by James Prosek
Johannes turned to me. “Sometimes we must drink tea to get trout,” he said.
The old man told us to wait in the poplar grove while he prepared the tea. We sat beside a small aqueduct in the shade and waited for him. Ida brought her book to read, but put it away when the man returned carrying a tray of tall clear glasses and a silver pot.
He sat down with us, Indian style on the grass, and as he poured the tea, he began what I inferred, from the different pieces of languages he tried to use—German, French, and English—was a philosophical discussion about the virtues of country life over city life.
“Istanbul,” he blurted, “no good,” and spat in the dry earth. He took a bit of soil and rubbed it on his forehead, then filled his teacup with water from the aqueduct and drank it. “The sound of the stream is good for sleeping,” he said through a combination of speech and mime, “the water is pure for drinking.”
He told us his name was Celal Boz and shook our hands. Then he took out a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, but there was only one left and the filter was broken off, so Johannes offered him one. He accepted, lit it, and puffed, staring into the foliage of the poplar trees above him. He took a sugar cube from a small bowl and pointed to cultivated fields on the other side of the river. “I farm sugar beets,” he said in broken German. A small boy came up to Celal’s tea tray and stole a lump of sugar. He put it in his mouth and sat within earshot of us. The tea had become stronger. We were nearing the leaves at the bottom of the pot, the sun was lower in the sky, and Johannes was impatient to go fishing.
But Celal was not impatient. His hospitality was thorough and unwavering. We would not go fishing until he gave us a tour of his home.
He carried the tea tray and we followed him to the steps of his abode, where we took off our shoes and walked in. The room was dim and colorful in contrast to the bright stark landscape outside. On the wall opposite the door were two portraits. One, Celal explained, was his father, and the other, Kemal Atatürk, the former president of Turkey (Ata-türk, or “father of the Turks,” known for Westernizing the culture and introducing the Roman alphabet). Celal was proud to show us that he had a shower and a telephone. He offered us lodging for the night and invited us for dinner.
Johannes said the word again, “alabalik,” as a hint that he wanted to go.
True, Celal had agreed to be our guide, and remembered his original duty as soon as we stepped out into the cool dry air.
He sat in the passenger seat of the Land Rover as Johannes drove, pointing which way to go when we came to intersections in the dirt road. Where there were villages children came running from the homes, curious to see who was passing through. But there were few signs of people over the hour that we drove, just large uncultivated plains blooming with daisies, cosmos, and chicory.
At last we crossed a bridge over the stream again and Celal pointed below it and waved his hand. “Alabalik çok,” he said.
“Çok?” I said to Johannes, “what is that?”
“Çok is many,” he said.
We stopped the car, and out of the streamside willows, it seemed, a dozen children ran up to us, curious to see what we were doing.
Ida read her book and attracted the least attention, especially I think because of her dark skin. The children were mildly interested in my fly rod, showing confusion in their faces as to what I intended to do with it. But what seemed to astound them the most, as well as Celal, was Johannes, who had stripped to his underwear and was dressing in a black rubber suit. When he jumped into the river below the bridge with a net, they stripped off their clothes and jumped in too.
The river was very swift, and the children were swept down in the current until they found footing on the gravel. I could see Johannes was having trouble searching for trout; though the water was clear, there were no holes deep enough to dive in and the turbulence from the riffles obscured his view.
“I saw two,” he called when he surfaced, and blew water out of his snorkel, “one big, one small.”
The children gathered around, dripping water, waiting to see if the fisherman caught anything in his net. He hadn’t. They put on their clothes and disappeared into the bushes again.
Ida and Celal agreed to stay behind with the car. The water looked fine for fly-fishing and I was eager to hike upstream. In five days of travel it was the first day I had taken out my fly rod. Johannes and I took to a path along the river and soon saw some men walking. We stopped to shake hands with them.
“Welcome,” said the oldest man in English.
