by James Prosek
Before lunch we walked to the Seine, here a fledgling river near its source. “The water is a little high,” Pierre remarked, “the mayfly hatch will be late this season.”
It had been a wet and cold spring but this felt like the first day of summer. After a bit of walking along the river and not seeing any fish, we all returned to the trailer to take off our boots and have some food and drink.
The small trailer in the farmer’s field was a kind of mobile home with a stove and cabinets and a table with chairs to sit around. Its kitchen was stocked with wine, Pernod, plates, pots, and utensils. We had brought along a half dozen baguettes and lots of Roquefort, Camembert, butter, melon, grapes, and ham. François had brought a piece of my silure and began to cook it in a pot on a small range with butter and shallots. Pierre opened a bottle of wine.
“I don’t like Camembert,” Pierre said, “but this Roquefort is fantastic! And it is really good with this cahors. It is a very strong red wine, perfect for Roquefort, you know.”
Lulu carried on about the virtues of Camembert.
“Do you talk so much about cheese in America?” François asked.
“No,” I joked, and poured myself more wine, “we just eat it.”
“You know,” Pierre said, “one of your American authors, Jim Harrison, I met him once in Paris—he talks and writes very well about French cheese.”
Between us we drank five bottles of wine and then went fishing out in the sun. We managed to remember our fishing rods but forgot our purpose by the time we crossed the large field between the trailer and the river. Pierre lay down in the thigh-high grass. Lulu didn’t make it to the river either, but dropped like a felled soldier. François made it to the bank and quietly lit his pipe under the shade of a chestnut tree. I took some casts in the river and then found my own place to rest, in the shade of a tall oak.
As I slept, the sun climbed higher in the sky, stealing my shade, and I woke lying in direct sun, my face flush and my body covered in sweat. I found a deep pool on the river, took off my clothes, and jumped in. Once I had cooled off I fell asleep in the shade again.
When I awoke I looked over at Pierre, still sleeping in the grass. It made me think of the painter Gustave Courbet and his two friends who used to make outings to fish and paint by the river Loue. There was a painting in the show at the Larock-Granoff Gallery by Courbet’s friend Célice, depicting Courbet fishing with a cane pole off a steep bank. I didn’t really like the painting, but it reminded me that it was nice to be on the water with friends.
DEPARTING PARIS
Before I left Paris on a train to southern Austria, there was one last thing I needed to do. I walked to 41, rue de Seine to visit François Calmejane.
He greeted me at the door wearing an apron, a pipe in his tobacco-stained teeth. I could not tell if he had been cooking or welding, though it did not matter, for whatever he’d been doing I knew he was creating. He was so happy when I told him I wanted to buy his sculpture of the salmon that I had first seen at the fly-fishing salon, le grand bécard vainqueur, that I thought the old tax inspector was going to cry. He took me in his arms, crying, “Oh, thank you, James, thank you,” and said it pleased him not only for the money, but because he knew the bécard would be with a young man who was a fellow artist and that his work would be seen in America.
The sculpture was large, even with the stand removed, and I hoped François would find a secure way of shipping it to my father’s home, where it would await my return. “I don’t have a choice whether to buy it or not,” I said to François. I wished more things were so clear in life as a trout stream or good art.
PART II
Johannes Schöffmann and the Trout of the Tigris River
Some years before, I had written to the eminent fish biologist Dr. Robert Behnke at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, asking if there were trout in the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates of eastern Turkey.
“There’s only one man I know who has fished for trout in eastern Turkey,” Behnke wrote me. “His name is Johannes Schöffmann and he lives in southern Austria. The first letter I received from him was in regards to a very rare and little-known trout of south central Turkey called Platysalmo platycephalus. The only other thing I know about him is that he’s an accomplished and inquisitive scientist who has traveled widely in search of trout. As far as I know, he is not affiliated with any university. He is, in the true sense of the word, an amateur.”
