The Longest Silence Read online

  I went out to fish that night, bounding along the roads of Estancia José Menendez in a Russian Lada. At the very point I meant to remark on the similarity of this landscape to my backyard to Mike Leach, my Anglo-Argentine guide, a flight of flamingos lifted up from the pasture, an anomaly like Mike Tyson’s voice, and wheeled off to the south. I had never seen such bird life and none of it familiar: Magellan geese, ashy-headed geese, strong-flying creamy-breasted ibises, Southern fulmars and other antipodean seabirds, silver teal, the carnivorous caracaras, numerous falcons, including the aplomados I saw so rarely, big night herons. Patagonian foxes the size of cats looked on modestly from the weeds; and, stratospherically high overhead, Andean condors with their twelve-foot wingspreads trained their mystical telemetry on the ancient plain. Looking across these superb distances to the Andes beyond—a series of almost whimsically odd peaks—it was hard to avoid feeling that the greatest thing man can do for land is to stay off it.

  As a sop to the visiting Yanqui, my guide gave me the latest synonyms for “vagina,” always handy in the outback. I began to fish. What, ho! I caught a nice big sea trout and went back to the estancia for a midnight supper. Even the wild wind of Tierra del Fuego had ceased to blow. My companions were companionable and Maria José, my cheerful hostess, told me I was a fine fellow to catch a sea-run fish on my first evening. As I lit into roasts and puddings, I was too absorbed to imagine that my luck might already have run out. I was happy to be dining in the middle of the night, contemplating my siesta after the next morning’s fishing. We were out of phone and radio contact and I lolled in this vacuum of accountability.

  The next morning I was fishing another stretch of the Río Grande, which has a unique quality: it is a prairie river that runs to the sea. The sloughing banks and undercut meanders would be familiar to any western angler, but the seagulls walking its banks and the mighty sea-run trout in its shadowy corners give it a thrilling strangeness. We fished it with shooting heads and the demanding T-300 lines. As yet, the wind was eerily quiet, not a hint of the forty-knot gales that make you rip your underwear trying to cast into it. I cast for four or five hours without a sign of anything and rode back for lunch and an afternoon nap. I wondered if I had appreciated that fish the night before as I should have. The water temperature had dropped into the thirties and fishing had slowed down, though a few fish had been caught elsewhere.

  As I retired, several of my Argentine companions, out of the earshot of the peerless Maria José, made sly references to “La Manuela,” the local equivalent of Miss Palm. I told them of a friend so in love with La Manuela that he bought her a ring, which he showed everyone and which looked suspiciously like his high school class ring, on his own hand of course. They held up magazine photographs of Argentine bathing beauties at Punta del Este. No, no, I protested, slipping off to my room with a slim volume of Belgian love sonnets. There I stewed about the fishing for a minute before falling asleep.

  A few hours later, it was again time to fish. We went to a remote stretch of the river this time, and though the wind stayed down and fish rolled along the grassy bank with heavy surges, none approached my fly. I cast inches from the bank, limiting myself to a single false-cast and covering the water with the care of man laying the last roll of linoleum on earth. A cold, full moon rose above the Andes. “Perhaps, with this moon,” said my guide and companion Federico, “they are doing their eating in the middle of the night.” I had been casting a four-hundred-grain leadcore for five hours and should have been looking forward to my midnight supper; but I felt rather sunk.

  All the jokes at the dinner table, particularly those told by a fellow who caught two fish, were stupid. The next windless day, after eight or nine hours of casting on either side of the siesta and no fish, Maria José remarked that soon my luck must change. I looked at my meal and wondered how people could eat at such a time. The others didn’t think the fishing was so bad. Actually, one did. He was having a spell and had asked God to get him out of it. More to the point, he sat down on the bank and told himself to grow up. I thought of the opening of The Old Man and the Sea, where the old man is “definitely salao.” I remembered a long bad spell on the Dean River in British Columbia. You just keep casting day after day until your hand swells up. That’s the only way out. If you’re a fisherman, you can’t just leave. The other hard luck case told me he just said to himself, “Look, this is crazy. It’s not the end of the world.”

  By that midnight meal I was a vampire pariah of failure, flinging my tackle and waders into my room. Into the vast allure of Maria José I ventured the sentiment, “Soy un perro infermo!” I am a sick dog! In years past I might’ve sucked down the cordials for the pain but now had to content myself with the Belgian couplets and the rising wind to rattle my shutters.

