The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  Hayes and Shelby had caught plenty of fish, too, and Hayes had caught one over six pounds. Shelby was still glowing from their afternoon. I asked Hayes if he had enjoyed himself. “I don’t know,” he said, this red-hot stocks-and-bonds trader. “Is the fishing good yet?”

  Someone suggested that the four of us form a club that would take a fishing trip a year. “Other kinds of trips, too,” said Hayes. “Like to topless Club Med resorts,” said Shelby. “No . . . but kayaking, maybe,” said Mr. Will. I suggested we call this club the El Salto Angling and Adventure Club. But Willy put some real thought into it, and came up with a better name. Then all the members of the Happy Campers’ Sporting Club went to bed.

  We were up at four the next morning and out on the lake by five-fifteen. Shelby and I fished together that morning, as we have countless times since he was five, and Willy was with his dad. We had a cloudy red sunrise on the lake with a low barometer, and the fishing was slow. Shelby and I threw popping bugs and Desperate Divers into some of the world’s bassiest-looking cover and caught about a dozen small fish by seven. Then Shelby hooked, played perfectly, and released a real hog—a bass that brought all the Happy Campers up to at least one fish apiece of around seven pounds. It was his biggest bass ever, and Shelby knows how rare fish like that are. His hands shook a little when he held it up before releasing it, then he hooked the red and white frog popper in the hook-keep, stretched out grinning along the gunwale, and had a long look at the day. I thought about how much fishing it takes before you start to learn the best and untellable things, like giving the other man the boat after you catch a good fish.

  We went back into the lodge around eleven-thirty to lunch and to nap until three. That afternoon Willy fished in the boat with Shelby, who introduced him to fly-fishing, and he caught a few bass on a popper. Hayes and I caught maybe forty fish—in between enjoying each other strenuously, as has been our way for twenty years—and he was still not sure the fishing was any good. He told me that he and Willy had gotten on each other’s nerves a little that morning. I condescended to tell him that was because he didn’t know the conventions; nor, I added, did he have much of a generous tutorial spirit. As it happened, I condescended too soon.

  “I love fly-fishing,” Willy told me when we met back at the boat dock at dark, and then he told me that twenty times more on the two-mile drive back to the lodge. He offered to buy the rod that I had lent him to learn on—a 9-weight Winston.

  “You can’t afford it, Mr. Will,” I said. “Besides, it’s too big for you.”

  “No, it’s not—I cast it really well. You’ll see tomorrow.”

  We had to leave the Angler’s Inn after lunch the next day to get back to Mazatlán. Willy and I shared a boat that morning, and both the weather and the fishing were a little off. All Willy wanted to do was fly-fish and, though it was remarkable how adept he’d become at it in one afternoon, I spent most of the early morning tying and retying leaders, getting wind knots out of tippets, and dodging his errant back-casts. Willy would have the casting rhythm down for a while, then lose it. “Quit whipping the rod, Willy—let the line straighten out behind you,” I said more than a few times. With him in the bow, my own fly-fishing range was limited, but for some reason I kept at it, if testily. “Front of the boat, Will. Remember, we talked about how when you’re in the bow you cast to the front of the boat so the other guy has somewhere to fish? Remember?”

  Had I gotten rusty at this or what, I wondered.

  Around eight, we ran up to the mouth of the Elota River, where there were acres of purple water hyacinth and steep cliffs on either side of us, and a two-foot-long gray and yellow lizard sleeping on a rock. The fishing was cramped and snaggy, and Willy was getting hung up a lot. I finally put my rod up to attend to him full-time. This is what you came here for, I reminded myself.

  After a while Willy’s casting smoothed out, and when a nice bass swirled on some bait in the shallows, he covered the fish quickly and accurately and caught it on a chartreuse popper.

  “You’re right!” Willy said to me. “I let the bug sit that time before I popped it.”

  “Good going, Mr. Will. You’ve got it under control now, buddy,” I told him.

