The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  Walton is one of our principal literary sojourners, with White and Thoreau. By comparison with White, he is unscientific; and by comparison with Thoreau, discursive and confident about his world, less challenging of his fellow man but also less wintry and intolerant.

  Walton is the leading player in his own book and is helpless to be otherwise. Unlike the rather alpine, punctilious, and detached Thoreau, or the hyperkinetic White, Walton’s persona is one of equitability and such serenity of faith that his journey, in the view of one contemporary, from sepulcher of the Holy Ghost to pinch of Christian dust, spoke of an amiable mortality and rightness on the earth that has been envied by his readers for three-hundred years. But the three do share a conviction that the elements of the natural world are Platonic shadows to be studied in search of eternity, a medium in which man was presumed to float as opposed to sink, as in the present when eternity has been replaced by the abyss.

  All three make note of the vast share of their fellows, getting, spending, and laying waste their powers, “men that are condemned to be rich,” in Walton’s words. He observes, “there be as many miseries beyond riches, as on this side of them.” The rich man, he thinks, is like the silkworm which, while seeming to play, is spinning her own bowels and consuming them. One thinks of Thoreau “owning” the farms by knowing them better than their tenants; it is less that the meek shall possess the earth than that “they enjoy what others possess and enjoy not.” The subject of The Compleat Angler is, really, everyday miracles, friends, a dry, warm house, remembered verse, hope. Walton reserves but one spot for envy and invidious comparison: “I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.” I think of gentle, forgiving Anton Chekhov, who could not bear the slightest criticism of his angling.

  It is not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether hunting, bird-watching, angling, or sailing, and each create superb opportunities to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water. In Walton’s century, man went from one of God’s creations to being an actor who might undertake the management of nature, whose “activism” has grown catastrophically worse ever since. This was part of the seventeenth century uproar, and part of the wedge Puritanism was driving between man and nature. Walton, with his many resonances in Roman literature, is often most serene when he is most medieval. The angler preparing his wiles for the capture of fish is closer to the fish themselves than that husbandman cited by Walton who manages fish ponds as though they were extensions of his farm. The angler’s skies are wilder, his cycles as deeply circadian as the migratory birds he encounters during the seasons of the river, his perils on earth less those of a few pinches of Christian dust than a ray of fortuitous light in the heart of creation itself.

  Walton tells us that “angling is an art” that, like “mathematics, can never be fully learnt.” However, “as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.” Therefore, some instruction is in order. In general, fishermen should conduct themselves as “primitive Christians, who were, as most anglers are, quiet men and followers of peace.” He excuses his contemporaries slightly by adding that primitive Christians were “such simple men as lived in those times when there were fewer lawyers.”

  Today’s reader, who is himself three-fourths river water, can accept that the world of fish is the “eldest daughter of the creation, the element upon which the Spirit of God did first move,” and from whose abundance all living creatures originally proceed. We can live with this. It is close to factual as we currently understand the world. The angler deep in a river intuits his nearness to the primary things of the earth. And Walton tells us that while God spoke to a fish, He never spoke to a beast, and that when He wished to prepare man for a revelation, He first removed him from the hurly-burly of cities so that his mind might be made fit through repose. A learned Spaniard is quoted as saying that “rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate and fools to pass by.” There are rivers of every kind on earth, he says, even one which runs six days and rests on the Sabbath. And of course, four of the Apostles were fishermen. Walton adds with some prescience that if we would live on herbs, salads, and fish we would be saved from “putrid, shaking, intermittent agues.” Indeed, he who has the urge to angle would do well to set out both physically and spiritually, not just with rod and creel but with “wit … hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself.” The angler has everything to gain. He cannot even lose a fish, “for no man can lose what he never had.” But by skill and observation he might still hope for success—first by becoming enough of a naturalist to make a dozen imitation insects to see him through the seasons of the year. And if he is sufficiently skillful and observant, he will own “a jury of flies, likely to betray and condemn all the trouts in the river.” He may also carry with him a bag containing the hooks and silks and feathers to imitate unforeseen insects, or to pass time of a “smoking shower” under the nearest sycamore. He is after all seeking a fish “so wholesome that physicians allow him to be eaten by wounded men, or by men in fevers, or by women in childbed.” In fact, Walton’s fish regularly pass in and out of mythology with their enameled spots and colors, “march together in troops” like the perch; pike hunt like wolves and tench minister to other fish which are ailing. Some are driven by hatred of frogs, others, like the old trout, possess a mournful intelligence and acute sense of mortality. The angler who understands such things may betake himself to steepletops and, with his rod and line, angle for swallows.

  Walton reminds us, as we daily remind ourselves, that it is terrible to resolve whether happiness consists in contemplation or in action. But he contents himself in telling the reader “that both of these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenious, quiet and harmless act of angling.” Walton anticipates modern riparian conservation in recognizing the need for controlling weirs and illegal nets by public policy with the forceful reservation that “that which is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” This is, of course, the tragedy of the commons, which deprives us daily of our window on nature.

