Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  “Yes,” Johannes said, “they marketed those in Argentina, but in Spanish ni-va means doesn’t go.” Johannes spoke in English. His English had greatly improved since I had known him.

  Yerevan was the first city of a former Soviet republic I had visited. It made a strong impression. Every dark-haired, thick-eyebrowed woman and man walked with their heads hung low and many of them carried something in a plastic bag. There was a beauty in the concrete-and-steel ugliness of the town, in the inconveniences I imagined existed, but it seemed a little drab and sad (like a glimpse of Dickensian poverty). Vendors sold sugar melons and bottled mineral water. Old Russian sedans—Volgas, Ladas, and Jigulis—in white, yellow, and baby blue moved up and down the uneven streets, their tires bald and patched, their wheels missing hubcaps. It was my first taste of Russian dysfunctionalism, viewed before the silhouette of Mount Ararat, from which, according to the Bible, post-flood life began.

  The lake Nuné had referred to at the café was Lake Sevan, our destination, which looked on the map to be roughly one-tenth the surface area of the country. “Though Armenia is relatively small as countries go,” Nuné explained, “Sevan is still quite large. When you stare across it, it’s like you’re standing at the edge of the sea.” She paused. “But I wouldn’t know exactly, because I’ve never been to the sea.”

  Lake Sevan, the outflow of which runs to the Caspian Sea, once had four separate races of brown trout that occupied different niches in the ecosystem and spawned in the rivers entering the lake every month of the year except June. “I’m confident we will be able to find trout,” Nuné had e-mailed me.

  The only written documentation Johannes and I had on the trout of Armenia was a paper published in Russia in 1896, during the reign of Czar Alexander. Johannes could read the Cyrillic alphabet, so he at least could pronounce the names of the rivers where the trout spawned. Our information was unfortunately over a hundred years old and sadly out of date. Since the late nineteenth century, Lake Sevan had greatly changed. In the 1930s it was drained sixty feet for the purpose of exposing what the government thought would be arable land beneath, but the dry earth turned out to be infertile and nonarable, mostly rock and sand. Realizing its error, the government subsequently built a fifty-kilometer pipeline through the Geghama Mountain Range to bring water from the Arpa River to the lake in an effort to fill it up again.

  “They won’t be able to,” Nuné said, addressing the subject, “but at least the level has remained stable.”

  The draining of the lake had caused the extinction of at least one of the native races of trout, that known as bodjak, which had spawned on the now-exposed shores. We had little information to substantiate the existence of the other three types of trout, but Nuné was optimistic that we would find them.

  “The trout of Lake Sevan are somewhat legendary among Armenians,” Nuné said with a prideful air. By this point we were out of the city and making our way to the lake itself. “We call it ishkhan, or the prince fish, and the legend is that there was once a Urartian prince [the Urartu people preceded modern Armenians] whose beloved drowned in Lake Sevan. He wanted to live with her forever so he asked a magician to turn him into a trout. That is why it is the prince fish.”

  One of the books I had brought with me to read was The Hunting Sketches by Ivan Turgenev, stories about Russian serf life in the nineteenth century. Turgenev was a landowner but wrote sympathetically about the peasants bound to his land. Looking out of the car window at the villages we passed I thought the lifestyle of the people here, subsistence farmers living in stone homes, was not much different from those I read of. The only difference was that the Armenians were not serfs, but citizens of a struggling democracy.

  “People are prepared to work, but there is no work,” Nuné said, sensing what I had been thinking. “I tell you, many lament the fall of Communism. They say, ‘At least back then we had jobs.’ Now the country is dependent on loans from the World Bank and contributions from the Armenian diaspora, mostly Armenian Americans in Los Angeles and New York. The leaders are involved in a kind of Armenian mafia. The money never gets to the people. Our biggest and newest opportunity lies in tourism, but in the West you read about how our prime minister and his cabinet members were assassinated last year, you think we live in chaos and it is not safe to come. Now there is a great opportunity to see Armenia. Westerners could not enter the country until the mid-nineties. We have much history. We were the first nation to adopt Christianity—in A.D. 301—and we have some of the oldest and most beautiful churches in the world.”

