Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  I particularly liked a wistful-looking, bright-lipped young divorcée in a low-cut fiftiesish party dress I met at a Saturday night dance at the Saga Hotel. I escorted her home and traced a finger across her low-cut line, and she looked detachedly down at her bosom and said the neighbors would be watching to see when I left. I persuaded her to look out the window with me and see that no lights were on up and down the street.

  “But mine,” she said.

  She looked me in the eye with feeling that was stronger than mine, and wasn’t for me.

  There, I bet any neighbor who may in fact have been watching would have observed, goes a wistful-looking guy.

  Let me remind you that I was in Iceland as a journalist. In one aspect of that capacity, three other journalists and I met three Brennivín-drinking women (Brennivín is a kind of schnapps) and accompanied them to the apartment where they lived. With one of them, I wandered out back. We lay down in a little pup tent, which seemed odd. She said she didn’t approve of capitalism. I said I didn’t either, all that much. She said she was a Stalinist. That stumped me. Leninism, I might have been able to embrace for the evening, but—and then she asserted without changing tone that she was pregnant. We were lying side by side, looking up. “Why … ,” I said, “do you have this tent?”

  Silence. No spark. We went back inside, where two of the other three correspondents were visibly fading, and the third, who was British, was gamely singing a song involving knickers. The other two women were expressionless. The pregnant Stalinist surveyed the company dourly and said, “You don’t know what to do with girls like us.”

  I know, now, that girl is an etymological mystery. Not to mention a Rorschach test. John Minsheu in 1617 derived girl from the Latin garrula, garrulous, on the notion that young females talked so much; or alternatively from girella, a word for weather vane, on the notion that young females changed as the wind blew. Neither of those derivations has stood the test of time. Anatoly Liberman concludes that girl may well have arisen from among a number of Germanic roots that began with hard g or k, ended in r, often took a diminutive suffix l or le, and “denoted young animals, children, and all kinds of creatures considered immature, worthless, or past their prime.”

  At any rate, girl originally meant a child of either sex. No one knows why it became female. Not until the sixteenth century does OED find men using the word to wax eloquent over female charms. In about 1520:

  For by god it is a prety gyrle

  It is a worlde to se her whyrle

  Daunsynge in a rounde.

  In 1593: “I saw one Lasse farre comelier than the rest, / A peerlesse peece, an heart-delighting gyrle.”

  Sounds great in poetry, but we hardened journalists returned to the Saga Hotel unlucky. The question that sticks with me is this: Was that pregnant Stalinist looking (in or out of that tent) for a deeper commitment? Or, maybe, a shallower one? In the latter case, I’m kicking myself—except how superficially can you respond to someone, Stalinist or not, who is in the family way?

  The next morning I went salmon fishing, on the Grimsá River north of Reykjavik, and met another girl.

  With the light tackle we were using, you can’t horse a salmon in. It can break your hook, your leader, your line, or your rod if you ever once say, “Now listen, stop that foolishness, come on here to me.” You must pay long, scientific court, working the fish against the current, gradually cadging line bit by bit. When a salmon first takes the hook, it is likely to lie there in the water, waiting for you to do something wrong. You may have to throw rocks at the fish with your free hand before it will deign to move. To a fish like that an old worm fisherman like me is inclined to say, “Well, if you don’t want to do this, let’s forget about it. Go jump a falls, and I’ll sit here and watch.”

  Which is what I spent a lot of time doing. I had often heard about salmon fighting their way upstream, but I’d never realized what a feat it was. They don’t usually make it up an eight-foot waterfall in one leap. Sometimes they get halfway up and hang there in the torrent, fighting against the water and the rocks with a flippety-flip sound that is clearly audible above the rush—then somehow they double-clutch and nose ahead into a route that carries them higher, and then they meet more resistance and are borne precipitously down and maybe back over a couple of smaller falls they’ve already negotiated. Reminded me of writing. Battling your way up one sentence, and another one, and another one, and losing that one and finding another way up so that reading it all can be like going with the flow.

