The Longest Silence

Twilight on the Buffalo Paddock

DAWN: A CURIOUS MIXTURE of noises. Birds, ocean, trees soughing in a breeze off the Pacific; then, in the foreground, the steady cropping of buffaloes.

They are massing peacefully, feeding and nuzzling and ignoring the traffic. They are fat, happy, numerous beasts, and all around them are the gentle, primordial hills of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, U.S.A. It is dawn on the buffalo paddock. It is 1966, the Summer of Love, and though I may well have spent the night listening to the Charlatans at one of the psychedelic ballrooms, I am doggedly trying to remember that I am an angler.

By midmorning in buffalo country things get a little more active at street level. Out of the passing string of health nuts, ordinary pedestrians, policemen, and twenty-first-century transcendental visionaries with electro-frizz hairdos that look more like spiral nebulae than anything out here in Vitalis Central — from this passing string, then, a citizen occasionally detaches himself, avoids the buffalo paddock by a few yards, and enters the grounds of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club. The club is the successor of an earlier organization, the San Francisco Fly Casting Club, which was founded in 1894. It has been located in Golden Gate Park only since the 1930s, when its facilities were constructed by the City of San Francisco.

The grounds of the club are not so prepossessing as its seventy-six-year history would lead one to expect. The clubhouse and casting pools are on an elevation that is shaped like a small mesa. It is a single story, dark and plain, and faces pools surrounded and overhung by immense, fragrant eucalyptus trees. The clubhouse is thoroughly grown in with laurel and rhododendron, and — after street-level Golden Gate — the effect is distinctly otherworldly.

Today, as a man rehearses the ancient motions of casting a fly on the elegant green surfaces of the practice pools, he may even hear one of the stern invocations of our century: “Stick ’em up!” and be relieved, perhaps even decorously, of his belongings. It wouldn’t be the first time. But that could only happen in midweek. On a weekend many of his fellow members will be there. Stickup artists will go to the beach and it will be feasible to watch your backcast instead of the underbrush.

This particular Sunday has been especially well attended. The men are wandering out of the clubhouse, where you can smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes, just as you might in the cook tent of one of the imperial steelhead camps these same anglers frequent in the Northwest. They pick up fly rods and make their way out along the casting pools, false-casting as they walk and trying occasional preliminary throws before really getting down to business. At the middle pool a man is casting with a tournament rod, a real magnum smokepole, and two or three people watch as he casts a 500-grain shooting head 180 feet.

Between him and the clubhouse, casting for accuracy with a conventional dry-fly rod, is a boy of thirteen. Later, this boy, Steve Rajeff, will be the world’s champion caster. At this point he is a lifelong habitué and he tournament-casts as another city boy might fly remote-control airplanes, and he casts with uncommon elegance — a high, slow backcast, perfect timing, and a forecast that straightens with precision. He seems to overpower very slightly so that the line turns over and hangs an instant in the air to let the leader touch first. He regulates the width of the loop in his line to the inch and at will. When a headwind comes up, he tightens the loop into a perfectly formed, almost beveled, little wind cheater. It is quite beautiful.

Standing beside him, an older man supports his chin with one hand, hangs his fist in one discolored pocket of a cardigan, and looks concerned. From time to time he makes a suggestion; the boy listens, nods, and does differently. Like most who offer advice here, the older man has been a world casting champion. When he takes the rod, you see why. The slowness of the backcast approaches mannerism but the bluff is never called; the man’s straightening, perfect cast never betrays gravity with shock waves or a sag.

So the two of them take turns, more or less. The boy does most of the casting, and while one casts facing the pool, the other is turned at right angles to him, watching his style, the angles, loft, timing, and speed of his cast.

At this point the boy is already more accurate than his elder and from time to time he lets his backcast drop a little so he can fire a tight bow in, and score — the technical proof of his bravura. But the older man has a way of letting the backcast carry and hang that has moment, or something akin to it. Anyway, the boy sees what it is and when the older man goes inside for breakfast the boy will try that, too, even though it crosses him up and brings the cast down around his ears. Embarrassed, he looks around, clears the line, fires it out with an impetuous roll cast and goes back to what he knows.

