The Red Smith Reader

by Dave Anderson

  “There is no corporate position on him,” he said, “but I sometimes wish he had gone into another line of work.”

  This was shortly after sunrise on a high, rocky bank of the Toutle River, a tributary of the Cowlitz, which is a tributary of the Columbia. The Toutle was then a beautiful stream of white rapids, great jagged boulders and pale green depths.

  Farther down, it plunged through Hollywood Gorge, so-called because of a scene in an old movie entitled God’s Country and the Woman, starring George Brent. In the film a logging train was derailed on the canyon’s lip and the logs plunged into the rapids far below. Now and then people used to try to navigate Hollywood Gorge by canoe or rubber raft, and it wasn’t a good idea. One who tried it with an inner tube resurfaced four days later in the Cowlitz.

  There was a fisherman every fifty feet or so along the Toutle that day. Most had spinning rods and drifted plastic imitations of steelhead roe along the bottom, hanging up on rocks every few feet. The river banks were littered with tangled monofilament and broken lures.

  A man and woman made their way upstream. In each hand he carried a steelhead hooked on a forked stick. She wore a blue bandanna about her head and a studiously nonchalant expression. “She caught era,” the man said. Later another man came by with two fish. He said only he and the lady of the blue bandanna had scored that morning, but minutes after that a fish came out of the water about five feet from where Jack Murphy stood on the bank. The steelhead had taken a spoon cast by a man a little way upstream.

  The Nelson party suffered skunkage, as the late John Randolph used to phrase it, but a day of fishing can be richly rewarding without fish. Nobody else had breathed this mountain air recently. Forests of dark fir climbed peaks outlined raggedly against the spotless sky. The river sang and shouted. Oliver Twist couldn’t ask for more.

  Next day it was on to the Cowlitz, then the most productive steelhead river in the world. The steelhead, as you know, is a rainbow trout with wanderlust. Hatched in fresh water, he goes to sea as a smolt about nine inches long, ranges widely and eats ravenously. Two or three or maybe five years later, he returns to the stream of his birth with nothing but love in view. At sea the rainbow’s pink stripe and blushing fins turn to silver and the head becomes steel gray, but after a time in the river his color returns.

  In 1972 anglers took 46,000 steelhead from the Cowlitz and in the record month of December 1971, the catch was 19,000, which is greater than the annual yield of Washington’s No. 2 River, the Skagit.

  The Cowlitz was a wide, tossing torrent, too big to wade. Four guys from the Washington Department of Game provided boats, expertise and companionship. They used casting rods and their lures were little wads of wool yarn in two tones of pink. Steelhead, like the Atlantic salmon, do not feed actively during the spawning run, but small bright morsels seem to catch their attention. Eight of ten steelhead interviewed thus far said they had mistaken these morsels for shrimp or roe.

  For a stranger, the river was impossible to read but Dave Gufler and Jim Briscoe of the Game Department knew where the pools were. They would anchor at the head of a pool and let the current roll their lures over the rocky bottom. Their companion, using a flyrod, took three jack salmons on the surface. None weighed more than a pound but they all had a terrible temper. The jack is a precocious king salmon who comes back to the river ahead of his age group.

  A steelhead took Gutter’s tuft of yarn, leaped in a twisting frenzy and took off. Briscoe made three passes with the net before he came into the boat. Then Briscoe fought and outpointed a leaping silver torpedo.

  “Would you let me try that flyrod for a while?” Briscoe asked the guest. He handed over his casting rod, which he had surreptitiously rigged with a green Hot Shot. This lure, a comparatively new development at that time, was a plastic minnow that a retarded chimpanzee could fish successfully. You just dropped it in the current and it went and found steelhead. It found two for the guest, beautiful, leaping, gallant adversaries.

  Today these grand rivers are fouled with mud, choked with debris. Thousands of acres of Douglas fir lie flattened by the blast. President Carter surveyed an abomination of desolation from a helicopter. “The moon,” he said, “looks like a golf course compared to what’s up there.”