  Salmon is probably from salire, to leap. As salmon beat on against the current, they are preyed upon by seabirds that follow them in from the ocean. A local man told of seeing a bird dive, sink its talons into a salmon’s back and then, unable to carry the fish away, tow it with great effort to the bank. That sounded more natural to me than flailing around with a tiny fake insect bearing some grandiose name—a Blue Charm, a Black Doctor, a Hairy Mary, a Thunder and Lightning—at the end of lots and lots of line.

  But there was no saying that around the star of our party, an internationally renowned angler. He showed me his six-and-a-half-foot, four-ounce rod, his number six fly line, and his six-pound test leader, with which he was resolved to catch twenty- and thirty-pound salmon. That struck me as no more feasible than trying to pick up Princess Di on a bicycle, but I didn’t say anything. He pointed out that the rod was impregnated with Bakelite resins. The reel, he said, had been handmade of missile alloys by a jeweler on Long Island.

  “Did you soak it in formaldehyde to get it into the country?” I asked. My understanding was that in order to keep salmon disease out of Iceland, all foreign fishing gear had to be thus sterilized before customs would let it in. I meant my question to be deflating.

  “No,” he said, “I had a surgeon friend put it in his autoclave.” He winked at our gillie and she smiled.

  Gillie is an old Gaelic word. Originally it meant a lad, or an attendant upon a Highland chief. In the nineteenth century it began to mean a sort of caddie for hunters or fishers. For a gillie to be female is unusual. Gunna was nineteen, a sturdy blond farm girl who trained Icelandic ponies. When a twelve-pound salmon got off the hook of a woman in our party and started flopping around in an inch or two of water, Gunna came running through the shallows and dived on the fish as if it were a loose ball.

  I liked her a lot. She reminded me of girls I used to run around with when I was nine, but I noticed her soft green eyes more than I noticed theirs then. She had them only for the MF, as I will call the master fisherman.

  I stood out in the icy river in borrowed hip boots for a while, casting badly yet hooking several salmon, which, since I would lose patience, would unhook themselves. I caught a pound-and-a-half sea trout, a lively but relatively simple soul that reminded me of many other nice fish I had met. And then I stood high on a riverside bluff, looking out at lava slopes the color and texture of old elephant skin, surrounded by various shades of aquamarine sky, grass, river, spray, and light rain, watching the MF do his stuff.

  He played one eighteen-pounder for an hour. “You must keep the balance nearly equal,” the MF announced as he did so, “or the partnership will be dissolved.” He tried to keep the fish in the middle of the river, but it worked its way into the shallows, where it got more oxygen and became exhilarated, took off again, jumped and twisted in the air, and the MF kept with it.

  “Edge pressure,” he called out in a professional tone. He was maintaining traction on the corner of the salmon’s mouth, keeping the fish off balance, its head against the current. Finally MF was within ten feet of his opponent. He got down on his knees and crept in, gaining line, trying to remain low because if the fish saw him, he said in his running commentary, it would be exhilarated again.

  I doubted this. But sure enough, the salmon stuck its head out of the water, evidently got a look at the MF, and took off across the surface like a speedboat. A wonderful move, to which the MF was equal. He stood and gave just the right amount, held
, and began to close in again. Disdaining gaff or net, he got the fish to where he could see it swimming near his feet, then crouched for several minutes, holding his rod high with one hand and extending the other hand over the water.

  Then he made his grab, stood up straight, and presented something long, still, and whitish that extended from his waist to his ankle. Holding the salmon up by the tail stretched out its spinal column so that the fish couldn’t move at all, while the MF rapped it behind the head—on the brain—with a rock.

  I went down and saw the fish lying on the shore, looking like a single, stout, silver-and-grey muscle with a tail, an eye, and a strong, underslung jaw. Silver scales lay around loose, scattered by the coup de grâce. The main thing that occurred to me about this salmon, however well caught, was that it was dead.

  But hey, that was what we were there for, and Gunna regarded the MF with admiration. That night in the lodge, the MF favored her casually with his attention, and she smiled.

