It was late afternoon, mid-September; I’d driven to Shat Creek after a long stint of fly-tying and stopped on a one-lane bridge overlooking a deep pool. An old man stood at the head of the hole flinging a wobbler for salmon, but the water was so low and clear and the salmon so scarce he may as well have been fishing for Roosevelt elk. I didn’t know it yet, but this man was my temptor; what I did know was that the slack water in the shadow of the bridge was lousy with fat bluebacks, lying deep, waiting for rain or darkness to move upstream.
The water was too quiet for flyfishing, so I grabbed a light spinning rod and (alas, H2O) can of nightcrawlers, tied on a two-pound leader, crawled on hands and knees to the side of the pool, flicked in an unweighted worm, and presto! I was into a seventeen-inch fish. When it jumped the old man whoopied and came running, kicking rocks, stumbling, talking to himself, waving his arms—and boogering every blueback left in the hole. I landed my fish and killed it with a rock, then considered applying the same to the cranium of the old man, who was now trying to shake my hand while shouting what a nice jack salmon my trout was. But the fish were already spooked—right under a ledge at our feet—so in keeping with anti-Wolf-Clan philosophy I tried to be friendly. It wasn’t easy. While I tried to explain that the fish was a sea-run cutthroat the old guy nodded like he’d never said it was a jack and sent his five-inch half-pound wobbler crashing into the center of the pool: a couple more bluebacks zipped under the ledge. I said, “What are you doin’?”
“Gettin’ skunked, goddammit! Been fishin’ my ass off all day and not a bump. Whatcha say ya got that jack on?”
I lit a cigarette and sucked it till my head rang while adrenaline and nicotine ran a footrace inside me: if nicotine won I’d have to sit down to keep from passing out; if adrenaline won I’d push the old fart in the creek. I sat down. Oblivious of nicotine’s heroics on his behalf, the geezer kept strafing the pool with his B-52 wobbler. I watched him for a bit then turned away to keep from having to light another cigarette: why should I die of cancer so he could keep spooking the fish?
I heard a sigh and a plunk and turned to see he’d thrown his pole in the sand; he sat on a rock, grimaced, and said, “I’m plumb jinxed!”
“Or plumb dumb,” I muttered, lighting another cigarette.
“Huh?”
“Nuthin’.”
“Been here since early morning and nary a strike, and here you come for ten seconds and ZABBODABBO! ya nail a nice jack! How do you account for it?”
Between my nicotine and his zabbodabbo my head felt like it had a Liberty Bell in it. I stumped out the cigarette, caught my breath, and said, “Lampreys.”
“Huh?”
“Lampreys.”
“Whaddya mean, ‘lampreys’? What’s lampreys got to do with it?”
I said, “Listen Mr. Dabbo: you need lampreys out there, the way you fish. Lots of ’em.”
“How come?”
“Because fish have an organ in their head which we scientists call a ‘brain.’ It’s just a little brain, I’ll grant you, but it’s a brain nonetheless. But if a lamprey would latch onto a fish and suck its brain out, then the fish wouldn’t mind if somebody kicked rocks at it and waved at it and threw a nuclear-powered wobbler on a Transatlantic cable at it. So you ought to make it a rule of thumb always to fish where there’s plenty of brain-sucking lampreys.”
He said, “Oh,” and lit a cigar. Then he sat and watched me. I watched him back. An inch down the cigar he asked, “Why’d ya stop fishin’?”
I nodded toward the water. “No lampreys. Just a lot of trout. In shock.”
He said, “Oh,” and watched me. I watched him back. Another inch down the cigar he said, “Sorry.”
I liked him better then. I said, “That’s all right. If we keep quiet a while maybe they’ll hungry up.”
