by James Prosek
Marat drove in the direction that the men advised for another twenty kilometers into the hills. The road became more and more treacherous and the car vibrated violently. We stopped where we could see the river off in the distance. It wound like a snake through a seemingly endless green meadow, starting somewhere in a hidden part of the mountains.
When we got down toward the stream on foot we found that the meadow was wet and soft like a cushion. The stream was forming here and all the seeps and springs we walked over were contributing to its flow. Tall grasses and wildflowers grew in the wet meadow, and though we were far above any village, men were there, harvesting and stacking it, in tall gumdrop-shaped mounds. I found it tiring to walk over the soggy ground more, I thought, than I normally should. As we approached the stream I felt a tightening in my knee. The beautiful gurgling sound of the stream through the meadow did not soothe. I was fearful something had set off the swelling again in my left knee.
I obsessively reached down to feel the knee and every time I touched it, it seemed more fluid had come into the joint. I was determined to ignore it and enjoy the beautiful place we had come into.
We came to a spot where we thought the stream looked good for fishing.
“I’ll go upstream with my fly rod,” I said to Johannes. “These pools look good, why don’t you stay behind and dive here.” He agreed to this plan and so I headed upstream, above Nuné, and Marat as well, eager to be on my own for a time.
I walked up along the banks and then through the currents of the stream itself, feeling the push of the cold water against my legs. I wanted to see if I could spook a trout and see it swim across the colored gravel of the clear pools. We had no guarantee that there were trout here at all, and I wanted to see one to build my confidence before I started fishing. I had no such luck, though, so I tied on a small caddis dry fly and began to cast it into small eddies behind boulders and beside the grassy banks.
In the shade of a large boulder where several large purple flowers were bent over and touching the water, my fly disappeared in a small swirl. I lifted up the rod and hooked the fish that had taken it. It jumped once and bent my limber rod in a pleasing arc. It sped around the pool from bank to bank, trying to find cover under the boulders until I was able to land it in the palm of my hand.
I had not noticed until then that Nuné had been following me and was watching from the tall grass on the bank. She had seen me catch and land the fish and came closer to see it.
“It is exquisite,” she said. “Gosh, it is beautiful.”
“Have you ever seen a live trout?” I asked.
“No.”
The trout was about fourteen inches, a velvety red on the sides with a marigold yellow belly and large black spots. I asked Nuné to hold the fish while I photographed it. She tied back her long black hair and held the fish for me. Then I told her she could let it go.
“Are you sure Johannes won’t want to see it,” she said, lowering her hands to the water. The fish flipped out of her fingers as she was thinking about it. “Oh well,” she said, “there he goes.”
“I’m sure Johannes will catch some of his own,” I said. “I think we’ll catch some more anyhow.”
For the next quarter mile or so of stream, Nuné walked alongside me as I fished. I was able to experiment with different flies and enjoy the day, sit down on the bank with Nuné and describe the joy I felt while fly-fishing. She had beautiful long black hair.
“It is an art,” Nuné said, watching. “It really is beautiful how the line loops around and lands on the water. And to see a trout take that fly is magical, you would never expect it.” I showed her other small flies in my boxes.
“They are so delicate,” she said, picking one up. “They are an expression of the predatory instinct through art. You are acting out the ritual of being a predator, but without killing the fish. That I have never heard of.”
“The English perfected that,” I said. “They made predation a high art.”
“I guess I knew that,” Nuné said. “In a fox hunt they don’t even kill the fox themselves, do they? They have dogs do it.”
“Sure,” I said, “they just dress up in costumes and ride on beautiful horses.”
“I guess a bullfight is a similar thing,” she said, “but fly-fishing is more peaceful, I think.”
When Nuné and I returned to Johannes and Marat we found them with a local farmer by his tent, drinking vodka. We had both been successful and shared our fishing stories. After a bit of discussion we concluded that these trout were either the progeny of a migrating population from the lake or were permanent residents.