  The guy—believe me when I say this—was not right for her. Okay, he could fish. Would you want your daughter or your little sister or just a young woman who was a friend of yours to tumble for a guy—one more than twice her age—because he could fish? After dinner I stayed up until it was just the three of us. Until three a.m. Finally Gunna gave me a put-out look and went to bed. Then after a while the MF, looking almost ruffled, went up to his room. I waited another half hour, and then I went up to mine.

  The next morning, back out on the river, the MF ignored Gunna. “Let’s go over there,” I said to her. “It’s the best place to watch ’em jump.”

  Well, the MF had no need for a gillie—in the daylight—and I was a member of the party. Coolly, Gunna climbed with me to a fifteen-foot cliff overlooking a deep pool above sheer, narrow eight-foot falls and below that, in sequence, a shallow pool, a wider, six-foot falls, another deep pool, and a broad stretch of rapids.

  On the lower levels, the fish were visible only when they jumped or tore across the top of the water. At the big falls and in the pool beneath it, you could see one jumping and hitting midway up the falls and scrambling against the water and the rocks at once. You could see one hitting just short of the top, being flung back end over end and falling with a smack like a person doing a belly flopper. You could see one shooting up in a greyish streak, losing his keel and sliding back down on his silver side; and then see black flashes of him boiling around in the crush at the bottom. Away from the foam, in the quieter parts of the middle pool, you could see lots of them waiting, looking much softer–a pale catfish grey with pastel splotches. Fins trembling.

  “I’ve never seen so many salmons!” Gunna exclaimed. “Salmons with salmons!” And then she gave me a nudge with her elbow, pointed to the uppermost pool, and whispered, “There is a big one.”

  An evocative cry. It took me back beyond all fishing to the girls I used to catch bumblebees with, out of honeysuckle bushes. “There’s a big one!” they would say, and I would calmly screw open my mason jar, at the ready. But this was more exciting. I tried to make corner-of-the-eye contact with Gunna.

  Then, oddly enough, the big one took my fly.

  I had cast my Thunder and Lightning and let it drift just below the surface of the pool. What the heck. Now a salmon had it, a much bigger one than any the MF had caught, and we weren’t going to have to throw rocks at it to get it moving. It was tearing around the pool; I set my hook just by jumping in surprise; the fish was heading downstream with it.

  And Gunna and I were standing fifteen feet above, on a tricky lava cliff, with our hip boots on. We were going to have to work our way down and around the rocks and into the pool and who knew where after that. It was like a dream in which you try to run under a perfectly thrown pass and find yourself standing in a canoe drifting rapidly the opposite way. The fish was determined, it was clear, to shoot the rapids back down, all the way to the ocean if necessary, and there I was trying to catch up with it, tentatively holding some wild notion of its life in my hand.

  I once rode an amusement-park ride that revolved, rotated, dipped, rose, and oscillated along seven different vectors simultaneously. I once untangled a six-month-old boy from an earphone cord while trying to keep his left hand out of the pudding and his mashed-potato-coated right hand off my suit on a dinner flight in heavy turbulence while fending off his almost equally food-covered two-year-old sister from the other side. But I have never been involved in such a multifariously lively operation as the one that took place that day on the Grimsá among me, Gunna, the cliffs, the falls, and that salmon.

  Gunna kept trying to grab the rod. I wouldn’t let her. We clambered over the lava, nearly pitching ourselves right down in there among the salmon several times. We scrabbled along ledges—she guiding my steps and crying out advice, I striving to play the great fish neither too tight nor too loose—for four or five full-to-overflowing minutes. As we scrambled we watched our fish sprawl down the upper falls and disappear into the pool below and then reappear in a flash over the next falls and into the next pool and then into the rough water at the lowest level.

  Where it got off. Suddenly. I had ceased to flow, had become too literal, too direct or maybe too abstract—had thought, “Now, surely, even though I seem to be dancing, which seems to be good, I should be pulling in”—and the salmon got a fix on my Thunder and Lightning and spit it out. I had a loose line.

