The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  But I am happier still (and can ignore my nomadic urgings for longer) in the lodges and camps where a lot of small, well-engineered parts cause the place to come together as reassuringly as the closing of a Mercedes’s door. This is not the same as luxury, though luxury can be one of those parts. I think of the old Walker’s Cay Club in the Abacos, which my father and I used to visit. It had giant palmetto roaches in the bedrooms and a small shark in the swimming pool, but it could stir a delicious contentment in you that left you pining for the place weeks after you’d left it. I think of two or three fly-out lodges in Alaska, where the first thing you wonder on stepping out of a floatplane is “How on earth could this place have gotten here?” and of the similarly astonishing and deeply luxurious Seven Spirits Bay Lodge on Australia’s remote Coburg Peninsula. Of Bahía Pez Vela in Costa Rica, and Fins and Feathers in Guatemala, and Tropic Star in Panama. Of the cottage camp above the lake at Quillen in Argentine Patagonia. Of Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara, Old River Lodge and Wilson’s on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Camp Bonaventure in the Gaspé, and Perry Munro’s smallmouth spike camp in Nova Scotia. Of New Zealand’s eight great fishing lodges, and of the incomparable Arroyo Verde in Argentina—which is made to stand in this volume for all the others. What these places have in common, in addition to very good fishing, is a precise sufficiency of methods to 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.

  You can grow accustomed to good guiding in the same hazardous way; and though guides and charter captains, like lodges, are usually more of a pastoralist’s enthusiasm than a true nomad’s, I developed a lifetime appreciation for them, too, on fishing trips with my father. Before I could drive a car I learned to fly-fish for tarpon in skiffs off of Islamorada, Florida, from men like George Hommel and Jack Brothers—and if that won’t give you the hots for good guiding, nothing will.

  Since then I have had the good fortune to fish with lots of talented guides, many of whom have become friends, and frankly I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t mention a few of them here: my journalism partner, Tom Montgomery, a character in many of these stories, who is as complete a guide as he is a photographer; Bob Butler, Paul Bruun, and Gary “the Wedge” Wilmot, who brings a wolverine’s intensity to the job; Captain Hook Hamlin, Peter Wright, and Jody Bright in big game; the nonpareil Kiwi trout guides, among them Peter Church, Tony Entwhistle, Peter Carty, Tony Hayes, Hugh McDowell, Vern Brabant; in shallow salt water, Marty Sawyer, Hank Brown, Jeffrey Cardenas, the inimitable Danny Ayo, the irascible and opinionated Tommy Robinson. Personally, I happen to prize strong opinion and irascibility in a fishing guide, along with a flair for providing lunches, a sense of humor, and the determination and imagination to do whatever has to be done to catch fish. And no one I know owns more of those qualities or puts them together more vividly than A.J. DeRosa, whose wit and wisdom, as the sort of Hegel of fishing guides, is chronicled here and forms for me a canon for the uncompromising, idiosyncratic commitment that the best guides make to their work.

  I got married when I was twenty-one and moved away from Alabama, and I didn’t fish at Lake Tadpole or with my father very often after that for the next twenty years. But I did go fishing during that time—halfheartedly and mostly out of habit at first, then later with a rediscovered and increasingly monomaniacal passion. In my thirties I began traveling to fish and to write for various magazines about that travel, and I have been lucky enough to continue to carry that particular license to steal right up to the present. The stories in this volume come from nearly thirty years of having a look at the next valley over. I took my enthusiasm for good lodges and guides with me, but increasingly during that time I became the singleminded nomad with a rod I had dreamed of being as a teenager until, almost totally blind from Next-Valley Fever, I wandered off the edge of my own map.

  Nowadays I travel less, I fish often at Lake Tadpole again, and I fancy that I can see a sort of shape or design to my life as a fisherman. I have tried to arrange the stories in this volume into sections that correspond with that design and illustrate it, without regard to the chronology in which they were written.

