking outlaw, leapt the Haffjardara to make his escape. The Sagas, the NBA, the Internet, and the thousand years of trying to catch a salmon, all had the effect — and a rather cheerful one — of making these disparate times seem simultaneous.

Steini, I learned, had just broken up with his girlfriend of many years. In fact, she had driven up to our salmon camp to inform him of her decision. He was unashamed of his sadness and Ludwig, one of the older guides, took him for long walks to discuss his heartbreak. There was in this a human simplicity I noted in many things Icelandic. That and a widespread competence. Ludwig disliked paying expensive gas bills for his old Land Rover, so he plucked out its engine and installed a Nissan diesel. “What about all the fittings between the Japanese engine and the English drivetrain?” I asked.

“We machined new ones.”

“Have you had any problems with it?”

“I’ve only put thirty thousand miles on it since we changed the motor. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Ludwig and I fished a couple of long and unproductive sessions, one in the pools below a beautiful falls, a beat that had not been fishing well. You stood on a sliver of rock, deep water on either side, and fished to the left and the right. I didn’t like the kind of drifts I was getting but the fish were there. The falls was just to my left a few feet and every so often a salmon went airborne burying himself in the curtain of falling water, making it impossible to determine whether he made it over the top or not. Less often a sea-run char, resplendently colored and resembling a huge brook trout, would make the same heedless vault at the face of the falls. They either surmount it or vanish at the base, you never really know which; but the magic of these pure sparks of marine life is acute.

Ludwig was formerly a schoolmaster. He had once been a Fulbright Fellow in the States. He was a fine-boned, handsome, weathered man of around seventy, a fly fisherman and ptarmigan hunter, a driven golfer, and a navigation instructor. When I asked where he sailed, he said Greenland, Poland, different places. He taught for thirty years beneath the glacier to our north, and when he moved into Reykjavik to be near his six grandchildren, he chose a house with a view of the glacier in the distance. Ludwig loved every season of Iceland, even the long, dark winter. The weather seemed to me to be remarkably varied, impacted as it was by many seas, the Gulf Stream, and the high latitudes. “In Iceland,” said Ludwig, “we don’t have weather. We have examples.”

Our cook, a man of rare talents who presented us with marvels of local provender — langoustine, sea fish, lamb with wild icelandic berries, still-living scallops, regal salmon, char gravlax — had a very short fuse and was intolerant of things going wrong at any level. “Our cook explodes,” said Ludwig, “and we love him for it!”

We took in all this fishing with the blithe purity available only to those who are guests. We were guests of my dear friend Bo Ivanovic, who too often impedes his superb angling abilities by looking after his friends. At a fleeting moment of semidespair, he allowed that it was hard to “keep these gears and wheels turning.” This looking after other people is trying to anglers as serious as Bo, who are happiest as solitary wolves intent on enmeshing themselves in the skein of signals and intuitions that tie the angler to the fish. Triangulating wind, tide, and weather isn’t made easier when a guest totters up in his robe and asks if you “haven’t a little something for the Hershey’s squirts.” The social savagery of anglers is such that they are liable to point out to the very host who has seen to their food, shelter, and transportation that they’ve caught more fish than he has. That the host rarely passes among his guests with a heavy sword is a testament to the depth of character in those who take on this role. The day comes, however, when they tire of all this and tell some repeater-sponge, unhappy that the staff is late in changing his sheets, to go fuck himself. One instance of this, after years of benevolence, and the host necessarily acquires an indelible reputation for being a short-fused spoilsport. By now, most any host realizes that he can turn this to his advantage. Fish camps are filled with dour former hosts who stay to themselves, read in their rooms, and push off early for the best pools.

My luck might have been better had I quit plying Ludwig with questions. I may have been more interested in him than in the fishing. But I did want to catch a salmon, and he was anxious that I succeed. We went to a beat where low water had almost brought the current to a stop. While there were plenty of fish, it was necessary to stay well back, lengthen and lighten the leader, and strip the fly. As I fished, Ludwig told me the story of his childhood. His mother died when he was a boy, and since it wasn’t possible for his father to keep him at home, he was sent to his uncle’s farm on the north coast of Iceland. He and his father missed each other tremendously and throughout Ludwig’s boyhood they wrote to each other at every opportunity. His father saved Ludwig’s letters and years later gave them to him. We talked about his idea of using them to write a biography of the boy who wrote them, the boy he’d been, tilting this idea around a good bit but then, still without a fish, drifted off into a chat about Pablo Neruda.

