Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  We made landfall at dawn and saw a red sun rising over a field of dried corn as we drove through the city of Pisa. From the hillside above town we could see the famous leaning tower glowing red with reflected light, like a piece of penne pasta cloaked in marinara sauce. We were headed up into the Apennine Mountains in north central Italy to fish one last stream before returning to Sankt Veit.

  Johannes spoke briefly about not wanting to return to work. Then he began talking about how it was mushroom season and where we were fishing might be a good place to find Steinpiltz, or stone mushrooms. His tone was peaceful as we spoke about other places where we wished to travel.

  “If I can get the time off, I would like to go with you on your latitude trip to Central Asia. There are many interesting trout there that I have not seen. This will take a lot of planning, but I have good information on the trout, and a few contacts. It is best to know people, if you can arrange it.

  “I hope you will stay in Sankt Veit as long as you want. We have rooms on the third floor that are usually occupied by young bakers who are training here, but they are open now. No one is using them. You can have an apartment and we can plan our travels.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said, referring to the third-floor room, “but I’ll have to repay you somehow.”

  “You can buy me a beer,” Johannes said.

  So I became a temporary resident of Sankt Veit an der Glan.

  SANKT VEIT: BARS 80, POPULATION 10,000

  Sankt Veit had a special tax for buying flowers to adorn the central square, its own torte (called the St. Veitertorte), and a city wall built in the thirteenth century. That summer, for the second time in fifteen years, Sankt Veit had been voted the most beautiful town in Austria. I found it charming and clean, a model place to live, but many of its residents found it isolated and boring.

  I had settled comfortably into my third-floor room and had made it a bit like home. I hung up clippings and photos and some of my paintings. I spread out sprigs of dried flowers and leaves that I had collected. Before me on the desk I put a single fig leaf, on the hard surface of which I wrote a poem, the first poem I had written in a long while.

  Johannes took me on several weekend excursions to Slovenia, where the mountain rivers were getting colder and the marble trout were preparing to spawn. We visited a place he knew, on a tributary of the Soča, where very large marble trout were digging redds in the dime-sized gravel (a redd is a kind of nest where the trout lays its eggs and then buries them). The spot was at an overlook by a ledge. On the top of the ledge there was some ice I had not seen, and I slipped and fell part of the way down. Thankfully, I did not hit my head on a rock, but I banged up my left knee and for the whole day I was limping, though I thought nothing of it.

  I fished several times for a large salmonlike fish called a Huchen that were purported to live in the nearby Drau, a large tributary of the Danube (the fish is sometimes called the Danube salmon). The sun no longer gave any heat; it was cold, and occasionally it snowed. I did catch one about five pounds and a brown trout of equal size, casting and retrieving large shiny spoons. These catches encouraged me to continue trying for one of the very big fish, like the one I saw hanging on the wall of a Sankt Veit pub.

  Johannes spent his spare time writing of his scientific findings during our travels that summer for the journal Österreichs Fischerei. He also had cleared three months for travel the following summer, and we were both working to secure visas and permits for travel. The countries we were considering, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, were not all easy to get into. Several travel advisories dissuaded Americans and Europeans from travel in remote regions of Central Asia.

  I spent most of my time with Johannes and Ida and their children, Mariela and Benedikt, but my companions were not all members of the Schöffmann family. I had made friends with some other Sankt Veiters. One was Klauss, a tall blond student of abstract philosophy.

  One night out at the bar where the big Huchen hung on the wall, I got very drunk and was introduced by Klauss to the bartendress. She was a young brown-haired girl with brown eyes, a round face, and slim body. She gave me a complimentary drink. Johannes showed up and had a drink with Klauss and me. The girl and Johannes had looked at each other, talked in German, and laughed. I was not too drunk to notice that I was being set up.