  “Don’t bother telling Johannes,” I said, “he doesn’t care about churches, he only cares about trout.” I realized I had begun to sound like Ida.

  “Well, trout are just another reason to be here,” she said.

  Eventually, in the distance, we saw Lake Sevan through a light blue haze. It lay as a kind of alpine sea, nearly six thousand feet above sea level. At first it looked no different from the pavement distorted by the heat waves, but then we smelled it, moist and not unlike the ocean, and saw clearly that it was indeed the vast inland sea Nuné had said it would be.

  The lake itself was green and clear. The air was cool by the water. The shores were lined with resorts from a time when prosperous Russians took vacations there. Many of them were half finished and almost all of them were abandoned. We took the road part of the way around the lake to a peninsula, on the tip of which, Nuné said, the president of Armenia had his summer residence. As we turned onto a road down the peninsula, we encountered a man dressed in colorful costume wearing makeup on his face, like a clown. Behind him, high above the ground, his friend walked a tightrope strung between two poles. It was all very bizarre.

  “Am I dreaming?” I asked Nuné.

  “No,” she said, “they are doing it for money.” Sure enough the man walked up to the car and we gave him some dram, the Armenian currency.

  Farther down the peninsula we came to a large building of overlapping concrete discs, cantilevered over a cliff, like something out of a Russian futurist’s imagination. It looked precarious.

  “The building is supposed to look like a fish’s mouth,” Nuné said.

  It was one of the few resorts still operating. Marat stopped and we walked into reception to check in.

  When we had settled in our rooms, each with his or her own balcony that hung over the cliff, the four of us walked down a path to the beach for a swim. Marat and Nuné sat on the beach in the sun cutting up a watermelon. Johannes and I jumped in the water.

  I lay floating on my back with my face to the warm sun and Johannes, wearing his mask, dove to the bottom to look around. He swam back to shore with a large crayfish and I swam back too to look at it.

  We watched Johannes photograph the crayfish from every possible angle.

  “He’s a little crazy,” I said to Nuné.

  “I admire the depth of his curiosity,” she said. “It makes life interesting.”

  When Johannes had finished with the crayfish, he let it go.

  “Can I show you where we would like to go?” he said to Nuné. Johannes took out maps to show to her and Marat, unfolding them on the beach.

  “Where did you get such beautiful maps?” Nuné asked.

  “They are old Russian military maps,” Hannes said.

  Nuné squinted in the sun. “They are really something,” she said. “It all is.”

  “So,” Johannes said out loud, looking across the open lake. “Do you think there are trout?” He pointed to the streams that flowed into the lake where he wished to fish.

  “I’ve arranged to meet with fishermen in the villages around the lake,” Nuné said. “We will know tomorrow whether they have been catching trout in their nets lately, or if the trout are extinct.”

  We sat in the sun and ate slices of the bright pink-fleshed watermelon. The sweet smell was hypnotic. I put on my diving mask and swam in the warm clear water, watching the light play in all imaginable geometric patterns over the sandy
bottom.

  That evening before dinner, Johannes, Nuné, and I walked through a grassy meadow on the peninsula to a ninth-century stone church. The sun was setting over the lake and a breeze was blowing from the hills behind us.

  We ate dinner at the hotel, on a terrace overlooking the lake. A young girl brought out a plate of oval flat bread, called matnakash, and fried siga, or whitefish. The next course was yogurt soup and sour cheese. When we had finished the bread the girl brought more, and a plate of peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes stuffed with beef and onion. We each drank several bottles of Armenian beer, Kilikia, and at the end of the meal a glass of Armenian cognac.

  I slept very well my first night in Armenia.

  PEPAN THE FISHMONGER

  The next morning, having all slept well through the cool night, we visited a small fishing village called Tsovagyugh, on the northernmost shore of the lake.