  ASSAULT BY A FISHERPERSON

  ILE D’ANTICOSTI, QUEBEC, 1976

  We hold these truths to be self-evident: that if God had intended man for racing, He would have given him four legs like a horse; and that the only sensible way to travel is in a yellow convertible with the top down. With Montreal heaving and panting with foot-racers in this second week of the Olympics, it was obviously the right time to put children’s games aside and come off to Anticosti Island to kill a salmon. Anticosti lies in the Gulf of St. Lawrence northeast of the Gaspé Peninsula and men have been making war on salmon here since Frontenac, the governor of New France, granted it to Louis Joliet in 1680 as a reward for discovering the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. (To be sure, DeSoto got to the Mississippi first, but he was a Spaniard and the French had never heard of him.) After almost 300 years of hand-to-fin combat, the human population of the island has grown to 235 and the fish are reduced to a few million.

  To reach Anticosti you fly Quebecair from Montreal to Quebec to Baie Comeau to Sept Iles, then change to a subsidiary airline called Les Ailes du Nord (Wings of the North), which serves the island metropolis of Port Menier in leisurely fashion. You can get to the island in about four hours and get off in less than a lifetime, fog permitting. Your luggage takes a little longer—say about three days.

  Joliet built a fort here and established cod and seal fisheries. After a century or so the island passed to other ownership and in 1895 it was bought by Henri Menier, the French chocolate king. He stocked it with elk, buffalo, and other fauna and built a chateau that burned down in 1952. He also evicted several hundred squatters who were doing a lively business in salvaging goods from shipwrecks. Since Jacques Cartier discovered Anticosti in 1535 it has been the scene of more than 400 wrecks with loss of 4,000 lives, but not all were purposely arranged by the squatters.

  In 1926 the Consolidated Paper Company bought the island from Menier’s heirs. Until two years ago the company continued to lease fishing rights on salmon rivers where Menier had built camps. Then the province of Quebec bought Anticosti as a provincial park. There are now three camps accommodating four fishermen each (or hunters in deer season) for $125 a person for a minimum of two days and three with eight beds each at $1,000 or $1,600 a person for six days. All rates include meals and guides.

  When the Wings of the North sat down on the gravel landing strip at Port Menier the cargo included Pierre d’ Auteuil of the Ministère de Tourisme de la Chasse et de la Pêche, one fisherman, one fisherperson and no luggage. Ah, well, said Pierre, who is young and hopeful, there would be clothing, boots and fishing tackle at Riviere a la Loutre (Otter River). He introduced Paul Boulet, who would guide the party. Paul is ruggedly handsome, dark, with curly black hair and deep, lustrous eyes. He has been guiding for ten years. Mario Andretti should have his way with a Ford pickup truck.

  In Quebec, Harold Martel of the Ministry of Tourism of the Hunt and of the Fish had said the streams on Anticosti were so low the salmon were committing hara-kiri on rocks but Paul reported that a good rain two nights back had raised La Loutre a couple of inches and started fish moving. La Loutre was 55 miles away, he said, on the south shore.

  It was only a mile or so as the pickup lurches before the fisherperson spotted a deer in the evergreens beside the road. Paul said the island, about 150 miles by 35 at its widest point, had a deer population of 60,000. They are descendants of 150 bucks and does imported in 1897.

  Moments later the fisherperson saw a second deer, a second doe, then a fawn. Around a bend, the truck startled a fawn in the road posing for a calendar. He made for the woods where his mom waited. Farther on a mother and child made way for the pickup, the fawn leaping to safety, the doe taking her time. Paul turne
d off on a side road where a buck was just leading a doe out of the forest to show her his etchings. Finally, beside a stream near journey’s end, Pierre saw still another deer, the tenth of the drive.

  The lodge at La Loutre is a simple frame house on a rise beside the river about 300 yards from its mouth, commanding a view of forest and sea. It is the oldest of the camps, opened in 1918. Paul said that before there were roads, fishermen reached it by boat and rode horseback to the pools. A stove in the living room burns bottled gas and on a wall is a color photograph marked “Wilson Pool, July 1967.” It shows thirty salmon abreast in clear water.

  With a couple of hours of daylight after dinner, Paul drove to a pool he called Quatorze (Fourteen). Here the stream runs swiftly between low gravel banks and turns square left against limestone ledges with a big eddy to the right. Paul stationed Pierre and the fisherman at the head of the riffle, the fisherperson near the tail. The fisherman worked the riffle once without result and was walking back upstream, towing his fly, when he felt weight on the line. A brook trout of about fifteen inches was trying to eat the Black Ghost. The trout was for breakfast.