We fell to gabbing and he turned out to be congenial enough. He knew an awful lot about the fishing around the state—and I mean “awful”: everything he said was slightly askew, almost but not quite accurate, so that if you didn’t know better you could spend a lifetime checking out his advice, and you’d find it just true enough to have an awful lot of awful fishing trips. When his cigar turned rasty he threw it in the creek (zipzip went two sea-runs, ssszft went the cigar), then asked if I knew anything worth telling about “our grand old sport.” I said Yes. That was all I said. He waited and waited, then asked what it was I knew. I said I knew that if he wanted a grand old blueback he’d need lighter gear. He said, “I don’t have lighter gear.” And I amazed myself by saying “We can take turns with my pole.” His face lit up like a chain-smoker: he jumped to his feet, sent several chunks of basalt crashing into the pool, and zipzipzipzipzipzip went the bluebacks, back under the ledge. He cursed and apologized so profusely that I began to feel sorry for him; obviously the guy was a born oaf. I sat and pondered for a way to get this stumblebum into a sea-run… and had a brainstorm. I said, “Sit tight.” He sat.
I went to a clay bank next to the bridge, grabbed a fistful of oozy gray clay, skewered a nightcrawler on my hook leaving lots to wiggle at each end, then squeezed the lump of clay gently around the worm. The old man marveled at my performance, pulled out a notepad, started to scribble, and asked what I called this invention. I told him it was an old Estonian ploy the classical name of which I forgot, but that Estonian immigrants to America’s fair shores had renamed it the “Hostess Twinkie.” He carefully recorded this flubdub on his pad. I waited for him to put his pen away, then handed him my pole.
We crawled to the ledge on hands and knees (I didn’t trust him to walk); I flipped the bail on the reel and set the drag so loose that he couldn’t break the leader no matter how hard he struck; then I lowered the Twinkie by hand down to the spooked cutthroat in the undercut; when the Twinkie touched bottom I said “Get ready!”
We lay on our bellies, watching: the clay around the worm began to dissolve and crumble away; the ends of the nightcrawler emerged, writhing like a stripper coming out of a cake… the sea-runs went nuts! Four of them assaulted the Twinkie and the biggest swallowed it, mud and all, gulping it so deep that even Mr. Zabbo Dabbo couldn’t manage to lose it. It was a nice trout, almost twenty inches; when we landed it he was ecstatic, literally jumping for joy—and sending another avalanche into the pool. But now it didn’t matter: we had the formula. Two more Twinkies got us two more fish, then I said, “That’s two apiece. That’s enough.”
He said, “You’re right! Anyhow, I gotta rush back to town and write all this up for tomorrow’s paper!”
I nearly choked. “Tomorrow’s What?”
“Tomorrow’s Oregon Reporter.” He beamed and held out his hand. “I’m Dutch Hines. The ‘Fishing Dutchman’!”
Holy Hostess Hohos. Dutch Hines! He was so much more wrinkled and klutzy-looking than the picture at the head of his biweekly column. He said, “You said your name was Gus, didn’t you?”
“Huh? Who? Me? Gus? Oh, well, that’s just a nickname.”
“Well I’d like to interview you, Gus. By golly I would! Haven’t had a better day’s fishin’ since I lost nine steelhead in one morning, on the Kilchis it was, two winters ago, with Fuzz Gramsay.”
I told him I remembered that trip. Did I ever—he’d written twelve columns about it! Pen and pad in hand, he said, “So how ’bout that interview?”