Johannes published his ichthyological findings in the Austrian scientific journal Österreichs Fischerei. He not only did his own original research, but helped others perform theirs. He kept in close contact with several scientists at universities in Europe, Asia, and America who depended on him to collect trout from remote sites for their research (not many people had fished for trout in the mountain climes of Turkey, Morocco, Iran, or Algeria). These biologists, in particular Louis Bernatchez of Laval University in Quebec, were working to create an evolutionary map of Salmo trutta, the brown trout, by studying its mitochondrial DNA. It was that species—by some sources the most genetically diverse vertebrate on the planet—that was the object of Johannes’s loucura.
I was on a train that had just stopped in Salzburg, already thirteen hours from the Gare de l’Est in Paris and four hours from my destination, Sankt Veit an der Glan, Austria. I knew very little about what lay east of Paris, so I was excited to discover what I might see.
Through Behnke’s introduction, I had begun a correspondence with Herr Schöffmann before I left home and I reread some of his letters on the train.
My questions to him were about the trout of Turkey, particularly in the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, what they looked like, the nature of their habitat, and, on a different note, my concerns about the safety of traveling in eastern Turkey. I had not noticed until then, the cool night sliding by outside the train, that Johannes had never addressed my questions on safety, but stated only that he was planning a trip to southeast Turkey in search of trout in the headwaters of the Tigris River. He added that I was free to join him if I wished.
I did not know Herr Schöffmann’s occupation, but somehow imagined him as a corporate man who wore a tie to work. I discovered something quite different. I was greeted at the train station by a man in khakis, dressed like a British explorer—I was the only passenger to disembark in his small town, Sankt Veit. It was not at first clear how we would communicate, as his English was poor and I spoke no German. After several false starts we settled on our best mutual language, which happened to be Spanish. Conversation came easier, though by no means fluidly.
Johannes lived near the station on the second floor of a beige plaster-faced apartment building. To get to the stairwell we had to pass through a room hazy with confection smells. The ground floor was a bakery, and Herr Schöffmann, it turns out, was a baker. The door on the second floor led into the kitchen, where we took off our shoes and where I first met Ida, Johannes’s wife. He explained to her that I spoke no German, but Spanish. Ida laughed, her stout and plump body shaking, and explained to me that they had learned Spanish in Colombia, where Johannes had apprenticed for two years as a young pastry chef in one of the best restaurants in Bogotá.
Johannes was no longer young, was mostly bald, with a reddish aspect and a dusky mustache. We sat down at a table in their living room and Ida brought us each a bottle of Gösser beer with a glass. I had correctly imagined Johannes as a man of few words. We poured our beers and toasted, though at that point we knew not what we were toasting to.
“Prost,” he said, lifting his glass.
“Prost,” I repeated.
“I must sleep for a bit,” Johannes said then, excusing himself. “I woke early; a baker’s work life is nocturnal.”
Ida sat down with me while I finished my beer. She lit a cigarette. Her complexion was dark and I thought she was Turkish maybe, though she explained her father was from India. “You look tired,” she said, and showed me to a small room where I could rest.
It was a girl’s room, hung with posters of American teen idols. I must be displacing their daughter, I thought.
I slept too and did not see Johannes again until afternoon, when he woke me to share his plan.
We sat at the table in his living room and Johannes showed me several albums filled with photos from his travels. What struck me immediately, whether the photos were from Lebanon, Bulgaria, or Croatia, was that Johannes had been able to find local people to help his explorations wherever he went. His impromptu guides appeared beside him, an Arab, a Basque, a Kurd, a Berber, showing me that fishing was a powerful tool for reaching across languages and cultures.
As I flipped through the photos I asked Johannes questions. I soon realized that if I was looking for answers this exercise was futile.
“How do you catch the fish?” I asked Johannes.
“With my hands,” he replied, which I thought was surely a joke.
“How did you find trout in these places, how do you communicate with the people? Did you have translators?”
“Why, you don’t speak Turkish?” he questioned in his deep voice and laughed.