“Alabalik,” I said as a statement of purpose. He looked at my line.
“Not with this,” he laughed. “It’s too thick, the water is clear.” He was looking at my green plastic fly line, not the thin clear end where the fly was tied. I showed him that the very end was clear and he looked at me and said that it was too thin, indicating with his hand that the current was strong. The man then looked at Johannes and his net.
“It is impossible to catch trout with this,” he said. “You need a bigger net.”
Johannes shook his head back and forth. “I have caught many trout with this,” he said.
The men went on their way. A small way up the stream the path stopped and we were blazing our own trail through the grass and willows.
I began to fish with my fly rod. For some long while I had no luck and thought there were no trout. Then, as I was walking along the bank, I saw a dark shadow against the gravel. I looked up to see if it might have been the shadow of a passing bird, and seeing there were no birds I decided it must have been a trout.
I cast a weighted caddis fly into small pockets here and there up against the willows that grew on the bank. The current was swift and took the line before the fly could sink. I waded out in the fast water and held my rod over the calm pocket, dropping it in and letting it circle in the back eddy. Johannes was watching from the shade of an apple tree when I hooked a fish. It got in the main current and shot off downstream. I stood on the bank hopeless, imagining what the fish was and what it looked like, and the tippet broke.
“Scheisser!” Johannes yelled out with his arms in the air. “Why could you not bring the trout to the bank?”
“Me?” I cried. “Why couldn’t you get in the water and net it?”
We were both disappointed because it had been a good-sized fish and neither of us had seen a fish from that stream.
We fished farther up the river and seemed to be getting closer to the mountains, but time was passing and I hadn’t caught anything. “I’m going to head back,” Johannes said, “maybe there are no more trout here.”
“Maybe you are right,” I said, “but I’m going to fish a bit more.” Johannes left me there.
I walked a bit longer and came finally to a long and slow pool I had been looking for. I knew, from the streams I had seen and fished, that there would be a big fish in that pool. Green moss carpeted the stones near a small cascade at the head where a single arching willow branch concealed a very likely looking spot.
I stepped into the stream and did my best to cast to the top of the pool, stripping more and more fly line off my reel to extend my reach. My small caddis fly hit the water and drifted into a small whirlpool, where I let it sit for some time. When I finally lifted my rod I could not believe the heavy weight at the end. It was a good trout and I was so afraid to lose it that I began to sweat.
I fought it gingerly but kept pressure on the fish and my rod tip high. The fish jumped, and when it did I saw how golden it was and that it was a good fish, maybe two pounds.
When I had pulled the trout close to my feet I saw it against the colored gravel; its back was a deep olive-oil green. Its sides were golden, like the sun when it nears the horizon, and its lateral line was strung with a row of vermilion spots with blue-white halos.
Johannes was somewhere downstream of me if he had not already made it to the car. My first thought was to photograph the fish and let it go. I was angry at Johannes for turning back
and didn’t think he deserved to see it. I also did not want to kill the fish, but I felt I would regret not showing him what I had caught.
I reluctantly killed it by sharply hitting the top of its skull with a river stone. Then I returned with the fish, strung through the gill on a willow branch.
Back at the Land Rover, Johannes unfolded his examination table and took out some paper, a pencil, and a camera, and lay those items on the table.
“Good work,” he said when I handed him the trout, “too bad you could not have brought him back alive.” He measured the eye, the head, the fins, the distances between them, and counted the fin rays and the number of lateral scales, the pyloric ceca (small fingerlike pouches in the digestive tract), and gill rakers, recording all these quantitative observations on the page. Then he drew the fish, as I did, noting all its characteristics, and when he had finished, he cut out the liver and put it in a vial of alcohol, writing Balik Çay, Euphrates basin, Salmo trutta and the date on the label.