  And he did—or part of it, anyway. I thought of all the other parts he had to look forward to, now that he was good and hooked. I remembered my older son Latham’s first big brook trout, caught in a beaver pond in Maine; my daughter Greta’s first fly-rod bonefish, caught in Venezuela. I remembered all three of them learning how to short-stroke yellowfin tuna on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, learning to double-haul, and to paddle a canoe. All that was out in front of Willy if he wanted it to be, along with his first tarpon, tying his first fly, casting into big wind. A lifetime of things.

  On the evening of our first day at El Salto, when Willy and I were in the zone—the sun was setting, the bass were on the bite, and the magic of fishing was happening to him for the first time—he said, “I think I want to be a full-time fisherperson like you, Charles.” That’s neat, I thought. I didn’t bother going into the sacrifice in income. It was almost dark and Xavier was getting antsy, but Willy kept on casting. I opened a beer and stretched out, watching him, and thought, in the beer-ad cliché, it doesn’t get much better than this. I watched him and hoped very specifically that, full-time or not, Willy would come to love and practice fishing enough that he would have it when he needed it—so that he could call up moments like this one to be his friends when things were desperate or miserable for him. I thought of all the healing and peace and camaraderie that fishing had given me since Otto Hahn’s boat, and how memories and dreams of fishing had always been friends I could count on when I needed them. While Willy kept casting into the dark, I drank my beer and hoped hard for another young life to be skewed like that by fishing.

  Mr. Will caught a second bass on the chartreuse popper at the mouth of the river and then he sat down. “You can fish now, Charles,” he said. “Maybe you’ve learned something.”

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN IN GODZONE

  NEW ZEALAND IS THE MOST OPTIMISTIC PLACE IN THE world. Today, for example, is already tomorrow in New Zealand, and you can’t get any more optimistic than that. Residents of the lovely fruit- and wine-producing region of Hawkes Bay on the east coast of the North Island advertise themselves as being the first people on earth to see the sun rise each day, and I plan to be there with them on January 1, 2000, to witness—a day before the rest of you—the most optimistic single moment of the next thousand years: sunrise on the first day of a millennium as yet unblemished for even a second by human screw-ups.

  I myself will almost certainly be beset by grave doubts, and I want to be standing there with a glass of Hawkes Bay Cabernet in hand hard by my man Geoff Thomas when that first millennial sun bulges out of the Pacific. “So how do you think this next one will go?” I’ll ask Thomas.

  “Ahh, she’ll be right, mate. She’ll be right.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yehyehyeh,” the Possum will say, and, tiring of his poncey little wineglass, will just start drinking straight from the bottle. “Shitchyeh.”

  Among the many human enterprises that run rough without the lubricant of optimism, hunting deer from a tiny helicopter ranks right up there with trout fishing—which might be part of the reason why New Zealand is the world’s capital for both.

  Geoff Thomas’s mate Steve “Golfie” Gamble is a legendary commercial hunter of deer from tiny helicopters who got his nickname from coming up with the improbable practice of stunning deer for live capture by firing golf balls at them from a specially bored rifle. A short, quick, wiry man, hard and merry, with a tidy mustache, a tough, boxer’s face, outsized hands, and ropy forearms often covered with deer blood, Golfie makes a living by piloting his little two-seater Robinson at treetop level across mountainsides and into the beech-choked valleys of New Zealand’s South Island, zigging and zagging behind sprinting deer through country so remote and rugged that walkouts are measured in days,
while his son Greg hangs by a seatbelt out the doorless passenger side, either shooting buckshot at the animals or “live-trapping” by firing an eight-foot-diameter net over them from a net-gun at a range of twenty-five yards or less. As well it should, this employment pays well (Golfie and his son gross up to $350,000 N.Z. a year supplying a strong foreign market for venison, antlers, and hides, and a domestic one for live deer), but both the overhead and the risks are horrendous. Nearly sixty deer-hunting chopper pilots and shooters have died on the job since the late 1970s.

  Despite its hazards, Golfie relishes his work. He also relishes his downtime, a good bit of which is given over to blue cod fishing, and Geoff Thomas, Tom Montgomery, my thirty-two-year-old son Latham, and I had driven down to the southernmost end of the South Island to join him for a spot of that before working our way north again in pursuit of New Zealand’s more heralded trout.

