The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  To Donald Francis Burke, and

  to Monte, Justin, and Chris Burke.

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T.S. ELIOT, Four Quartets

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Foreword: Fishing’s Inner Game

  by Terry McDonell

  PART ONE: STRIKING THE TENT

  Dream Fishing

  Heart of the Olive

  Fat Boy’s Lonesome Fishing Guide Blues

  The World’s Greatest Fishing Lodge, Period

  PART TWO: GONE FISHING

  The Next Valley Over

  Collision at Homosassa

  The Big Game

  The Clove Key Experiment

  The Conversion of Epstein

  Fishing for Grace with the Black Dog in the Land of Ponce de León

  PART THREE: ROUNDING THIRD

  Bon Temps with Rebel in a Sportsman’s Pardise

  Hooking Mr. Will

  On the Road Again in Godzone

  The River Definitely Had Trout in It

  Home Waters

  INTRODUCTION

  Trips are for business or to the dentist. A dream fishing trip is not a trip at all, brothers and sisters, but a voyage of discovery to the next valley over.

  This is a book about just such voyaging, and the dreams that propel it. When The Next Valley Over was first published in 2000, I had under my wading belt some four decades of chasing angling dreams around the world. Since then I have added another decade and a half to the same wanton (my wife might add, feckless) pursuit, and have chronicled some of those later experiences in a second volume of angling voyaging called Waters Far and Near. What the two books have in common is this: every story in them is as much about the dream that generated and sustained the voyage as it is about the destination and what was caught there.

  After all that time, here is what I would now consider to be the ideal dream fishing voyage, the one I would like most to take if only I could:

  You are a ten-year-old boy who lives to fish. Someone trustworthy has told you about a farm pond a few miles from your home that holds at least one humongous bass. On Friday night you put new ten-pound monofilament onto your spincast outfit and sharpen the treble hooks on a Dalton Special, your go-to lure. Very early Saturday morning you eat a bowl of cereal, make a sandwich, wrap it in wax paper, and put it in a pack with more lures and a bottle of water. It is just light enough to see when you set out, and as you walk, the landscape seems to take its shape in expectation. Unsure exactly where the pond is, you are forced to wander around cursing for awhile to find it, but when you do its discovery is sweeter for having been difficult. The sun is just up as you rig your rod. Since your fingers are trembling, it takes three tries before the knot is right on the Dalton Special. Then you take a few deep breaths and look around. A heron is stalking minnows at the marshy end of the pond; a kingfisher chitters out of a sycamore. The pond looks better than you had even hoped, big bass written all over it. You feel as open to anything and everything as a hunting fox, your senses that sharp, that oblivious to past and future, choosing the given—that moment and place—in Annie Dillard’s perfect phrase, “with a fierce and pointed will.” You cast . . .

  The almost magical capacity of the angling voyage of discovery is to entrance us, to cocoon us from the quotidian, to be our only frame of reference for as long as we are on it, and to make it impossible as well as undesirable to think beyond where you are and what you are doing—as good a definition as any of time standing still. Whether it is the tigerfish of the Zambezi, the taimen of Mongolia, or a farm-pond bass, those are the tokens brought back from the dream, not the dream itself. It is the dream that gives them meaning and value.

  One thing I have learned in over fifty years of chasing them is that, like gratuitous grace, dream angling voyages can be neither deserved nor earned. They cannot be begged, borrowed, or stolen. They cannot even be bought. Again, as with grace, they either rise of their own volition to meet your petition—like an arm-long brown trout rising to your Royal Wulff from a hidden lie in some tannin-stained backcountry New Zealand river—or they do not.

  But though you cannot demand a take, what you can do is prepare for it and try to be worthy of it when and if it happens, for in the end it is not the nature of the travel that makes or breaks a voyage but the nature of the traveler. The best worthiness exercise, I have found, is to embark on each voyage, be it your first or hundredth, with a child’s wide-open eyes, allowing curiosity and wonder to add to, not merely corroborate, whatever angling skills and knowledge you believe you own. I believe too that a dream voyage demands traveling only with people you like (or even better, love), an eager curiosity about the natural and cultural history of wherever you are going, and an equally eager willingness to engage with whomever you meet there.