  For some time I wanted to write a novel that would be a sort of angling Pilgrim’s Progress, with a very slow learner for a hero. Now that I realize I have largely lived that story, I have no more desire to write it. Real progress began for me somewhere in my mid-thirties with the realization that no matter however else I might be benighted, I would no longer, ever, be one of the poor souls referred to in this quote from Thoreau that I copied off of A.J. DeRosa’s dashboard:

  MANY MEN GO FISHING ALL THEIR LIVES WITHOUT

  KNOWING THAT IT IS NOT FISH THEY ARE AFTER.

  From that moment on, I knew it was really dreams I was after. My dreams then all had big fish in them. They had me solving difficult angling problems and beating odds on far-off waters, and living the life of Riley while I was at it. But no matter; at least I had thrown my worm in the water.

  DREAM FISHING

  IWOKE AT 3:45 A.M. BEFORE THE ALARM CLOCK WENT OFF and sat up in the little bed, my head full of Tasmanian dreams: wind, merino sheep in a white opium poppy field, cruising brown trout with foreign accents.

  I turned off the clock so it wouldn’t wake my five sleeping teammates, and dressed—pile long underwear and lots of wool, waders and felt-soled boots, a raincoat. My old fishing vest, with its familiar bulges and clinkings, went on last. I clipped a net with a retractable handle to my wader belt, stuffed a knapsack with a camera, extra clothes, and two or three of the miniature bottles of Dewar’s scotch they had welcomed us with the night before, and went out to the narrow hallway to pick out two rods.

  There were nineteen of them standing there, each humming with its own specific action inside a sleek aluminum tube. Made of precisely layered and tapered cones of graphite and boron-graphite, with high-tech initials like IM-6, IMX, RP III, and HLS-19 designating a modulus of elasticity here, a taper or tensile strength there, some of these rods were prototypes, and all of them were state-of-the-high-present-art of fly-rod making.

  Tyler Palmer, a flamboyant American ski racer in the 1970s, told me once that when he stepped into his bindings before a race he could hear his skis humming to him of how they wanted to perform. Fly rods, like skis, are things to moon over, bridges between dreams of action and action itself, and I cannot even look at one without imagining its particular character in my hand.

  I picked out a kelly green 5-weight with a soft tip in case the wind was down, and a fast, prototype 8-weight, with a reel seat of cocabolla wood and a half-wells grip, in case it wasn’t: the former hummed of settling a dry fly onto the nose of a sleeping cherub; the latter of pushing sixty feet of line into God’s own sneeze.

  Outside the Team U.S.A. cottage was a calm, early summer night in November under the Southern Cross. It was not yet four-fifteen, but Bronte Park was active. Lights were on in the other team cottages, and other anglers on the early morning shift were trudging in waders through the eucalyptus trees toward the bus that waited for us in front of the main building. I gave my name to the brisk Australian official standing by the bus and was given an identification tag to pin on my vest and a scorecard. Two or three men were already sitting by themselves on the bus, looking sleepily out of windows into the velvety Tasmanian dark. Naomi and Wynonna Judd sang to us over the intercom.

  I put my knapsack and rods in the overhead rack and sat down behind Tony Entwhistle, the legendary New Zealand trout guide and a member of the New Zealand team. Like most Kiwis, Tony loves to talk, but this morning he was preoccupied. He gave me a floating nymph he had had some luck with in the practice sessions, and I hooked it into the fly pad on my vest.

  “Will you be over this summer?” Tony asked.

  “In March or April, I think.”

  “Good. We’ll take a few days o
ff and fish for fun.”

  Tony and I have had a number of unforgettable days together on New Zealand rivers. One particularly magical one on the Sabine the year before tempted me right then to start bridging memory into thoughts of fishing four or five months in the future, but I was already dream-engaged.

  Over the next few minutes the bus filled with fly-rod anglers from seventeen countries. They climbed aboard, nodding to each other, put their rods and knapsacks into the rack above them, and silently took their seats, like commuters in fishing vests. At four-thirty on the dot, the bus pulled out for London Lakes. Over the intercom, Willie Nelson opened the Eighth Annual World Fly Fishing Championship with “Whiskey River.”