Without showing me a map he told me the object of our expedition, to catch a trout in the headwaters of the Tigris River. We were to drive several thousand miles from Austria almost to the Iraqi border in southeast Turkey to reach high tributaries flowing from the mountains. The Tigris trout were important to Johannes, foremost because he had never caught or seen them. There was only one published reference to their existence (in an early-twentieth-century paper by the Italian ichthyologist Enrico Tortonese), and no pictures or detailed descriptions of live specimens.
“I think they will be different from other brown trout,” he predicted.
To understand Johannes’s theory on why the Tigris trout would be special, I had to understand a bit of the theory of how trout evolved. Ancestral trout thousands of years ago invaded rivers from the ocean during the end of glacial periods when there were significant inland waterways from melting ice that no longer exist. When the meltwater retreated to the ocean, the ancestral trout that had invaded from the ocean were stranded in different streams and evolved into the different types of trout we have today. In eastern Turkey, trout invaded rivers from the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Mediterranean, the headwaters of which, in certain places near mountain divides, came very close to touching one another and also to connecting to the headwater tributaries of the Tigris River, which flow all the way to the Indian Ocean. It is thought that the Indian Ocean was too warm to sustain the ancestral trout, therefore the trout in the headwaters of the Tigris must have come from somewhere else; they swam over the mountain passes from the Caspian and Mediterranean, and perhaps even Black Sea basins, when there was enough water from glacial melt to do so, and have since been stranded there for thousands of years.
Searching for this mysterious trout would be an adventure. The journey would be long and dangerous. The streams where the trout lived were in the most politically turbulent part of the country—near the Iraqi border where Turkish military were actively fighting the Kurdish separatists. All this seemed to please Johannes immensely. It all made me a little nervous.
Johannes’s town, Sankt Veit an der Glan, was said to have ten thousand people and eighty pubs. That seems an astonishing ratio, but I soon learned how they all stayed in business. Over the course of my first days in Austria, I think that Johannes and I visited most of them and I soon developed a capacity for great amounts of beer. Sometimes we were joined by Ida or Johannes’s two children, both younger than myself, Mariela and Benedikt, but usually it was just Johannes and me. It was through his friends, not himself, that I learned about Johannes.
“Johannes is crazy,” one of his friends told me as we drank our Villacher beer, “he risks his life to find trout. Don’t you notice how he wears those fatiguelike khakis? He’s a real explorer.”
Johannes, too, painted, as we discovered over drinks. He was also, like me, a Gemini, left-handed, and shared a curiosity for all natural things. His friends confirmed, in a combination of English and German, what I had already realized—that Johannes was not just a simple baker. He had traveled widely and learned pieces of far-off languages; he was the prodigal son of Sankt Veit.
Our first outing to a river together was on a sunny Sunday morning four days after I’d arrived. Johannes, Ida, and I drove in his old Land Rover up into the mountains and over a long winding pass to Slovenia. The valley we came into was a soft velvety green with a milky emerald river flowing through, the Soča.
When we came to the floor of the valley, Johannes pulled onto a dirt road and parked at the edge of a thick wood by the river. On a tree in front of us was a sign—a fish with a black X over it.
I stepped out of the car to grab my fly rod in the trunk, but Johannes shook his head.
“Not here,” he said. He pulled out, instead, a wet suit, and, stripping to his underwear in seconds, zipped himself inside the black neoprene. It covered every part of his body but his face. Ida stood beside him clutching a blue towel. The towel bulged with something hidden beneath it. They made for the river, Johannes walking with several kilos of lead on his waist belt, his mask, snorkel, and fins in his hand.
As Johannes submerged himself in the crystal-clear and frigid currents of the river, Ida unfolded the towel, revealing a small net. She handed it to him and he dove, though I could still see his distorted black form. In seconds he had returned to the bank with a small trout, smiling like a boy who had ensnared a butterfly. So, it was as he had told me; he did catch trout with his hands.
“This is a marble trout,” Johannes said, his elbows propped up on the bank, the fish in his gloved hands. “It is native only to certain rivers draining the Adriatic Sea, like the Soča here.” He let the little fish patterned with vermiculated sides slip back into the water.
