by Bill Heavey
I climb into the boat with Elieser (El-ee-AY-sir), one of Tisseaux’s top guides, and young Carlos (whom everyone refers to as Plomo, which, as near as I can tell, means “lard-ass”). We head downriver to a bend that has been productive lately. We pass dugouts with fishermen staking gill nets in the reedy shallows for guapote, a toothy, white-fleshed member of the perch family that makes wonderful eating when fried in garlic. Every so often, we pass a shack set on stilts by the water. But there is scarcely another motorized boat in sight—much less anybody fishing for tarpon.
This wasn’t the case as late as the mid-1970s, when several tarpon camps operated along the San Juan. But the vicious civil war between strongman Anastasio Somoza and the rebel Sandinistas, then the Sandinistas and the Contras, put a serious damper on business. Thirty years of rest have done wonders for the fishing. There are a lot of big, unpressured tarpon here once again, and it’s only a matter of time before the word gets out.
You wouldn’t know it today, but this nearly deserted waterway was once one of the most important in the New World. After the Spanish relieved the Incas of their gold, they shipped it east across Lake Nicaragua and 125 miles down the San Juan to the Atlantic. Later, thousands of eager young men reversed the route to California during the Gold Rush. When the Panama Canal was built, the area returned to its former obscurity.
Nicaragua is a big, ruggedly beautiful place without a lot of people telling you what you can and can’t do. The lack of infrastructure keeps the country well off the tourist circuit. What this means is if you like clockwork schedules and dependable electricity, stay the hell away.
Lake Nicaragua is the largest in Central America (3,300 square miles, most of it pristine) and contains islands with standing pre-Columbian statues, as well as the world’s only freshwater sharks. The country is loaded with wildlife, short of guardrails, and subject to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and mudslides. You are pretty much guaranteed not to run into anybody who went to your high school.
Bowing to the King
At the bend in the river, Carlos idles the motor while Elieser and I rig four rods. When the water is low and clear, you can sight-cast to breaking tarpon with fly or conventional tackle. If it’s running high and stained, as it is now, the sensible thing is to troll. We’re fishing heavy rods and light lines: stout 7-footers with flexible tips, 12-pound test, and 8-foot leaders of 100-pound mono spooled on Catala baitcasting reels. The drags are set just tight enough so that we don’t lose line as we ride slowly back up against the current.
You want the drag as loose as possible for the initial strike, then you tighten down slightly for the fight. We make runs of about half a mile up the river, returning each time to the same spot at the bend. Elieser speaks little English, and I less Spanish, but he is fluent in pantomime. He explains that you wait until the rod is well arced before you take it because a tarpon will often bruise a lure once or twice before biting.
Set the hook three times with long, smooth sweeps of the rod at water level, so you don’t goad the fish into an early jump. Pull too hard and you’ll draw it out of his mouth; too soft and he’ll spit it out. Make your move too early or too late, and there will be nobody there. You can screw up in any number of ways, it seems, and have one chance to get it right. If you connect, just keep the pressure on—not hard but constant.
Tisseaux has already told me that a good average is one hookup for every three fish that hit the lure. You can’t overpower something as strong as a tarpon on light line. That you can catch Megalops atlanticus at all, he says, is because the battle takes place as much in the fish’s mind as anywhere else. There comes a moment in each fight, he believes, when the great fish begins to wonder whether its unseen opponent is stronger than it thought. If you’re bearing down at this instant, you can break the fish psychologically. This is why two-hundred-plus-pound fish are sometimes boated in fifteen or twenty minutes. If you are not pressuring the fish at this juncture, however, the fish will fight on. And a defiant tarpon will fight longer than you can.
On our fourth pass, the rod with the 43/8-inch redhead Rapala bobbles once, twice, and goes down hard. Elieser shouts. I grab the rod and do the triple hookset while he and Carlos scramble to reel in the other lines. Strangely enough, the fish is swimming toward me, and I have to crank as fast as I can to stay connected. Stranger still, it stays hooked. Elieser watches the angle of my line closely, and when he sees it starting to flatten out, he yells what sounds like “Brita! Brita! Brita!” It’s an unlikely time to endorse a brand of water filter, but then it occurs to me that the fish must be getting ready to jump.