  As in the most satisfying dreams, the best angling voyages conflate the known with the unknown into something altogether new, utterly unanticipatable, complexly pleasurable and deeply salubrious. One of their defining characteristics is that you feel at the very tip top of your game throughout them, and that feeling often lingers long after they are over.

  In what is thought to be the earliest book ever written about fishing (1496), Dame Juliana Berners wrote the following: “Ye shall not use this crafty sporte for the increasing and sparing of your mony, but pryncypally for your solace, and the helth of your body, and specially of your soule.” There is no better advice for the sporting voyager. While the pursuit of wild fish in wild places might be the framework of the voyage, it is the pursuit and capture of soul-health that turns it into one of discovery.

  But the ultimate and most munificent characteristic of dream voyages is that they continue to live, vivid and unfading, in the memory. Dawn on the deck of the Nomads of the Sea off the wild coast of Chile, watching a blue whale surface and spout, an entire day of unfinished trout water ahead. Casting to, hooking, and unwisely bringing to the boat a crocodile off Australia’s Cape York Peninsula. Watching a beloved nephew expertly play a red-hot grilse in the pool where, with me years ago, he caught his first salmon. Two of those memories are over a decade old, one just a few days young, but they and literally thousands more like them—many of which are contained in this book—are equally burnished into lasting preciseness in my memory.

  Such memories are the true tokens from the dream. I have used them to conjure up Dame Juliana’s solace countless times when I have needed solacing. They have never let me down. And I fully expect to be fingering a handful of them on the bench outside the Trail’s End Saloon when the stagecoach pulls up for the Big Dream Voyage to the next valley over.

  Charles Gaines

  Seafields, Nova Scotia

  Fall 2016

  FISHING’S INNER GAME

  by Terry McDonell

  Charles Gaines is a handsome man. I mention this not to flatter or embarrass him, but to set you straight about his handicaps, which are numerous and important within the context of this new book of his. Most great fishermen “win ugly,” which means that they simply will not be denied their chosen fish on any particular day. Gaines is more complicated. The perfect cast has been his forever and he is a confident man, yet he has told me on more than one occasion that his own image in a morning mirror can spook him so badly as to send him to the Herradura before breakfast: Face, I know not who you are but I am going to shave you. Something like that. Charles Gaines is not crazy; but rather so deeply eccentric and graceful in his fishing life as to pass from time to time into what his friend, the great sporting writer Vance Bourjaily, calls “the trance of instinct.” This is when Gaines’ life i
s most vivid, most engaged, most hilarious, most sacred. This is what he writes about in The Next Valley Over, and this is why all the fishing is so important.

  Nothing about writing is ever easy, except maybe the idea of it. The literature of fishing is flush these days with middle-aged white guys, most of whom are a little too quick to mention the time they enjoyed a drink with Charles Gaines at Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara or wherever. They’ve all been to a great lodge somewhere: Wilson’s on the Miramichi, Seven Spirits Bay, Arroyo Verde, or maybe even Perry Munro’s smallmouth spike camp on the Black River—but Gaines has been to all of them. As journalists like to brag, he’s done the reporting. With all appropriate respect for Izaak Walton and the great Roderick Haig-Brown, this is the book Merriwether Lewis would have written about fishing if he were a better writer and as good a fisherman as Gaines, which he most certainly was not. The truth is that Gaines has been leading his own private Corps of Discovery for a very long time—“gone sprinting bushwhack between valleys.” In this light, it almost begins to make sense that the amortization of the market value of the fish he catches some years has to run to $500 a pound. Ergo, if you fish and read on a level of sophistication above dynamiting gar, Gaines is your writer, although he has done that too. In fact, as I start to write a sentence about Gaines being an explorer at the shining bottom of his soul, that bull wacko of all saltwater fishermen, Ted Williams, jumps into my head swatting line-drive triples off the center field wall at Fenway. In the end, it’s all about art.

