by James Prosek
“If we have not found a stream by this evening,” Johannes said, “we will seek local knowledge in the bar.”
In the mountain town of Aritzo we took a break from camping and got a room in a small inn. Near dark, we walked the streets of the village to the first bar we found. The men inside were huddled around a television set watching soccer. One or two of them heard Johannes and me speaking Spanish and took an interest in us.
“Where have you come from?” asked an old man holding a bottle of Moretti beer.
“I am from the States,” I said in Spanish, “and he is from Austria.”
“It’s a long way from Aritzo to home then,” he said. “We welcome you. What have you come for?” He glanced over at the television set to see if he could catch the score. Johannes hesitated to tell the old man.
“We are trout fishing,” I volunteered, and then, almost at a whisper, “Do you know where we might catch some?”
“You have not picked the best time of year for trout fishing,” he said, “you can see that the rivers are very low. I’m sure you’ve seen.”
“That does not bother us,” Johannes said. “The trout must still be there.”
“They are there,” he agreed, and blinked his eyes heavily. “I can’t really tell you where, though. I fish only twice a year, and when the river’s up. But only when I get the taste for them. We are so close to the sea, you know, there are enough fishes to eat.”
“If you want to know about trout,” another man said, “ask the bartender.”
“Yes, he is the real fisherman,” said the first man drinking from the bottle, and then he spoke to the bartender.
“I can draw you a map,” the bartender said. “I think that would be easiest. It’s near my home on the Flumendosa River.”
“They are black spotted and their bodies are yellow?” Johannes asked the man.
“That’s what we’re looking for,” I said.
“Yes, yes, they look like that,” he said, drawing the map on a bar napkin and then explaining it. The bartender gave us each a beer and did not charge us. The old man had treated us to a round.
At breakfast the next morning in the inn overlooking the distant mountains, Johannes searched for the map the bartender had drawn for us on the bar napkin. To his horror he realized that he’d taken it out of his pocket that morning and blown his nose in it.
“Shit,” he said, and chuckled, “it’s in the trash in the room.”
“I remember what it looked like,” I said. “It led us right back to where we had been in the hailstorm.”
“I noticed that,” said Johannes, “but then he drew an arm off the dry streambed.”
“We should be able to find it then,” I said.
We spent the day walking beside a dry streambed. I did not mind the hike; even if we did not find fish it was a beautiful land. Autumn was near, you could smell it, dry chestnut leaves in warm, dry air. The trails we followed were made by wood pigs, which we heard snorting and occasionally saw. It was easy to mistake the sound of the wind through the trees for running water.
Suddenly we saw it, glinting like silver as it cascaded from a deeply shaded grove of oaks. The smell of the air had suddenly turned damp, of mushrooms and moss. The pools of the stream were too dark to see into and dried oak leaves choked the eddies. We did not know if we had found the place we were told to visit, but it looked as promising as any place we’d seen.
I proved with my fly rod that there were trout living there. A small fish came up to hit my dry fly. The fish was almost entirely black from living in the peat-stained water, like an eel or a night sky.
Johannes was elated. He put the trout in a plastic bag filled with water and carried it alive back to the car, where he photographed it in a long narrow glass tank. When he was done he killed it, sketched it, and removed its liver to preserve in alcohol. A sense of remorse crept over me when I thought of how freely the trout had taken my fly and how freely Johannes had taken its life. But I enjoyed holding the fish in my hand, studying it and painting a small watercolor from life as it lay on my paper casting a small violet shadow.
As we left the valley of the Flumendosa, into another I knew not the name of, I felt at peace. The roads in the mountains were winding, the cutbacks so severe they almost doubled over themselves like a snaking river that touches at its elbows and leaves oxbows.
We spent two more days in Sardinia and then, having circumnavigated the island in a clockwise fashion, we arrived at the north where the ferry was loading for Bonifacio, Corsica.
INDULGENCES OF A CORSICAN KIND
I sat at meals of wood pig, cheese, seafood, with wine of both tannic red and clearer golden, in country restaurants in the mountains and by the sea. As Johannes had described it, traveling in Sardinia and Corsica was pleasure by indulgence and not a strange pleasure through sacrifice and fear, as our trip through Turkey and the Balkans had been.
Johannes described Corsica as bountiful.
“There is more water,” Johannes said on the ferry from Santa Teresa to Bonifacio. “The food is better too, because it is France. The trout are now truite, not trota.”
Riu Solenzara was the first Corsican river I saw, like a necklace of clear turquoise pools tumbling down through a rocky valley. In places the banks were open, in others there were tall pines, which appeared to be very old. The only drawback, in Johannes’s eyes, to the natural beauty of Corsica was that it attracted a lot of tourists. Many of them were bathing in the river as we drove up the Solenzara Valley.
“Shit, there are many people here,” Johannes said when we pulled off in a grove of ancient pines. “You’d better leave your fly rod here. You don’t need your wet suit either, the water is warm.”
I grabbed my mask and snorkel and walked to the river behind Johannes. We stripped to our swimsuits and slid into the pool. The water was pleasant, like tepid bathwater, and clear. I stared at the bottom and watched the light play over the river stones.
