The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  Every traveler here soon discovers the considerable reverence for the British connection. If the queen ever gets run out of England, this is where you’ll find her holed up; the Victoria Chamber of Commerce will have drawn its wagons in a circle around her.

  In addition to such good transpositions as the unmatched gardens of the city or its numerous bookstores, you get double-decker buses imported from London, coats of arms in woolen-store windows and tea and crumpets available everywhere from the Empress itself to the Rexall drugstore.

  But to emphasize the town’s studied dowdiness is unfair. It is obvious that Victoria is a town of what used to be called graciousness, and any ride around its perimeter will put the traveler’s back to those unparalleled gardens and his face to the headlands of the San Juan Islands.

  There had been heavy weather immediately prior to our arrival, and long, golden log booms, the shape and color of egg yolks, had been towed inside the bays for protection. Beyond, handsome trawlers were moored under clouds of gulls. If you squinted, it looked like Anchorage or Seattle or San Francisco or Monterey or—squinting tighter—Mazatlán: the Pacific community seemed continuous.

  That first morning I picked up the menu downstairs in the hotel. A number of breakfasts were described: “the Charlotte,” “the Windsor,” “the Albert,” “the Edward,” “the Victoria,” and “the Mountbatten.”

  “I’ll have the Mountbatten,” I said, “over lightly.”

  Frank made a number of order changes to his Edward.

  “If you’re going to substitute oatmeal and add an extra egg on your Edward,” said the waitress, “you might just as well order á la carte.”

  I was hungry and abruptly ate my Mountbatten.

  We spent the day driving as far up the coast as Saltspring Island. At one of the ferry crossings, watching the wind-striped water and high, beautiful fjords, I innocently poisoned myself with a prawn.

  A local prawn? I don’t know.

  Within hours I had failed to finish my drink. My companion was on the phone to the house doctor. My vision was contracting. My gorge was rising for the tenth time. The Canadian Pacific, so recently thrilling, was now the scene of hopelessness and abandonment.

  WE WERE GOING NORTH to Smithers by way of Williams Lake. The fellow passengers were more promising than the tour group—a few swells like ourselves, some surveyors, timber cruisers, a geologist. The minute the aircraft had elevation, a country revealed itself that was so tortuous, folded, and empty that some trick of time seemed to have been performed.

  The sky came down to a jagged horizon of snow, and for 360 degrees a coastal forest, baleful and empty, rose to the mountains. Past the bright riveted wing, the ranges succeeded each other to the north in a blue eternity.

  We landed at Williams Lake on the Fraser River, dropped off passengers, taxied, flew a few yards, landed again, taxied again, took off again, and landed. The pilot came out of the cockpit with his shirt unbuttoned and remarked with appalling candor that the plane felt like a Model A.

  They sent us into Williams Lake to eat while they fixed the plane. In the cab we learned the airline we were using was bankrupt, and so it had come to seem. But at the restaurant they told us to return to the plane immediately.

  When we boarded, the pilot said, “I hope it goes this time. Occasionally you’re not lucky.”

  So we flew over the increasingly remote wilderness, hoping that we would be lucky and that the plane would work and be better in all ways than a Model A.

  At Smithers, the seaplanes rested very high on their pontoons beside floating docks. A mechanic tapped away at a workbench nearby as we boarded a De Havilland Beaver.

  Within a short time we hung precariously over a long, gravelly mountain ridge. The pilot craned around looking for mountain goats, while Frank and I exchanged nervous glances and judged the drop.

  On either side of us stood implacable-looking peaks and ridges while underneath, blue-and-green lakes hung in saddles and rockwalled cirques. Occasionally the entire groundscape shone amid delicate water meadows, and in a short time we had landed and were taxiing toward our fishing camp. I thought of the trout under our gliding pontoons.

  “How is the fishing?” Frank inquired routinely of Ejnar Madsen, the camp’s co-owner.

  “Extremely poor,” said Ejnar.

  “Really!”