By this time a good many people are scattered along the sides of the pools. The group is not quite heterogeneous, and though its members seem less inclined to dressing up than many of San Francisco’s populace, they are not the Silent Majority’s wall of flannel, either. To be exact, sartorially, there is no shortage of really thick white socks here, sleeveless V-neck sweaters, or brown oxfords. The impression, you suppose, is vaguely up-country. My companion is widely known as a superb angler. He is not a member of the club and is inclined to bridle around tournament casters. They remind him of something more housebroken than fishing, and he doesn’t like it. He thinks their equipment is too good, and of course it is, largely. When they talk about fly lines and shooting heads, getting fussy over fractions of grains of weight, he instinctively feels the tail’s wagging the dog. Nevertheless, the fisherman has something to be grateful for. Shooting-head lines, now standard steelhead gear, modern techniques of power-casting, and, in fact, much contemporary thinking about rod design — actions and tapers — have arisen at this small, circumscribed anglers’ enclave. Still, it is difficult to imagine a tournament caster who would confess to having no interest at all in fishing, though that is exactly the case with some of them. Ritualistically, they continue to refer their activities to practical streamcraft.

My companion typifies something, too, something anti-imperial in style. Frayed lines and throwaway tackle, a reel with a crude painting on the side of it, brutalized from being dropped on riverside rocks. His rod is missing guides and has been reinforced at butt and ferrule with electricians’ tape that, in turn, has achieved a greenish corruption of its own. He is a powerful caster whose special effects are all toward fishing in bad wind and weather. He admits few fishermen into his angling pantheon and, without mercy, divides the duffers into “bait soakers,” “yucks,” and other categories of opprobrium. Good anglers are “red-hots.” His solutions to the problems of deteriorating fishing habitat incline toward the clean gestures of the assassin.

I sit on one of the spectators’ benches and chat with a steelhead fisherman about the Skeena drainage in British Columbia. He’s been all over that country, caught summer-run fish miles inland that were still bright from salt water. The conversation lags. Another member sits on the bench. “Was anybody ever really held up here?” I ask rather warily.

“Sure was,” says the man next to me, and turns to the new fellow on the end of the bench. “Who was that?”

“Guy that got stuck up?”

“Yeah, who was that?”

“There were three of them, at different times.”

The man next to me turns to me. “It was this guy from Oakland.”

The man at the end of the bench isn’t interested. The fellow next to me asks him, “Didn’t he get pistol-whipped or something?”

“Who’s this?”

“The guy from Oakland.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

The man next to me turns to me again. “I’m not positive,” he says with exaggerated care, “but the dry-fly man from Oakland got pistol-whipped unless I’ve got my signals real crossed.”

“Did they take his rod?” I ask somewhat aimlessly.

“No.”

“His reel or anything?”

“No,” he says, “just glommed the wallet and cleared out. It was pretty crummy.”

I excuse myself. With a new Winston tarpon and billfish fly rod I’m anxious to try, I go down to the last pool, where a handful of members are casting. I am a little sleepy from the gigantic breakfast they’ve given me. The elevation of the club drops off abruptly behind this last pool and a path leads down through the heavy tree roots to a little space that looks like the banks of a streambed. As I strip line from my reel, I notice that three people are undulating beneath the trees down there. One is a girl wearing Levi’s and an Esther Williams total sunblock hat with mirrors hanging from its edges on strings. One of the men seems to be a Lapp. The other is dressed as Buffalo Bill and is more frenzied than his companions. Occasionally he adjusts his enormous cowboy hat with one hand, somehow finding the hat as it goes by on a weird parabolic course of its own. I wonder if he has seen the buffalo paddock.

Presently a girl in ballet costume leads an attractive pony into the clearing, followed by a young man carrying a light meter and a viewing lens hanging around his neck and wielding an enormous Bolex movie camera. He walks right past the girl and heads for us. I can see the huge coated surface of his telephoto lens, blue even at this distance, the shoulder stock of his camera, and the knurled turrets that seem to be all over it. His approach becomes imposing. He looks put out.

