Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  “See what I told you,” Johannes said, “the farther east you go the earlier the sun rises and the more parsley on the salad.”

  We drank our beers and then drank a second round. The brand of beer was Efes and we were surprised they had any at all, being that the area was mostly Muslim. We tried to guess what kind of fish they would bring us for dinner.

  “Maybe they will serve us trout from the lake,” Johannes said. The boy returned with three fish, butterfly filleted, cooked in salt, pepper, and paprika to a rust brown color.

  “The fish is very good,” said Johannes, chewing, and taking some more with his fork. “It would be even better with a little wine. But it is not a trout. My guess is that it is an introduced Corregonus species. You call it whitefish.”

  An old lady, hunched over and walking with the use of a cane, came in from the rain and sat down. I noticed she was staring at Ida. Ida noticed the staring too. The old woman came and sat down next to her, talking loudly in her ear as if that would make her understand better. The old woman smiled at her, with a mouth like a wrinkled pumpkin. I smiled at the old woman, but her eyes were fixed on Ida. She seemed to be curious about her, asking her where she came from, perhaps because Ida’s skin was dark and she was traveling with us and our skin was white. “Is this your son?” she said, pointing at me. One of the men in the room spoke German and translated. She insisted Ida was Turkish, but Ida insisted she was from Austria, that she was dark because her parents were Indian.

  After a few minutes, Johannes started speaking in German with the man who had translated for Ida and asked him if we could park beside the shack for the night and sleep. It was still raining and the man said we’d better not sleep on the ground in the rain. One offered us a room of his house to stay in.

  It was too early to sleep so we kept drinking. We listened to the thunder and watched the lightning flash outside until only the old woman and the young boy were left. The boy put on some Turkish music. Then the power went out and the music with it. The boy went over to the radio and tapped on it with his hand but it did not respond. The old woman began to hum a tune.

  It was very cold and misty by the lake the next morning. We bundled up with what warm clothes we had and drove around the other side. At the village of Gölbelen a man told us there were trout in a stream three kilometers up the road. But from that point beyond the village the road was impassable, even for the Land Rover. Johannes and I started off on foot, wiping away the sleep from our eyes, and Ida stayed behind with the car. Purple bell-shaped flowers hung above the dew-dampened grass. A man on horseback carrying a large scythe passed us on the road.

  We walked up two kilometers and found the stream. Immediately, I began to catch trout on my fly rod. Since the trout were in a stream that flowed to the Caspian Sea, they would most likely be known as the Caspian Sea subspecies, Salmo trutta caspius. They were red-and-black-spotted like the Euphrates trout and the lavender spot on the gill plate was the color of the bell-shaped flowers that grew in the rich green meadow.

  Two or three pools upstream of me in the tall grass I saw a man fishing the stream with a cast net. He stood on the bank and threw the net into the small pools. As he did, the meshes glistened like a cobweb hung with dewdrops. Johannes and I began walking back to the car with two fish kept alive in a plastic bag full of water.

  “Today we will see Mount Ararat,” Johannes announced as we were returning over the largely bare, windswept country. “Do you know about Ararat?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I answered.

  “It’s the mountain on top of which Noah had landed his ark when the earth flooded. Eden was here too. There must have been trout there,” he said, half joking, as he walked. “And they survived the flood, of course.”

  On the road south toward Mount Ararat, near to the borders of both Armenia and Iran, Ida asked if we could stop beside an out-cropping of red-orange rock to buy peaches from a street vendor.

  Beyond there Johannes spotted a tank perched on a hill. When we continued on, we were stopped by the military. The soldiers, armed with automatic weapons, asked us to step out of the car and they performed a thorough search.

  “What are you doing here?” one soldier asked in English as we stood outside the car.

  “We are fishing,” I said, but he didn’t understand.

  “Alabalik,” Johannes said.

  “Alabalik? Hah!” the soldier said, and started to laugh. He had a long look at Ida and then waved us on.

  A broad-based mountain with a white cap materialized in the distance, a shade darker in value than the sky peaked with a white cap. It was Mount Ararat, and though it was still twenty kilometers distant, it was so massive that from where I was sitting in the backseat of the Land Rover it spanned the entire windshield.

  The living cargo of Noah’s ark had survived forty days and forty nights of rain and storm. When the waters ultimately receded, they disembarked on the 41st parallel.

  Ch. 8:4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. 5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen. 6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: 7 And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from the earth.

  Trout, of course, as Johannes pointed out, being denizens of the water, were not dependent on the ark for survival. One could say that God favored fish and chose a fate for life on earth that they would be immune to.

  Heading on a long straight road to the mountain’s base and another military checkpoint, we were also nearing Eden. The soldiers themselves might be guarding the gates.

  In Milton’s Paradise Lost, a spring bubbled forth near the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. That spring was the source of the Tigris River, and if we could find it, Johannes was betting there would be trout.

