The Longest Silence

Down Under

THE RIVERS of the world translate high-country snows to the salty rollers of mid-ocean. Some, like the Makarora of New Zealand or the Whale of Labrador, are images of perfection; the Nile and the Mississippi, images of deep history and civilization. Too often, the rivers we grow up with are like the Rouge or the Cuyahoga, rivers which catch fire or take the paint off the bottoms of ships. But even the worst ones are quite wonderful. I live among the smaller headwaters of the Missouri, crystal cabinets of moving trout water that begin in watercress. Eventually their waters move thousands of miles, ending in drifting sludge, syringes, and condoms before debauching into the Gulf of Mexico. These intimate by-products of man-the-party-animal are the most appalling things transported by moving water in its several manifestations. But if you love rivers you have to take the good with the bad.

I was flying low over the sheep pastures of New Zealand in a small helicopter whose doors had been removed to facilitate jumping on red deer which had been detained by a net gun. The man who leaps onto the backs of frantic and dangerous creatures wears motorcycle leathers in bleak anticipation of the tossings and abrasions he may reasonably expect. Generally, if he wasn’t the town bum, he would not have gotten himself in this position. But for some it is an awful thing to run out of beer, and stranger things than jumping out of aircraft upon wild animals to cover bar tabs have perhaps been done, but not many.

Today I’d taken his seat, and such meager room had been allotted this luckless individual that my right buttock was hanging over thousands of feet of clear antipodal space, so charging my senses that, half a decade later, I intently remember the brand-new green of that country, the pale and eerie sheep trails and the cedar forests where the kia bird, a knee-high alpine parrot, whiles away his evenings pulling nails out of the roofs of sheep stations. Everywhere there were rivers, and though I never quite feel I’ve seen or fished enough of them, this was certainly a vast supply.

These flights over the South Island of New Zealand jarred me out of my routine perceptions, especially those I’d acquired as an angler. When my friends and I settled in at a small and comfortable lodge in Makarora, I was almost surprised to find Americans there: specifically, an emergency room doctor, Monte Downs, and his father, Wil, a man in his seventies who had dedicated his life to tropical medicine and flyfishing. The two men were on a month-long trip together and you sensed a great catch-up devised fairly late in the game; in the glow around them was an almost palpable relief. They sang antique harmonies, they discussed dengue fever and trout, and they fished very hard. Old Wil seemed to drive the guides like rented mules. And at dinner, if conversation flagged, he dropped his chin to his chest and went to sleep. He often grabbed insects out of the air or, apparently, when he was shaving, off the bathroom mirror. At the end of his stay, he presented to the proprietor, pinned on a sheet of Styrofoam, a neatly organized and labeled collection of these bugs, and recommended the display as a training aid for the guides. Of this stay in Makarora, I recall one riverbank aircraft landing sufficiently in doubt that the Kiwi pilot was moved to remark, “Chaps, it looks a bit rough. We’re going to have to thumb it in soft.” No one compares to New Zealanders when it comes to bestowing stupendous vulgarities on delicate subjects.

Mostly I think of that father and son, a month of fishing together; that is, days and nights spent in active intimacy at what might have been inflexible ages, late in life in a country where we were all strangers. The rest of us, men with fathers, either living or dead, caught this out of the corners of our eyes.

Six years later, a big box arrived at my house in Montana, filled with fishing books — first editions beautifully bound in fragrant leather — along with a letter from Monte Downs which confirmed what the rest of us had suspected, that the month the two men had shared was the best time of their lives together and a permanent resource to this surviving son.

Wil Downs died the past January 26 after returning from two weeks fishing in Patagonia. Monte said Wil had often mentioned our good times and comic evenings in New Zealand, and Monte wanted to commemorate that with this gift of books from his father’s library. I put the books on my shelf thinking that they somehow told me something I would one day have to understand, something about all that has come to me through rivers and fishing, memories of people who were spending the best of themselves in time.

Wil Downs, though, stuck out. In an obituary by his colleague Thomas Aitken, Downs was described as one of the most accomplished tropical medicine authorities in the world, a malariologist, a virologist, a parasitologist and epidemiologist, an entomologist and an ecologist. From our dinners in New Zealand I knew his sharply focused and intimate views of literature. But his love of rivers and fishing seemed to overarch it all, a music as deep as his love of the world.

I also have in hand Wil Downs’s New Year’s letter for 1991, wherein he begins dispensing various accumulations preparatory to moving into a rest home. Simultaneously, he announces a trip to South America to fish some rivers that have aroused his curiosity. Departure is soon. “This causes immediate stress and a desire to unload. My suspicion is that the Argentine fishermen largely fish with wet-fly, streamer, Matuka flies and when they do the dry-fly, fish a large fly. I hope to make a serious study of the susceptibility of Argentine trout to the small dry-fly.”

