Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  Despite the risks of being caught in the midst of a skirmish, or killed by an eagle, Robin had a positive attitude about Central Asia and its largely nomadic peoples. “No matter if they are Russian Orthodox, Muslim, or Buddhist, the country people will treat you well. Islam especially is a religion based on hospitality. You have to tolerate inconvenience, though, and accept that travel there is unpredictable and fickle. The borders are disputed, the people have no work, and you can get unlucky.”

  When he left my house he wrote the following in the guest book:

  “In appreciation of two days with James, not counted against our allotted span—catching magical brook trout and discussing the finer points of our esoteric researches.”

  Johannes and I had focused our sights on Kyrgyzstan (which borders Tajikistan on the south, Kazakhstan on the north, China on the east, and Uzbekistan on the west), a newly formed democracy risen from the rubble of the Soviet Union. From the little information we could find, Kyrgyzstan appeared to be the most stable former Soviet republic, and one of stunning alpine beauty (ninety percent of the country is mountains). It also had populations of the easternmost native brown trout, living in streams originating in the Pamir Alay Mountains.

  We flew from Yerevan, over the Caspian and Aral seas, enormous bodies of water, and a large desert expanse of the 41st parallel to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Once we had landed, Johannes and I waited in Almaty all day in the terminal for Ida’s arrival. We were afraid that if we left the terminal that somehow we would not be able to return. Our valid transit visas were supposed to hold us over until we got to Kyrgyzstan, but we were not allowed to stay very long in Kazakhstan.

  “Ah, mi hijo,” Ida said when she saw me. Then she hugged me first and then Johannes. They exchanged a few words in German. I began to tell Ida about our trip to Armenia and was interrupted by Johannes.

  “Okay,” Johannes said, “save it for later. We have to catch the bus.”

  “Always business business,” Ida scolded.

  Silver and rounded like an old toaster, our bus to Kyrgyzstan was waiting outside the terminal in the cool night air. It took several hours to get from Almaty to the Kyrgyz border and the capital, Bishkek. It was an overnight ride on a dusty highway that smelled simultaneously of pure desert air and fuel.

  We arrived in Bishkek at dawn, driving down a long avenue and past an enormous stone statue of Lenin. The city’s nondescript cement structures I soon learned were a Soviet trademark, aftershocks of the Communists’ stifling of creativity. They were identical to what we had seen in Yerevan, many abandoned mid-construction with pieces of rebar sticking out like fish spines. Beside the buildings, in equally drab attire, vendors sold gum and cigarettes in singles and packs and watermelon, carpus. Other symptoms of Soviet life were visible outside the bus window. Wooden slats had been stolen from park benches and burned during energy crises. The parks had only two kinds of trees, plane and pine, which were wild and unkempt. The faces of the people were drawn and pale like the old gray suits they wore.

  The people themselves were diverse and colorful, the kind of rich diversity I had not seen since my last trip to Brooklyn. There were Slavic peoples with blond hair and blue eyes (Russians and Ukrainians), ethnic Kyrgyz with dark windburned faces, Turkic people of the western Xinjiang Province of China (called Uighur), Kazaks, Uzbeks, Dungans, and Tatars. Bishkek was a marvelous Central Asian stew and this saved it from total homogeneity.

  The old silver bus dropped all passengers off at a hotel in the center of the city. From the hotel we took a taxi to the domestic airport terminal and waited for our flight to a city in the southwest of the country called Osh (Bishkek is in the north). On the border with Uzbekistan (on the ancient Silk Road), Osh is known for its political turbulence, frequent fighting, and once-great silk production.

  Tired and unwashed, our luggage hanging from our hyper-extended arms, we were told that our flight to Osh, scheduled to leave at 10:30 A.M., was canceled, to be rescheduled for some undetermined time, possibly within the next twenty-four hours.

  “You cannot be in a hurry if you want to travel in this place,” Johannes said over beers at the airport bar. I stared out of a dirty window onto the weedy tarmac. An hour later I was restless, and Johannes and Ida were arguing, so I took a walk.