  There, in the rosy dawn light we saw women with knives dressing out whitefish for smoking. Once the fish were cleaned, the women strung them on sticks and suspended them in the cavity of an oil barrel, at the bottom of which a small pile of wood barely burned. After several hours over the smoldering wood, the silvery whitefish had become a rich golden amber.

  Nuné interrupted the women at work and asked them who in town might have trout for sale. The brawny women in full-length dresses and aprons, like those in a Winslow Homer painting, stood upright still holding their knives and addressed her.

  “It is late June,” they said to her in Armenian, “the season for trout closes in May.”

  As we drove farther into the village we found the fishermen themselves. When Nuné asked them for ishkhan they shook their heads.

  “My friends here just want to see the trout and maybe buy some for dinner,” she explained to them.

  “Go see Pepan,” one suggested. “Pepan catches more trout than anyone. He might have some in his freezer. Go down the road a bit and turn right, or better yet, I’ll take you there.” The man hopped in our already crowded Niva and showed us the way.

  Pepan lived in a two-story sandstone house and he came out to talk with us. He was a big man, a little less than six feet tall and broad like a bull. Despite his menacing appearance, he was a friendly man, exuding the kind of warmth derived from being powerful and secure. We handed him a bottle of cold Kilikia beer as a gesture of greeting and he embraced it in his big black arms covered with thick tawny hair. He pulled off the top of the bottle with the fingers of his plate-sized hands and the neck of it disappeared in his black beard as he chugged it down.

  “Do you have any ishkhan we could see?” Nuné said to Pepan.

  “Ishkhan?” Pepan said, smiling, “we have no ishkhan now, ha ha ha, there are not many left in the lake. It is not the season.” He threw the beer bottle on the ground and it rolled into a shaded corner beside his house.

  “We were told you caught ishkhan in your nets last night,” said Nuné boldly. “My friends have come from abroad to Armenia to see the trout of Lake Sevan.”

  Pepan turned reluctantly toward his home and told us to follow.

  He bid us sit at a small card table on a set of plastic chairs and served us each a cup of coffee with sugar. Then he pulled tray after tray of trout from a big refrigerator, his initial reluctance turning to enthusiasm about the beautiful fish. He had specimens of two of the four races of trout from the lake, gegarkuni and summer bahtak, and explained to us the differences between them.

  “The gegarkuni has these large spots, always black, like a leopard—the summer bahtak has smaller and fewer spots and usually a row of red spots down the sides.” Johannes and I gawked at the fish in the dim light. Before us were the drawings of trout we had studied in the old Russian paper come to life.

  Pepan pulled out one specimen of gegarkuni that was more than two feet long. He confessed to Nuné that he had caught it in his nets early that morning. Though it had been dead for several hours, it was still a beautiful silver fish, with the big black spots like a leopard’s, as Pepan had described.

  Johannes and I asked if we could photograph the fish in the light, but Pepan refused. We finished our coffee and bought the best specimens to take with us, though we could not afford to pay what he was asking for the big prize fish.

  “Who can afford to buy that fish for two hundred dollars?” I asked Nuné.

  “Mafia,” she said.

  After visiting the village of Tsovagyugh our plan was to head west and south, counterclockwise, around the lake. We had marked the tributary streams we wanted to try angling in and on the way we would stop in the villages to see what the fishermen had caught in their nets.

  On the lake shore near the village of Noratoos was a large group of fishmongers selling fish out of the trunks of their old sedans. Marat stopped the car and we walked along piles of smoked whitefish, dried whitefish, carp, and live crayfish. The crayfish were the same pale green color as the lake water with tinges of orange on their claws and big as a man’s hand. The crayfish vendor’s son heard Johannes and me speaking English and thought he’d try his out on us.

  “Come to the blackboard,” the boy said. “Hands behind your back. Sit down in your seat.”

  “This is all the English you remember from school?” Nuné asked the boy, taking his ear and twisting it. She laughed. We bought some crayfish for dinner and asked the vendor if he knew where we could find ishkhan.