A gyrfalcon — Ludwig called it an Icelandic falcon — appeared in the distance, coursing over the land with extraordinary power, certainly the most impressive bird of prey I’d ever seen. It intersected the river about a quarter of a mile above us and turned down the bank, searching. I could hardly believe my luck as the bird rode right down the bank opposite me, the heroic falcon of dreams, a stark medieval-looking raptor, every bit of its shape refined to heraldic extremity. It hovered slightly as it passed us, swept downstream thirty yards or so, banked up to slow the velocity of its turn, then came right up the same bank. Directly in front of me, the falcon crashed into the deep grass of the far bank. A bleak cry issued from some creature and the falcon lifted off with a duckling in its talons. When it soared off to a spire of rock with its prize, the mother duck tumbled into the stream and, pushing her two remaining babies ahead of her with urgent, plaintive, heartbroken quacks, paddled away. Ludwig was holding his heart; it was really very sad. I felt an ache until that night when our English companion, David Hoare, said, “That falcon has a nest of babies to feed.”

Time was running out and I didn’t have a fish. I suppose that, technically, this was a streak of bad luck, several half-day sessions without a take, when all others in camp were doing fine. I was even mourning the duckling who would never be a duck and its mother, by now down to two babies out of what had probably been eight.

I tied on a Red Francis, a horrible tube fly that looks like a carrot with feelers on one end. Certainly it is a shrimp imitation but fish react to it strangely. Often they ignore it, yet sometimes it seems to drive them crazy. In the last minutes of daylight, the latter obtained. Every fish in the pool ran around violently — if it’s supposed to be a shrimp, why would they do that? — and one large fish won the race. A bite! I fought this very strong fish in a most gingerly manner up and down the pool and landed him, a fifteen-pounder, with the clear understanding that my bad luck streak was over. I don’t know how you know this, but you do. Ludwig’s pent-up emotion boiled over too as he, at about 150 pounds, lifted me, at about 190, into the air with my fourteen-foot double-handed rod waving overhead. I had played this fish so carefully that reviving him took a bit of time. I was glad to be back in a realm in which I greedily put green fish on the bank with all their strength intact. One swipe with the hemostat and they were free to go.

BO WANTED ME to see several other rivers in Iceland and took me next to the Selá River in the northeast. There I spent a day with Orri Visguffson who grew up in a family of herring fishermen but now leads the effort to save the North Atlantic salmon. We discussed Halldór Laxness, the great Icelandic novelist, whose Independent People everyone in camp seemed to be reading. “He lived just outside Reykjavik,” said Orri. “We saw him often. At some point, he began to think of himself as something of a gentleman. There was an ascot tie, a house in the country. But we never held this against him. We had no idea why he did these things. Certainly he had his reasons.” In Iceland, a thousand years of freeholding farmers have created a specific culture within what is the world’s oldest democracy. Taking on airs is perceived as fabulously exotic and inventive. In Orri’s patient account, Laxness’s ascot tie floated like an enigmatic object in a surrealist painting.

Orri was helping me to fish a run that was not easily understood. A stream flowed into the main body of the Selá, which flowed from right to left. Orri had me stand in the stream thirty yards above the juncture and cast to the outside of the seam caused by the stream. He continuously adjusted my position with push-pull gestures of his hands and monosyllabic instructions about the cast itself. Then he had me wade across to the inside of the small stream, changing my angle slightly on the drift, then directed me downstream for a cast or two until I had reached the beach, the stream now entering the river to my right and the drift swinging acrosss the seam of the incoming water. Orri watched the drift, indicated that I must move several inches to my left, then returned his hand to its sweater pocket. He nodded solemnly and the salmon struck.

No expression crossed his face as I fought and landed a very hardy eight-pounder fresh from the sea. I released the fish and stood up, enormously pleased with everything. Orri made a forward motion with the back of his hand. “Back to work. This is not a vacation.”

Jack Hemingway joined us for a day. He was going from river to river and would continue to do so, he said, until every source of funds had dried up. Few people who were parachuted behind German lines in World War II would’ve thought to bring a fly rod, but Jack did. To this superficial observer he seemed a happy man. In any case, something contributed to giving a seventy-five-year-old the enthusiasm and energy of a boy. I kept thinking of Jack as “Bumby,” the infant of his father’s Moveable Feast, baby-sat by F. Puss, the cat, and imagining the tempestuous times in which he’d grown up in France among the century’s most evolved characters. Jack turned out great, and a real fisherman. He called his most recent birthday party The Son Also Rises. It was a pleasure to sit near one splendid river and talk about others with someone who had lived so fully for such a long time. We each have Gordon setters who are related to one another, so we tried to fathom their clownish and not entirely comprehensible personalities. Jack trained his on chukars in southeastern Washington; I trained mine on huns in Montana sagebrush; but we both could marvel at the cooperation we’d had from these grouse dogs. So many things you love to do: the best combination, we here decided, was hitting the Bulkley in British Columbia for steelhead at daybreak and sundown, and hunting roughed grouse through the day, with a little nap somewhere in between. But now we were in Iceland. How good. How utterly good.