  The domestic terminal was like an open warehouse with big windows on all sides. On the periphery were stone benches, where tired figures slept and slouched. Though it was excruciatingly hot, no one wore shorts or showed any skin but that on their hands and faces. That is, except for a tall blond girl wearing a red summer dress.

  She could not be from here, I thought. I marveled at her perfect upright posture, her slim and astonishing figure. Then she turned and caught me staring at her. To my surprise, she picked up her bags and approached me.

  “Are you on the flight to Osh?” she asked. She spoke English with a heavy Russian accent. A ray of light slanted down from the ceiling and illuminated her blond hair and her eyes, which had the amber translucency of golden raisins.

  “Yes,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead, “but is there one?”

  “I don’t know, there’s a chance they could have the flight ready as soon as sixteen hours. They are waiting for fuel.”

  “That’s why they aren’t flying, because there’s no fuel?”

  “Yes, it’s quite common,” she said, her nose twitching as she spoke. “Are you with anybody?”

  I spent a second or two thinking about that and what I should say. I settled with the truth. “I am, with two friends,” I said.

  “I want to get back to Osh so badly. I miss my little sister.”

  “You live in Osh?” I said.

  “Yes.” Her cheeks were flush. Sweat beaded up on her temples. “It’s only six hundred kilometers distant, but the roads are so poor, and it’s hot. It is hell hot. I’ve been in this situation before.”

  “You are thinking of going overland?”

  “It is possible, but it takes a long time, nearly twenty hours. But on the other hand, there’s no way to know if or when the plane will leave.”

  “Well, I hope the plane takes off by this evening,” I said. “My friends and I have to be in Osh by morning to meet our driver.”

  “You are American, I assume,” she said. “I’m Anastasiya.” And she extended her hand to mine. “Where are you from exactly?”

  “I’m from New York.”

  “Oh, New York, how wonderful. I have never been to the States, but I have traveled more than most people in Kyrgyzstan. I am returning now from Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was representing my university at an international debate, sponsored by the George Soros Foundation. “How about your friends,” Anastasiya asked, “where are they from?”

  “They are Austrian, a married couple. Even to me it sounds very strange, but the man is a baker by profession and his wife likes to travel. We are here to look for a rare kind of trout that lives in streams that come out of the Pamirs.”

  “It doesn’t sound very strange to me at all,” she said. “We see geologists come through and mountaineers, trout is just another reason to see Kyrgyzstan’s natural beauty.” Anastasiya looked at me with those transluscent golden eyes. “Aren’t you concerned your friends will wonder where you are?”

  “Not right now,” I said. “I’m enjoying being away from them. They’re not going anywhere anyway, they stay close to the beer and there is only one bar.”

  “Let’s go sit then,” Anastasiya said. I took one of her bags and followed her to a stone bench, where we sat down. I watched feverishly as she folded her long legs.

  “Trout,” she said, “we say forel in Russian.”

  “Does everyone speak Russian?”

  “Oh no, in the countryside they speak the native Kyrgyz language. You are lucky in your country, everyone speaks English.”

  “Your English is very good,” I said.

  “Thank you. For two years actually, I had an English teacher from Missoula, Montana. He had us read
a book about his home and trout fishing, you must know it. A River Runs Through It. I feel it is a good book because it is one I cannot forget. You close it and you’re still thinking about it. At the end I was in tears.”

  I laughed. “I did not cry when I read it, but I did when I saw the movie.”

  “So you like books,” she said. “Have you heard of Chingiz Aitmatov? He lives in the Chuy Valley not far from here, our only famous author. My favorite book of his would be translated Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore. It is about four generations of men in the same family of fishers, caught in a storm in the Bering Sea. Every day they fish within sight of the peninsula where their town is, and while they fish their dog follows them along the shore, but then they get caught in a storm that blows them beyond sight of land and they are lost, and the dog pines. There is only enough fresh drinking water for one person so the three oldest men jump into the ocean and leave the youngest with the water.”

  “Does the boy live?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Anastasiya said and smiled, “you’ll have to read the book.”