  As modern naturalists have come to do, Walton relates the lives of various fish to all the things around them: weather, insects, worms, the seasonal habits of townspeople, the tides of the sea, the budding and blossoming of plants, the dispersion of cities during plagues or religious wars, the follies of anglers themselves. Most of all, angling, to Walton, is about being fully alive: “I was for that time lifted above earth, and possess’d joys not promised in my birth.” Beside rivers, we seldom fill our minds with “fears of many things that will never be.” Here, “honest, civil, quiet men” are free from dread.

  The angler’s day begins humbly, wherein he differentiates between the various dung—cow’s, hog’s, horse’s—as he searches for “a lively, quick, stirring worm,” perhaps in old bark from a tanner’s yard. Or, competing with crows, he may follow the plough through heaths and greenswards. Finally, he may cultivate a dead cat or raid a wasp nest for its grubs. But his day becomes a soaring event in the mysteries of sea and stream, milkmaids reciting Christopher Marlowe, hours among the “little living creatures with which the sun and summer adorn and beautify the river banks and meadows.” At times, The Compleat Angler resembles Pliny, or a medieval bestiary, so ravishing and inexplicable does our author find his microcosm. What is this grand beast? “His lips and mouth somewhat yellow; his eyes black as jet; his forehead purple, his feet and hinder parts green, his tail two-forked and black; the whole body stained with a kind of red spots, which run along the neck and shoulder blade, not unlike the form of St. Andrew’s cross, or the letter X made thus crosswise, and a white line drawn down his back to his tail; all of which add much beauty to his whole body.” Answer: caterpillar.

  The technocracy of modern angling h
as not been conducive to the actual reading of Walton. Today’s fisherman may own The Compleat Angler as an adornment, but turns to his burgeoning gadgets for real twentieth-century consolation, staring at the forms of fish on the gas plasma screen of his fathometer or applying his micrometer to the nearly invisible copolymers of his leader. In Walton’s words, his heart is no longer fitted for quietness and contemplation. Even in the seventeenth century there was need of a handbook for those who would overcome their alienation from nature. In our day, when this condition is almost endemic, it requires a Silent Spring or The End of Nature to penetrate our stupefaction. The evolution of angling has reached a precipice beyond which the solace, exuberance, and absorption that has sustained fishermen from the beginning will have to come from the way the art is perceived. And here, learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and awe may be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us; that is, less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch fish. He tells us how to live.

  Iceland

  THE VOLCANIC LANDSCAPE, the cool fog from the sea … this must be Iceland. I walked out of my small hotel on the northeast coast of the country. A large river, milky with glacier melt, flowed beneath us in a shallow canyon. From among a church and some houses around the hotel, an old man appeared, hobbling toward the estuary on ski poles and following a small black hen. They traveled at the same speed and eventually disappeared over a low hill, first the hen, then the old man, to the edge of the sea.

  Another fellow came out of the hotel and struck up a conversation with me in English. A nervous sort, he kept touching his lips. “Of fish, I prefer their heads. I go to the store, I buy only the heads. I cook them and then I suck out all the little parts.”

  That night, I found myself dining with some English salmon anglers. One, a florid, lively man in his sixties, was telling me of the recent death of his mother who had always been bored by salmon fishing. On the Alta, where his father had persuaded her to fish for one day, she caught a fifty-pounder and never fished again. This year, as she lay on her deathbed, her son sat by her side. She was only occasionally conscious as her life ebbed away. At the end, she opened her eyes and gazed at him. “You’ll never catch a fifty-pound salmon,” she said, and died.

  The buildings of the town were rugged and pretty, sided with brightly painted corrugated iron, the windows and fascia of the roofs decorated with fanciful designs and ornamental carpentry. Streetside windows had their shades drawn for privacy but the window ledges were filled with small objects and souvenirs their owners thought might amuse pedestrians: a little horse, a soldier, a German postcard, magnets in the shape of small black-and-white-dogs.

  We stopped to bring a couple of salmon to a priest, a popular man, perhaps forty years old, who served four congregations in old rural churches whose steeples pointed sharply in this big green landscape. The stated passion of this man of God is salmon. My host inquired of the priest and his jolly, bohemian-looking wife as to the well-being of their son. Very well, very happy, apparently. Does he still have the bright blue Mohawk haircut? Yes, yes, says the priest. The son was in a band and that, somehow, was part of it—his eyes playing continuously over the bright sea fish. Yes, all the lads in the band had mohawks, what a lovely fish. Leaving the vicarage, we stopped on a narrow bridge high over the stream to look at salmon. This is still something of a miracle to me, peering from country bridges at sea-run fish. We used to have more of these fish in America than anyone so we killed them off. In the bend below us, a pair of swans sailed along slowly. The fish held steady. Sooner or later, something would make them move decisively but we are not sure what that was. Without doubt, a specific moment of departure would register and the salmon would move up.

