Aren has walls and structures dating back to the fifteenth century, a fine Baroque cathedral, a museum dedicated to the dinosaurs whose formidable footprints have been discovered nearby, and—on a hilltop above it—the ruins of a Romanesque castle. But its most distinguishing and improbable feature is the Fonda Casa Domenc, a dowdy bar and restaurant situated on the village square, out of whose tiny kitchen is served some of the finest foods in Spain.
Proprietor, bartender, head chef, and sommelier of the Fonda Casa Domenc is the indefatigable and gregarious Juan Antonio Pascual Anmella, whose family has owned the watering hole for almost three hundred years. Juan Antonio also owns and operates the only tourist accommodation in the village, a plain but endearing small hotel called La Ribagorza Lodge and Spa, which is a two-minute walk down a cobblestone street from the restaurant.
After we had unpacked at the Lodge, we were met at the restaurant by Ivan Tarin, the Spanish outfitter for our trip. Through his company, Salvelinus (the Latin name for brook trout), Ivan has been organizing and guiding fly-fishing expeditions through the Spanish Pyrenees since 2001, and more recently—to meet a growing demand for them—providing ancillary activities for non-angling spouses and friends of his fishermen.
Ivan is crisp, volatile, garrulous, and hyper-active. He is also a superb trout guide, and a well-organized and innovative outfitter who now oversees a staff of seven first-rate guides and one for clients who do not fish; manages his own lodge and a fly-fishing school in the western Pyrenees; services upward of 150 international clients; and, during his long season of March 1 to November 30, puts those clients with fly rods onto over fifty mountain lakes, fourteen main rivers, and sixty tributaries, and sends those without rods on day-long guided van trips to medieval towns, monasteries, and castles, to parks, mountain hikes, wineries, and bird watches. It is a daunting one-man undertaking, and if Ivan appears from time to time a bit frazzled by its demands, his day-to-day operations on my two trips with him have run with laudably few hitches.
For each of our four days based in Aren we would breakfast as a group at 8 a.m. on fresh neon-yolked eggs and fruit, cheeses, smoked meats, and toasted slices of baguette rubbed with tomato and garlic and drenched in olive oil. Then our six non-anglers (or “Phallic Knockers” as they preferred to be called, for reasons too occult to go into here) would leave in their van with a driver and tour-guide for a full day of . . . knocking around the Pyrenees, while the anglers sallied off into five pairs, each with a guide in his vehicle, to a staggering variety of prime trout fishing.
On Monday, you and your partner might find yourself fishing one of the many bouldery mountain freestone rivers for shy, gorgeously marked zebra trout. On Tuesday, you could be chucking streamers for hog rainbows in a reservoir; on Wednesday, fishing small dries and nymphs for sixteen-to twenty-inch spring-creek browns; and on Thursday, helicoptered up for a day of lights-out fishing on one of the stunningly beautiful Ibons which Salvelinus angles.
There are over 2,500 high-mountain glacial lakes, or Ibons, in the Pyrenees, about 25 percent of which hold trout (most of them hold brook trout; a few, browns only). These lakes are found at altitudes of 6,000 feet or higher and are accessible only by long hikes that leave little time for fishing, or by helicopter if the weather is right. We were graced by perfect early fall weather for our entire stay—clear skies, leaves showing their first colors, cool enough in the mornings for a fleece, warming to shirtsleeve temperatures by midday—so all of our anglers were able to experience a day on an Ibon. And what a day that is: you, your partner, and guide are solo tenants of the frigid sapphire lake, surrounded by steep cliffs that give way to a forest of granite peaks soaring as high as 9,000 feet, cutting a cerulean circle in the sky, and settling onto you and your Ibon a magisterial amphitheater hush. And the fishing? How does casting dry flies to cruising brook trout and releasing thirty or forty of those jewel-like beauties over two halves of a day, broken by a fine shore lunch, a bottle of Rioja, a Cuban stogie, and a siesta sound?