  “Here’s a book for you,” I said, pulling it out of my shoulder bag, “you can have it, that way I won’t have to carry it anymore. It’s by a German named Hermann Hesse.” I handed her my copy of Narcissus and Goldmund.

  “I will read it,” she said. “Are you sure you want to part with it?”

  “It’s no problem,” I said. “I hope you enjoy it. I’ll show you where we are headed.”

  “Yes, do,” she said.

  I pulled out a map from my shoulder bag and showed Anastasiya.

  “We’ve arranged to meet a driver in Osh and drive south to this river here, the Kyzyl-Su. In this tributary, here, near this town on the Tajik border, Daraut, there should be trout.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said, “it’s not easy for foreigners to go there.”

  “We have the appropriate permits and everything,” I said, “I just hope they work.”

  “Will you be staying in Osh on your return?” Anastasiya said. “I ask because I’m on vacation until August first, and if you’d like I can show you around town. There is not much to see, but I can take you to a canyon nearby where the Ak-Burra River runs through. Here,” she said, pulling out some paper, “I’ll give you my telephone number. You call me when you return.” She wrote it down with care on a small piece of blue stationery.

  “I am so looking forward to going home,” she said. “I will get to see my little sister, who I always miss so much every time I go away. She’s four, I’m twenty. I also have a second sister who is fourteen.”

  Anastasiya and I passed more time talking and then I introduced her to Johannes and Ida at the bar. She did not drink; I had a beer, and all of us (except for Johannes, who does not eat lamb) ate some lagman, a noodle dish with lamb and potatoes.

  We decided to wait for the plane. At 2:30 A.M. the airline announced that they were combining three canceled flights that day into one jumbo jet. At this announcement Anastasiya, who had been reading, woke me (I had been sleeping on a stone bench). I found Johannes and Ida, and we began the push to get seats on the plane. Anastasiya said they often overbooked flights and you had to fight to get a seat. In the race to the plane we were up against some locals and an expedition team of Austrian mountaineers.

  Outside, in the cool air of early morning, under the brilliant stars of a Central Asian night, we waited on the tarmac for the airplane door to open. Anastasiya pulled a wool sweater over her thin red summer dress. I saw several of the Austrian mountaineers looking at her and felt a tinge of jealousy. One approached her.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “I’m from Osh,” Anastasiya answered.

  He seemed surprised. “And you?” he asked me.

  “Osh as well,” I said.

  Anastasiya looked at me and laughed.

  “I hope you don’t mind my telling them off,” I whispered to her.

  THE BASE CAMP AT LENIN MOUNTAIN

  During the two-hour flight, Anastasiya slept with her head on my shoulder and I let my cheek rest on her hair. When the plane landed, our intimate moment abruptly ended. I said good-bye. Johannes, Ida, and I took a taxi to our hotel.

  I welcomed having my own room, clean sheets, and a soft flat surface to lie down on. Despite the exhaustion stinging my eyelids, still I could not sleep. I was happy to listen to a rooster crowing, to think of Anastasiya, the way her hair smelled, and to feel the cold air over my face.

  I went into the bathroom to pee and noticed that the toilet paper, though not suited for its intended purpose, made beautiful stationery, and looked like handmade paper. I took it from the bathroom and wrote a letter to my father. I described the rooster crowing and what I’d seen of this small city.

  “I am very close to the opposite end of the earth from you, but on the same parallel,” I wrote. “If there is significance to this, I am too tired to elaborate on what it is.”

  I lay down in bed then and slept so deeply that I must have sunk below the mattress. Needless to say I felt rested by the time we had to wake to meet our driver. At the appointed time, a man named Sasha appeared outside the hotel in a green Russian jeep (called a Vilis). We met him with our bags and he packed them efficiently in the small space behind the backseat. The first stop on our way south was for provisions in the town bazaar, where Kyrgyz women sold fresh fruits and vegetables, baked goods (a flat bread called nan), and knitted items. I bought a watermelon and a bag of violet-colored plums. Johannes bought six slim bottles of vodka and a pack of cigarettes. We were leaving a fertile valley called the Ferghana for a bleak and mountainous region on the border with Tajikistan.