“We’re trying to make a movie,” he says. None of us knows what to reply. “The thing is, we’re trying to make a movie.”

The man next to me inquires, “Would you like us to get out of the way?”

“That’s right. I’d like you out of the way.”

All of the casters get out of the way. They hadn’t known, apparently, that when it’s a movie, you get out of the way.

At the end of the pool is The Pit. You can climb down into it and you are chest level to the water. This is a very realistic approximation of the actual situation when you are fishing, and any fancy ideas you might develop about your casting on the platforms can be quickly weeded out here. My new rod is very powerful and after a couple of hundred casts the epidermis of my thumb slips and a watery blister forms.

I return to the bench on which sits one of the club officials. I decide to find out if the Golden Gate outfit is merely exclusive. “It’s funny,” I say disingenuously, “with as many hippies as this city has, that there aren’t any in the club. How’s that?”

“They don’t ask to join.”

Inside the clubhouse, I chat with the membership. They’re talking about casting tournaments and fishing — fishing generally and the vanishing fishing of California in particular. They know the problems. These are anglers in an epoch when an American river can be a fire hazard. The older men remember the California fishery when it was the best of them all, the most labyrinthine, the most beautiful. A great river system initiating in purling high-country streams, the whole thing substantiated by an enormous and stable watershed. Now the long, feathery river systems are stubs.

Many of the men standing here today used to haunt the High Sierra and Cascade ranges, overcoming altitude headaches to catch golden trout in the ultraviolet zone. Probably most of them have been primarily steelhead fishermen, though some fish for stripers in San Francisco Bay.

In view of the fact that the movement of people to California over the last five decades may be the biggest population shift in the history of the world, it is amazing the fishery held up so long. But in the last ten years it has gone off fast. Ironically, it is the greatness of the fishing lost that probably accounts for the distinction of the Golden Gate Club: it has bred a school of casters who are without any doubt the finest there has ever been.

Fishing for sport is itself an act of racial memory, and in places like the Golden Gate Club it moves toward the purer symbolism of tournaments. The old river-spawned fish have been replaced by pellet-fed and planted simulacra of themselves. Now even the latter seem to be vanishing in favor of plastic target rings and lines depicting increments of distance. It’s very cerebral.

There has begun to be a feeling among the membership that, like music without the dance, casting without fishing lacks a certain something. And so they are fanatically concerned with the dubious California Water Plan and the rodent ethics and activities of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. The men sit around a table in the lodge and break out a bottle or two. They seem to be talking about some secret society, and when listening in I discover they mean those who have bought fishing licenses in the state of California. The men propose to rouse this sleeping giant of two million individuals to keep their ocean rivers from being converted into outdoor water-ski pavilions. But an air of anachronism hovers over them. The Now Generation seems to substantiate the claims of the high-dam builders, and it appears to be true that people really would rather water-ski on unmoving water than take in all the complexity of a river. Maybe some of them will see, way down beneath their skis, the drowned forests of California and the long, stony stripes of old riverbeds.

At any rate, they won’t be dropping in today at the Golden Gate Club. Handmade split-cane rods and tapered lines seem a trifle dull. The Eel, the Trinity, the Russian, the Klamath, begin to seem, in the conversation of these men, rivers of the mind. Some imagine the anglers as sadists who want to hurt the little fish with sharp hooks hidden in chicken feathers. In the park I talk with a futurist who wants to know what difference it makes if the fish are lost since we can already synthesize food anyway, and I think of the high-protein gruel rock climbers carry in plastic tubes as our cuisine of tomorrow.

“Well,” I tell the futurist, “I don’t know what to say!”

The members begin to drift out of the lodge and head for the parking lot.

It’s sundown in buffalo country.

If you’re casting at the far pool you are inclined to switch your eye from time to time toward the underbrush. Did someone move in there?

Why go into it. This is too agreeable. I put on a sweater in the evening and watch the diehards. The pools have gone silver. The emptiness around the few members who remain seems to make their casting more singular, more eloquent.

The whole place is surrounded by trees. Nobody knows we’re in here. I pick up my rod and cast.