  We put our luggage down on the dock as it began to rain. There had been an Act of God and we could not be philosophical about it. I asked what had happened. The biggest summer rain in many years had raised the lake and turned the river almost black with runoff.

  Next day we floated disconsolately down the slow, ineffably northern river in a twenty-five-foot, Indian-built, spruce riverboat. The rain poured off our foul-weather gear and made puddles in our laps.

  Between long spells of silence we burst into absurd conversations:

  “Neighbor’s cat crawls under the hood of the car. Next morning the neighbor starts the car. The fan does a job on the cat.”

  “Apropos of what?”

  “Wait a minute. They take the cat to the vet. He shaves the cat’s whole tail except for the end. The cat looks like a lion. Pretty soon the cat thinks he’s a lion.”

  “In what way?”

  “Forget it.”

  Now the rain was going sideways. You’d cast a fly and it would vanish long before it got to the water. We knew gloom.

  Some very small, very stupid trout came upon our flies and ate them. We caught those trout. Of the large smart trout known to live in the lake, we took none. Some hours later we sat around the Air-Tight heater, for all purposes blanked.

  We were fishing for rainbows in their original watershed. In such a situation they can be expected to be magnificent fish, quite unlike the hatchery imitations, which have, in effect, besmirched the species. They are strong and fast, and rise freely to a dry-fly. We were, moreover, in an area that produces fish of a rather large average size.

  In the spring and early summer the fish here herd and pursue sockeye fry, including the sluggish little alevins, the very young fry, tadpole-shaped, with their still-unconsumed egg sacs. Ideally, the big rainbows are to be found chasing the bait on top, where they can be cast to, rather like pelagic fish. We liked this image. We would cast, fight, land, and release until our arms were tired. The rainbows could also be taken on dry-flies. There were mayflies and grasshoppers to imitate and in the lower stretch, stoneflies.

  Though we hadn’t made much of a beginning, our hopes were still running high. The next morning we were fishing by six, hunting feeding rainbows. It is “hunting” if you find something. If you do not, it is driving around the lake in an outboard.

  “We should’ve brought the water skis.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  We continued hunting, as it were. And we didn’t find anything, not one thing. When more of the unseasonable rain blew in from the exaggerated sky, we sat, fly rods in hand, like drowned rats. I began to take an interest in the details of the bilge.

  Later, when it had cleared a little, we headed down the lake to an Indian village inhabited by a branch of the Carrier tribe, so named because its widows once carried the charred bones of their husbands around on their backs. The village is situated prettily on a high series of hills and looks out on the lake and river where the two are joined. There are a couple of dozen buildings along a wooden walk and a small Hudson’s Bay store.

  When we passed the upper part of the town, a man worked on his outboard while a girl in an aniline-blue miniskirt pulled sockeye salmon from a net. Ravens and gulls screamed and circled overhead, waiting for a chance at the offal from the gutted salmon. There were a hundred thousand or more sockeyes in the river now. Many of them came up out of the wilderness with bearclaw marks on their flanks.

  We docked at the lower end in a pounding rain and hurried up the hill to get under the eaves of the wooden schoolhouse. A notice in the window read:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  During
the absence of the schoolteacher, this school building must be closed. It therefore cannot be used for dances, bingo games, or any other social gatherings. Anyone asking permission to use the school will be refused.

  R. M. McIntyre,

  Superintendent,

  Burns Lake Indian Agency

  In two or three places on the walls of this wilderness school were dabbed the letters LSD, which did not stand for League of Spiritual Discovery. The letters were put there, doubtless, by someone who spoke English as a second language.

  When the weather relented a little, we hiked up the hill to the old cemetery, which was mostly overgrown. The epitaphs were intriguing: “To the sacred memory of our brother killed by a gunshot wound.” I found two old headmen’s graves, “Chief William” and “Chief Agusa,” whose titles were purely titular; the Carriers gave their chiefs little power. The cultural overlay seemed rather bald on the last stone I looked at. Beneath a conventional crucifix it read, “In memory of Ah Whagus. Died 1906. Age 86.” Imagine the fishing when Ah Whagus was a boy.