  By morning the wind had become a gale, with birds hurtling overhead and grass flattened on the wild pastures. A gaucho went past with his horse and a little dog, all three leaning into the wind. A guanaco appeared beyond a tempting bend of river, a sort of primitive creature that resembles a small camel. With his melodious whinny he seemed a veritable modern novelist. As I watched his splay-footed retreat over the land of the forgotten monster Patagon, a maledroit wobble of his neck in retreat, I thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The morning ended without a fish.

  My siesta was a torment. I actually felt sick. I thought I was throwing strikes but it wasn’t working. I was now thinking only of escape, perhaps to the seafood cafes in Buenos Aires. No Belgian couplets for me. I stared at the ceiling of my room and tried to imagine what I had in mind in four decades of throwing a fly line, and counted up how I’d lied to myself about it not really mattering if you actually caught a fish. But these were such great fish, the biggest brown trout in the world. It was a tormenting paradox.

  That night I fished the Polo pool with Kevin. He was a guide but first he was a fisherman. He said, “It happens when it happens.” As the eventless evening wore on he showed me the lies, the green bank, the fallen bank, the beaver lodge, the gravel bar. It was a readable run. I couldn’t daydream, couldn’t cast automatically. Each one had to be placed, and the water covered had to be continuous and steady. I released myself into my bad luck and felt a kind of liberating indifference. The moon started to come up and I watched the line straighten on the water. Mend, drift, retrieve, cast again. The full moon rose again. The line flowed across the pool, angle to angle, an easy slide.

  And then it stopped. The curve in the line straightened and I hooked a fish, a big fish. The long rod bowed deeply and then the fish soared into the air, wild and rattling in the silver light of the moon, then fell back into the water. I backed up onto my bank and fought the fish downstream. Kevin got in the river with the net but couldn’t see the fish. I was trying to tell him where it was when another fish jumped out in the darkness, and Kevin started toward it until I persuaded him that my fish was coming down the bar. Kevin put a flashlight in his mouth and illuminated a circle of black water in front of him. Suddenly the fish was there, its spotted back breaking the surface, then up showering streamers of silver from the mesh of the net. I leapt like a guanaco off the riverbank and danced Kevin around the shallows. “I’m a human!” I shouted. When I held the fish in the water, the hook simply fell from its mouth. He was a big male, over eighteen pounds, the biggest trout I had ever caught, to put it mildly. I stood in the river for a long while, holding him into the current and feeling the increasing strength in a kicking tail I could barely encompass with my grip. To the north, the Aurora Austral raised a curtain of fire in the cold sky. My trout kicked free and continued his journey to the Andes.

  THE CONTEXT FOR ANOTHER TRIP to South America was building outside my window: four feet of Montana snow, thirty-five degrees below zero and the very special familial tensions produced by constant confinement and small things gone wrong, a condition of late winter known locally as “the shack nasties.” The dogs wanted to go out and then come in and then go back out in some sadi
stic drill they decided to impose on us. Furthermore, the decorating scheme of my house seemed like the set of The Little Shop of Horrors: piled books, windrows of family photographs, unanswered mail, too many chairs, too many rugs, an always-lost cell phone, a channel changer especially lost during football playoffs, every doorknob a coat hanger, every bedpost a clothes peg, the ominous rings of ice around the windows, the mud boots, the snow boots, the coveralls, the mismatched gloves, the face mask in case we’d like to go for a little walk that usually began with one spouse dropping the other off in the car, well upwind so that the elements could shove you a couple of miles back to the house for health purposes. But it was a remark of my wife’s that sent me halfway around the world in search of sea-trout. “None of my friends has a home so underfurnished as ours,” she said.

  Hasta la vista, baby.

  Flying into Ciudad Río Grande is an arresting experience. The winds are generally gale-force and rather alarming as the plane bucks and surges toward the long tongue of concrete runway. Aircraft already on the field, though tied down and unoccupied, surge against their restraints. Even our big Buenos Aires jet continues to lurch about as the passengers unload. Experienced locals grab tight to everything that is loose—from packages to their hair to the bottoms of their dresses—as they emerge onto the runway, barely able to free up a limb to wave to their friends and relatives waiting inside. One thinks immediately of the uncertain destiny of the fly line liberated in these latitudes. In Tierra del Fuego, anything disturbed is soon airborne. I have fished while the wind carried the gravel off the bars and streamed it into the air. If you smile too often, your lips will hang up on your teeth in the dusty grimace that distinguishes a new angler. The old hands have a sort of pout that’s not so much an indicator of mood as an attempt to keep dirt out of the intake.