Tisseaux has talked me through the procedure of “bowing to the king,” of lowering the rod tip to accommodate a leaping tarpon. But when I see the silver missile launch itself fifty yards away—see the impossibly vivid fish, clad in bright chain mail, levitated and soaring sidewise over the water—I have a brief out-of-body experience. I stand there mesmerized, watching as if from a parallel universe. The tarpon, exempt from the laws of gravity, is, by many orders of magnitude, bigger, more beautiful, and more violent than anything I’ve ever hooked.
Suddenly I am aware that the line has gone slack, and that everybody on the boat is busily looking anywhere but at me. My mouth opens as I struggle to join up brain and tongue. At last, demonstrating my keen grasp of the obvious, I blurt out, “Big fish!” Elieser, who has busied himself with some task at the front of the boat, doesn’t turn around. But he nods his head once as if he has just heard something encouraging. Perhaps this gringo is not a complete fool after all; he knows when he has lost a big fish. (In the debriefing that follows, I discover that what Elieser had been yelling was not brita but brinca—“he jumps.”)
The One That Didn’t Get Away
We head back down for a few more runs before dusk. Pushing my beginner’s luck, I hook another tarpon almost immediately, this time on the shad-colored Rapala. Remarkably, again, it stays hooked. I’ve got nearly one hundred yards of line out, and at first the fish feels like deadweight. Then it starts taking line and swims downriver and toward the far shore. Elieser positions the boat ahead of the fish, motioning for me to keep pressuring. By urging the tarpon to go where he’s already headed, we make him change his mind and turn back.
After a few minutes, I gain some line. I’m concentrating so hard on feeling what he’s doing that I’m not really watching the water. But now when Elieser shouts “Brinca!” I’m smart enough to drop the rod tip. The fish is a little smaller than the other, but still a good one. My guide thinks he may go 130 pounds, an average tarpon on the San Juan. When he jumps, I look to the side to avoid being mesmerized. I want this fish.
I am not aware of the moment of doubt in the tarpon’s mind, but it must come because just twenty minutes later, Elieser has the leader in his hands. Then he mouth-gaffs the fish and disgorges the lure with pliers. The tarpon stays there briefly, riding in the current alongside the boat, surveying us with a wild, inscrutable eye. Elieser moves him to and fro in the current with a gloved hand. Then with a giant, indifferent shrug the fish disappears beneath the water. Elieser whoops and claps me on the back. It is only now as I finally smile and the adrenaline subsides that I realize I’ve been fighting the fish with every muscle in my body. But I’ve done it. I’ve caught a tarpon.
A Town in Darkness
It is nearly dark as we head back up toward the tiny port town of San Carlos, set where the river flows out of the lake. As we get closer to shore, Carlos and Elieser put on their sunglasses and motion for me to do the same. “Chayul,” says Carlos. A moment later we are immersed in an endless cloud of tiny nonbiting insects. There are billions of them, so many that you cover your nose and mouth to avoid filling up on live protein before dinner. Light must increase their concentration, for the entire settlement is dark, a ghost town.
We stumble off the boat and directly under the roof of a cement-floored restaurant where a s
ingle red neon Carta Blanca beer sign provides the only illumination. Apparently the bugs can’t see red light very well. Beer arrives at the table with a napkin over the mouth of the bottle and a straw poked through the napkin, the local version of bug armor. Meanwhile, night falls. Someone sets down a plate of what seems to be garlic-fried guapote, rice, and beans before me. It is delicious, even if I can’t see it. Over-the-top Spanish pop ballads blare from the stereo. For dessert, someone hands me a stiff Flor de Caña rum and Coke with another napkin-and-straw bug guard. I down it and find that I can’t stop grinning.