  I stayed until the early morning when the bar had closed. I watched the girl clean the bar top, stack the clean glasses, load the washer with dirty ones, and then she followed me to my room and spent the night. I was afraid that people would know I had a girl in my room, but then I didn’t care. She was passionate and eager and her wrists smelled like alcohol. The cool Austrian, almost autumn night was beckoning through the window. I was experiencing a form of companionship and intimacy I had not felt since my stay with Yannid in Rouen.

  I shared with the girl, whose name was Alexandra, my master plans for travel that winter and the following summer, my maps, my drawings of fish, my journals, the conglomeration of clippings and photos and pages written on with notes I hoped to distill into a book. She took an interest, and for the next two weeks we spent a good deal of time together. All the observations and thoughts I had been holding inside I told to her. She spoke English well. I took her fishing on the Drau and explained the angler’s hope of catching a big fish.

  She was leaving soon to study in Vienna but continued spending time with me up until the day she left. When she did I wished her a good journey.

  “It’s not so far,” she said, referring to Vienna. “You will have to come visit and we will go skiing.”

  “I will,” I said.

  I was slightly solemn when she had gone and Ida teased me.

  “Ah,” Ida said. “My son is in love.” I suppose I had spent enough time above the bakery to be adopted.

  October left and November came. The cornstalks in the valley at the foot of the Alps had turned golden and been cut. The life in the trees had been drawn into their roots. The first flakes of snow fell, collecting on the insignia for the Schöffmann bakery on the wall of the building outside my window, a large pretzel, and on the cobble street. I already was dreaming of warmer days and trout fishing. I was happy, arranging my fishing equipment on my bed, taking inventory of my flies.

  But one morning I woke in my bed and as I was sitting up to look out the window onto the rooftops of town, I noticed that my left knee had fluid in it. I got up and went about my day, read, showered, and tried to ignore it. An hour later the amount of fluid in my knee had doubled and I had trouble bending it. I walked down the three flights of stairs, and by the time I got to the bakery where Ida worked I was having trouble walking. Ida asked me why I was limping.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “it just happened.”

  “Too much dancing,” she laughed.

  At night it throbbed like a bad tooth and I experienced a rush of nightmarish thoughts as I lay awake. The next morning there was so much fluid in my knee that I couldn’t see my kneecap and the skin around it was stretched to the tautness of a drum.

  After two weeks of hoping the fluid would go away on its own, the swelling only became worse, so I decided to seek medical attention. I thought of the fall I had taken off the ledge in Slovenia when we had gone to see the marble trout spawning in the Soča. Maybe I had strained it, had walked too much and too rigorously, had not rested it.

  The doctor I visited did not know what was wrong either. He said to wait a few days and if my situation did not improve he would remove the fluid with a needle.

  Those few days passed with no improvement, so when I returned, the doctor inserted a needle below my kneecap and extracted nearly a liter of yellow fluid. I left his office with a bandage around my knee and by afternoon the joint had filled up with fluid again. I returned the next day and the doctor did not venture to guess what was wrong but sent me to a rheumatologist.

  As I walked down the streets of Sankt Veit trying to conceal my limp, people
asked me what was wrong. “I hurt my knee when I fell off a ledge,” I said. “It’s injured.” The word injured for me carried in its connotation a hope for recovery. “Or maybe,” I said, “I picked up a strange parasite in Turkey that affects your joints. It’s a tough bug, but I’m going to beat it.”

  I could get around with some pain, but I began to worry—what would happen if my other knee went out too?

  Already I had trouble doing basic things, kneeling down to sit on the toilet or getting in the backseat of a car, because I could not bend my knee. These were new challenges I faced. I became irritable because I did not want to be delayed by having to struggle with so many petty things that should come easy. I refused to think of all the things in life I had taken for granted, the most immediate one being the ability to walk.

  The rheumatology specialist I visited was named Peter, someone I recognized from some bars in Sankt Veit. I looked to be the only person under seventy in his waiting room.

  When the doctor saw me he lay me on an examination table and aspirated my knee with a long needle, following that with a cortisone shot in the same place.

