Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  The mouth of Johannes’s net was a braid of wire coat hangers bent to form a circle. The mesh of the net was green and very fine, tapering down to a point, so that if a trout swam in it could not swim out. I watched Johannes use it, swimming after the fish, twirling and chasing with the swiftness of an otter, until he had trapped the fish under a rock and coaxed it to flee into the mesh. Though his element was air, I could not help but wonder if the amateur ichthyologist was part fish.

  The brilliant colors of the trout were not apparent under water. It was in the light of the day that I saw the luminescent cobalt blue on the gill plate, the vermilion and black spots, irregular in shape.

  We camped by the river in the national park that night after sharing a bottle of retsina wine.

  The following morning we headed for Turkey, on a winding road up a mountain pass. The land was dry and punctuated by hard leafed oaks, changing to dense green foliage over the divide. Johannes turned onto a dirt road along a stream, a small tributary of the Aliakmon River, the location of the first known written reference to fishing with an artificial fly.

  The closest there was to an ancient holy site for fly fishermen, the Aliakmon (which is thought to be the Astraeus mentioned below) and its Macedonian fly fishermen were mentioned in a second-century A.D. text called De Natura Animalium by Claudius Aelianus, a Roman naturalist:

  Between the cities of Beroea and Thessalonica flows a river called the Astraeus, and in this river are fish with spotted skins. These spotted fish feed on insects unique to this countryside, which flutter over the river. The insect is not like the flies found elsewhere, nor does it resemble the wasp in appearance, nor could one describe its configuration as like a midge or the bee, yet it had something of each of these. The river people call it Hippouros.

  The flies seek food above the river, but do not escape the attention of the spotted fish swimming below. When the fish observe a fly on the surface, they swim up stealthily, careful not to disturb the currents, lest they should frighten their prey and, coming upward like a shadow, open their mouths and seize the flies, like wolves carrying off sheep from the fold, or as eagles take geese from a farmyard—having captured the flies, the fish slip back into the rippling currents.

  Although the fishermen understand this, they cannot use these insects as bait, for when one touches them, they lose their natural coloring and their wings wither. The fish have nothing to do with such damaged flies and refuse them.

  But the fishermen have planned another snare for the spotted fishes, and deceived them with their craftiness. They wrap ruby-colored wool about their hooks, and wind about this wool two feathers, which grow under a cock’s wattles and are the color of dark wax.

  Their rods are about six feet, with a line of a similar length attached. With this they cast their snare, and the fish, attracted and made foolish by the colors, come straight to take it.

  I had tied several of these Hippouros flies—undoubtedly caddis flies, which I found to be very abundant in this drainage—and cast them into the stream we had stopped at near the town of Tripotamos. Intoxicated by the smell of sheep dung, I became uneasy and had trouble fishing. Neither Johannes nor I saw a trout.

  We passed fields of blooming sunflowers, as determined to face the sun as Johannes was to travel east.

  We came to the coast of the Aegean and the city of Kaválla. Palm trees grew on the beach, zinnias along the sidewalks and in front of resort hotels.

  “Deniz is Turkish for sea,” Johannes instructed at one moment, and then hearing cicadas singing from the roadside trees, he said, “I have found cicadas in trouts’ stomachs.”

  We stopped at a café on the seaside. The waiter brought us three glasses of clear alcohol and three glasses of water. Johannes showed me that when you added water to it, it turned milky white. “It’s ouzo,” Johannes said. “They call it raki in Turkey or aslan sütü, lion’s milk.”

  We set up camp that night by the sea.

  It took two hours to pass through the border.

  The official read my name aloud from my passport.

  “James Otakar,” he said, looking at me in the backseat. I had inherited Otakar from my grandfather. It was my middle name but appeared printed next to my first. We were on our way to Istanbul.

  We came to the Marmara Sea and from the car I could see the broad-flanked ships sailing in it. It was Saturday and a long line of cars was headed the opposite way from us, out of Istanbul to the beach. By noon we were passing through the city, where Johannes refused to stop, and over the long bridge across the Bosporus Strait into Asia.

  “Now we are in Asia,” Johannes announced when we reached the other side.

  “Too bad you can’t see the city,” Ida said, “the Hagia Sofia.”

  “But there are no trouts in Istanbul,” Johannes said.

  It was six hours to the lake where we would spend the night, Abant Gölü, and inquire among fishermen about the trout that lived there.

  By late afternoon we were nearing our destination in the northeast, Abant Lake. Johannes handed me something to read that he had been keeping in the glove box. It was a scientific paper, our primary source for the locations of the trout in Turkey. I pulled it out of the plastic sleeve he had kept it in. The title page read:

  The Trouts of Asiatic Turkey

  The Hydrobiological Research Institute

  University of Istanbul, April 1954

  by Enrico Tortonese

  As I read more, I learned that Tortonese was an Italian biologist from the University of Torino who had made several expeditions during the late 1940s in search of trout in Turkey. The paper outlined his observations and discoveries concerning the specimens he’d found, using the trout nearer his home, from Sardinia and Corsica, as benchmarks for comparison.