Cripes! Dutch Hines. I didn’t know what to do. All my life I’d marveled at his prose, amazed that any man could say so much about catching so few fish; even more amazed by his stubborn use of the editorial “we.” He reminded me of a kid in my first-grade class, Mikey. Mikey used to talk about his pencil at Show’n’Tell. It was a fat green pencil with the school’s name and district number stenciled on it. Every kid in the class had an identical pencil. But that didn’t stop Mikey. He would hold it up for us to see, read the stenciled name and number to us, tell us it was a gift from his grandma, or his dad, or his uncle, tell us how green it was, and how fat, tell us how we must be sure to turn the dial on t
he pencil sharpener to the very biggest hole before attempting to sharpen such a pencil, point out to those who’d just joined us that yes it was a pencil, and yes wasn’t it a fat one, and wasn’t it green, and he’d show it and tell it and tell it and show it till children of frailer constitution started passing out from ennui and the teacher would have to carry him by his belt, telling all the way, to his desk. The Dutchman’s fishing trips were his green pencil; the Reporter was his Show’n’Tell; and the addiction of America’s eyeballs to newsprint constituted the invisible walls of an inescapable first-grade classroom.… Dutch Hines! Crikeys. What to do? This bozo had easily three-quarters of a million readers. That’s 1.5 million eyes, barring cyclopses. And he wanted to interview me! My brain began to lurch and flutter like a moth toward the flame that will cook it. I knew his writing habits; I knew about the Green Pencil Syndrome; I knew he would be show’n’telling about this afternoon on Shat Creek, about the bluebacks, about the Twinkie, about me, for many a column to come if nothing distracted him. And nothing would distract him, because it would be weeks, maybe months, before he caught another fish. I knew he’d made Fuzz Gramsay a rich man by endorsing him, and that if I told him that I’d built the rod he’d just used he would do the same for me; I knew that if he endorsed me I’d get a thousand rod orders before the month was out; I knew that even if I lowered my prices, even at a meagre ten dollars profit per rod, that was ten thousand smackers; I knew that with profits from that first burst of orders I could advertise in every major sporting magazine in the country, could hire a half-dozen peons to do my rod-building and fly-tying for me while I became a designer, an organizer, an entrepreneur; I could open a tackle factory and warehouse in Fog; I could hire salesmen and financial advisers and marketing experts; I could automatize and computerize and expand; I could spend my days inventing prototype rods and flies and let the local peasantry hunch over vises, squinting their eyesight away and snorting rod varnish; I could shunt Gus Orviston Autograph rods off to every corner of the trout-infested world; I could put Fleas and Headless Hunchbacks and Bermuda Shorts on the map; I could buy a floatplane, a fleet of jet-boats, start a guide service, take fat cats to all the great sport-fishing grounds on earth; I could buy a jet, make connections in high places, hire politicians, hire accountants, secretaries, research assistants—all of them women, sleek-thighed and soft-bosomed; I could open a chain of Trusty Gus’s Custom Rods and Flies that circumscribed the continent; I could invest, get into real estate, play the stock market, cruise Tahoe and Vegas, start chains of Cutthroat Gus’s Seafood Restaurants, Cutthroat Gus’s Riverside Fishing Schools, Cutthroat Gus’s Trouter’s Resorts; I could buy myself a harem to forget Eddy with; I could catch (or buy the proof and claim I caught) record-breaking fish to heighten my repute; I could speculate in land and lumber, subdivide the Coast Range, build private solar-powered hatcheries and surround them with resorts; I could build a geodesic dome over the Tamanawis and control its ebbs and flows with a pushbutton control panel by my half-acre bed where I’d loll with my harem, dictating fish stories into computers that edited and polished and sold them for national syndication; I could buy myself a nuclear aircraft carrier with built-in spas and woods and trout ponds and sail out to sea to escape the rabble on weekends; I could make H2O look like a hick with a cane-pole and bobber compared to me; I could buy the whole blasted coast of Oregon, name it Gussica, secede from the Union, start my own space program, make Titus my Lieutenant Spock and me the Captain of an Intergalactic Winnebago and blast away into space to search out potential trout-planets and go where no fisherman had gone before; I could stock my new planets with Donaldson Rainbows, Montana Black-spotted Cutthroat, or the Salmo-Gussious Titantrout I’d have developed by then in Gussica’s solar hatcheries; I could spread my name, face, rods, and flies all through the fish-infested heavens, and every resource and river, every hidden treasure and tree, every huge fish and alien queen and natural and unnatural wonder would spread itself before me…
and so on.
“Well,” said Dutch. “What do you say?”
I said, “Sure, Dutch. I’ll do the interview.”
The following day the Oregon Reporter’s three-quarters of a million readers found the following special double-sized column ensconced in their sports sections:
THE FISHING DUTCHMAN
Dutch Finds Redhot Cutthroat Fishin’ on Shat Creek!