The Death of a Giant
The next day, we motor over into Lake Nicaragua to fish for guapote and rainbow bass, its slightly larger cousin. Elieser outfishes me badly using the exact same crawfish crankbait, smiling all the time. The guapote run two or three pounds but hit like freight trains and are far stronger than largemouths. The rainbow bass, which run four to eight pounds, are reputed to fight even harder. I don’t know, because I don’t get one. But Elieser hooks a six-pounder. When it heads for some reeds, Carlos strips off his shirt, dives off the boat, and swims right into the cover to flush the fish out. Elieser yells and dances a little jig when he gets it aboard. It makes a very tasty dinner.
Back on the San Juan the next day, I pay for my earlier successful hookups by missing three fish, one per hour. Then, at about four o’clock, the big one hits, once more on a shad Rapala. It takes about fifty yards of line, then starts swimming back and forth downriver. I move up to the bow, barefoot and crouched, feet spread wide for stability. Carlos sneaks up and buckles the fighting belt around my waist, and I jam the rod butt into it. Every time I feel the fish change directions, I counter so that I’m always pulling back across the length of his body.
The weight and strain on the rod signify a fish bigger than the one I landed, and even bigger than the one I lost. He takes line at will, and when Elieser shouts, “Brinca!” I see that the fish is so heavy he can’t get his whole body out of the water. He jumps, but only two-thirds of him appears. Then he crashes back like a falling tree. Even so, I bow to him, so far that I nearly lose my balance and go into the drink.
I try to calm down and force myself to concentrate. You don’t “play” a fish this big; you just attempt to keep from breaking off. When he jumps again, only half his body emerges. After a while, I start to gain on him. Twice he comes close to the boat, but when he sees us he surges. On the third time, Elieser snatches the leader and gaffs him in the mouth. The fish lies glistening alongside the boat just under the water, wide and long enough to walk on.
My guide looks inside the tarpon’s mouth and shakes his head ruefully. He has taken the lure deep, down into his gills, and the fight has torn them up. If we release him he won’t make it, but there are folks along the river who can use every ounce of the meat. It takes three of us on the long-handled gaff to haul him over the rail into the bow of the boat, whereupon we all hightail it to the stern. Elieser says he’ll go about 185 pounds.
The great fish lies there, occasionally slamming his body around, sending scales spinning across the deck like big silver medallions. There is enough power in that body to break your leg and then some. I watch him die, watch him change colors as he goes, a veil of purple descending over his silver scales, the black of his back deepening. The colors are fleeting and beautiful, like something that burns too bright to last long in the ordinary world. The moon in his eye sinks away to nothing, and the eye goes cold. I am glad to have caught him but sadder than I ever would have expected to be the agent of his death. And I am afraid to go near him until I’m sure the last spark of life has left his body.
We stop at one of the shacks on the river, where a small boy and I wordlessly drag him up the path with a rope, like you would a deer, to where his father sits on his haunches sharpening a knife on a stone. His wife and four more children watch shyly from a distance. I shake the boy’s hand, and his father thanks me. We walk back to the boat as the sky darkens. In my pocket is my trophy, a single round scale, thick and hard as a toenail, flecked with silver. We head back up the river. Five hundred yards from the unlit town of San Carlos, Elieser gives the signal and we all put on our sunglasses.
GOOD COP, BALD COP
Not long ago, curious to see firsthand how local government wastes my tax dollars, I hitched a ride with the only game warden in the District of Columbia. Actually, any police officer can enforce game laws, but over the years it’s been Dennis Hance who has devoted himself to the task. If you call up the D.C. Police and ask to speak to a game warden, he’s the guy who answers. If President Bush decided to fish the Potomac without a license, Hance would be the guy to write him up.
The department public information officer had told me that due to liability issues, members of the press were prohibited from riding in the patrol boat. So when Hance invited me aboard, I slapped myself in the head, inducing a bout of temporary amnesia, and jumped in. Almost immediately, Hance, who bears a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford, pulled up to a guy fishing from shore. “See your fishing license, please?” he asked pleasantly.
The angler in question, like most inner-city residents, had the ability to detect hostility or condescension from a cop in parts-per-billion concentrations. He glared at Hance. “I know who you are,” he muttered. “You gave me a hard time ’bout not having one last week.” I stood there and tried to look like Hance’s tough but taciturn backup. The guy’s eyes swept over me, and I could sense him thinking, At least I don’t have to worry about the bald guy.