  This was near the beginning of the eighth angling road trip Thomas and I have taken together in his country, but the first in nine years of mixed fortunes for both of us. If I had harbored any doubts about whether or not I was still resilient enough for one of his nonstop, balls-out sporting tours, I had lost them over the past two days crawling around in the mud behind the Possum hunting Canada geese near Fiordland National Park, and I was now simply and purely delighted to be under way again in the place where I have always been able to see more clearly than anywhere else on earth the difference between the hawk of living and the handsaw of getting by.

  Over the years Thomas and I have learned that it always pays to begin a fishing trip in New Zealand with a confidence booster, a little easy and profligate ripping of lips, before getting down to the often maddeningly real thing with the trout, and Golfie had promised that the obliging blue cod would give us exactly that opportunity. But anyone can just learn something to be true and then act intelligently on that knowledge; Geoffrey and I have always disdained the easy way. When we arrived in Tuatapere, Golfie’s hometown, at around noon on the day before the blue cod trip, Tom made plans to go up in the Robinson with Golfie for a tour of the coast, Latham opted for a walk around town, and Geoffrey and I decided to go look for some trout to savage.

  Tuatapere calls itself “the sausage capital of New Zealand,” but the local restaurant had only one sausage. We split it four ways for lunch, then Geoff and I drove forty minutes north to a little river running out of Lake Monowai that promised to be easy and confidence-boosting, but lied. All afternoon and into the evening we were beaten and insulted by trout that were as obnoxiously picky about what they would and wouldn’t eat as New York models. In fact, as I pointed out to Thomas, for all we caught, we might as well have spent the afternoon casting little cheeseburger flies onto a fashion show runway.

  But the next day, drained of confidence as we were, we managed to exact a bloody revenge. After most of a bottle of Scotch and a four-Maalox feed at Golfie’s house that night of crayfish tails, mutton chops, and goose and duck stroganoff, no one felt much like rising at 5:30 A.M. to go deep-sea fishing—least of all Golfie and Geoff, who had stayed up yarning and finishing the Scotch for hours after everyone else went to bed. Yet Thomas—at his toughest as usual when the going gets tough—managed to rouse himself into an almost offensive cheeriness by the time we had driven thirty miles along the coast to Gardiner’s Bay, a foggy, rocky, desolate sort of place that was our boat-launch for cod fishing.

  “Right,” he said, rubbing his hands together and bobbing his head as we stepped out of the vehicles into a cold fog. “Now we’re on a bloody fishing trip, eh, Golfie?”

  “Now we’re bloody fishing,” Golfie agreed.

  “The point here, mates,” said Thomas, “is to catch all the blue cod in New Zealand.”

  “To catch the last bloody blue cod in New Zealand,” said Golfie, struggling for emphasis through a terminal-looking hangover.

  Geoff and Latham went with Golfie and his son Greg in Golfie’s little inboard. Tom and I were in a well-used eighteen-foot outboard with Golfie’s friend Horace the bushman and his crew—John, with the beard and long hair and no inclination to talk, and Taylor the Maori. Both boats puttered out together for about a mile through a swelly sea into Foveaux Strait, with Antarctica the next stop south, and anchored up where Horace felt was right, in seventy-five feet of water. Just visible through a lifting fog off our starboard bow was Stewart Island, New Zealand’s third and smallest island—the anchor of Maui.

  The creation of New Zealand, according to Maori legend, is, fittingly, a fish story. One day the demigod Maui, who lived in Hawaiki, the original Polynesian homeland of the native Maori people of New Zealand, went out fishing with his brothers. They went a long way out to sea—somewhere close to where we were angling for blue cod, in fact—before Maui pulled out his magic fishhook, made from the jawbone of his sorceress grandmother, and threw it over. Soon he hooked a giant fish, so big he had to toss out his anchor to keep the canoe from being towed. That anchor became Stewart Island. The fish he finally wrestled to the surface became the North Island. And the South Island, its entire length lying just off our stern, is what became of Maui’s canoe.

