These days A.J. stays in George Kelly’s house. He can see the Worm from the porch, and occasionally he will walk over and take someone through it. On the trailer’s front are painted the words for fishing bums in Spanish, Los Vagabondos de Pesca; on the back is a flamingo; and on most of the door-side is the Worm’s namesake art—a painting of a mess of writhing night-crawlers spilling out of a tin can: bigger-than-life trout bait. Inside the trailer there are cartoons, news clips, and photos of llamas stuck to the walls. A clipped headline says, “Armpit Skin Used to Make Tongue”; another, from the Wall Street Journal, says, “To Many Sportsmen, Flies Are Not Pests But Alluring Objects.”
Also pinned to a wall is a poster announcing
THE SEVENTH ANNUAL BOAT-NIGGERS’ BALL
KOTTONWOODS KOUNTRY KLUB
FORT SMITH, MONTANA
“G’wine to row all night,
G’wine to row all day,
De Bighorn River be 12 miles long,
Oh de do da day . . .”
By the bed is a copy of John Gierach’s Trout Bum. In the Worm’s living room is a fly-tying bench with a sign over it asking, “Who Farted?” There is a calendar of pinup girls from 1981, old fly-tying dubbing, mule deer antlers, mesquite wood chips, shotgun shells, and mourning dove decoys. The little outlived home is pungent with impiousness, with the itinerant, male-bonded, partying, ass-kicking, up-yours life that used to carry on in it. Visiting it, says A.J., makes him feel like Chuck Berry taking reporters through the old Flexible bus he used to tour in—a little sad, but also like grinning when he looks at the bed and remembers all the good times different people had there.
The Worm was a boy’s club, a hangout, a crack in the rocks to get away from the posse at a time when A.J. and his two trailermates were still young enough to have options real enough to make them feel righteous in refusing them; when “Who Farted?” was the question of the day; when there were damned few overequipped anglers and no little blue pontoon boats on the river; and when clients came to experience the river, not just to catch the thirty fish a day the fly-fishing magazines started telling them they had every right to catch. Now the Worm is none of those things, it is abundantly clear that everybody farted, and A.J.’s buddies finally took what options they still had and went south, leaving him just about the last of the original boat niggers at the Ball, looking disconsolately around the middle of a trailer that no longer makes any sense, with nothing left to do but blow it up.
Now if I can just hang on
Through the Big Hole and the Yellowstone,
I’m sure to have some fun come late October.
I’ll take Caladonia out,
We’ll shoot some ducks and kill some trout,
And thank the Lord another fishing season’s over.
The next day, angling to catch a “quality fishing experience” with no toy boats in it, A.J., Tom, and I don’t get started until noon and then go downriver to a stretch that is less written about and therefore less populated than the stretches just below the dam. We see only one other boat the rest of the day. The float is through the Crow reservation, and both the water and the landscape are lovely. The day is still and hot, there are nesting mallards and Canada geese to watch, A.J. sings his “Fat Boy’s Lonesome Traveling Fishing Guide Blues,” and we have good fishing on Wooly Buggers. In short, we catch that quality fishing experience, and keep on catching it all afternoon and evening.
And why are there not more sports with their guides down here catching that same experience with us instead of gridlocking each other up above? It has to do, explains A.J., with the nature of the modern client, the modern guide, and the modern guide-client relationship.
Not too long ago, most of the clients he got were one of two types: old codgers who had spent a lifetime fly-fishing and were smoked in the traditions, the etiquette, the literature, and the essential gentleness of the sport; or younger codgers, new to the sport, who wanted to be smoked in all those things at least as much as they wanted to catch fish. These clients never killed trout if you asked them not to; they knew how to put down their rods and watch a mother merganser swim by with a clutch of ducklings; they wouldn’t fish another man’s water if their Mercedes sedans depended on it; and they preferred to learn things well rather than quickly, and to measure their days more by pleasure and camaraderie than by the number of trout they put in the boat. With these clients, or most of them anyway, it was possible for a guide to really be a Guide—someone sharing a treasure trove of experience, doling it out exactly as it was needed—in how to participate productively and enjoyably in one of the most pleasant pursuits mankind has ever invented for itself.