  Sea trout are enigmatic fish to be polite. They are brown trout and therefore subject to that species’ notorious moodiness. Sea trout have inflicted compulsive fly changing, night fishing, pool stoning, and further extreme belly crawling measures upon their devotees. That they bring an oceanic rapacity to the smaller world of the river makes them no easier to understand.

  We had favorable full moon tides which we thought would send us new waves of fresh fish. Winds which had been gale force for weeks began to abate. There were several generations of fish in the river at the same time, ranging upward from superhot little jacks that would be the crown jewels of a sea-trout fishery anywhere else and ranged on up to sizes we could only dream about. Our host, Estevan, was by now an old friend. “Stevie” loved to fish, knew his river well and kept us amused with his detached sense of humor wherein anglers and all their passions were regarded with the objectivity of a top researcher closeted with a houseful of laboratory mice. If one party returned with six fish while another returned with four, Steve would note, “Six beats four.” Later, this took on a life of its own and Stevie was heard to note, “Eighty-one beats eighty” without any explanation as to what this referred, though it had to be something other than fish. For mishaps, he had an elegant South American shrug which meant, “What can you do?” and contained no hint of condescension. The strongest negative emotion he ever revealed was occasioned by an angler who made every mistake possible in order to lose a fish that would have been a world’s record. Stevie spent the rest of the day staring through the windshield. When I asked him about his rage, I learned that it wasn’t the the loss of the great fish that disturbed him, but the fact that the angler had resumed casting after the fish got away. “That,” said Stevie, “was too much. I went to my car.” This particular vehicle is a low mountain of caked Tierra del Fuegian mud, rod racks on top, rap tapes on the front seat, and a United Colors of Benetton sticker in the rear window. In it we rumble across the grasslands, sheep fleeing before us in flocks, condor shadows racing from the Andes and, to a deep, throbbing beat, the Fugees ordering Chinese food in a New York restaurant. Stevie looks around, takes it all in. “Thirty-seven beats twenty-nine.”

  My friend Yvon Chouinard believes in going deep. I go deep only when utterly discouraged. When Yvon notices me reacting to the sight of his four-hundred-grain shooting head landing on the surface of the river like a lead cobra in its death throes, he states, “To save the river, first I must destroy it.” This Pol Pot style remark fired my determination. On the Río Grande, he got into a pod of bright sea trout and caught one after another with devasting efficiency. Some yards above him, I held a cold stick and consoled myself with the cries of my success-gorged partner, “I feel like a shrimper!” Fish must have been running as their silvery rolls and huge boils were increasing and at last I began hooking up. These fish were beyond big. They were heavy and violent, taking the fly with a brutish malevolence. By the standards of two lifelong fishermen—and we had a hundred years between us—we were so far into the zone that not even approaching night could drive us out.

  I put on a small bomber and began working the far grassy bank, enjoying the provocative wake the fly pulled behind it, enjoying the evening as the Darwin Chain receded into the stars. A kind of hypnosis resulted from the long hours of staring into this grasslands river. Suddenly, a fish ran my fly down, making an eight-foot rip in the silky flow of the river. I could feel this one well down into the cork of my double-hander. The fight took us up and down the pool, and the weight I perceived at the end of my line kept my anxiety high. Several times I thought I had the fish landed when it powered out of the shallows. In the end, netting the fish, Stevie said, “Look at those shoulders!” We weighed her in the net and Yvon came up for a look at this twenty-five pound female. To judge by her brilliant silver color and sharp black spots, she was just out of the ocean. I never imagined such a trout belly would ever hang between my two hands. As she swam off the shelf, she pulled a three-foot bow wake. In the sea yesterday, she was now heading to the mountains. We were glad to watch her go.

  Yvon noted that with twenty-one sea-run brown trout, nineteen of them over fifteen pounds, we had had the best fishing day we would ever have. We were tired and vaguely stunned. There was also a sense that wherever we’d been going as trout fishermen, we had just gotten there today.

  Stevie contemplated all this, let his eye follow a flight of ashy-headed geese passing overhead, and said, “Twenty-one beats twenty.”

  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 voy
age!” 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.