  We walked around the village. The shy people smiled at the ground or stayed inside when we passed. On the boardwalk someone had written “Big Fat Sally Do Your Stuff.” Beyond the LSD graffiti and the noise of a transistor radio playing Dolly Parton—“I’m a lady mule skinner from down ol’ Tennessee way”—black-shawled Indian women were taking the salmon down the river to a lower island and smoking them against a winter that was probably more imminent to them than to us. The older people were locked in some intense dejection, but the children played with familiar, maniacal energy in the deep wet grass with their salmon-fattened dogs.

  It had rained enough that our simple cabin with its Air-Tight heater acquired a special and luxurious glamour. When we got good and cold, usually the result of running the boat in one direction while the wind took the rain in another, we would head for the cabin, put some wood in the heater, douse it with coal oil, and throw in the magic match that made everything all better. This was the romance of the heater. We played with the flue, adjusted the draft, and while the logs rumbled and roared inside we tuned the thing like a violin. One afternoon, when a view through any of the windows would have suggested that the cabin was Captain Nemo’s vessel and that we were at the bottom of the sea, Frank leapt to his feet with an expensive Japanese camera in his hands and began to take picture after picture of the tin heater rumbling peacefully, our wet laundry hanging around it in homage.

  One of the exhilarations of fishing new places lies in rendering advice into some kind of obtained reality. Cast the fly, you are told, right along the bank and the trout will rise to it. So you cast and you cast until presently you are blue in the face and the appealing syllogism you started with is not always finished. When it does not work, you bring your vanquished person back to the dock, where there is no way to weigh or measure the long face you have brought instead of fish. At the first whiskey, you announce that it has been a trying day. Then someone else says that it is nice just to get out. Irrationally, you wonder how you can get even for that remark.

  But once, when the British Columbia sky made one of those spectacular partings we associate with the paintings of Turner or the handing down of stone tablets, we saw what had been described to us in the beginning.

  Large fish, their fins showing above the water, were working schools of salmon fry: a setup. We started the engine and ran upwind of them, cut the engine, and started to drift down. We had the goods on them. When in range I false-cast a few times, made a long cast beyond them, and gently retrieved into their midst.

  I hooked a fish instantly. After a strong first run, it mysteriously flagged. As I reeled, it came obediently to the boat, where Frank netted it.

  “What is that?” he asked. In the net was some kind of giant minnow.

  “It looks like Martha Raye,” I said bitterly. Later we learned that it was a squawfish. No one ever caught one on purpose.

  Not until almost our last day did the river began to disclose itself. We made a pass along the Indian village, where we were seeing occasional rises. The problem was a river so clouded that the fish were unable to see the fly, a condition blamed on a nearby stump desert the loggers left in their wake.

  We began to drift, blind-casting large Wulff flies ahead of us, mending the line to keep the river from bellying it and dragging the fly. In very short order, a bright band appeared beneath my fly, moved downstream with it and inhaled. I lifted and was solid to a very good fish, which was netted some minutes later. It bumped heavily in the bottom of the boat until I could get the fly out and release it.

  We were startled. A short time later another came, boiling the fly under with a positive, deep take, and was released. There were no rises to be seen any longer, though fish rose fairly well to our own flies, until we had six. Then the whole factory shut down and nothing would persuade a trout to rise again. While it had lasted, all of British Columbia that existed had been the few square inches around my dry-fly. With the rise over, the world began to reappear: trees, lake, river, village, wet clothes.

  It is this sort of possession you look for when angling. To watch the river flowing, the insects landing and hatching, the places where trout hold, and to insinuate the supple, binding movement of tapered line until, when the combination is right, the line becomes rigid and many of its motions are conceived at the other end. That stage continues for a time dictated by the size of the trout and the skill of the angler. When the initiative changes hands, the trout is soon in the net, without an idea in his head until you release him. Then you see him go off, looking for a spot, and thinking.