  And fish. Charles Gaines knows his fish. He knows, for example, that most saltwater gamefish live “like Greek playboys, following pleasure and abundance from one sunny spot to the next,” and that of the roughly thirty thousand species of fish that inhabit the earth, the tarpon is arguably, pound for pound, the gamest. He imagines them “coming in from the deep water at night, on a rising tide, under a waxing three-quarter moon, sensing the landmarks, the certain and particular characteristics of the place, and then registering pleasure or relief from the instincts switching off that brought them to it—like getting off a train late at night, and recognizing, just from the way the air feels, a place you are happy to have traveled a long way to return to.” Gaines is especially good on tarpon, but his knowledge from big game down to smallmouth bass is astounding.

  Charles Gaines’ choices in life—to become a writer; to test himself physically; to sacrifice for his craft; and ultimately to spend an extraordinary amount of time on the water—are on the fault line of talent and ambition that fractures American literature. Hemingway and Zane Grey are in this book, not just in anecdote but in spirit. But so too are Jimmy Buffett, Bayou Pon Pon, and Dion and the Belmonts. Likewise you will find the “Hegel of fishing guides” and any number of hard cases and sporting media entrepreneurs. And in the middle always is Gaines, somehow playing Huck and Tom at the same time—shooting out street lights with his BB gun at age nine or hooking a thousand-pound black marlin “rising as suddenly and menacingly as a revolution” thirty years later. This is an outlaw book in so many ways.

  As you get to know Gaines, you wind up visiting him much more than he will ever visit you. In the twenty-five years we have known each other, we have had dinner perhaps five times in New York City where I live; and I have gone to wherever I could find him more than 20 times. Charles lives and plays in interesting places. That beautiful farm in New Hampshire for so many years, the property in the Abacos, his high-tech Swiss-Family-Robinson hideout on the Nova Scotia coast, Guatemala, Africa, the deepest possible Alabama South. The secret truth is that when you visit Charles, you don’t actually have to fish, but you had better be hungry for the physical details of his world, the tastes and smells and colors that wash over him like rain.

  I have notes, lists of reasons to read this book, starting with the jaw-dropping recognition of self—if you’ve ever caught a fish you’ll see yourself in this book. Then there is the lesson that good times should be orchestrated and not left to the uncertainties of chance. Gaines plans ahead, even for the accidental side of his life. More interesting, I think, is that he wants you to understand that there is no sadder story than a life of small regrets. He wants to move you with his perfect pitch and surgical detail, then he wants you to put the book down and go out looking for places where you may find “a precise sufficiency of methods of purpose, and an effortless and invisible rightness that seems to ride the air and fall over you as diffusely as sunlight, leaving you with the dangerous sense that the time you spend there is what life is meant to be like.” He’s trying to teach you something: fishing’s inner game. Study hard.

  When Gaines’ literary agent, the ever-patient Dan Green, was asked what the introduction to The Next Valley Over should be about he replied hilariously that he wanted only one question answered: Why all the fishing? My answer is that Gaines is an animist who believes in the ritual of fishing—the reflective silences of the tiny trout stream and the “non-stop wet dream of fun in a faraway place catching huge fish to loud music with a buzz on.” No flock-tending rules and conventions for Charles Gaines. It is all, as he likes to put it, “how it should be.” You have to admire a man who does what he wants and writes like an angel, a man who in his own words has been “caught and released.” God, I love this book.

  New York City

  1/20/2000

  PART ONE

  Striking the Tent

  IT IS APRIL IN ALABAMA, 1957. THE DOGWOODS ARE vivid and suggestive on the hillsides surrounding the lake, and the bass and bluegills are on the beds. Fifteen years old and more wise-ass by far than I have any need to be, I am in the bow of an aluminum johnboat. My father sits in the stern, running the electric motor. He is fifty-one, in his prime. He is happy and open this afternoon as he always is when he is fishing, particularly on this lake. The lake, which my mother has named Tadpole, is less than an hour from our home in Birmingham. My father and a couple of other men have owned it for two years. It is his haven from his job and other demons, and it is our haven from the worst of each other.