“Maybe there are some of each,” Johannes said. “Anyway, our work is done for today. We should head back to the lake so we arrive before dark.”
On the treacherous ride down the road to the lake my knee continued to swell. I was seated in the back of the Niva and eventually was forced to put my leg between the two front seats because it got so bad I could not bend the joint.
“What’s wrong?” Nuné asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but I’ve got this problem with my knee. I hope it goes away.”
“I will pray for you,” Nuné said.
In my own prayers I rarely ask for anything, but that night at a small rustic inn by the lake I did. It was a hot, uncomfortable, and still evening and I tossed and turned on the uneven mattress. I felt feverish from the anxiety that I would not get better and that I would be a burden on the trip. I lay awake and was spooked by strange sounds that seemed to echo through the town of Martuni.
In the morning the knee was worse. It throbbed like a second heart, and when I got out of bed it was excruciating to walk on. Nuné came to my room early with a cup of chamomile tea. Minutes later she returned with a bottle of fluid.
“Lay down on the bed and let me see it,” she said. It appeared as though she wanted to try to treat it. I lifted up my pant leg. She could see that the swelling had increased; this I could read in the expression of concern in her face. She opened the bottle and poured what appeared to be oil on one hand and then spread it on both hands and began to massage my knee, adding more as she went. I just lay back, and after a night of no sleep I began to doze. The air in the room felt cooler and I noticed that the oil had a sweet odor.
“What is it?” I asked her in a half whisper.
“It is calendula oil.” I looked up at her, where she sat on a chair by the bed, and she had no smile or expression on her face. “I think it will help you get better.”
That day, Johannes went with Marat to sample a nearby stream and I rested by the lakeside and read books. Nuné stayed by my side and kept me company.
HAMLET THE FISHERMAN
That night a rainstorm blew over the lake and brought cooler and less hazy weather behind it. The next morning, out beyond the dark muddy surf, the water of Lake Sevan was a milky lime green. Where we stood it was sunny, but in the distance cobalt blue clouds dropped needles of rain to the water’s surface.
Long after first light, but still in the morning, Marat, Nuné, Johannes, and I were on a dirt road through a semidesert land following another tributary of the lake, the Masrik River, to its source. The road was lined with Queen Anne’s lace and yarrow, and looked largely devoid of human activity.
Nuné explained that the villages we passed in this valley were once occupied by Azerbaijani Muslims who fled across the nearby border with Azerbaijan. “We are still fighting them over a region east of here called Nagorno-Karabakh.” Some Armenians had found opportunity in the vacant homes.
Up ahead, an old shepherd tended his flock on the barren landscape. He wore a large green poncho and rested his hands on the curved handle of his cane. Other villages deeper in the mountains had been occupied again. Women, young and old, cast suspicious glances at us from open doorways, children played in a cemetery, and the land was again cultivated, mostly with potatoes. We stopped on a bridge over the Masrik River and a man came out of his home to greet us.
“I am the mayor,” he said, “welcome to my village.” Nuné asked him if there were trout in the river.
“Farther up the road,” he said.
“How much farther does the road go?”
“Not very far,” he said. “It ends at the pass by the border.”
At the end of the road, in a village nestled in a bowl-shaped valley, our car stalled and would not start. A heavy cool mist soon turned into a drizzle and then rain. An old man appeared, as old men had a way of doing, with one hand on his white beard and one behind his back.
He examined our car, peering over Marat’s shoulder as he looked under the hood. The man encouraged Marat to leave the car alone and to follow him to his house.
“Come in,” the man said, waving us toward his home. We probably wouldn’t fish until the rain passed anyway, so we went with him.
After a short walk, we entered a small stone house. It was two stories, and we followed him up a dark steep stairwell, which I had some trouble climbing. At the top of the stairs and through a door was a large room where the old man introduced us to his wife and two daughters. He put on a gray suit jacket, sat in a chair by a table, and lit a cigarette.