Well, we learned yesterday afternoon that there’s nothing to the old saw that says “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” By a stroke of dumb luck this old dog learned a bagful of tricks from a young buck he bumped into who just might be the finest fisherman this Great Northwest of ours has seen in many a decade. We were trying for silvers on Shat Creek, but the run isn’t what it once was, nor will it ever be until something is done about a problem this writer has pointed out again and again. We do not refer to pollution, overfishing, poaching, clear-cutting, bad management, or any of the things the ecology boys keep raising such a stink about. No, the culprit behind all the lousy fishing is, in our opinion, sea lions. That’s right. Sea lions. And here’s proof: just twelve years ago we were fishing with Jocko Dreyfus, who runs the excellent charter service out of Yaquina Bay, when we got into a school of silvers, and this writer had hooked a dandy when—you guessed it! A sea lion ate our lunker right off the line! We think every saltwater angler ought to carry a rifle and shoot these creatures on sight. Why, the blubbery monsters are so fat and active, one can easily guess how many salmon they swallow in a single day!
But getting back to the old dog and the young buck, his friends call him Gus, but he told us this is just a nickname and he doesn’t know where it came from. His real name is Antoine Chapeau, and he hails, believe it or not, from Palm Springs, California, where he used to manage a beauty salon. In yesterday’s exclusive interview, Antoine told us,
“I got awful tired of looking at women’s hair all day, Dutch. Most of ’em had hair just the color of monofilament, you know. The healthy ones reminded me of eight-pound test and the ones who wore wigs, once you pulled the wig off, reminded me of 5x tippet or algae or something. I got to thinking, ‘This can’t be healthy!’ So I sold out, pulled up stakes, headed for Oregon, baited my hook, and started fishin’!”
And fish he does! With a passion and a skill he claims he learned in the desert around Palm Springs. Chapeau told us he learned to fish by studying books on mesmerism, Indian mythology, behavioral psychology, and by working with a flyrod out in the wastelands. Throughout his youth he diligently practiced an art he calls “Dry Fishing,” and it is this that taught him both the incredible patience and the “shamanistic” approach to the sport that characterizes him today. Chapeau told us,
“After a day spent casting hookless flies into mirage creeks among the arid dunes, one begins to sense an order of things imperceptible to those whose minds are unaffected by extreme heat and dehydration. You see, Dutch, fish live in water. If one understands water one understands fish. And it is by craving water that one comes to understand it. Hence, to learn to fish, go to the desert and stay there. When the seizures and hallucinations start, you’ll be amazed at what you’ll learn!”
Sounds odd to us, too, but you should see the results! One trick he learned in the desert from an aged Estonian immigrant is called a “Twinkie.” When the big sea-runs we were after shied under a rock ledge, Chapeau wrapped a wad of clay around a nightcrawler and lowered it down. As soon as the worm started poking out of the clay the big cuts smashed the “Twinkie,” and did they ever put up a fight! We caught four in minutes, all fifteen-to twenty-inchers, then Chapeau made us stop. A true sportsman, he didn’t want to deplete the supply. While we cleaned the dandies he talked about some of the desert lore he uses to take lunkers by surprise:
“In the first place, Dutch, you got to be superstitious as hell. You got to think like a witch doctor. There’s too much science in people’s approach to fishing nowadays. Fish don’t understand science. But they worship magic!
Getting strong now.
Time to spawn now.
Time to throng now.
Won’t be long now.
Getting high now.
Time to die now.
When I finish this ritual I reel in, replace the totem fish with a conventional lure, cast back into the same water, and before long BINGO!”
Sounds strange, we realize, but Chapeau showed us the very knife he uses to carve those totem salmon! If more proof than this is needed, go try that Twinkie method on bluebacks!
Another interesting technique of Chapeau’s is not for the modest! When he knows there are salmon or steelhead in a hole and they just aren’t biting, he walks up to the edge of the water where the fish can all see him, props up his pole, pulls out a little line, places his lure on the ground a few feet from the pole, lays his landing net beside it, then retires into the bushes. In the bushes he strips naked, then he moves back toward the water, puffing his cheeks and writhing his nude body in a fishlike manner; he pretends to swim up to the lure, grabs it, pretends to be hooked, struggles for awhile, then throws the landing net over his head and cries out in a loud voice so the fish can hear, “OH! WHAT HAS HAPPENED! OH! OH! I FEAR I AM CAUGHT!”
The River Why Page 27