  Tortonese was first to formally describe the trout of Abant Lake as Salmo trutta abanticus. The tone of the paper was formal and scientific, but I enjoyed the spare prose, which I found to be jewel-like and spirited.

  1. Uludåğ (Blythinia)

  Locality—While on excursion on the mountains South of Bursa, I was able to examine several trouts just captured in cool brooks along the Northern slope of Uludåğ (Olympus); height about 2000m.

  As if in some dream where at every turn there is a coincidental meeting, we arrived on the broad shores of Abant Lake the moment at which I came to observations of its trout in Tortonese’s paper.

  The trouts living in Abant Lake form a small, isolated population. These fishes remind one of those present in some rivers of Sardinia, described by Pomini (1940). It can hardly be doubted that the trouts existing in Abant are genotypically as well as phenotypically distinct from those of Sardinia. What is their taxonomic status? Of course, there is no question about their belonging to Salmo trutta, but I do not think they are to be included either in S. t. macrostigma (the Mediterranean trout) or in S. t. labrax (the Black Sea trout). They rather represent an undescribed subspecies, for which the name abanticus is here proposed.

  And as we took to a dirt road around the lake, set in a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by green mountains, we saw some fishermen casting their lines. Just as we reached them one of the fishermen was landing a fish. Like weary treasure hunters who had just glimpsed El Dorado, we jumped out of the car and descended on it. It was a golden trout with leopardlike spots that seemed to glow as it reflected the last light of the setting sun.

  When we had finished admiring the fish, and the tall Turkish angler had stowed his prize in a canvas sack, we had an Efes beer and some dinner at a small wooden lodge by the lake. During the day, Johannes had been fairly silent, though I could not determine if that was due to his nature or his reluctance to speak Spanish. With alcohol now, and one trout under our belts, conversation came easier.

  We all laughed and spoke in combinations of the languages we knew. We noticed each other’s idiosyncracies. Ida discovered that I ate very quickly and in large quantities and joked that I had four stomachs like a cow. She mocked Johan
nes’s tendency to take his mustache between his thumb and forefinger when in thought. Johannes joked about his own bald head, saying it made him faster as he chased trout in the water. Ida asked if I had a girlfriend, and when I told them about Yannid, she teased me, suggesting that I was a heartbreaker.

  “To our first alabalik,” Johannes said, toasting, and took his mustache between his index finger and thumb. We laughed. “In Turkish,” he said, “balik is fish and in Arabic Allah is God, so maybe trout is God’s fish.”

  Ala in Turkish actually means a scarlet shade of red; it also means speckled, so alabalik is a speckled fish.

  We had a glass of raki and that helped me to sleep. The air was crisp and fragrant by the lake that night.

  THE FIG EATERS

  Turkey was all one time zone and the farther east you traveled the earlier the sun rose. Near the border with Iran, Johannes said the sun was up at 4 A.M.

  We were all a bit hungover the next morning, but still we joked and played etymological games. When we stopped for breakfast along the road headed east, Johannes wanted to order eggs but could not remember the word in Turkish. So when the waiter came, Johannes said the word for chicken, tavuk, and mimed the shape of an egg with his hands. This made Ida laugh and reminded her of a time from when she and Johannes had lived in Colombia.

  “My aunt came to visit and went to a café to get a coffee with milk, café con leche, but didn’t know the word for milk, so when the waiter came she said café con moooo, and squeezed her own tit.” We laughed heartily.

  When Johannes got up to go to the bathroom, Ida said to me, “He’s probably going to look for trout in the toilet. A special trout.” But she did not laugh.

  That day we drove from the Black Sea basin, which had been lush and green, over the mountains to a more arid land in central Turkey. By the time we reached the capital of Turkey, Ankara, we were ready for some tea and lunch.

  Çay was poured from a silver pot into small clear glasses, piecs of dark tea leaves visible on the bottom. The body of the glass was hot, so it was customarily held by the rim and sometimes drunk with a sugar cube in your mouth. We ate a fresh tomato salad with onion, pepper, cucumber, and parsley.

  “The farther east you go, the less alcohol there is, and the more parsley.”

  After the yogurt soup we left for the city of Erzincan.

  Somewhere, just east of central Turkey, we passed an old man driving a horse cart. We crossed a small bridge over a stream, which Johannes said was a tributary of the Euphrates. Tall rows of poplar trees grew along the banks. Their tops were tossed and their leaves shook by a warm and persistent dusty breeze.

  Beyond another small stream on a dry hill I spotted an army-green tank with its large barrel pointing at the road. Soon, beyond the waves of heat rising from the road we could see men standing, and later their vehicles materialized beside them. They stopped us in the middle of the flat land.

  “Passports,” they said. They took and examined them. I examined Johannes’s face in the rearview mirror to get some indication of the seriousness of this meeting. He looked calm and even had an awkward smile on his face.

  “What is your purpose for traveling here?” they asked him.

  “Alabalik,” he said.

  The soldiers, who looked to be younger than me, probably eighteen or nineteen with barely any stubble on their faces, laughed and laughed, repeating the word alabalik over and over. They paused for a while and then said, “Cigarettes?”