  My father is working the shoreline with a yellow popping bug, covering every good lie with his jerky but efficient fly-casting, catching (so far; we have just gotten to the lake, and dusk, the best time for bass, is a couple of hours away) lots of bluegills the size of your hand. He whoops every time he hooks a fish, and cackles as he plays the bluegills’ tight, furious circlings. This annoys me. The whooping and cackling seem out of proportion to the hooking and catching of such small, common fish. I slouch and dream in the bow, as is usually my wont for the first half hour or so of our trips out here. I think of the River Dee in Scotland, about which I have recently read, and the salmon that live in it, and I scroll the surface of the water with the tip of my Orvis Superfine fly rod. The honey-colored cane rod was my father’s Christmas gift to me a few months before, and it annoys him that I am using it now so carelessly, to so little end, but he won’t say anything about it—not here.

  He does say, “You’d better throw your worm in the water, Skip. Fishing’s not a spectator sport, buddy.” He says this often, and he means life as much as he does fishing, long before that sentiment became a bumper sticker. I work out some line and wonder how a man his age, a man who has caught marlin and other huge fish in places I dream of going to, who I’ve seen catch bonefish in the Bahamas and brown trout in Montana, could possibly get so worked up over the little bluegills here in Lake Tadpole. Maybe, I think, he’s faking it. For me, maybe. But my father never fakes anything, and I know that.

  We both cast to a log angling into the water off the bank. “Fish in your half of the boat, Skip,” says my father. A bluegill sucks in his popper with the sound they make, like blowing a kiss. My father whoops and cackles, his face glistening with joy. “There’s plenty of lake here for both of us.”

  We always had home water to come back to, to catch bass and bluegills and to get along, but from the git-go, fishing to me meant traveling to fish.

  My father loved to travel, as long as
he could do it in style and make fishing the major if not the only point. In the manner of the forties and fifties, he and my mother usually traveled without children, but they would take me and my sister along with them once or twice a year and on a two-week vacation out west every summer. Neither my mother nor my sister was interested in fishing. That left me, and I became his fishing partner on these family trips—to Florida and the Bahamas, Wisconsin, Maine, Mexico, the Rocky Mountains—from the time I was old enough to hold a rod.

  I believe that the majority of anglers who travel to fish are by nature either pastoralists or nomads. My father was a pastoralist, a pure lodge man, who liked to go someplace and hole up there for the duration of the trip, getting to know a particular piece of water in intimate detail over a period of time while having the same table for dinner every night. I, on the other hand, was a born nomad. I can remember, in my teens, lying awake at night in dude-ranch cabins in Montana, fantasizing about stealing the keys to the rented car parked outside. I would take my waders, a rod, and a pack full of bananas and hot dogs, and I would depart that single valley to which Fate and my father’s vacation choice had confined me, and drive north to the next valley over—and then to the next, and the next, fishing each as I went until I ran out of Montana. Then I thought—if Lynne Dye wasn’t already writing me passionate entreaties to come home to Alabama and marry her—I might just continue on into Canada, and then into whatever place was north of Canada.

  But though I was from the beginning, in my soul and dreams anyway, a fishing nomad, I did acquire early on from my father his pastoralist appreciation for fishing lodges and camps. In fact, while he was unforgivingly discriminating about them, I have rarely met a fishing lodge I didn’t like (though certainly I have liked some much better than others). I believe this is because for as far back as my memory goes I have associated fishing lodges with vacations, with my father’s big, hearty, entertaining presence, and with unspoken but unbreakable truces between the two of us as long as we were in one: with fun, peace, and good humor, in other words. And to this day I’m happy for a night or two in lodges that serve up nothing much more than that, along with edible food.