Our two groups would gather together again around 9 p.m. for dinner each night at a long table in the stone wine cellar of the restaurant Domenc. Cooked by Juan Antonio and his chef de cuisine, Raluca, in a kitchen the size of a coat closet, every one of those dinners was a seven- or eight-course marvel of impeccably-prepared local foods matched with excellent Spanish wines from the restaurant’s distinguished cellar. A shooter of cream of zucchini might be followed by a carpaccio of tuna with pomegranate vinaigrette, and that by a timbale of potato with black trumpet mushrooms and quail eggs, and that by a crispy black sausage with tomato marmalade, and that by trotters with porcinis.
After long days of fishing and phallic-knocking and some three hours of laboring at Juan Antonio’s groaning board, it was an exhausted and overserved company that retired each night to the down comforters of Ribagorza Lodge, only to get up the next morning and repeat the exercise. But all of that company being made of stern stuff, there were very few complaints.
On our fourth day, we took regretful leave of Juan Antonio and fished and knocked our way east, while our bags were being transferred to the trip’s second location in south-central Catalonia near the town of Peramola. That morning, while my wife and her friends in the van were touring the deserted but perfectly preserved buildings in the medieval village of Montanana, my great fishing pal Nana Lampton and I were mulling over one of the conundrums that so often raise trout fishing from mere sport to an ensnarement in a single-minded and addictive fascination with what is difficult.
From a bridge over a tail-water river so movingly lovely, I would settle for it being the one that runs through Heaven, Nana and I and our redoubtable guide Serge Vazeat are looking down at a large, clear, slow-water pool in which at least a half dozen outsized rainbow and brown trout, each between twenty-five and thirty inches long, are eating insects too small to see off the surface in slow surges that bring their great dark backs and dorsal fins, shark-like, out of the slack current. Just beneath that current waves a jungle of weeds. The two-part conundrum is this: it is all but impossible to wade within casting distance of these trout without spooking them; and if you do manage to hook one, the fish would be all but impossible to land through the weeds on the ultra-fine leader tippet and miniscule fly you will have to use to tempt it to eat.
One is, of course, always well-advised to listen to one’s guide—particularly when he is as expert and knowledgeable of his fishery as Serge is. But after a certain point in your history with it, the sharpest joy of trout fishing can come to reside in a masochistic attempt to solve unsolvable problems, so Nana and I ignored Serge’s quite reasonable advice to go upstream and catch some catchable fish and instead spent a riveting hour trying to catch these. I would love to tell you that we did so. What I can tell you is that it was for both of us the trip’s most memorable hour of fishing; and that I will recall the two trout I hooked—on a fly the size of a peppercorn, then promptly broke off in the weeds—long after all the ones I caught.
For the next three nights we lodged splendidly at the Hotel Can Boix, a small four-star resort featuring an Olympic-sized pool and tennis court, commodious rooms, fetching grounds, and a kitchen serving excellent Catalan victuals.
Located in the Alt Urgell area of Catalonia, Can Boix sits cupped in a swerve of hills at the base of a sheer, craggy cliff, and overlooks the medieval town of Peramola, the valley of the Serge River, and a timeless countryside of mountain pastures and grain fields, shepherds herding their flocks with crooks, and women selling wild mushrooms out of their aprons. Hannibal crossed the Alt Urgell with his elephants on the way to Italy, and it has been inhabited since pre-history. It is one of Europe’s most important areas for Romanesque art and architecture, and it was to these attractions that the Knockers bent their attentions over next two days, while the anglers fished the Segre.
Flowing through the Alt Urgell for forty-six kilometers, the Segre is Spain’s greatest trophy trout river and one of the greatest anywhere. While
wading it by myself the year before, I released in one short afternoon four rainbows and a brown, all over twenty inches long, and three of them over twenty-five. This year, due to recent heavy rains, the river was the color of café con leche, and the fishing in it was slow, even during a blizzard-like evening hatch of white mayflies.
If the Segre trout were off their feed, our group was anything but on the trip’s next to last night at El Moli restaurant. It was 9:30 when the anglers and the Knockers met up there—the former just out of waders, the latter just out of their van from an afternoon of visiting a restored thousand-year-old farmhouse, all of us peckish.