My companions, David, Bo, and Tarquin, were well acquainted with the Selá and went to each day’s fishing with a purpose. I went forth rather more uncertainly with my tiny map of the river. Bo usually sent me off with a small disquisition about the nature of my beat, and then I was on my own. It is surprising how much a steady current of the unknown adds to the excitement of angling. One knows what salmon-holding water looks like, generally. But “generally” doesn’t get it. In streambed hydrology the fabulous secrets known to the fish are revealed to us only by experience. On the Selá I fished with continuous puzzlement but a kind of excitement that may not survive familiarity. I walked among small bands of sheep very unlike the bland animals of my home country. These are more wild, more alert, and probably haven’t had the brains bred out of them in the genetic search of some economic edge like thicker wool or leaner mutton. I clambered down through a shattered granite slope among wildflowers and deep grass to a long run beneath a falls where the sparkling slicks and runs, ledges and boulders, were thrown before me like a complex hand laid down by a demonic bridge player. For a long moment, rod at my side, I was overcome by the richness of the possibilities and the sense that this opportunity could be wasted in the many beckoning but probably fishless runs.

There were wading maneuvers that enabled one to fish the pool which involved following rocky ridges out into the torrent and covering the water in a series of overlapping casts. I’d had good coaching on this from my companions, but a river, once you are out in it, has several kinds of sorcery that make you wonder if you are truly doing things as you should. Further, you cannot follow instructions very well, except to make a beginning, because it shuts off the faint pulse of intuition, the cutting for sign, the queer alertness that comes when you are fishing suitably. Coming to know water offers the prospect of crossing what Conrad called a “shadow line,” beyond which a profoundly satisfying sense of where you are, even what you are, enters your soul, and you begin to fish with such simplicity and doubtlessness that it is of little consequence if you fail to catch something.

I remember a conversation with Bo when we were in Argentina, the inevitable contention as to what makes a good fisherman. I think Bo had grown tired of anecdotes about effective fishermen, anglers on what the permit wizard Marshall Cutchin calls the “production end” of the sport. Perversely, I took the position that a good fishermen should be an effective catcher of fish, citing, as an analogy, the case of a man at a driven shoot who, though enjoying himself, never hit anything. Would we call him a great shot anyway? At this Bo politely folded his tent with the gracious comment, “I see I’m going to lose this one.” But actually I prefer his argument. My analogy would have held up if it had concerned hunting rather than shooting, where the feathered targets and other aspects of the malady obscure the very real differences. Shooting has more in common with golf than it does with hunting. There are great hunters who kill very little and great fishermen who never kill anything. And it’s a kind of greatness that not only doesn’t require recognition but one which recognition tends to discredit. A great fisherman should strive for equanimity in the face of achievement, and this cannot be trafficked. Probably all who write about fishing should be disqualified, except those who, like Walton, Haig-Brown, Kingsmill-Moore, Aksakov, Plunket-Greene, are celebrants. Most fishing writers have tried to show us how much smarter they are than everybody else, creating an atmosphere of argument and competitition.

So, having fished my way through the enchantments of perfectly clear Icelandic sea-bound water and the myriad puzzles of its movement among submerged boulders and right down to the tailout without so much as a pull, I retreated to the shore and took the spit of raised bottom out to the last position in the lower pool. Against the pale yellow of the slabrock in the tail, I could see two small salmon holding. They were at the end of a long cast, and to get a good mend it was necessary to make the cast and then immediately strip the slack for the mend. I covered these fish for a good while, several changes of fly, and failed to interest them. I reeled up and tried to decide if I should fish the run through again or go downstream. Leaving such good-looking water is never easy. As I looked at the two uncooperative grilse in the tailout, I noticed a dark shape slightly below them. I tried to recall if the bottom was discolored there but the shape moved up beside the grilse, which it dwarfed. This was a terrific salmon.

I went right back to what I had been doing on behalf of the smaller fish and had as much success. I was really feeling driven about this, not having seen a fish anything like this one all trip long. There was no shift of movement, no ardent elevation, much less a boil, when my fly crossed the fish’s window. I did note that the grilse were getting agitated, either to move up into deeper water or to simply depart this atmosphere of disturbance I’d created. Perhaps the big fish would go with them, too.

I decided to change the game entirely, before I wore out my welcome. I put on a 120-grain sink tip and tied a small, black Madeleine to the end of my leader. I made the same presentation, except that the whole ensemble was a couple of feet down, slap in front of the fish. He moved slightly. I had to assume something had happened, so I lifted the rod and concluded I was either into the fish or the bottom. My line bellied out downstream briefly, then tightened as the leader sheared upstream.

The salmon took a hard left onto the shallows where he made a fearful uproar. I told myself that I would never land this fish and I was right. Ploughing around in the rocks, flinging water everywhere, he liberated himself as decisively as he had taken my silly little fly.

But I was so jubilant because for a moment at least we had agreed about something! It was like a brief truce in a marriage, following which one partner says, “I’m out of here.”

I felt oddly content as I sat at the bottom of the canyon, and willing to wait to fish again until I absorbed it all, the idea of the streamlined shapes coming in from the sea, by the moon, by the tide, by whatever mystery, up through the sheep pastures, bent on some eternal genetic strategy. They know what they’re doing.