  “I know you from the bar, don’t I,” the doctor said. “You are Hannes’s friend.”

  Afterward he sat me down and asked a series of questions. “Do you have a family history of arthritis, are you allergic to any medicines, do you have psoriasis?”

  “Psoriasis?” I said, “like the dry-skin condition?” I told the doctor yes, I did have a mild case of psoriasis.

  “Ahah!” Peter said, with an enthusiasm I would not have expected.

  He looked at me over his reading glasses and squinted, speaking with a heavy Carinthian accent. “I think I know what you have. This,” he said, putting his hand on my swollen joint, “is an imperfect knee.” He leaned forward slightly. “I think you have a rare form of arthritis related to psoriasis called psoriatic arthritis. We don’t know much about it, how you get it, what the relationship is between the psoriasis and the arthritis.”

  “I don’t know anyone in my family who has had this problem,” I said.

  “There are some severe forms and cases,” the doctor continued. “But I am hopeful yours is monoarticular, that is, it will attack only this one joint.”

  Peter handed me a color pamphlet about the disease. It contained pictures of symptoms, like pitted fingernails and red sores all over the body. It spoke of extreme cases, people whose every joint—wrists, knees, elbows, and knuckles—were swollen. “Sausage fingers” was one term that described swelling in the hands. As a painter this scared me most of all. In truth, the doctor had made me petrified with fear and dread.

  “I never heard of arthritis in young men,” I said.

  “There are things we can do,” the doctor said. “I’m putting you on a strong dose of an American anti-inflammatory drug. Don’t walk on it if you can help it. Take it easy.”

  “Doctor,” I said, “I live in a three-story walk-up. I hike, I fish, I like to strain my body. How bad is this going to get? Will I be confined to a wheelchair?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure? Will I be able to hike and run and walk along rivers?”

  “You should,” he said, and stopped making notes on my chart to look at me. “Just not maybe as fast as you used to.”

  Everyone around me, including Johannes, asked what was wrong, why my knee was swollen, why I was limping so severely. At the bar, people asked Johannes, “What’s wrong with James?”

  “He hurt his knee,” Johannes said.

  When they asked to see it and I lifted up my pant leg I saw disgust in their faces, especially in their eyebrows. I had never experienced being the object of such extreme pity. I hated it. I had no solace except the hope of recovery and the thoughts of all the places I wanted to visit when the weather warmed.

  I began to envy those who could walk without limping, even the people I viewed as the ugliest, most miserable souls, and tried to hide my own limp but could not. I knew people could see that I was limping because I could notice it myself in my reflection in the windows of shops in town. I had an intense and increasing fear that I chose not to face, that which told me I might not get better.

  In this state I would not be able to do many of the things that were so important to me. I could not help thinking that even the laziest stream would suddenly be an obstacle to me, and that my life was over as I had known it. I began to despair when I thought that I might even get worse, would not be able to paint because my fingers would be swollen, or hike mountains because I could not bend my knee, or walk down a steep embankment to a river, or even leave my bed.

  Ida was openly sympathetic, called me her son, and told me I would get better. Johannes could not understand why I was not right, but never did he suggest that my condition would jeopardize our plans for the next summer. “You must get better,” was the only thing he said to me, and he said it only once.

  Johannes and I studied maps, sometimes daily, in hissecret front den, and he gave me scientific papers to read (though I could not read all of them, as some were in German and Russian). The images of the trout in these scientific works, the sometimes primitive drawings in Russian journals published in the nineteenth century, gave my recovery a purpose; I wanted to see those fish in the flesh and paint them on my own.

  In the wake of a cortisone shot in my knee the swelling would go down for a couple of days. Then it would fill up with fluid again. Toward Christmas and the New Year my knee was in good enough shape that I could dance a bit, but my mind was so obsessed with the idea of complete recovery that I had little fun. I did not go out much, and essentially for the winter hibernated with my thoughts and memories. That is, until I saw Alex, the girl bartender in Sankt Veit who had returned from Vienna for Christmas break.