  The islands were named Aoteraroa, “land of the long white cloud,” by the Polynesian explorers who discovered them, sailing from Hawaiki (possibly one of the islands in the Marquesas group) in canoes over a thousand years ago, guided only by the stars and a gifted navigator named Kupe. Lying halfway between the Equator and the South Pole, the temperate islands they found—the largest by far in the Pacific—were a virtual paradise: with no mammals other than bats, but with fish-crowded coastal waters and forests teeming with more than 150 different species of birds, including the flightless and luckless moa, which stood as high as ten feet and was soon hunted into extinction for its flesh and feathers by the original New Zealanders. Today, though the moa is gone and the country is not without conservation and environmental problems, New Zealand (or “Godzone,” as it is known in and out of the country to the countless numbers of people who, like myself, believe it to be just that) is still like a Noah’s Ark of the world’s natural pleasures and thrills and beauties and fruitfulness—so completely the other side of the rainbow for anyone who fishes or hunts or otherwise adventures outdoors, that it is still possible there to want to catch the last blue cod.

  For two or three hours we gave it our best shot. Using old boat rods with taped-on guides, rusty star-drag reels with arbors one-fifth full of frayed monofilament, two links of a logging chain for sinkers, and big, dull hooks baited with chunks of very ripe cod from the last trip, we began almost immediately to haul up fish. They were greenish blue, long-finned, big-mouthed creatures, about two to five pounds apiece. We also caught some little red, surprised-looking soldierfish. Everything went flopping into the fish box regardless of size or make. Then Taylor brought up a small dogfish shark. With his knife he sliced it up the gills, ripped open its stomach, and cut off its tail before throwing it back into the sea.

  “Not fond of dogfish, huh?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I got nothin’ particular against ’em,” said Taylor.

  We were catching a cod about every thirty seconds on our boat, and Latham and Greg were doing about the same on theirs, anchored forty yards away from us, while Geoff and Golfie lay on the deck not feeling altogether tip-top. More dogfish met the same fate as the first, and pretty soon our deck was awash in shark blood. The fish box was filling. Mollyhawks, mutton birds, and gulls swarmed around us, picking pieces of shark off the rolling sea. After a while Golfie’s puking could be heard over the rock music coming from a tape player on his boat. Our boat was quieter. Though Taylor occasionally hollered while bringing in a particularly good dogfish or cod, Horace and John fished with somber, wordless intent, their eyes as distracted and hooded as if they were planning a revolution.

  On a normal day, Horace told me on the run back in, he and John and Taylor would bring home two-hundred-plus blue cod. I didn’t doubt it: we had over forty of the sad-faced, bugeyed little th
ings in the fish box after only a couple hours of fishing. And how often did they go out? I wondered. As often as they could—maybe three or four times a week.

  It was the full-unrestricted-utilization-of-the-resource approach to fishing and hunting—born of plenty, passed along in a gene, perhaps by moa hunters—that is still as fight-provokingly dear to the hearts of many Kiwis as their all-black national rugby team. You used to see more of it all over the country when I first started going there fifteen years ago. Then it was accepted practice to kill many if not most of the large trout you caught; now it no longer is. Then it was common to kill every billfish boated in the Bays of Plenty and Islands; now it’s not. But your average Kiwi sportsman is still pretty much unmoved by talk of seasons and licenses and limits, etc., which seem to many of them decadent, imported concepts from countries such as our own that have long ago crapped their own nests and now like to natter on about rules and regulations to others who have not yet completed the job. And nowhere is that sportsman more unmoved than in Southland—New Zealand’s Wild West. So Tom and Latham and I kept our fastidious opinions to ourselves about how many kept blue cod is too many, and in fact accepted every one that Horace and Golfie offered us for our drive north.

  We began that drive about ten-thirty after a cup of tea with Golfie and his wife and four or five of Golfie’s friends, two of whom were also helicopter deer hunters. Ten days later in Auckland we would read about their chopper going down in the bush; miraculously unhurt, they walked out in two days and immediately bought another helicopter. Loaded down with blue cod, abalone, crayfish, and sea urchins from Golfie, we popped in an oldies tape and headed northeast to meet Ron Stewart.