Later that day, the three of us shared a bottle of chilled red wine and a plate of prosciutto and cheese at a local restaurant called the Gostilna?
Zvikar. It was a favorite stop for Johannes and Ida. We sat under umbrellas outside as a rainstorm swept through the valley. Purple thunderheads rumbled.
“My head hurts from diving in the cold water,” Johannes said and laughed. “But diving is the only safe way to fish if a warden is around.”
As we drank the wine we discussed the itinerary for our trip, which would take us from Austria to Italy the next day and then by ferry to Greece. Johannes revealed that oftentimes we would be searching for trout in national parks where fishing was closed, or without licenses.
“We will have to be Schwarzfischers,” Johannes said. Ida laughed.
“What is that?”
“Schwarzfischer means literally black fisher, it is German for poacher.”
So we founded an international society to describe our cause, La Sociedad Internacional de Schwarzfischers. We would fish by any means possible and catch trout for art and science regardless of the regulations.
The next day our trip began, overland from Sankt Veit to the city of Trieste in northern Italy. From there we took a ferry twenty-five hours down the Adriatic Sea to Igoumenitsa, Greece. It was early the following morning that we came to the first river we would fish on our four-week trip, the Voïdomátis.
I sat in the backseat with notebooks, the tent, the vials of alcohol for specimen preservation, sleeping bags, and diving equipment. In Trieste (the birthplace of my mother’s father) I had bought my own wet suit and diving equipment.
Green fields of corn and wheat and acres of sunflowers spread to the foothills of the Voreia mountains that skirted the Greek-Albanian border.
Johannes lit a cigarette.
“In Tiranë, Albania, my friend Peter and I rented a car, it had no brakes,” Johannes said. His stories were like this—spare, and though they had good starts, they often went nowhere. “I brought home live fingerling trout in a soda bottle and stocked them in the mill creek near my home.” Between the anecdotes he taught me words in Turkish
: ekmek, çakmak, tavuk. But the most important were the words for trout, in Greek and Turkish, respectively, pestrofa and alabalik, and beer, bira. “Bir is one, so when you order a beer you say bir bira.”
“On the map the river is called the Vjosë,” Johannes said as we looked into its emerald currents off a bridge. “That is the Albanian name. The Greeks call it the Voïdomátis.”
We set up camp by an ancient stone bridge. Swallows darted above the surface of the water chasing insects. Below them, trout were rising to the same prey, small caddis flies. Johannes explained that this was a sanctuary closed to fishing, a national park, and for this reason there were many trout.
“We will wait a little before we fish, till the end of the day when the sun is lower and the hikers have gone home.”
I sat in the shade of a giant plane tree and enjoyed the cool shade. Its trunk was mottled like a sycamore, and mimicked the play of light that reflected from the river on its broad leaves. The air smelled of honeysuckle.
“Ah, mi hijo,” my son, Ida said, coming up beside me to sit with her knitting. After a time, I left her there and walked to the river to wet my feet. The water was ice cold, fed either from melting snow in the mountains or from an underground spring. I knew that trout streams were usually cold—cold water held the high levels of dissolved oxygen that trout needed to survive.
When Johannes felt it was safe to fish, we found a quiet and hidden place to dress in our wet suits, beneath some ancient plane trees. With masks and snorkels, we dove into the river.
I had dived in tropical countries, over vast coral reefs in warm water with many-colored fishes. This was quite a different experience. Frigid water quickly seeped into my wet suit and formed a layer between the neoprene and my skin, eventually warmed by my body. We entered at the top of the pool and drifted quietly down like detritus, our eyes alert for any movement on the bottom. From above the surface you could see no trout; underneath now, I could see maybe fifty, or a hundred. They swarmed over the bald river stones like horseflies, scattering under logs and into dark crevices in the rock. Among the throngs were two giants, though I was mindful they looked bigger with the distortion of my mask and the water. The biggest fish took the best shelters, leaving the smaller fish vulnerable, like runts in a litter with no nipple. I could not help thinking how many trout I had failed to see in my life, staring into currents from above. This was a revelation.