My eyes migrated to a far wall of the room where a large color map of the former Soviet Union was hung on the wall. I stood up to look at it. Armenia appeared in the same shade of yellow as the Siberian tundra. I assume that the key indicated this as a dry climate with extreme temperatures. On a table below the map was a small Armenian Orthodox Bible embossed with a silver cross. There were four beds in the room, one against each wall, and a wood-burning stove in the center that radiated heat and suppressed the damp chill.
One of the old man’s daughters, a middle-aged woman herself, spread out a tablecloth on the table where her father sat. We all sat around it too and were served a warm yogurt-based soup with cracked wheat and cilantro called spas. Then she brought a plate of lavash (flat bread), with sour cheese, cilantro, violet-colored mint leaves, and arugula. Through a window I could see the rain falling and puddles forming on the once-dry earth. It had grown dark outside.
The old man ate little, but lit another cigarette when a loud clap of thunder resonated in the small valley.
“Twelve of my sheep were killed last night by wolves,” he told Nuné. “You can see the remains up the hill; they ripped open the bellies and ate the entrails but left the meat. I’m aiming to go up and fetch it and eat it myself.” Nuné made some attempt at sympathy and let a few moments pass before she asked about trout in the Masrik River on our behalf.
“There are trout in the stream,” he said, “but very few.” As the rain was pouring down he told us about a giant trout his cousin had caught in Lake Sevan just weeks before. “It was the biggest one I’ve ever seen. He is with some seasonal fishermen, a dozen or so, on the southeast shore. They are from Tsovagyugh but they camp for the summer on the opposite side near Aregooni.”
The old man encouraged us to spend the night in his home, but we declined his hospitality. The stream was blown out from the rain, it ran high and off-color, so we decided not to spend time fishing it. When we were walking out to the car I remembered that it had failed to start, but when Marat turned the key it did. Maybe it needed a rest.
Early that evening, we met with the fishermen on the eastern shore of Lake Sevan near the town of Aregooni. As the old man had told us, there were a dozen men living there, all their possessions packed in old sedans, sleeping in tents on the beach near the lapping waves. They had four boats with outboard engines and the carcasses of expired engines sat on the gravel beach.
“Hello,” one said, extending his hand through a haze of cigarette smoke. He was drunk on oghee, a kind of grappa, and his whole body smelled of it. Nuné told them we were interested in seeing trout. A young fisherman named Hamlet invited us out in the boat to check his gill nets.
“My name is Hamlet,” he said, “after Shakespeare.”
He started the motor and we made our way out into the lake. The boat looked to be homemade from scrap metal and did not ride true, but meandered in the horizonless blue of the lake. When we had gone about a half mile there was no land to be seen.
The nets were hung beneath plastic bleach bottles and sunk with lead weights. Hamlet pulled the nets, which he said were set at twenty-five meters, but he caught no trout, only carp and barbel, which he did not even bother to take out of the net.
“They will be eaten by crayfish,” he said. “We haven’t caught a trout in two weeks. Let’s go back.”
The fishermen may not have had trout but they had plenty of grappa. Soon we were drunk too, sitting in their grubby midst. They all had stiff black beards, shirts caked with dried fish slime, and pants sequined with scales from carp and whitefish.
“We have to go into town, to Aregooni to find a place to spend the night,” said Nuné. The stars were brilliant overhead. “No,” Hamlet said, “you must stay with us.” He ran over to two small tents and began to clean them out. The four fishermen who had occupied them said they preferred to sleep near the surf, next to the piles of empty bottles. Marat hesitated to stay, but the fishermen were insistent, so we slept that night on their blankets, which smelled of smoke.
The sunburned fishermen smiled in the reflection of the campfire coals as they threw fish spines and tails from their own repast into the flames. Some fell over and passed out, and only a few were up at first light to pull the nets.
My knee became so swollen that I decided I should rest it even though I had lost hope of its getting better. Nuné stayed in the car with me and talked, or I read Turgenev stories to her, while Johannes and Marat walked up streams looking for trout. I felt bad not only for myself but for Johannes. He had counted on me to be an able travel partner and now I could not accompany him or help catch fish.