To be a Guide is to be, as necessary, a drill sergeant and nanny, a psychologist and marriage counselor, an entomologist, chef, storyteller, buddy, and subtle imparter of traditions and ethics. The old kind of clients let you do all that, wanted you to do all that. But these new guys, these thirty-year-old geeks with ten-million-dollar companies and hundreds of shiny little devices hung all over their vests that they don’t know how to use, these graduates of some three-day fly-fishing school who take their cellular phones in the boat with them and don’t have time for anything—time to listen, time to watch, time to learn, time to enjoy—all these guys want you to do is row the boat, smile and chuckle a lot, and look snappy and neat in your Patagonia gear with maybe a purple bandanna around your neck like some Guide of the Year they saw in Fly Rod & Reel magazine. And mostly, of course, they want you to catch a lot of fish for them, no matter how badly they fish; they want to rip as many lips on whatever river they’re on as the magazines says Joe Expert did.
Fly-fishing now is big business, and if enough customers want something, they’ll get it—including white-bread, cookie-cutter guides. A few years ago, whenever a particular outfitter in Jackson Hole ran out of palatable guides to take out his clients, he would call A.J. A.J. would put on the ugliest clothes he could find, roll his good boat off the trailer and replace it with a filthy, leaky old scow with “Abuse Tours” painted on the side, and take his veep-for-the-day fishing. On one of these standby trips, he somehow neglected to remove from the bow a dead, week-old whitefish he’d been using to train his dog. Unfamiliar, no doubt, with the maverick-guide sense of humor, it took the client four hours to ask, “Do we have to carry this dead fish along with us?”
Around four o’clock we stop on a shady island to cook supper. A.J. expertly butterflies and smokes two small trout for an appetizer. We pour some whiskey into tin cups, fire up cigars, and he puts on the grill a couple of mallards that have been marinating since yesterday. The river rustles by on either side of us and we lounge under a stand of cottonwoods, feeling the day start to cool and darken toward the evening fishing, which is a magical thing wherever in the world you have it.
On the whole, says A.J., he wouldn’t trade his life for anyone’s. “It takes a lot of stamina to stay a trout bum. But we have the seasons, and the seasons keep you whole. I look forward to the spring when I’m getting back on rivers, I look forward to grasshopper season in the middle of the summer, and I look forward to the leaves falling when I can put a shotgun in the boat and shoot a few ducks at the end of a day of fishing. I think when you’re in tune with the seasons, it’s hard to have any kind of regrets. I don’t know a single old fishing guide who’s bemoaning the fact that he’s spent twenty or thirty years guiding . . . To be honest with you, I don’t even know how people live in the real world.”
He thinks he may guide another ten years or so. Then he’d like to open an Italian deli in Jackson Hole, sell prosciutto, Italian sausages, and roasted peppers, ski, play a little saxophone. And, of course, fish. Because whatever he is or isn’t, A.J. DeRosa knows he will never be one of those geeks referred to in the Thoreau quote on the dashboard of his van: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
I’ve got them “Oh oh no,
I Don’t Want to Go
Guide a Geek
Again Tomorrow Blues.”
Listen to ’em whine
When they tangle up their line,
And I can’t even pay my Association dues.
THE WORLD’S GREATEST FISHING LODGE, PERIOD
IN 1972 THE GREAT BELGIAN FOOD WRITER ROY ANDRIES DE Groot wrote an article for Playboy magazine that lovingly proposed the French country restaurant Troisgros as the World’s Greatest Restaurant. Describing a meal there of terrine de foie gras, lobster in Calvados sauce, and roasted wild duck, the article made you want to eat the paper it was printed on.
It also made the brave point that in this world of mediocrity and qualification, there are still a few identifiable superlatives around, as well as a few reporters with the discrimination and temerity to name them.
De Groot was a blind nobleman, overweight and gouty, who died by his own hand. His appetites were not easy on him, and he spared himself not at all in their pursuit: in explaining how he was able to identify a single restaurant as being the world’s greatest, he estimated that since childhood he had dined in 12,474 restaurants around the world and “as far as I can remember, not one of them was ever as good as Troisgros.”