I dove down and searched for trout in cuts in a ledge on the opposite bank. I looked under rocks and slipped along the bottom pretending I was an otter. I surfaced to see if I could spot Johannes and instead I saw a young couple, completely naked, making love on the rock ledge.
I dove to the bottom again and looked under several big boulders hoping to see a trout. I scared one out of its hole and chased it to the ledge, where it hid in a small niche. Under the water you could not see the trout’s colors; the fish looked subdued and the same color as the slate gray ledge. It was only when you took the fish out of the water and beheld it in the sun that you saw its brilliant colors.
I tried to find Johannes so I could show him the trout and he could try to catch it. As I swam upstream to look for him I passed two naked women swimming breaststroke across the pool. I felt somehow that I was trespassing in their territory. They didn’t acknowledge me formally but they were giggling when I came close to them, maybe because I was wearing a mask and snorkel. I felt like a little fish beside them.
I don’t know how much time passed, but when I found Johannes he was standing by his glass tank, already photographing a trout he had caught.
“Where have you been,” he asked, “looking for nymphs? I have seen some too. We have finished work early, now we can go eat.”
We ate a good meal of cochon du bois and set up our tent by the beach, where we slept soundly.
The next morning was Sunday. We drove up a river called the Golo to search for trout. The farther we drove the steeper the ledges on either side of the river and the narrower the road that followed it. The dawn bathed the canyon walls in a rose light as if the sun was emanating from the river. Farther upstream, the canyon leveled out and we went through a forest of tall pines, Forêt de Valdu-Niella, where we heard the distant shots of hunters. The floor of the forest was blanketed with dry needles, and paths were cut through by forest pigs.
We fished a tributary of the Golo in the dark forest that gurgled over pristine colorful river stones. The s
un had not reached this spot and the air was still cool.
Johannes put on his wet suit and dove in the small pools, thrashing like an alligator as he chased after trout. He warned me that there were park wardens around and that I should not fly-fish, so I sat on a large boulder above the creek and read. After some minutes, I looked at the sun making its way higher in the sky, this brilliant orb I had seen from every place I’d ever been.
Before late morning when the sun had reached our cool quiet spot, Johannes had caught three trout. They had yellow sides and mostly red spots, like some trout we had caught in Turkey. Johannes carried them alive in a bag of water back to the car.
By noon we were heading back down the canyon to fish another spot where the Golo River had collected several tributaries and was larger, with deep emerald pools. On the way, we pulled off on the roadside by a stand of large chestnut trees to eat some bread and cheese, and to photograph the trout in Johannes’s glass tank. A warm dry breeze blew through the shady stand of trees and made music in the chestnut leaves.
I was hungry and sat down to eat, cutting hunks of cheese with my pen knife.
“Remember that spot in the poplar grove where we had tea with the Turkish man?” I said to Johannes, who began setting up the materials he needed to study the trout.
“Yes.” Johannes chuckled. “I remember. His name was Celal, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“That was a nice trout you caught there in Balik Çay.”
“It was,” I said, reminiscing. I asked Johannes if he thought we should open a bottle of wine to celebrate the three trout we had caught that day.
“Let’s save it,” he said. “We have one more place to fish today.” I handed him a piece of cheese to eat.
“Oh, hell,” he said, “why don’t we drink the wine now.” We ate more cheese with the wine and finished the bottle in the car.
All along the winding mountain roads were signs of unrest from Corsican separatists. The graffiti spray-painted on barns and road signs read libertà per Corsica.
“We are always searching for trout in places where people want their independence,” Johannes said, referring to the Kurdish people who wish to secede from Turkey. “The Basque country is another place where there are interesting native trout and separatists.”
We were driving slowly through the village of Castirla when I spotted a sign on a building that read Chocolaterie, the C in the shape of a fish hook with a small fishing fly. I asked Johannes if we could stop and investigate.
I walked into the chocolaterie and spoke with a small woman who stood behind a glass case of chocolates. I asked in French the best I could why there was a fishing fly on the sign. She said it was because her husband was a pêcheur de la mouche, a fly fisherman. I told her that I was too.
“He’s fishing down in the river now,” she said, “nearer to Francardo. Maybe you will find him.”
Francardo was a typical Corsican mountain village, gray stone buildings right up to the street, built so tightly it looked as though no mortar had been used. Small clusters of cosmos and michaelmas bloomed in cracks in the slim sidewalk where there was one.
Though the air was still cool, an occasional warm breeze blew from the river valley. The rock ledges and boulders had been baking in the sun all day and now radiated the heat like a second source, warming the air.
Before fishing, we drank a cold Coca-Cola at a small café.
“It’s a good day for swimming,” Johannes said.
We parked our car just upstream from the village and walked down a steep and rocky hill to the river. The water in the river was tepid, and when I put on my mask and dived in I saw many trout. They held stationary in the current like fruit in a bowl of Jell-O, as if the movement of the water did not affect them.