Which is how they like you at El Moli. Located in a small village hard by the banks of the Segre, this is one of the very few restaurants I would happily crawl naked through a field of nettles to eat in. Outrageously picturesque, it is housed in a centuries-old stone building whose ground floor consists of a bar and cavernous dining room, the two separated by shelves holding bottles of local wines and grappa, house-made manchegos, olive oil and smoked meats, and jars of quail eggs, tomato relish, and garbanzos. All the food served at El Moli is organically grown by its owners, the lovely Lydia, her chef husband, and her wizened, life-loving father, Santiago, whose main job appears to be flirting with the women who visit the establishment.
Under the dour gaze of the wild boar heads decorating the dining room walls, we sat at a twenty-foot table until after midnight eating tapas of olives, almonds, Iberian ham, and hard cheeses; then tomato and mint salad, round potato and onion omelets, lamb and boar sausages. We toasted the trip, each other, the restaurant, Lydia, Santiago (at his insistence, more than once), and anything else we could think of with cava and house vino tinto, pouring those into our mouths in often erring streams out of long-spouted glass porrons. And, on the way back to the table from the bano, I had a brief conversation with a guy at the bar.
He was a big, pig-tailed, scar-faced, broken-nosed bacan with a carefree face and a sheepdog on a leash. He told me he was a painter and pointed out some of his canvasses hanging behind the bar, all of which featured undressed, lasciviously rendered females. “I can see you like the women,” I said to him.
“All,” he said, and grinned hugely. “Women, art, wine, food, fishing, the mountains. All with the others very strong!”
I shook this man’s hand and called him brother.
HOME WATERS
UNTIL I WAS OUT OF COLLEGE AND MARRIED, MY FATHER and I rarely got along anywhere but in a fishing boat. Mostly it was my fault that we didn’t get along. I was not an easy kid to raise, particularly for a man who was almost forty when I was born, a perfectionist who was forced to spend his middle years wrestling both with himself and certain members of the family he had married into and felt, therefore, a little chapped about having gotten for an only son a kid with a six-foot wild hair up his rear end who needed wrestling, too.
My father was, back then, a man of strenuous and often debilitating appetites. In his forties he nearly died from a bleeding ulcer he got from the IRS and too much rich food. His own father died the color of a peach from booze, and so would my father have, had he not sometime in his fifties, finally and for good, won his twenty-year-long struggle with that particular appetite. His appetite for money and professional success, though it got him in the end most of what he wanted, was soured for a long time by the frustrations of putting his good mind and MIT engineering degree to work for those things within the stodgy, hierarchical family business he married into. In the years between when he retired at sixty-seven and when he died at eighty-three, his appetites ran mostly to electric sheets, tennis, Hawaiian Punch, warm weather, Belgian loafers, and travel. About the only hunger he had in common then with himself at fifty, or forty, or twenty, was for fishing—the one thing he could never get enough of in middle age that didn’t disagree with him.
My father started me fishing for redfish in Florida before I was five, and he taught me to fly-fish before I was ten. By then we had moved from Florida to Birmingham, Alabama, and he was in full swing, wearing himself thin. He fished with buddies all over the world back then, for various reasons. At home, in home waters, I think he fished mostly to recover; for that, and to give himself and me time to get along.
I’d be in trouble in school. Or Bobby Carlson and Frank Young and I would have been seen running naked down the Mountain Brook Parkway, or caught shooting out street lamps with BB guns. My father would come home from the office, sit in his lounge chair in front of the TV and hear about it, still dressed in his suit pants and a button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, still looking avid from the day but worn down by it, too. He would sit and ponder whatever it was I had done, then get suddenly crisp around the mouth. My mother would ask that “it” wait until after dinner, which was served every evening at six-fifteen on the dot by a black man and woman with whom I was on much more intimate terms than I was with my father. “It” came about eight-thirty or nine o’clock, and consisted usually of a half-dozen measured strokes to my butt with a two-foot-long shoehorn. It never occurred to me then that my father was often spanking more than me. I believed then, and do now, that I usually deserved what I got and therefore I didn’t understand until much later the gesture that sometimes followed the spankings. I’d be in bed, maybe asleep. He’d open the door to my room and stand there for a minute, backlit by the hall. “Son?” he’d say.