  I was fishing with a young man named Steini on the Haffjardara River. Early in the season, he had had a hard time being away from the Internet. Most of his friends are out in cyberspace and he hated leaving them. When I first asked him about himself, he said, “I’m a Knicks fan.”

  We talked about the agonies of Karl Malone, the helplessness of the Utah Jazz in the face of Michael Jordan. I told him about a new biography of Isaiah Thomas just out and he made a note to himself to order it when he got back to Reykjavik.

  The evening was quiet, the beautiful river whispering in its rocky banks. We were fishing at a narrows where one of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas, Grettir, a sort of Viking outlaw, leapt the Haffjardara to make his escape. The Sagas, the NBA, the Internet, and the thousand years of trying to catch a salmon, all had the effect—and a rather cheerful one—of making these disparate times seem simultaneous.

  Steini, I learned, had just broken up with his girlfriend of many years. In fact, she had driven up to our salmon camp to inform him of her decision. He was unashamed of his sadness and Ludwig, one of the older guides, took him for long walks to discuss his heartbreak. There was in this a human simplicity I noted in many things Icelandic. That and a widespread competence. Ludwig disliked paying expensive gas bills for his old Land Rover, so he plucked out its engine and installed a Nissan diesel. “What about all the fittings between the Japanese engine and the English drivetrain?” I asked.

  “We machined new ones.”

  “Have you had any problems with it?”

  “I’ve only put thirty thousand miles on it since we changed the motor. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Ludwig and I fished a couple of long and unproductive sessions, one in the pools below a beautiful falls, a beat that had not been fishing well. You stood on a sliver of rock, deep water on either side, and fished to the left and the right. I didn’t like the kind of drifts I was getting but the fish were there. The falls was just to my left a few feet and every so often a salmon went airborne burying himself in the curtain of falling water, making it impossible to determine whether he made it over the top or not. Less often a sea-run char, resplendently colored and resembling a huge brook trout, would make the same heedless vault at the face of the falls. They either surmount it or vanish at the base, you never really know which; but the magic of these pure sparks of marine life is acute.

  Ludwig was formerly a schoolmaster. He had once been a Fulbright Fellow in the States. He was a fine-boned, handsome, weathered man of around seventy, a fly fisherman and ptarmigan hunter, a driven golfer, and a navigation instructor. When I asked where he sailed, he said Greenland, Poland, different places. He taught for thirty years beneath the glacier to our north, and when he moved into Reykjavik to be near his six grandchildren, he chose a house with a view of the glacier in the distance. Ludwig loved every season of Iceland, even the long, dark winter. The weather seemed to me to be remarkably varied, impacted as it was by many seas, the Gulf Stream, and the high latitudes. “In Iceland,” said Ludwig, “we don’t have weather. We have examples.”

  Our cook, a man of rare talents who presented us with marvels of local provender—langoustine, sea fish, lamb with wild icelandic berries, still-living scallops, regal salmon, char gravlax—had a very short fuse and was intolerant of things going wrong at any level. “Our cook explodes,” said Ludwig, “and we love him for it!”

  We took in all this fishing with the blithe purity available only to those who are guests. We were guests of my dear friend Bo Ivanovic, who too often impedes his superb angling abilities by looking after his friends. At a fleeting moment of semidespair, he allowed that it was hard to “keep these gears and wheels turning.” This looking after other people is trying to anglers as serious as Bo, who are happiest as solitary wolves intent on enmeshing themselves in the skein of signals and intuitions that tie the angler to the fish. Triangulating wind, tide, and weather isn’t made easier when a guest totters up in his robe and asks if you “haven’t a little something for the Hershey’s squirts.” The social savagery of anglers is such that they are liable to point out to the very host who has seen to their food, shelter, and transportation that they’ve caught more fish than he has. That the host rarely passe
s among his guests with a heavy sword is a testament to the depth of character in those who take on this role. The day comes, however, when they tire of all this and tell some repeater-sponge, unhappy that the staff is late in changing his sheets, to go fuck himself. One instance of this, after years of benevolence, and the host necessarily acquires an indelible reputation for being a short-fused spoilsport. By now, most any host realizes that he can turn this to his advantage. Fish camps are filled with dour former hosts who stay to themselves, read in their rooms, and push off early for the best pools.

  My luck might have been better had I quit plying Ludwig with questions. I may have been more interested in him than in the fishing. But I did want to catch a salmon, and he was anxious that I succeed. We went to a beat where low water had almost brought the current to a stop. While there were plenty of fish, it was necessary to stay well back, lengthen and lighten the leader, and strip the fly. As I fished, Ludwig told me the story of his childhood. His mother died when he was a boy, and since it wasn’t possible for his father to keep him at home, he was sent to his uncle’s farm on the north coast of Iceland. He and his father missed each other tremendously and throughout Ludwig’s boyhood they wrote to each other at every opportunity. His father saved Ludwig’s letters and years later gave them to him. We talked about his idea of using them to write a biography of the boy who wrote them, the boy he’d been, tilting this idea around a good bit but then, still without a fish, drifted off into a chat about Pablo Neruda.