The tissue samples from this fish and any others we caught would be sent to Louis Bernatchez, the research biologist at Laval University in Quebec who was using DNA to create an evolutionary map of the trout of Europe and Asia (and to define the characteristics that make each lineage unique). Specimens of particularly interesting fish, Johannes said, we would preserve whole and send to Dr. Robert Behnke at Colorado State, the man who had introduced us.
“Send him a piece of your liver,” Ida joked, observing Johannes’s scientific rituals. “See if he can tell the difference.” In the meantime, Celal Boz showed excitement over the nice trout, but expressed his impatience to get home.
We sat on Celal’s cement porch in the early evening drinking tea, awaiting the dinner his wife was preparing for us. Buffalo began returning from pasture over the bridge on the river, kicking up dust as they walked. Their lowing mingled with the sounds of flowing water. Ida found her way into the kitchen, which was in another building, and helped Celal’s wife cook over an open fire.
We could not refuse the Turk’s hospitality. As we waited for dinner, he insisted we sleep on his mattresses and not the ground. Near twilight outside his front door in the poplar grove we heard the braying of donkeys, bells, flutes, and singing. A band of Gypsies had decided to take up residence there for the night and began pitching their tall canvas tents on the smooth green grass where we had taken tea that afternoon and where I had pitched my tent and intended to sleep. They lit two small campfires, and three Gypsy children lit sticks on fire and began racing around my tent. Celal offered again that we sleep in his home.
Finally Celal’s wife and Ida, after two hours in the kitchen, brought out the trout I had caught, grilled over the fire, the skin crispy and golden and sprinkled with paprika. We ate it with flat bread and dishes with eggplant and yogurt. The door to Celal’s home was left open so you could hear the sound of the river. As the sky grew dark, all you could see were two Gypsy campfires and the faces of the Gypsy children glowing in the warm light.
THE TROUT OF EDEN—COOL MOUNTAIN BROOKS OF GÜLYURT AND ARARAT
To explain Johannes’s route to our eventual destination, southeast Turkey, which for several more days was circuitous and dizzying, one needed only to look on a map, understand our quarry, and realize the manner of roads relative to topography. There were still other trout he wanted to catch before we got to the upper tributaries of the Tigris River near the border with Iraq. Trout required cold water, which generally meant that they lived in streams high in the mountains, where the roads were poorest and most difficult to maintain.
The next morning we traveled north again and crossed from the Euphrates River watershed, which flows to the Indian Ocean, over a mountain pass back into the basin of the Black Sea. Near the divide, we made our way through a cool penetrating fog. Emerging from the low clouds we glimpsed small villages built of roughly cut stone. Manure, beaten flat and cut in bricks, was stacked in neat piles outside the doors. Even now in summer, it was burned for heat and cooking in the absence of trees (which I assumed had all been cut). The pungent smoke awakened my nostrils. In contrast to the dry land we had traveled the day before, this country was green. Tea and corn grew on terraced hillsides. Where the land was uncultivated, wildflowers were dense, lush, and in all colors imaginable. With the car windows open we could hear, more than we could see, in the mist, a small brook tumbling down the hillside.
At a dramatic viewpoint in the valley the mist had partially lifted, revealing a small town and a mosque that forced its tall needlelike tower into the low clouds. On the adjacent slope a woman was cutting grass with a scythe. Another woman was raking the grasses into a pile and a third was carrying a load down the hill by a tumpline about her head, her torso bent almost at a right angle to her legs.
We stopped on the road by a small brook and considered fishing. I decided to string up my fly rod and see if I could catch a trout. Out of the mist appeared three young men with the beginnings of mustaches on their faces. One approached me and removed a small golden hook from the leaves of his wallet and began to tie it on the end of my line. He encouraged me to follow him down the hill. Johannes said that I should, so I and the young man with the golden hook were running down a hill into the thickly green valley, through the damp cool air, wildflowers growing to our shoulders.