He’d walk into the room, sit on the side of my bed, and bend over and hug me, smelling of bourbon. Then, if it was spring or summer or fall, my father would say, “We’ll go fishing on Saturday.”
The first home water I remember was at Louis Ford’s ranch on the Black Warrior River near Tuscaloosa. Louis had for fishing water not only the river but a number of ponds and lakes full of bass, crappie, and big bluegills. We’d fish the lakes on the surface in the morning and late afternoons for bass, using Dalton Specials and a lure Louis said imitated a baby bird fallen out of a nest. In the middle of the day my father and I could take sardines and crackers and RC Colas down the slow, muddy river, and fill the boat with crappie and bluegills. Sometimes Louis would go with us on the river and tell stories while he fished—like about the time my father kept the boat from sinking when a stump tore a hole in the bow below the waterline and he patched it on the spot with a raincoat and screws he took out of an old wooden tackle box.
Louis was a big, red-faced, horn-handed countryman, and he and my father loved each other. One winter my father invited Louis up to a formal dance at a country club in Birmingham. Somehow, dressed in an unfamiliar tuxedo, Louis got his feelings hurt at the dance and drove himself and his beautiful wife home to Tuscaloosa. He and my father didn’t see much of each other after that night. Louis died years later without either of them having put a patch to whatever happened at the party.
For a few years after Louis’s place, our home water was a series of private bass lakes around Birmingham that belonged to friends and business associates of my father’s. Some of those lakes were prettier or fishier than others, but every one of them gave my father pleasure and calm. If it was a weekday during the summer, he would come home from the office around two and we would fish until dark. If it was Saturday or Sunday, we would fish all day.
Before we actually got to the lake, on the car ride out or during the meticulous preparations we made together before we left, he could be thinking about things and irritable, his painstaking reaction to stress shunted for the time being into worrying the tackle, electric motor, batteries, and rain gear together, or into wondering if I had on enough clothes or had been to the bathroom. But once we reached the lake and he opened the door to one of his succession of yachtlike Buicks, stepped out, and looked at the water, he quit wrestling anything. It was time out for him, and he would come open like a fist unclenching. I could have broken into his liquor cabinet the night before, stolen a car, and driven through the lobby of the Alabama Theater, and all he’d have to say about it beside a bass lake the next day—grinning hungrily, grabbing the rods
and the tackle box, and leaving me to bring the motor and batteries down—would be, “Come on, Skip. You can’t catch fish with your worm out of water.”
It didn’t matter whether we caught fish or not, though we usually did—the entire time we were on the lake he was delighted and noisy. He would sit in the back running the electric motor, both of us fly-fishing a bank with yellow poppers. He would point out beaver signs and wild fruit trees, and instruct me on how to smell a bream bed and how to tell in my sinuses when low pressure was coming, and he would talk nonstop—about “Crunch and Des” stories, John Alden Knight, his youth—his voice so detached and unemphatic and continuous that you had the impression he was not so much talking as just scoring his fishing.
When I was thirteen my father bought his own lake near a place called Margaret about forty-five minutes from Birmingham. Lake Tadpole, as we called it, was home water to him until he died, and to me until I married and left Alabama. Tadpole was really two lakes, a small upper one and a twelve-acre lower one, set in a valley in the north Alabama hills. It was and is a beautiful place—the big lake a buxom, feminine shape ringed by dogwoods and fruit trees and old pines—and he and I believed it was as good a piece of bass water as there was in Alabama. But its real significance to me was as the place where my father and I went to get along after I ran away from one prep school and was kicked out of another; after his mother died; after I left college and hitchhiked around the country for a year working on mackerel boats and mango farms; and, after finally realizing I would never come to work for it, he sold the division of the family company that he had built from scratch.
The Next Valley Over Page 22