“Then it ought to be easy for you to show it to me now,” Hance said.
The angler’s radar kept pinging away. But the strangest thing was happening. It was coming up blank. “All right,” he said. “I bought one after last time, but I ain’t got it on me.”
Hance ran a sniff test. He believed the guy. “Look. You know it’s a fifty-dollar fine. This is number two. I’m gonna cut you a break, okay? I’m gonna be back here and so are you, so let’s not make trouble for each other.”
And then the guy actually smiled. It wasn’t so much the words—it was the vibe. Hance has something they don’t teach in the police academy: It’s called the common touch. And if you could bottle it, you could name your own price. “You’re all right, man,” the guy said.
This encounter, lasting all of one minute, blew me away. If it had been me, I’d have tried the soft approach, too. Only the moment it started to go south, I’d have turned Clint Eastwood on the guy: reached for my Glock, cuffed him, and demonstrated why nobody messes with Officer Heavey.
“Easiest thing in the world to be a hard-ass,” Hance told me. “The trick is to leave ’em smiling. That guy’ll remember me. And I bet he’ll have his license the next time I see him.”
Lest you think Hance is someone who takes the easy way out of a situation, you should know that he has been cited three times for risking his life while trying to save people who were drowning.
What I like about the guy is that if he thinks you made an honest mistake, he’d rather help you than punish you. But if you’re deliberately breaking the law, don’t come crying for mercy. Once, he found two men in possession of 138 out-of-season rockfish. He wrote them up for the maximum, a total of $27,600.
Later that day, we came across a man and his daughter pushing bicycles. His was loaded down with rods and a five-gallon bucket full of herring and perch. These fish were legal, and the man had a license. “Do you have any more fish, sir?” Hance asked. The fellow shook his head. Hance walked past him and pulled a stringer of carp and channel cats from beneath some bushes. “Sir, I saw you put these there not two minutes ago.” The limit on channel cats is three a day, and the guy had six. Hance wrote the man up for three $100 violations. The little girl’s face was a stone mask the whole time. Hance finally leaned down and said, “If you don’t smile, I’m gonna have to ride your bike.” The vehicle under discussion: a pink Barbie mod
el. That brought a grin.
Hance reflected on the encounter. “Was it tough to give that guy a three-hundred-dollar fine? Yeah. Was it fair? Yeah. He wouldn’t have hidden those fish if he didn’t know it was illegal. Now the word will get out to everyone he knows that you can’t take too many fish. And when his little girl grows up, there’ll still be fish here.”
Hance’s days on the water may be numbered. Because he’s good at what he does, he’s up for a promotion. So a guy with consummate people skills and knowledge of the river may end up driving a squad car or, worse, a desk. The good news is that D.C.’s police department, like most bureaucracies, can be counted on to screw up a good part of the time. For the sake of the fish, let’s hope it malfunctions correctly. It would be a gross miscarriage of justice to elevate such a deserving public servant.
III
NOT ENTIRELY
UNTRUE STORIES,
2005–2009
THE 2005 ELMER AWARDS
“Be vewy, vewy quiet.” With these words, Elmer Fudd invariably seals his doom. He can’t stand playing the fool, but he is fit for no other role. The universe delights in taunting him. Truth is, there’s a little bit of Elmer in all of us. And a whole lot of him in a few of us. We here at F&S salute those brave souls. They make the rest of us look far more competent than we really are.
The Opportunity Knocks Award
Bryan Parker picked the wrong place to spotlight his first deer. The Hartselle, Alabama, man, twenty, was driving home with a Smith & Wesson pistol he’d bought for his father when he saw a deer frozen in his headlights and shot at it. He happened to be right in front of the Morgan County sheriff’s house at the time. Sheriff Greg Bartlett, who at first thought someone was shooting at his home, chased but lost Parker’s truck. Parker was arrested thirty minutes later at his home after the sheriff identified the vehicle. He was charged with hunting after dark, hunting on a public road, hunting from a vehicle, and hunting without a permit. “I’ve never toted a gun,” he said. “When I saw the deer, I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a pistol.’ I must have been out of my mind.”