  We drove for two hours and then Sasha stopped the jeep on a tall mountain pass from which we could view the vast desolation. Below us was a red canyon—seemingly bottomless. We were on the divide between the two major river drainages of Central Asia, traveling from the basin of the Syr Darya River into that of the Amu Darya.

  “They both flow to the Aral Sea,” Johannes said, eating a piece of watermelon I had cut for him. “The one difference is that the Amu Darya has native trout and the Syr Darya does not.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  Our first glimpse of the Kyzyl-Su River was in the village of Sary-Tasch. The river raged and roiled in a terra-cotta red color, true to its Kyrgyz name, which meant red water. At the limits of the village we were stopped by armed officials at a roadblock. Our permits and papers for travel in the Pamir Alay appeared to be in order and we were allowed to continue, now in a westerly direction, parallel to and not distant from the river. The Pamir Mountains, the highest in the world outside of the Himalayas, were visible out the left side of the jeep. Their snowcapped peaks jutted skyward, exposed, and clear of mist or cloud.

  In the next village, Kashka-Su, we crossed the river on a rickety bridge. The wind was so strong it blew a spray from the turbulent water onto the jeep windows. Near the bridge, we passed a man on a horse. He wore a khalpak, the traditional tall white felt hat that Kyrgyz men wear.

  Sasha continued to drive south, up into the hills toward the camp where we had made arrangements to stay for several days. We gained elevation, the roads became worse, and the country more desolate. We drove over clear creeks with beds of green stone that looked like jade, and by the occasional round tents (yurt) of Kyrgyz nomads. The people stared from their doorways, their goats milling outside nipping the blossoms off low-growing wildflowers. The air became colder. As we passed more yurt camps, mongrel dogs with ears clipped from fighting bit at our tires.

  Finally, around a small hill, Sasha told us in his own way that we had arrived. Johannes had not expected ample accommodations but at least a shelter. What lay before us was a hollow, with a group of motley-colored tents. Behind the tents, incredibly huge, was the snow-covered peak of Lenin Mountain, 7,134 meters. We stepped from the jeep into frigid air.

  A Russian man walke
d up to us from his red tent. He peered at us through his thick, black-rimmed glasses and zipped his puffy purple down jacket to stave off the cold.

  “Hello,” he said, “I am Vadim, welcome to our base camp.”

  Johannes, wearing a short-sleeve shirt, groped in his bags for a jacket. Vadim looked at stout and overweight Ida. She was holding her lower back from the pain she suffered on the bumpy ride. Vadim seemed confused when he saw wet suits, snorkels, and fins tied to our backpacks and probably thought to himself, what are these lunatics doing with diving gear in a dry near-Arctic climate at thirty-eight hundred meters?

  “What?” Johannes said when he’d found a jacket and put it on, “there are only tents here?”

  “Yes,” said Vadim, matter-of-factly, “this is the base camp for expeditions to Pik-Lenina. Trips by foot to the summit begin here.” Vadim looked at Ida again, his brow twisted. “You have no tent?” he said, “no sleeping bags? I think there has been a mistake. What is it you’ve come here for?”

  “Forel,” Johannes said, his teeth chattering, “in the Kyzyl-Su.”

  “Forel,” said Vadim, smiling. He wore a baseball hat, which he took off then and looked at us skeptically, scratching his head through his thick black hair.

  “First we must give you a tent and sleeping bag,” he said. “You must realize that this is a base camp. We function on the minimal; it is not meant to be comfortable. It is thirty to forty days by foot from here to the summit of Pik-Lenina. Once they are up, they have to come back down. In 1994 we lost fifty-three people on their return, including guides, to an avalanche.”

  Vadim took us into the dining tent for a hot cup of coffee with cognac.

  “You are here now, so we must do our best,” he said, sitting down and lighting a pipe. “I apologize, but as I said, this is a base camp in rough country. First of all, to find trout you need to go down, not up.”