  “Ish-khan?” he questioned, thoroughly articulating both syllables. He waved his hand for us to follow. The boy closed the trunk of the car where the crayfish were and got into the passenger seat. His father drove away from the shore and we followed him to his house.

  The man stopped the car and went inside. His wife greeted us at the door with hot coffee.

  “This is pure ishkhan,” the man said, returning with a large object wrapped in brown paper. It was even bigger than Pepan’s fish, maybe thirty inches, a kaleidoscope of blues and purples. The man stood with his hands on his waist and made an offer to Nuné in Armenian.

  “He wants to sell it to you for a hundred and fifty dollars,” she said.

  “No, no,” Johannes said, “we have enough trout to study and eat. And we have crayfish too.”

  As the day wore on it grew very hot and I knew the trout we had bought would spoil in the trunk of the car. The live crayfish were in a bin of water and seemed not to mind the heat.

  Farther along the lake we crossed a beautiful spring-fed stream called the Tsakkar, not unlike some streams I had fished in Normandy. We turned off the road and followed it upstream to where some of its fingers percolated up from the ground. At one of the springs I saw a small bird with an amazing array of colors. It looked to be a finch of some kind, though it reminded me of a painted bunting or a warbler in a strange state of molt. Below the bird, in the water, I saw a trout holding in the current, a sight that never ceases to surprise and awaken me. I felt as if I had been in a deep slumber since the last time I had seen one.

  I turned to get my fly rod, but when I returned to the pool the fish was gone, and so was the bird.

  The water was warm enough that Johannes did not need to wear a wet suit to dive. He put on his mask and snorkel and slipped into the river. Both Marat and Nuné were amazed when he came up with a small fish in his net, even though it was not a trout.

  “Now I see why he is so good at languages,” said Nuné, “because when he dives he must ask the trout to go in his net.”

  We stayed the evening in a villager’s home on the western shore of the lake. For dinner we boiled the crayfish we had bought and sucked their sweet meat from the vermilion shells. As I had expected, the trout had spoiled in the heat, and we fed them to a stray dog and her puppy. From our rooms we could hear the lapping of the waves, and though we were thousands of miles away, I felt as though I were on the edge of the sea.

  After a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs the next morning, the four of us continued south along the coast of the lake until we reached a tributary stream called the
Argichy. Where we first glimpsed it at its confluence with the lake, the Argichy looked slow and murky, but as we drove upstream on narrow secondary and tertiary roads it began to clear, like a beautiful trout stream.

  The valley of the Argichy was more green and lush than other areas surrounding the lake that we had seen. Grasses and wildflowers grew along the road, and in the villages every stone home had a beautiful garden plot with potatoes, sunflowers, and hemp. Men and women were active in the fields hilling up the earth around potato plants or already harvesting the grasses from open meadows with scythes. Young girls, their hands inverted and resting on their lower backs, arched their torsos and stared at us, not seeming to be working, but keeping their watch on the solitude. The farther up the river we drove the more men we saw cutting the grasses on the open hillsides. They were sunburned and their dark naked backs were peeling.

  We stopped to take a photo of the river and I watched them work. Even at a distance, I could hear the sound of their sharp scythe blades cutting the grass, like plaintive birdsongs. Occasionally, a man would stop work, pull a whetstone out from his pocket, spit on it, and make his blade keen again. The women and older men raked what grass was cut into tall stacks with wooden rakes and pitchforks.

  We came to a fork in the road and stopped to ask some workers which path led to the headwaters of the stream. They were taking a break from their work, standing beside the tents where they had spent the night. One man stepped forward and offered us bread and cheese and boiled potatoes. We ate a bit and then they gave us each a shot of vodka with a tablespoon of salt in it.

  “Are there trout in the river?” Nuné asked them.

  “Yes,” one said, “kharmrakhait,” which, Nuné explained, meant red-spotted; a union of kharmish, red, and khait, spots.

  “That is the trout we want,” Johannes said, and reminded me that in Turkey and also in nearby Azerbaijan, trout was alabalik, or fish with red sides.