The stream was swift and clear and the rocks on the bank glistened with moisture. The young man turned over some river stones and strung my hook with live mayfly nymphs he found there. Then he took my rod and began to fish with it and I saw how agile he was. He leapt from wet rock to wet rock, dunking the nymphs in a series of emerald pools, almost a nymph or sprite himself. When he walked on the bank he barely left a mark on the mats of purple wildflowers.
He caught several trout the size of large sardines, heaving each into the air and over his head, landing them in the soft grass behind him. They came unhooked in the grass and I searched for them, usually listening for them rustling before I saw them.
I was looking for one, and trying to listen over the sound of the rushing brook, when I looked up and saw my young fisher sprite had disappeared. The mist had become dense where he stood. I was just about to tell him to stop fishing, that four trout were more than I wanted to see killed, and then he was gone.
I stood up and began to run frantically downstream. Had he slipped and fallen into a deep hole, where he drowned or froze in the chill water, or worse, had the nimble nymph tricked me, secretly planned to steal my fishing rod, and was hiding with it in the tall orange and purple flowers? I felt confused and misled; I slipped on the stones as I ran after him, fell, and banged my knee, but I was determined to get my rod back. I was just as at home on the stream as he, after all, this was my domain too.
I came to a rickety wooden bridge and decided not to cross, but ran deeper down the valley and into the mist. I was picturing the young fisher continuing to fish down the stream with his golden hook and my rod, catching trout and heaving them over his head, when there ahead of me on a gravel bar I saw my rod and reel. I didn’t notice until then that I was out of breath, and though the air was cool I was sweating. I reached down to grab my rod, so relieved to see it, as it was the only one I had brought on the trip. I lifted it up and inspected it; I could see nothing wrong and the golden hook was still on the line.
I looked around and saw no trace of the young man, but there on the gravel bar now I saw a girl was washing clothes. She was beautiful and dark skinned, wore a red cloth over the top of her head, and didn’t appear to be startled by my abrupt appearance. I nodded to her; perhaps she had startled the sprite and caused him to drop the rod. Then I turned and began walking back up the valley to the road.
Johannes, Ida, and I spent that night on the Black Sea in Hopa, where Georgian fishermen docked their boats. We talked over dinner about the fish I had brought back that day. Ida spoke of all the types of wildflowers she had seen and photographed. Johannes did not listen or respond to her; they sat side by side but he did not tou
ch her. I thought of all the wildflowers I had trampled while in pursuit of the young fisherman down the valley. Ida conceded that trout could at times be as beautiful to her as the flowers and kissed Johannes on the cheek. When she turned to light a cigarette I noticed Johannes wiping his face where her lips had touched him.
The next morning we drove over another mountain pass into a third drainage, that of the Caspian Sea. On the pass the wind was strong and ripped from the ridge down the valley. We stopped by a small stream and asked an old man and woman if there were trout. A cold drizzle was falling.
“Alabalik?” Johannes said with his best accent.
“Yok,” the man uttered, nodding slowly and without an expression, none.
We drove into a lightning storm on a broad treeless plain. Over a small hill, through the thick fog and rain that was becoming harder and steadier, we saw Çildir Lake, and no boats or habitations anywhere.
Ida had taken charge of navigation and wore a look of concentration on her face as she studied the map. We passed a little sign by the vast lake that read Balik Restaurant.
“Pull over, Hannes,” she demanded. “Didn’t you think that James and I might be hungry?”
“How about me?” he said.
“You wouldn’t eat if we didn’t tell you it was time,” she shouted, folding her arms over her chubby figure.
The bumpy road followed a peninsula out into the lake. We passed sod-roofed homes, mounds in the earth with little chimneys coming out of them, puffing smoke. We parked the car and walked into the small shack that we assumed was the fish restaurant.
When we were inside the restaurant, it started to rain even harder. There were four tables, and at one were several grubby-looking men with bushy mustaches. We sat down too; there were no menus, so we asked for beer and hoped the food would come. A boy brought us each a beer and a tomato and cucumber salad with so much parsley I could barely see the vegetables.