  Johannes handed the young soldiers a pack with two cigarettes left in it. They took them out, and stood expectantly. “Okay,” Johannes said, and wrestled an unopened pack out of his shirt pocket. He handed it to them and they let us pass.

  Farther down the road we passed more tanks with their barrels pointed at the road. It was disconcerting. We had entered an area of Turkey under emergency rule by the Turkish military.

  For many years the Kurdish people who lived in eastern Turkey and considered themselves of a separate race and religion were trying to secede from Turkey and create their own nation of Kurdistan. To prevent the separatist and sometimes terrorist group called the PKK, Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, from achieving its goal of independence, the government had stationed troops there. Frequent outbreaks of fighting occurred, especially in the southeast, our eventual destination near the Iraqi border, where the headwater tributaries of the Tigris River flowed from craggy mountains. I knew from what I’d read that the Turkish military had a history of suspicion of outsiders; the added political turbulence would not make traveling in the region any easier.

  I looked to Johannes to be my Virgil in the inferno and hoped that he was capable as a guide. The roads were unpaved and the fields beside the road were unevenly cut by hand with scythes.

  After eight hundred kilometers on the road that day, we spent the night in Erzincan at the Hotel Berlin. It was a run-down establishment with no furniture in the lobby, just a desk and a telephone. We were required to leave our passports at reception overnight.

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving my passport here,” I whispered to Johannes.

  “You only have one passport?” Johannes asked, striking a match to light a cigarette.

  “Don’t tell me you have two?”

  “Of course, so does Ida.”

  We rented one room with two beds and I slept on the floor. At about one in the morning I woke up with a dry mouth and a full bladder. There was no water to drink and I couldn’t get the bathroom door open. Ida was snoring loudly, making gasping noises like a slain cow, and Johannes let out farts at intervals. I tried to fall back asleep but could not.

  As the sun rose, and a cool breeze crept through the window, I heard the call of “God is good” broadcasted from the spires of every mosque in the city. It echoed through the street, a high plaintive song.

  “Allahuekbahhh, allahhhhalllaaahhh.”

  The next morning I purchased several postcards depicting the mountains near Erzincan and wrote messages home on them as we drove east.

  We crossed the Euphrates River twice as it wound back and forth under the road, and turned north to follow a smaller tributary called Balik Çay, or fish stream (Ç in Turkish is pronounced ch; çay, besides being the word for stream, is also tea in Turkish).

  In the town of Mercan, at my request, Johannes stopped at a post office. At a table in front of the building, several mustachioed men were seated playing backgammon. They looked at us and squinted from the bright sun, chewing on dried figs they took from a pile between them.

  “Alabalik?” Johannes asked.

  They pointed in the direction we were going, away from the Firat Nehri (Turkish for the Euphrates), and said we would find trout in the village of Balikli, twenty kilometers distant. They offered us tea and figs but Johannes declined. “We don’t have time for tea,” he said to me, “we only have time for trout.”

  We drove toward a range of low snowcapped peaks, called the Otlukbeli, and arrived in the village the fig eaters spoke of. A small river flowed through Balikli, under a bridge and through a shady poplar grove. From the bridge we could see a skinny man, his long trousers rolled up, standing with a fishing pole in the middle of the stream. We stopped to watch him fish.

  The water in the river was somewhat opaque and milky blue. It flowed around his legs and an eddy formed downstream of him where he dropped his bait, which looked to be a ball of bread.

  Johannes called out to him over the sound of rushing water, “Alabalik.”

  “You think he’s fishing for trout?” I asked Johannes.

  It was nearly midday and the reflection of the sun on the rippled currents was blindingly bright. A cool breeze blew from the poplar grove carrying a strong scent of cow dung.

  Our eyes were fixed on the fisherman when an old man came up behind us. He cleared his throat audibly to get our attention. When we turned, he lifted an open hand to his dark forehead as a kind of greeting.

  “Alabalik,” he said after
a long silence, “evet,” yes, and shook his head from side to side. Johannes looked at him with a hopeful glance. The old man spoke again like an echo of himself from parched lips under this thick gray mustache, “Alabalik.”

  When he said the word alabalik—the i is pronounced like the u in put, and the word was spoken deeply and aquatically—it was as if he were uttering a secret that should not be shouted. He seemed excited to help us. Perhaps, I thought, he was a fisherman himself.

  Johannes wanted to make it clear that we were interested in the indigenous trout. He told him repeatedly, “ala, ala,” red, speckled, trying to communicate through mime and drawings in the dust on the hood of the Land Rover that we wanted only the native trout with the red spots.

  “Evet,” the man said, and to show he understood he took out a small container of paprika from his pant pocket, spread some on the soft underside of his arm, and mixed the powder with a little spit to produce a soft vermilion color.

  “Yes, yes!” Johannes shouted, delirious with pleasure.

  The man pointed up the river. A wind rustled the leaves in the poplar grove.

  “Alabalik,” he said, and looked at the sun and then his watch, “no,” by which he meant to say the sun was too bright for fishing at that hour. “Çay?” he asked.