Fishing lodges are to me, more or less, what restaurants were to De Groot—an expensive, outsized, debilitating, and lifetime passion. I have shamelessly squandered time and money at them for over thirty years in most of the fifty states, in nearly thirty countries, and on five continents. From castles in the British Isles to a tin aboriginal shack in the Northern Territories of Australia, anything I hear of that calls itself a fishing lodge gets my attention, and usually, sooner or later, me. I have not yet, perhaps, been quite as ruined by my passion as De Groot was by his, but neither have I yet indulged it for as long. I fully expect to; but for now there is more than enough ruin and indulgence under the bridge for me to paraphrase De Groot with authority: since childhood I have visited a truly shocking number of fishing lodges, and as far as I can remember (allowing here for accumulated ruin to brain cells as De Groot wisely did), not one of them was ever as good as Arroyo Verde.
You can reach Arroyo Verde by driving for about an hour north of the southern Argentina resort city of Bariloche; but the prettier way is the two-hour drive south from San Martín de los Andes. If you have stayed at the Hôtel La Cheminée in San Martín, you will have breakfasted well, and if you leave early the air will be snappy and blue with altitude as you drive out past the lake and up into the Andes. You pass streams becoming great Patagonian rivers—the Caleufú, the Hermoso, the Meliquina—tawny, windswept mountains, sandstone monoliths, and strange, Arizona-like rock outcroppings. Then the road drops over Cordoba Pass into a verdant valley, the valley of the Traful, and onto the ranch property.
The name of the ranch—or estancia, as they are called in Argentina—is Arroyo Verde. It means “green creek.” It might as well mean heaven if you enjoy fly-fishing and the major creature comforts.
Ernie Schwiebert is a man who fully enjoys such things. A sort of De Groot of fly-fishing, a well-traveled, sybaritic, and discriminating angler and fishing writer, Schwiebert has called the Traful “the world’s greatest landlocked salmon river.” He has visited Arroyo Verde to fish that river more than twenty times over the past thirty years.
The Traful is twelve miles long from its headwater lake to where it empties into the dammed head of the Limay River. In addition to landlocked Atlantic salmon, the river holds good populations of brown and rainbow trout, and some brook trout. Most of these fish are large, many of them as large as you can dream a freshwater fish to be. This twelve-mile length of world-class fishery belongs entirely to two brothers—Maurice Larivière, who, with his wife, Meme, owns Arroyo Verde; and Maurice’s younger brother Felipe, who owns the estancia La Primavera on the opposite side of the river from Arroyo Verde.* Their father bought the valley in 1934 from an Englishman, who acquired it from the area’s first white settler, an American adventurer named Newbury. In addition to the Traful River, this Larivière property (both brothers own other estancias in Argentina, as well as town houses in Buenos Aires) comprises 26,000 regally isolated acres, including a couple of mountain ranges.
Maurice Larivière raises red stag, horses, cattle, and sheep on Arroyo Verde, and for the past five years the estancia has been open from mid-November through mid-April (summer in the southern hemisphere) to paying guests. Like Schwiebert, most of those guests come to Arroyo Verde for the first time to fish, but it is more than the fishing, good as that is, that brings them back year after year.
The landscape could be southwestern Montana except for the brilliant red Chilean fireweed called notro blooming on the hillsides. Wild purple lupine is also in bloom, and a butter-yellow Argentine forsythia. The river winks at you as you follow it for miles, pool after pool playing hard to get. There are doves, ducks, geese, and ibis in the air, and thoroughbred horses and prime English beef cattle in green paddocks. A covey of California quail scatters in front of the Jeep, and hares are everywhere.
“You like hare?” asks Carlos Sanchez, who has brought you here. “Bueno! Maurice will love to shoot and cook one for you.”
The ambience at Arroyo Verde is an andante harmony, a nonchalant but careful balance of sympathetic effects. The main house is generous and handsome, made of logs and glass. The grounds around it are expensively but unobtrusively landscaped with flowers and flowering shrubs, the statue of a deer, a fish-holding casting pond and stream, a stone terrace looking out to the river and the mountains. Fat Labrador puppies sleep in the grass. A cat stretches on a lawn table. There is a small village of outbuildings surrounding the main house—a tack house and barn, a guest cottage, a building holding the generators that provide the lodge with power, and housing for the lodge staff and the gauchos who manage the estancia—all of them well placed, good looking, nothing more than what they need to be. Comely as it is, there is not the slightest pomposity about the look of Arroyo Verde; it simply looks perfectly right.