I must have made a discreet entry into the water because many of the fish continued to feed with me there, darting to catch small insect larvae floating by. I was mesmerized watching them as I tried to swim in place. I could see the trout were different from ones Johannes had caught in the upper tributary that morning. Their sides were peppered with fine black and red spots and their mouths looked like they were shaped differently.
When I had swum enough I put on my shirt and pants and began walking upstream, hoping to find the fly fisherman whose wife ran the chocolate shop. I had not yet seen a fly fisherman in Italy or southern France.
After about fifteen minutes of walking I saw an old man sitting under a fig tree, the broad green leaves like three-fingered mittens concealing his face. When I walked closer I saw that he was lighting his pipe and that a fly rod was leaning up against the tree.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” I said.
“’Jour,” he said.
“Have you caught anything, vous avez eu une touche?”
“Non,” he answered. He looked to be older than his wife, if he was the man I was looking for. His pipe smoke was carried to my nose by a warm breeze. It smelled like burning chocolate.
“I am a fisherman, from America,” I said. “My friend and I are looking for native trout, truite sauvage. Do you know if the trout here are native?”
“Ah,” he said, “the trout of Corsica have lived through a lot. They have introduced other French trout to our island.” He puffed on his pipe. “The Nazis threw explosives in our streams to kill the trout to eat. I was a member of the Résistance. Do you know this, do you understand me? The Résistance!”
“Je pense.”
“I know the trout of this island, what they used to look like. Most of these streams have introduced fish. In another valley there was a very peculiar fish, wild and native, with big red spots. I can show you this fish. I have one in my freezer that is fifteen years old. The trout in that stream are now gone.”
“You are from the chocolate shop, yes?”
“Yes, I make the chocolates. If you want, you can meet me at the shop tomorrow morning. I will show you this fish.”
“I would like to see the trout. I will be there with my friend in the morning.”
I left the man to his fishing and walked back down to the pool where Johannes had been diving.
I told Johannes about the old man and the peculiar native trout he spoke of that is now extinct that he kept in his freezer.
“This guy is old,” I said. “I think he was in the war.”
“Which war?”
“World War Two.”
“Did you tell him we were fishing?” asked Johannes.
“No.”
“Good, you never know, he could be a warden.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
We drove over the pass to the coast to spend the night and had dinner in the town of Porto. We started at the bar with a beer and then drank several glasses of pastis on empty stomachs. I spoke about my excitement to see the frozen trout.
“So, it’s just a frozen fish,” Johannes said, “I prefer them live.”
“But it’s a native fish and they’re no longer around. The man said they were unique.”
“How does he know, he’s just a chocolatier.”
“And you are?”
Johannes smiled. “Well, we’ll see, maybe he knows what he is talking about.”
For dinner we ate salade niçoise and thin linguini with mussels in a white wine and garlic sauce. It was nice to be up in the mountains and by the coast in the same day, neither one very far from the other here. Corsica was not a very big island.
After dinner we had another drink.
“We have covered a lot of territory, you and I,” Johannes said. “We have drunk pastis in five countries by five different names.” He was talking about the clear anis-flavored drink we had that turned cloudy when you added water. Johannes listed them. “Raki, aslan sütü, ouzo, Anis del Mono, Pernod, pastis, Ricard.”
We went without speaking for some time, watching what went on around us. The sea air had a bit of September melancholy in it.
The next morning was our last in Corsica. We had to m
ake the town of Bastia by evening to catch the ferry to Livorno, Italy. But first we had an appointment with the old fly fisherman at the chocolaterie in Castirla.
“The trout of Corsica have lived through a lot,” the old man repeated when I entered the shop with Johannes, though I think he was talking more about himself. He was wearing an apron and wiped his hands on it.
“I suppose you’ve come to see the trout,” he said. “Well, I’m sad to say I looked for it all yesterday afternoon and into the night and could not find it. I took everything out of my two freezers and put it back in three times over.” The old man took his pipe, which had been sitting in an ashtray, and lit it. “When I asked my wife if she had seen my trout she said she threw it out with some other old fish five years ago. I’m sorry, monsieur, it was a large trout with big red spots. I’ll tell you what they looked like, the spots were like ripe raspberries. But, can I give you some complimentary chocolates to take with you?”
I took some chocolates that he had put in a small wax-coated paper bag.
“Thank you, monsieur,” I said to the chocolatier. Johannes and I headed for the door.
“Typical of a wife to throw out the old man’s trout,” Johannes said as we were leaving.
“Hold on,” I said and went back inside.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” I said to the man. “Do you have any locally made flies for trout fishing? I would like to bring one or two home as a souvenir.”
“Why, yes,” he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth to speak. “I have the best Corsican flies, made with feathers from my friend’s prize gamecocks. Let me go in the back room and get one or two for you. I always keep my fly-fishing rod nearby.”
The old man gave me two beautifully tied dry flies that were blue gray in color, the stiff hackles of the feathers bristling from the hook like an insect’s legs. I thanked him and left the chocolate shop.
Johannes made a point of reminding me that I had cost us some time, that if we had not stopped at the chocolate shop then we could have fished another stream on the way to Bastia. Now we had no time. We caught the overnight ferry to Livorno, Italy, at twilight.