  Twenty-Fish Days

  ON A WARM DAY in mid-October at Sakonnet Point, I was staying again at my uncle Bill’s old house, with its view over the low weathered roofs to the harbor and the cove where we swam as children. My feelings of excited anticpation were unchanged after half a century. Roses still bloomed along the stone fences and the air was full of swallows and gulls. When I was growing up, we often visited family along the Massachusetts and Rhode Island shore where great importance was placed on the benefits of “salt air.” As I recall, it was believed to contribute not only to good health but to salutary morals as well.

  I sat on the wide, wooden porch with my morning coffee, waiting to go fishing once again with my cousin Fred, and vividly pictured, really saw before me, scenes from long ago: my aunts and uncles, brother and sister, cousins and parents, gathered on that damp and fragrant grass in sight of the sea and blue skies.

  The harbor was an active commercial fishing place in those days, with a number of swordfish boats from whose pulpits swordfish and white marlin, called “skillygallee,” were harpooned. The swordfishermen were our heroes. We made model swordfish boats with needles and thread for harpoon and line, tied “choggy” minnows across their decks for a triumphant return to port. I remember my businessman father heading out in his long-billed cap for a day of swordfishing with the great Gus Benakes aboard the beautiful Nova Scotia boat, the Bessie B. Those people are almost all gone. But much else has stayed the same. Even the old harbor tender, the Nasaluga, is still there.

  As if to bless my fishing, a gold-crowned kinglet (probably dazed) landed on my shoulder while I drank my coffee and contemplated the striped bass fishing ahead. When Fred came we set out across the lawn just as we’d done forty-five years ago, carrying handlines and fiddler crabs. Now we bore graphite fly rods and bar-stock aluminum fly reels. Still, it felt the same. More to the point, we had arranged to fish with Fred’s friend Dave Cornell, who guides these waters he knows so well.

  I had come from across the country and we were making a late start. The wind was already blowing hard. Nevertheless, we quickly headed out through the harbor around the breakwater and were running between granite ledges past the ruins of the West Island Club, where sports of the Gilded Age cast baby lobsters for tackle-smashing striped bass. Club logs reveal their astounding catches followed by a rapid decline, paralleling the industrial pollutio
n of their spawning rivers. Where once stood their fishing stations, grande-luxe living quarters and kitchen gardens, there remained only gull-whitened rocks and the nervous attendance of the green Atlantic.

  The sea was rough. We made a few stabs at schooling albacore and worked our way east toward Westport, finally tying off to a mooring buoy and eating our lunch. Dave was thinking in defensive terms, based on uncooperative weather and the gentlemanly hours of his guests. He untied us from the buoy and we headed up a saltwater river, turning into a fairly busy marina. He positioned us just outside the pilings of some empty slips along a finger pier. In a very short time, I could hear bass popping along the seawall. We caught several small fish before facing that our options that day were sharply limited. We headed back to Sakonnet.

  The next day, Fred and I were better behaved and we set out at daybreak, with Dave far more optimistic. We rounded Warren’s Point and looked east toward the Massachusetts shore. The wooded land looked remarkably unpopulated except for a church steeple sticking up above the trees. Among those trees once lived Awashonks, the female chief of the Sakonnet Indians during King Phillip’s War. Between the green landmass and the Atlantic was a pure white line of low surf, sparkling with sea birds.

  The ocean looked as wide and level as a snooker table. At a number of places, birds were diving into schools of bait pushed by predatorial fish underneath. There would be a patch of rough water with a stream of birds trailing from it like drifting white smoke. This looked suspiciously like the good old days.

  We skirmished with a couple of schools of false albacore without success, casting from the drifting boat into the bait, the albacore cutting through like fighter planes in the clear water, succeeding through speed rather than maneuverability. With little opportunity to tease them into taking, it was hit or miss. We missed.