  My “controller” at the first of the morning’s two beats was a dignified forester named David. It was David’s job to watch me fish for three hours, to make sure I didn’t cheat or stray outside the boundaries of my beat, and to measure, record, and release any trout I caught. It was my job simply to fish for Old Glory.

  David and I reached the shore of Lake Samuel at five-fifteen. There was no wind, so I strung up the 5-weight, tied on a No. 14 Red-Tag Beetle in the growing light, and walked down to the edge of the water. My beat was three hundred yards of shoreline, with a flagged stake at either end separating me from other anglers. There was a shallow grassy cove to the left, which was perfect for spotting cruising trout to cast to, and two hundred yards of rocky drop-off to the right for blind casting if no fish showed in the cove. David asked me what I did for a living. I told him I wrote, and also sent people around the world on dream fishing trips like this one.

  “This is a competition,” he corrected me. I didn’t feel like arguing.

  Two musk ducks splashed thirty yards out in the calm water. In the eucalyptus woods behind us a kookaburra kicked off its maniacal morning chuckling, a sort of birdsong version of P.J. O’Rourke on the subject of Democrats.

  There were red and green parrots in those woods, too, and wombats and spiny anteaters. And somewhere in there, his mean little teeth clicking, a Tasmanian devil was finishing off a road-killed wallaby. In the grasses, we had been told, were tiger snakes, a quick and certain end to your fishing day.

  And in the water, of course—in the deep black water of London Lakes and the emerald coves I was to fish later at Bronte and Little Pine Lagoons—swimming below the ducks and swans and platypuses and through my dreams for months before coming here and for weeks after leaving, were the big, wary Tasmanian brown trout.

  My friend Vance Bourjaily has written truly that bird shooting is a sojourn back into the trance of instinct, and in that trance “if a bird falls, it is like being able to bring back a token from a dream.”

  And so it is with fishing: the ancient Saratoga in the rainforest rivers of Cape York, the black bass of New Guinea, the Nile perch and mahseer of Africa and the bonefish of Christmas Island are all—like cow-pond bluegills to a farm boy—tokens, a rod away from dreams. It’s the dreams that give them weight and value.

  At 5:28 I slid a pair of amber Polaroid glasses onto my nose, stepped into a lake in the central highlands of Tasmania, opened my ears, and looked for references. Fish are fish everywhere, but everywhere they have different accents. The best you can do is listen carefully and look for references. Fly-fishing is a game of skill, but more than that it is a relaxation of normal attentions and a drift into instinct as absorbing and renewing as sleep.

  False-cast, the green rod hummed of leaders straightening two feet off the water and flies dropping as quietly as wishes. On the dawn air was a faint, sleepy scent of eucalyptus burning—a faint haze in the still air, a hush.

  “It’s five-thirty,” said David. “You’re fishing, mate.”

  I straightened a cast into the haze, two feet above the water, and let it fall.

  HEART OF THE OLIVE

  THE HUGHES 500 HELICOPTER FOLLOWS THE FISHY RAPID-and-pool sequences of the upper Tongariro River, passing over cultivated fields, with the three great snow-capped volcanoes of the Taupo basin looming to the east. Within fifteen minutes you’re over the beech-forested, roadless foothills of the Kaimanawa mountain range, then twisting up the valley of your river for the day, a legendary North Island, New Zealand, bush river, its turquoise runs and deep green pools glinting with sun and promise.

  The chopper sweeps up the valley like skiing powder turns, scattering trout from their lies in the river. After a while it hovers, circles downward, lets you and Tony Hayes out on a gravel bar, and lifts off, making a little whirlwind of sand on the bar.

  You hold your hat and watch it climb out of the steep, beech-dense gorge. Then it is gone and there is no sound other than the river, the trilling of a bell bird and a waterfall’s distant hiss upstream. You stand and let the remoteness soak into you. Only thirty minutes after having breakfasted on venison sausage at Tony’s glorious Tongariro Lodge, you are now a three-day walk from the nearest road or house, in a place visited by no more than ten or twelve humans a year.