  Pierre’s rod tip bent and a shaft of silver shot out of the darkening pool. The fish leaped three times before Paul got a landing net under it. It was a young salmon, a grilse. On Anticosti, Paul said, salmon run from three to ten pounds and those under four are considered grilse. “Paul said the fish I catched was about three and a half pounds,” Pierre reported later.

  Since arrival at Quatorze, each visitor had worn a halo of tiny black flies, aggressively carnivorous. They concentrated on ears, bald spots, temples and necks, and wherever they hit they drew blood. A hat would have been some protection. In the missing luggage were two hats.

  “Why don’t they bite you, Paul?” the fisherperson asked as twilight came on and the clouds of insects thickened.

  “They are used to me,” Paul said. “We get along.”

  By bedtime, each bite had raised a lump the size of a hickory nut. The fisherman had often been called a knucklehead. This time it fit.

  THE BRAKES GOT DRUNK

  LAGUNA DEL MAULE, CHILE, 1953

  This typewriter is being beaten with fingers whose knuckles are bleeding and nails broken after hand-to-fin struggles with trout exactly the size, shape, and disposition of Tony Galento. Up here in the Andes fishing is a more perilous game than Russian roulette. If you survive the mountain road, there are rainbow in Lake Maule ready and willing to eat you for bait. Nothing is impossible to fish that live a mile and a half up in the sky.

  Lake Maule perches on the Chilean-Argentine border about twenty kilometers and two thousand feet above the sparse grove of maytenus trees at timberline where camp had been pitched the evening before. The last drop of fluid had drained out of the brakes of the old Chevrolet truck during the journey to campsite, and there are no filling stations along the narrow, twisting shelf that serves, more or less, as a road.

  Herman, the driver, halted trucks that passed camp occasionally with construction crews working on a dam at the lake. They told him oil would ruin the brakes, but said wine could serve as an emergency fluid.

  “Because it contains alcohol, eh?” said Captain Warren Smith, of Panagra. “We can do better than that. Where’s the Vat 69?”

  The Chevrolet scrambled up to the lake with a boiling radiator and a full brake cylinder, not the best truck in Chile, but by all odds the happiest.

  Maule straddles a pass in mountains entirely devoid of vegetation. They are bare peaks of volcanic rock crumbling into gray dust under the wind that blows eternally up this gorge from the west, making even these midsummer days uncomfortably cold. A little way out from the shore there is a belt of seaweed just under the surface where the trout lie and feed on a small pink crawfish called pancora. This shellfish diet gives the rainbows their majestic size, but it is the barren landscape that gives them their evil temperament. In all this desolation they brood.

  Captain Smith and his North American burden rode by outboard to the east end of the lake, where snow touched the Chilean mountains rising from the water’s edge and Argentine mountains showed just beyond. They started casting over the weed beds, using a smallish bronze-finish spoon of scarlet and orange. Almost immediately there was a grunt from the captain and wild splash. Something dark and shiny and altogether implausible came out of the water and returned. It looked like a trout, but not like the sort of trout people ordinarily see when their eyes are open.

  “You go on fishing,” Captain Smith said. “I’ll be awhile with this fellow.”

  His rod was a bow and his line hissed through the water. The fish was in and out of the lake, in and out, and then it was in the boat flopping on a gaff, a pink-striped brute of black and silver. “He’ll hit about nine pounds,” the captain said calmly.

  Thereafter the captain cought fish and his companion caught backlashes and weeds. So intense, however, is the dislike these trout have for people that even the least proficient angler is bound to be under attack.

  Between backlashes, a distant relative of Primo Camera sprang up for a look at the latest New York styles in outdoor apparel, made a face of hideous disapproval, and spat out the spoon.

  Another grabbed the same spoon and went into a terrifying rage. Four times in quick succession he stook up on his tail, snarling and shaking his head and cursing horribly. On the fourth jump he snapped the leader.

  Then Captain Smith had one that broke the leader and departed. Then it happened again to the amateur, but not before the whirling reel handle had smashed fingernails and stripped skin off awkward knuckles.