  There was a place,

  Now not, though sin, not time, first wrought the change,

  Where Tigris at the foot of Paradise

  Into a gulf shot under ground, till part

  Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life (IX: 69)

  In my mind, the sources of all rivers were good to drink from and to fish in: pure, cold, and clear. The walls of Eden had crumbled long ago but the trout were probably still there. Johannes was the only man I knew who was convinced that trout really did live at the source of the Tigris, and the closer we got there the more apparent became his monomania for catching one. Here there were no flowers except what bloomed from the chicory and sage. Fine dust filled the Land Rover as it blew across the land, settling on every horizontal surface, including my eyelids and upper lip.

  At dinner that night in Dogubayazit on the Iranian border, Johannes discussed our journey’s most risky task—to enter the region south of Lake Van, where the most hostile battles between the Turkish military and the Kurdish people were being fought, and emerge with a specimen of Tigris trout.

  “You must now add the Kurdish word for trout to your vocabulary,” Johannes said. “Massi alé.”

  The next morning we were even closer, on a lake south of Ararat described as having trout in Tortonese’s paper. Balik Gölü, it was called. A sparse population of Kurdish nomads had pitched their brown tents over piles of stones on the lakeside. Where there was a road, the road was dry and hard and dust came in through the car’s ventilation system. Johannes stopped the car by a boat beached on the shore. Beside it a fisherman was sleeping in his car.

  “Alabalik?” Johannes said, knocking on the man’s window. The man got out of the car, brushed some dandruff off the lapels of his gray suit, and offered two trout he had caught that morning in his nets. The fish were mangled from fighting in the fisherman’s net, but you could still see the characteristics that convinced Tortonese of the fish’s uniqueness: the sparse black spotting pattern, the lean sleek body, and the forked t
ail.

  We came to a town called Diyadin. Above the village there was a stream called Murat Çay that Johannes wished to sample for trout. He stopped at a kabob stand on the main street where men were gathered and tried to recruit one or two to be our guide. He asked them if there were trout in Murat Çay, holding up the trout we had bought at Balik Lake to demonstrate.

  “There are many,” one man told us. “But you shouldn’t go because there is fighting in the hills.”

  “Beş milyon, bir alabalik,” Johannes said, offering five million Turkish lirasi for one trout. None of the men would take payment to guide us up the river.

  “They shoot you in the head,” they warned, demonstrating with their fingers.

  We gave the two trout to the cook at the kabob stand and asked if he would cook them. He cooked them well; Ida ate the smaller of the two and Johannes and I split the big one. Johannes was picking his teeth with the spines when a man invited us into his office for tea.

  The man had a large kind smile and served us tea in red lacquered cups. Judging by the tools in his office and the tooth diagram on the wall, I surmised the man was a dentist. There was a map of Turkey on his desk and Johannes told him where we wanted to go. The man showed disapproval.

  “Don’t go up Murat Çay,” he insisted, “there are terrorists in the hills.”

  After we’d finished our tea he sat Johannes in the dentist chair for a free inspection. He told him to open his mouth.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” the dentist said, looking into Johannes’s mouth. Then the dentist made an imaginary gun with his hand and pointed the barrel at Johannes’s head. Ida laughed and took some photos, the flash filling the dark office with light. The warnings did not seem to scare her.

  “Don’t go to Murat Çay,” he repeated, “ta ta ta ta ta…,” and then pointed the imaginary gun at Ida’s heart, “Ta ta ta ta ta….” The dentist laughed.

  “Qué dentista,” Ida said, rolling her eyes. “El es loco.”

  Johannes jumped out of the dentist chair and we left the office. The dentist stood smiling and laughing in the doorway as we walked away.

  I noticed for the first time as we were leaving the village of Diyadin that white roots were showing in Ida’s black hair. It had not occurred to me that she was old enough to dye her hair, she had such a youthful and jovial demeanor. The white roots reminded me that time had passed since we’d left Sankt Veit.

  The checkpoints became more numerous as we drove toward the city of Van and the vast turquoise lake of the same name. As my anxiety grew, I could only imagine what was going through Johannes’s head. He was probably thinking he’d discover a new species of trout. I was thinking of the dentist.

  By noon we were deep into southeast Turkey and finally in the drainage of the Dicle Nehri, as the Turks call the Tigris River. Everywhere on the road and beside us across the semidesert countryside were reminders that a war was being fought here. There were tanks, armed vehicles, men with guns, blown-out and barricaded sections of road. As we approached an unusually large checkpoint, Johannes made sure to remind me not to take photos of the military, to hide my camera and my journals.

  The road was blocked by two iron gates and two soldiers waved us to the side of the road. Johannes stopped and opened the window.

  “What is your purpose for traveling to the village of Çatak?” the soldier asked in English.

  “Alabalik,” Johannes said.

  “Alabalik,” the soldier repeated and sunk his upper lip into his lower one and wrinkled his brow. “Well, passports, please.”

  He held our passports together in his left hand and licked his finger in anticipation of flipping through, but he did not open them.

  “Please step out of the car.”

  What might they find that would cause suspicion, I wondered. Would they confiscate my sketchbook, my journal, the film I had shot? As we sat in the dirt and waited, I thought about how the soldiers looked to be about my age. Johannes, Ida, and I sat on the side of the road. Eventually the official who held our passports returned.