  You string a rod. Somewhere upstream, maybe in the next pool, lies the biggest trout you have ever seen—ready to rise out of the dark pool of imagination and into your astonished reality. All you have to do then is catch it.

  One of the favorite recipes of the great eighteenth-century French epicure Grimod de La Reynière was called “A Roast Without Equal”: “an olive stuffed with capers and anchovies inside a figpecker inside an ortolan inside a lark inside a thrush inside a quail wrapped in a vine leaf inside a lapwing inside a fat pullet inside a pheasant inside a wild goose inside a turkey inside a bustard, the whole thing to be cooked in a pot with onions, carrots, ham, celery, lard, spices and herbs, hermetically sealed over a low fire for twenty-four hours.”

  La Reynière describes the result as “the quintessence of plains, forests, swamps, and the best poultry yard.” And Alexandre Dumas noted that “at the end, one threw away everything but the olive, the apex of quintessence.”

  Think of that lark as fly-fishing clear rivers for big trout; the ortolan as having those rivers all to yourself; and the figpecker as having those rivers to yourself in heartbreakingly beautiful country. The olive, then—that apex of the quintessence of fly-fishing for trout—can be nothing other than helicopter fly-fishing in New Zealand. The elements of that quintessential experience, the “plains, forests, swamps, and the best poultry yard,” if you will, that give this olive its particular, ineffable flavor, are solitude, some of the world’s loveliest riverscapes, and sight fishing in air-clear water for big, difficult fish.

  Difficulty is the caper at the heart of the olive.

  You and Tony walk the bank slowly and look for fish, staying low and in the trees whenever you can to break your outlines. You find the first one, a brown trout of around seven pounds, in the second run above the bar where the chopper dropped you off. You watch him for a while and see from the occasional white flash of his opening mouth that he is feeding lazily on nymphs. You check your knots, kneel at the water’s edge some thirty feet behind the fish, false-cast out of his cone of sight to measure the cast, then chance your throw, as the French say.

  If it is right, the fish will not see the fly line. Twelve feet of transparent leader tapered to four pounds breaking strength will drop the fly three feet upstream of the trout’s nose, and the nymph will sink at the right speed and float without drift (because you have techniqued out the drift; if you haven’t, you can forget the fish) down the fish’s feeding lane and into that white-flashing mouth. Very often, however, your throw is not quite right, and these fish are unforgiving. This time your first cast doesn’t get deep enough. Spotting for you from the bank, Tony says the second is too far left. On the third, the trout is history.

  A quarter of a mile upstream, a rainbow trout hangs in the pellucid, turquoise center of a deep pool that looks like it ought to have Tarzan’s Jane emerging from it. Water tinkles into it from a steep, miniature waterfall; ferns trail in its calm edges. The fish is suspended, feeding piggishly in the foam line—a sin
gle fish you could die happily after catching—but there is no way to cast to him. You discuss it in whispers, crouching in the brush that here grows so close to the river’s edge there is no room for a right-handed back-cast. There is a small chance you can cover the fish, you decide, if you wade out below the tail of the pool and can manage to squeeze sixty feet out of a backhanded cast with a weighted nymph: the caper at the heart of the olive.

  You do it; the huge rainbow inhales the fly, and fifteen minutes later you have run, following the fish, almost all the way back to the bar where the chopper let you out. Finally, Tony nets the trout—an honest nine and a half pounds by the scale in his net handle—and you hold it as carefully as you would a newborn for a picture, then slip it back into the tugging current.

  You are now forty-five minutes into your day. Upstream you have seven hours of fishing ahead of you and four or five rough miles. You will see at least four fish today that are over ten pounds, and one giant of maybe fourteen; and you know that there are even bigger fish than that holding in this remote, mysterious, blue-green water. The biggest and most difficult resident river trout in the world, in fact, live in this river, hidden like dreams until they rise up to meet you. Unless you are spending the night on the river, the chopper will pick you up near dusk and take you back to a hot shower, a drink, smoked trout canapés, a baron of New Zealand lamb, a big native Cabernet, and a sumptuous bed.