  By now half the population of the lake had taken a passion for collecting hardware. Six leaders were snapped and six spoons confiscated by force before it was decided that the fifteen-pound test nylon was faulty. There’s an awful lot of trout in Maule going around with their faces full of painted metal with nylon streamers. Maybe the style will catch on, like nose rings in the cannibal islands.

  With the spoon tied directly to the casting line, anybody could catch fish. Practically anybody did. The outboard would take the boat upwind to the lee of a point or island; then the wind would drift it swiftly over the weed beds. Duck and geese and tern and grebe swam on the water. Except for one other fishing party, the place belonged them and the fish.

  “Let’s take one more drift,” the captain suggested, “and call it a day.”

  Half a moment later his companion screamed. The reel handle was snatched from his grasp and the drag sang. A trout leaped, fell back on his side. He looked six fet long. He dived, wrenching off line. The boat drifted on, but he wouldn’t come along. Twice the captain ran the boat upwind, cautiously undoing knots the fish had tied around weeds. At length the sullen beast came aboard.

  He was a good twelve pounds, broad-shouldered, magnificently colored, and splendidly deep, like Jane Russell.

  BASS DERBY

  MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 1950

  The rain which had been falling in sudden sullen bursts all day backed off just before the arrival of Mr. Al Brickman, proprietor of Vineyard Haven’s popular stores, Abercrombie & Brickman and Bergdorf-Brickman. Mr. Brickman had contracted to show an ignoramus a thing or two about fishing in the annual Martha’s Vineyard striped bass derby, a month-long competition in which anglers who snatch the largest comestibles out of the oceans are rewarded with automobiles, cruisers, fishing tackle, etc.

  Mr. Brickman was accompanied by Stan Bryden, an island man, and General Charles W. Ryder, who recently switched his address from one island, Japan, to another island, Martha’s Vineyard. On the drive down to Menemsha Bight, all three explained that experience of surf casting was not essential to a derby candidate.

  “That boy Drake,” said Stan Bryden, “whose forty-pounder is leading the field right now, never caught a bass before he hooked this one.”

  “One day,” said Al Brickman, “there was an off-island kid over here on his honeymoon, borrowed some tackle and made one cas
t and got a backlash. While he was untangling the backlash, a bass took his plug. He couldn’t reel in so he just backed up inland and dragged the bass onto the beach. He lost the plug, and that night he come down to my store, bought another plug, went back and caught another striper.”

  At Menemsha Bight the bass-slayers got into hip boots and rubberized overalls and waterproofed parkas and lugged their tackle down to the beach. The tide was rampaging out through a narrow cut and there were perhaps half a dozen fishermen casting into the current from the rock jetty, with a dozen or so more strung out along the beach flinging their feathered jigs into the surf. The jigs, or plugs, or tin squids, are cigar-sized gobbets of lead with feather tails which, it is optimistically hoped, will look edible to large stupid fish.

  Either there weren’t any large fish or they weren’t stupid enough. The anglers kept heaving their jigs out to sea and reeling them in and nothing else kept happening. Nobody worked too hard. A guy would make a few fruitless casts, then thrust the butt of his rod into the sand and go light up a cigarette and tell some lies.

  “When I was a kid,” Al Brickman was saying, “a buddy and I used to camp down here in two pup tents and go fishing, and the things we’d catch you wouldn’t believe. Ever see a goose fish? They have two feet on ‘em webbed just like geese.”

  “See old Levi Jackson fishing down the beach there?” said Ted Henley, an island man. “Every time I see him I think of one time I saw him with a monkfish, which are as fat as this with a mouth that big. He’d stuffed this monkfish full of rocks and old scrap iron and all sorts of heavy stuff and then I saw him sewing up the fish’s big mouth. I watched, wondering what in the world he could be doing.

  “Well, he finally got the fish sewed up and then he picked it up like this and threw it overboard. I heard him say, “There, you slob. You’ve torn up my nets enough. You’ll never do it to anybody else.’ “

  A gull flew in from sea, wobbling crookedly, with something dangling from its claws. The bird alighted on the jetty close enough so you could see it had a surf-casting plug looped to one foot. Apparently it had been stupid enough to think this gadget of lead and feather was a fish.