  “Do you really want to cross this line?” He looked at Johannes. “If you do you may, but the road to Çatak will be closed after 5 P.M. At that hour we are sending in a military operation, and you should not be there.”

  The official dusted off his hands and lifted one of the metal gates to let us pass. It was 3:15.

  “We have only an hour to fish,” Johannes said, driving desperately fast down the only road that led to the streams near the Tigris’s source.

  Ida in the meantime stared out the window until she began to shout at Johannes. I could not make out exactly what she was saying but she involved me in her tirade and she was very angry.

  “You should have left me at home. I would have stayed there had I known you’d put our lives at risk.”

  Sweat began to bead up on Johannes’s brow and dripped down to his forehead and the bridge of his nose, hanging as a drop on the tip, where he wiped it off. I took my mind off the shouting by concentrating on the map. I saw that the town of Çatak was only about forty kilometers from the border with Iraq. Between us and that border, a dozen or so streams trickled out of the mountains and gathered to feed the Tigris River. The stream we were headed for was called Çatak Çay.

  Not twenty minutes had passed before the stream came into view, flowing through farms alongside the road. Large poplar trees shaded the banks, beans grew on poles, and squash and cucumber blossomed in rows in the dark earth. The stream itself was swift and clear.

  “There must be trout in it,” Johannes said.

  But he did not stop to fish it, he drove all the way to the village of Çatak to ask the native Kurdish people where the trout were, using the Kurdish word for trout, massi alé. When we got there, though, Çatak was not a friendly scene. The streets were deserted and an armed soldier stood on every street corner. Johannes turned around and we headed back north of town.

  Johannes pulled off the road near a lovely stretch of river. I was stringing up my fly rod when a red van pulled off the road beside us. Out of it poured a dozen Turkish police in plain clothes.

  “Alabalik?” Johannes asked them.

  “Evet,” they said, “passports?”

  “You must leave,” another said.

  “Why?” asked Johannes.

  “There is terror here, it is not safe,” he said matter-of-factly, pointing up in the dry craggy hills overhead. “Thousands of people die fighting here.”

  I couldn’t associate any permutation of the word “terror” with this scene. We were in a canyon of sorts and along the stream grew willows and poplar, their gentle leaves sensitive to the slightest breeze. The water was very cold, the sun burned my neck. I was fly-fishing.

  “Okay then,” the policeman said “you have ten minutes to fish, then you must leave.” A colleague of his took a fishing rod out of the van on which was tied a large copper spoon. Another held a revolver, and I pretended not to notice. I was very thirsty and walked down near the stream to drink where a spring cascaded out of the rock on the bank. I drank until my mouth was numb from the cold water. I closed my eyes, then looked into the sun, thankful for such a beautiful day, then closed my eyes again and felt the sun burn from above the cliffs.

  I was crouched down, balanced on my toes, when the ground began to shake and a raucous sound drowned out the gurgling of the small spring and the river. A tank was passing on the road.

  One of the men approached and tapped me on the shoulder. “You must leave,” he said. I had not made even one cast.

  I counted ninety-three tanks passing on the road as we left the area, each with a soldier standing upright and armed in the open hatch. Kurdish children along the side of the road waved to the Turkish soldiers and some soldiers waved back. We followed the road back to the checkpoint and spent the night by turquoise-blue Lake Van under a large apricot tree.

  RETURNING TO AUSTRIA

  The next morning was the twenty-sixth of July. During nervous fits in my tent th
e night previous, I dreamt that I was back together with my high school girlfriend, Whitney. I would not have recognized her were it not for the freckles and her blue eyes and the way she wore her straight brown hair. With the dream came old anxieties. I could smell the cool melancholy air of the New England autumn when school began and the dreaded end of summer with it. An apricot leaf, turned yellow, had fallen into my lap as I read in the vestibule of my tent that morning.

  Meanwhile, Johannes was having his own anxieties. He realized he was not going to catch his Tigris trout on this trip. I was picking apricots from the tree pretending not to hear the jokes he cracked about trading me to terrorists for a specimen of the Tigris trout.

  During the course of the day’s driving we came to more military checkpoints. The inspections were overwhelming, invasive, and taxing. For the first time Johannes had truly given up on his mission and we were headed west.

  I pitched my tent that night on a rocky surface in the parking lot of a small restaurant in Malatya. I had bad stomach pains, perhaps from eating too many apricots, and the air was stifling hot.

  The next day I lost my appetite, acquired severe nausea, and purged my intestines. I had two bites of bread for breakfast with my morning tea but could eat no more. My mind could concentrate on little else but the pain I was feeling. I suddenly felt dirty and couldn’t remember the last time I had showered. Had it been eight days? I noticed for the first time that my arms were caked with dust. The thought of being clean again began to obsess me. I dreamed of having a shower and cold clean tap water to drink. What thoughts filled my head; perfect images of the pink faucet in the bathroom at home and how in the summer it beaded with condensation when cold water coursed through it.

  I would jump into the next river that Johannes had in mind to search for trout. That happened to be the Karagöz River, a tributary of the Zamante, near the village of Pinarbaşi in south central Turkey. We had long left the basin of the Tigris River; the Karagöz flowed from its source to the Mediterranean Sea.