  “Get over it,” she said to me in the bakery one day, more or less, “don’t languish like a pussy, everyone’s got problems.” And she walked out the door.

  Later she came to my room and told me about her semester at school.

  “I’m sorry you can’t come skiing with me,” she said. “You will get over it.”

  She stayed with me that night and her tenderness gave me hope. That was just about all I could ask for.

  I did get over it. Though I was not back to normal by the time I packed my bags for a trip to Japan in late April, my knee was good enough that I could walk around without much pain or a noticeable limp. I feared doing something that would set it off again and was overly conscious not to bang or twist it in any awkward way.

  After months of limited mobility I had been given freedom to walk again. My recovery coincided with spring and that made it even more magnificent. It was then I realized that the adversity I’d faced that winter was something I had secretly wished for my whole life, a fault or imperfection that might help to push and challenge me and wipe complacence away forever. I hoped even more deeply that my problem would not return and continued taking the drugs the doctor had prescribed for me.

  HOKKAIDO, JAPAN, 41°N—A GIRL WHOSE NAME MEANS LITTLE RIVER

  My next journey on the latitude was with my friend Dawn Ogawa, who was tall and thin with straight black hair. In Japanese her last name meant little river. When she graduated from Yale (where we had met and dated) she returned to her home in Hawaii (where she grew up with her Japanese father and American mother), and shortly thereafter left for Japan on a Fulbright Fellowship to do cancer research in a hospital in Kansai.

  When Dawn invited me to visit her in Japan, she of course knew that my idea of a trip would involve trout. “That’s okay,” she said through e-mail, “it will give me an opportunity to see a countryside I have not yet seen.”

  We chose May for our travels because Dawn would be on holiday, and I researched where we might find good fishing.

  An indispensible resource in the planning for our trip was a man named Katsuhiko Yoshiyasu, an ear, nose, and throat doctor from Kyoto. As with Johannes Schöffmann, he was introduced to me as a tro
ut specialist by Dr. Robert Behnke. Behnke had received a copy of Dr. Yoshiyasu’s beautiful new book on native Japanese trout and encouraged me to contact him. I wrote him and began a correspondence, sharing books and photos concerning our mutual passion.

  In my last letter to Dr. Yoshiyasu, sent from Austria in the midst of my miserable state, I expressed an interest in fishing Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, explaining to him that Hokkaido was on the 41st parallel, which I was writing a book about. As the doctor did not speak or write English very well I told him that further arrangements would be made through my Japanese friend in Kansai.

  Dawn wrote Dr. Yoshiyasu in March and he replied to her with a twelve-page handwritten letter. He included maps (favorite spots marked with a yellow highlighter), appropriate flies, meticulous diagrams showing how to fish for the native trout, and pictures of the fish with the names spelled in phonetic Japanese on the back. Also included were his regrets that he could not join us. “Hokkaido is beautiful,” he wrote, “though it’s a little cold in May.”

  I arrived in Kansai the week before the boys’ day holiday, meeting Dawn in the airport and taking the train with her to the suburb called Nishinomiya, where she was living. The symbol of boys’ day is the fish, and from every high pole, rooftop, and car antenna colorful fish flags were flying against a blue sky.

  As Dawn showed me around Nishinomiya, I admired the colorful fish flags and noted that fish were just as at home in air as they were in water. Tubular in shape, the flags filled like sails and swayed in a slight breeze or darted in a stiff wind.

  I also observed the many rock gardens in people’s yards. “They’re called Kare Sansui, dry mountain stream,” Dawn said. “They’re supposed to express the spirit of Zen through only rocks and sand. The sand around the rocks is usually raked into a design to create the effect of movement like current in a stream.” The fish flags and the rock gardens resembled each other, I thought, in that they both represented the beauty of water, through suggestion, without water.