Afterward he planned to go to his ranch in Colorado where, aided by his teenaged great-nephew, he meant to fish and to study “the relationship of the abundant Culicoides of the Upper North Platte River Basin, altitude 8000’ or higher with vector-borne viruses infecting livestock, wild animals and birds, and maybe even human beings.” Then on to the Skeena drainage of wonderful steelhead rivers in British Columbia, followed by a visit to a daughter in England. There was a piano to ship, a pool table to ship, books to ship; a chapter to write on yellow fever for an Oxford practitioner’s manual of diagnosis. Splendid fighting cock necks had arrived from Monte in Kauai and must be shared among fellow fly-tyers. At this point, describing the colors of the necks — furnace, ginger, black, cree — Wil conjures fishing friends over the years, a rain of small, generous biographies, amounting to a “pantheon,” he says, “major and minor saints.”

About this time I must introduce my son, Monte Downs. We had a heartwarming experience several years ago when the two of us went to New Zealand and spent the best part of a month together. On one memorable occasion, when we were fishing together on the South Island, with a New Zealand hardy guide, 15 years Mont’s junior, and showing the guide’s usual poorly concealed opinion of his patrons’ prowess, Monte hooked a big trout in Siberia. The trout ran him under a big rock at the top of the pool, in deep water, Mont tried to disengage it, with no success and finally broke it off. Not long afterward, he hooked another large trout in the same pool. This fish also ran upstream and deep and got under that big rock. Mont, from below, walked into the frigid stream, deep, deeper, with tight line on the fish all the time. Deeper still, over his waders, deeper still nearing the rock, and his hat floated off downstream, and Mont’s head disappeared under the water. He was under for half a minute, and then his head reappeared. And wonder of wonders, he was still onto the fish and the fish was free and a few minutes later, Mont, soaking wet and shivering, beached a 26-inch brown trout. The guide murmured, “I’ll be damned!” My heart swelled with pride. Indeed, I had fathered a fisherman.

Wil, considering the rich companionship he had from angling, wondered how could he reconcile it with his love of the solitude of rivers. He hoped to fish with each of his cherished angling companions, “but please, not all at one time.”

ONCE IN A WHILE during fishing season, Craig Fellin gets a day or two off from his guiding business in Montana’s Big Hole and invites me to join him for some low-pressure, semi-exploratory fishing. This summer, when he invited me and our friend Mike right before the mayhem of the salmon fly hatch began, we tried an old tailing pond left behind half a century ago by a mining company. With banks of raw gravel, it’s a lunar place to fish, and the heavy metals — laden trout living there are protected by their carcinogenic flesh. They grow to tremendous size.

I caught only one fish that day but it was a good one, a cutthroat which rose to a size 16 Parachute Adams and weighed between four and five pounds, a short, cold, and animated slab that felt wonderfully substantial in my hands before I released it and saw its golden shape sink into the green depths of this weird fish pond.

Then things got so slow and the air so warm that we took a long snooze on the bank. When we awoke, encouraged by the ants crawling on our faces, we had completely lost track of our original momentum and perhaps couldn’t even remember what brought us to this strange locale in the first place.

We went back to Craig’s camp that night and talked about his winter guiding on the Malleo River, at the base of the Chilean Andes on the Estancia San Huberto. There he’d met a remarkable man, an old man who wanted to fish twelve hours at a stretch, who sometimes had to be carried up the bank at day’s end. Craig had found a man who, once he saw the water, held nothing back. They fished every day for two weeks. As they drove to the river, the old man recited Civil War poems, interpreted the landscape, identified the birds, and rhapsodized about the burgeoning life he saw. He and Craig had once corresponded before they’d ever met, and the man sent him jars in which to catch and transport insects. Craig dutifully stood under his porch light at Wise River, Montana, snatching caddises out of the air to fulfill this request.

“He not only fished hard,” Craig said, “he took everything in, everything. It was just so wonderful being with this guy. You’d get to a run and he was in touch with everything in it. If fish quit feeding, he could wait. He could wait ’til they started again. He was always watching.

“On the last day at the corral pool, he took a nap. There were some big fish on the bank. We crawled up and marked those fish and crossed the river so he could cast to them. He hooked a great big fish and landed it. I guess it was maybe the biggest fish he ever caught in his life. It was only four o’clock. But he said, ‘Let’s call it a day.’ That was so unlike him.” Craig paused. “He flew out the next morning.”

Craig brought out a beautiful collection of necks, enough hackles to last out the millennium. A tributary of the Big Hole River roared just beyond the window. “Maybe we fished too hard,” Craig said. “He admitted that himself. Because when he went home … he didn’t feel well. And, well, he died.” Craig looked at the fly-tying materials. “He sent me this stuff, to remember our trip by, I guess.” Craig was struggling with something. He said, “He was a doctor of tropical medicine.”