  I assume the salmon was relieved. Though now he had to work his way back up the falls.

  I was exhilarated. Towed by the fish into richer air.

  Gunna didn’t say anything when I beamed at her.

  I didn’t know what to say. We climbed back up to the lip, to the ledge right next to the top of the highest falls. I reeled in my Thunder and Lightning, which looked ravished. We were close enough to kneel and reach in and feel the cold water surging down, so I did.

  And just then another big salmon plopped right up onto the ledge beside me. I swear. It had misjudged its bias and precipitated itself out of the water.

  It flopped around, not much better at walking than I was at fly casting. I gave the silver-scaled meaty flash a little grab or nudge with the first two fingers of my right hand—it was something like standing on a football sideline and “catching” a player who has burst out of bounds and is braking, spinning his wheels, trying to reverse so as to get back into the thick of things. I could, physically, have seized the salmon and flipped it up farther ashore the way a bear fishes, but I didn’t. Neither did Gunna. We watched it flounder—no, not flounder, watched it salmon—on the rocks between us. On its fourth flip, the salmon seized itself by its bootstraps, heaved itself sideways, landed in the corner of the falls, and astoundingly slid up and over the lip, upriver and out of sight. Off to spawn. Imagine a poured-out goldfish slipping back into the tank along the stream, against the flow, of the pouring water.

  I gave Gunna an elbow nudge.

  “What would we have said we caught him on?” I asked.

  “A Hairy Mary,” she said, giving me a smile, finally.

  glass

  George Orwell, a great prose stylist, is often quoted as having said “Good prose is clear as a pane of glass.” In fact, in “Why I Write” (which the excellent, highly readable linguist Geoffrey Nunberg calls the most widely cited of all twentieth-century essays on English), Orwell wrote: “Good prose is like a window pane.”

  Orwell was certainly speaking in favor of clarity, and against worn-out phrases “tacked together like sections of a prefabricated hen-house” (hear, hear!), but he was too judicious to present a pane as purely transparent. The earliest panes of glass, prized today if you can find them, were by no means invisible. And even today, to try getting a windowpane utterly clean is to court despair—go for that last little streak on the inside and you realize it’s on the outside, and when you go out and get it, you see a fingerprint on the inside. There’s a reader-writer metaphor in there somewhere; I’m not going to try to buff it up any further.

  The
word glass derives from the same root as gold, arsenic, melancholy, gall, Hare Krishna, glimpse, glide, zloty, glare, gloss, gloaming, glitch, and glib. If you’re glassy-eyed, your soul is not exactly visible, is it? In “through a glass, darkly,” glass means a mirror. I heard once of a man who was killed when the mirror over his bed fell on him. Imagine a last moment of seeing yourself descending, in great alarm, upon you.

  See puppy.

  Gmail?

  No. Should be G-mail. As in G-man, G-spot (Gspot? Come on), and G-string, not as in Gstaad. Gmail looks like someone sat on Warren Harding’s middle name.

  gnat

  Chambers says this is ultimately related to gnaw.

  A gnatling is a small gnat.

  At Answers.com, we are told that “a gnat usually reaches a length of 4 cm (2.114 in.) and a wingspan of approximately 6.23 cm (3.415 in.).” Call that the average gnat? That is a huge gnat. Information drawn from a pest-management company. Scare tactics, if you ask me.

  Godwottery

  “An affected or over-elaborate style of gardening or attitude towards gardens,” says OED. From “My Garden” by T. E. Brown: “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!” (Wot an archaic word meaning knows. OED, however, seems to say proper present third-person singular would have been wots or wotteth.)

  going global

  Alan Furst, a highly regarded novelist of international intrigue, was quoted in The New York Times as saying that his books “should read like books in translation—it’s translator’s English.” That remark brought me down. Global markets driving out local flavor. I prefer what I. B. Singer told The Paris Review, that the modern Yiddish writer “was brought up with the idea that one should get out of Jewishness and become universal. And because he tried so hard to become universal, he became very provincial.” My ambition is to write American English like a native.