Inside, your room is large and airy, with French doors opening out onto the lawn. The sheets are monogrammed linen; towels in the big, hand-painted tile bathroom are huge and plush; an antique dressing table is set with silver brushes, and there are good books on the bedside table and good art on the walls. You will learn that any clothes you take off in here will be washed, pressed, and returned without your knowing they’ve gone.
Lunch is at two: scrambled eggs with local mushrooms, a rare eye of round, sautéed onions and spinach fresh from the garden, a salad, and a bracing bottle of vino tinto.
Can this get any better? you wonder over dessert.
Well, yes. There is a siesta after lunch, and at five o’clock you go out fishing. When you return, just after dark at 10:00 P.M., a white-jacketed man meets you just out of your waders with a glass of single-malt Scotch and a silver tray of smoked trout canapés. After a shower, there is champagne with a fresh Argentine Port Salud and Cole Porter playing in the living room. Supper is borscht with sour cream in Spode bowls, followed by eggplant soufflé and toasted homemade bread, a wonderful Argentina Merlot, and a tart lemon mousse. Then coffee is served around a fire in the living room, and you settle in with a snifter of brandy to look at Maurice’s collection of prints and first-edition books, and then to watch a tape.
The tape is of an American Sportsman segment from the 1960s: the legendary angler Joe Brooks is fishing the Traful River, looking as well fed and happy as you are.
Maurice Larivière is said to be the best roll-caster in Argentina. An elegantly efficient and understated method of delivering a fly when obstruction behind the caster makes normal casting difficult, the roll-cast suits both him and his river. Maurice is a fit sixty-five. He rides one of his thoroughbred horses every day while he is at Arroyo Verde, and he is there all summer long. He favors gaucho boots and bombachas, the baggy gaucho trousers, and wide cloth gaucho belts. He speaks perfect French and English, and converses authoritatively and energetically on the American Civil War, horse breeding, Broadway musicals, bi
rds, European history, old prints and rare books, bamboo fly rods, and more birds—all of this often in one evening. His wife, Meme, a Buenos Aires grande dame, is not always at the estancia during the summer, and it is likely that Maurice decided to open Arroyo Verde to the public because he so relishes good conversation and the company of fellow anglers.
Long before there were paying clients, there was a good bit of that company here, much of it distinguished: Brooks and Schwiebert, Curt Gowdy, Norman Armour, Pickney Tuck, Charlie Gates. And Dwight Eisenhower. The headwater of the Traful is a breathtakingly clear and blue mountain-ringed lake, forty-five kilometers long, called Lago Traful. Maurice owns three or four miles of it and has, on a point near the river’s mouth, a cottage that must be for guest couples who choose to stay there, a mile or two from the main lodge, one of the world’s most enchanting places to come to terms. Standing near the cottage and gazing down at dozens of landlocked salmon stacked up at the boca, or mouth, of the river, Maurice will tell his guests, “This is where Eisenhower fished. He caught nothing.”
That rarely happens on the Traful, though it is not an easy river. Lago Traful was originally stocked between 1903 and 1905 with rainbow, brown, brook, and lake trout, whitefish, and landlocked Atlantic salmon from Sebago Lake in Maine, all of them provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The lake trout and whitefish didn’t take, but the others did with a vengeance. One of the things that distinguishes the Traful River as a great fishery is its variety—the presence in it of all three major species of river trout and landlocked salmon; another is the average size of the fish caught in the river, which for both trout and salmon would be close to six pounds. That astonishing average weight, and the presence in the river of many fish over fifteen pounds and up to twenty-five, is due largely to a rich, year-round food supply of small crustaceans, called pancora, in both the lake and the river. The large average size of the fish is also partially responsible for why the river is not an easy one, since few big wild trout are dumb. Then there is the river itself: it is fast and deep in many places, with challenging wading, and casting circumstances that often demand Maurice’s roll-cast. There are good hatches of mayflies and caddisflies on the river in March and April, and in those months the dry-fly fishing can be excellent; but for much of the season the Traful is a wet-fly river, with large streamers, nymphs, and pancora patterns producing the best results.
The Next Valley Over Page 4