“Just get better,” he said when he spoke to me. I must, I thought, or it would be difficult to carry on the rest of the summer in terrain possibly more difficult than this.
Nuné rubbed calendula oil on my knee every day. She also concocted other remedies. One day she encountered some beekeepers off in the distance and walked through the tall dry grass to get a jar of comb honey. She spread the honey on lavash bread and had me eat it. “This will help,” she said. Another day, far from the lake now, we had come to a region near Jermuk known for its therapeutic springs. Nuné bought me bottles of mineral water and had me drink them. After several days of staying off it, watching Johannes bring fish he’d caught in tributaries of the Arpa River back to the car, my knee began to improve.
By the time we had returned to Yerevan the pain and swelling were nearly gone. As a final cure, Nuné invited us to her home and cooked a piece of sturgeon meat.
“It is an ancient and strong fish from the Caspian Sea,” she said. We ate the fishy-tasting fish, and I had an extra-large helping.
CENTRAL ASIA
Extending in a horizontal band between western China and Turkey, Central Asia is a largely dry and desolate region that travelers have always been eager to cross. In this sense it has never been the center of anything, except perhaps conflict. Historically, Central Asia supported a commercial network known today as the ancient Silk Road; the same roads are now used to move opium. Most were part of the Soviet Union until the early nineties, when the area was split into a half dozen or so countries with their own governments, informally called the stans: Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. When I began doing research for my trip, I learned that the stans were difficult to enter and politically volatile, that rebel groups ran the hill country like nineteenth-century American bandits, looking for foreigners to take hostage. These were risks a Schwarzfischer secretly invited.
The only person I’d met who had been to Central Asia was a fellow trout hunter from southwest Scotland named Robin Ade. He had heard about my first book on trout and contacted me while on a trip through North America. He stayed two nights at my father’s house; we fished local strea
ms, and Robin shared stories of his travels.
He had lived in Afghanistan in the early seventies, back when it was a hippie hangout, like Nepal was in the 1980s and 1990s, with much available hashish and opium. He had not been back for over twenty years and then returned on a solo expedition in 1998 to search for the easternmost native brown trout, Salmo trutta oxianus. This trout lived in rough territory, in streams and lakes on the border with Pakistan, some of the highest elevations for native trout in the world. It was just short of impossible for Westerners to enter Afghanistan legally at that time.
Sitting by my favorite brook trout stream in Connecticut one warm April day, Robin told me his story. “For several months in my home in the southwest highlands I grew out my beard. I bought a ticket to Islamabad, Pakistan, and from there took a jeep to Chitral. In Chitral, my beard nearly two feet long, I exchanged my Western clothes for local dress and walked to the Doruh Pass, forty-five hundred meters in elevation. From there I snuck across the border into Afghanistan as if I were a local.” Robin puffed on his pipe. “It helped that I speak Farsi.
“My destination was a lake at the head of the Konkce River, a high headwater of the Amu Darya River [what the Greeks called the Oxus, which flows to the Aral Sea]. In the days following I caught many trout. The scenery was beautiful.” Robin paused to puff on his pipe. “I was also traveling near a region of northern Pakistan where native people were fair skinned and blue eyed like me, so I really fit in quite well.”
“Did you encounter any hostility from the people?” I asked.
“The people, no,” he said. “Apart from a guy who chased me with a hatchet for trying to photograph his wife, the Afghans are warm people. But one day, an eagle swooped down and hit me from behind while I was fishing on a high ledge above the lake. I felt the wind first, and then it struck me with its talons. It nearly did do me in; I imagined it was trying to drive me off the cliff to kill me, as they do sheep and goats. Two weeks after I crossed the Doruh back into Pakistan, the Taliban fought the Pakistanis on the shore of the lake where I’d been fishing. I was very lucky with my timing. If I had stayed I would have been taken hostage or killed.”