Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  “Yes, of course,” Johannes said. He pulled out a map and, laying it on the table, showed Vadim precisely where we wanted to go.

  “Where did you get such beautiful maps?” Vadim said, visibly impressed.

  “In Austria,” said Johannes. “We cannot find trout without these maps. Here, in this stream flowing into the village of Daraut”—he pointed—“we are looking for a population of the easternmost native brown trout. This is the stream from which the type specimen for this subspecies was named, Salmo trutta oxianus.”

  “No problem,” said Vadim, his face brightening. “You will need a truck to bring back all the trout that you will catch.” He filled our empty coffee cups with ice-cold vodka. “Distilled from the tundra lichen,” he said and laughed. “Climbers and fishermen are the craziest people I know.”

  Vadim’s generosity flowed deep into the night, so despite the cold and discomfort, we slept soundly, in a state of inebriated bliss.

  Through the night a mixture of snow and rain fell, but by morning the air was clear. The foothills below us were barren, smooth like velvet, and dry, with occasional abrupt rock formations thrusting from the ground. Vadim suggested that the camp cook, Natasha, the girlfriend of one of the guides on Lenin Mountain, accompany us in our trout hunt and act as a translator. She did and proved pleasant company, especially for Ida, who was feeling ill, and appeared to be in serious need of female companionship.

  The river where we were headed to fish, Daraut River, flowed from a canyon in the Pamir Mountains and through the village of Daraut on the border with Tajikistan.

  Sasha drove attentively on the dusty, uneven, narrow, and treacherous roads. When we had reached the crook of the valley and crossed the rickety bridge back over the Kyzyl-Su, he stopped at a small wooden shack. Fuel was sold there by the bucketful from large tanks. Sasha, with the help of two boys, poured the fuel into the twin tanks of the Vilis through a funnel. As he was doing so, a car pulled up carrying two sahibs.

  They were Americans.

  “What are you here for?” one asked me.

  “We’re looking for native trout.”

  “Fascinating,” the other said.

  “And you?”

  “We are geologists.”

  “Don’t tell me,” one said, “your name is James.”

  “Yes,” I said and looked to see if it was written on me.

  “I am a fly fisherman, I have your books,” the man said.

  We exchanged addresses and would have talked more, but Johannes was urging me on. I got in our jeep.

  “It’s not every day that you meet a fan in Kyrgyzstan,” I said to Johannes.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Sasha drove us up the road into the village of Daraut. We stopped by a pair of old men wearing khalpaks, seated in the sparse shade of a plane-tree grove.

  “Are there trout in the Daraut stream?” Natasha asked them.

  “Yes,” one said, “but you must walk a long way.” He looked at the jeep. “You can only drive so far. A rock slide has blocked the road. My son and some other men are working to clear it, but it could take weeks.”

  “How far should we walk?”

  “About five kilometers.”

  We followed the stream on a dirt road and after twenty minutes came to the rock slide. Three men were working with a bulldozer to clear it.

  “This is it,” Natasha said. We parked beside a beautiful bank of wildflowers that grew lush and colorful by a small spring. Ida was sick and stayed behind to watch the car and our things. I sympathized with her; I felt a little dizzy myself, maybe from the altitude or the intense dry heat. She didn’t like to hike very far anyway.

  Johannes, Natasha, and I went by foot with food and fishing gear up the stream. The gradient was steep and the flow was fast and angry. After we had hiked a kilometer or so, we came to a mud hut. Natasha greeted the man, woman, and three children who lived there. The father offered us flat bread, honey, and butter.

  We sat on some large boulders in the sun to eat. They were covered with beautiful orange lichen. A breeze moved the dry grasses.

  “It looks like that stream in Portugal we fished,” I said to Johannes.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he said, “the Zêzere. The only difference is that you can’t find a good bottle of wine around here.”

  I laughed a bit. “But the honey is good,” I said.

  I picked some yellow and purple wildflowers and pressed them into my sketchbook. With a feeling of optimism I rigged up my fly rod.

  At nearly twelve thousand feet this was possibly the highest-elevation native trout habitat in the world. The ancestors of the fish in this rushing headwater stream originally swam up from the Aral Sea. They would not be easy to catch with a fly, I thought, the stream was too swift. We hiked farther to look for nice deep pools, but the stream was just a glacial-blue froth. When I started to fish I put several pieces of lead on my line to sink the fly, hoping I could get it to a fish by dropping it in an eddy behind a boulder. I fished a hundred yards of river.

  I came to a small turn where the current was slower and the stream ran beneath a grassy bank. I coaxed my fly into the spot and got a strong tug. I was so excited I yanked the fish in one pull out of the water and onto the dry path behind me. I threw down my rod and leaped on the fish like a boy chasing a frog. When I caught it and beheld it, half covered in dust, I marveled at its sparse vermilion and black spots and the gentle daffodil yellow sides.

  I yelled for Johannes to come.

  “Good, you have caught one,” he said, taking out a plastic bag to fill with water and carry the fish live back to the jeep so he could photograph it in his tank.

  When we were done with the fish, we clipped its adipose fin (a small stubby fin behind the dorsal) and placed it in a vial of alcohol, preserving the tissue for DNA analysis. Then we let the small trout go.

  That night after dinner we drank hot coffee with cognac. Vadim congratulated us on our catch.

  “That’s fine,” Ida erupted. “But I am not feeling well. I want to return to Osh.” Johannes thought about it, slowly drinking his coffee.

  “Well,” he said, “we have caught our fish, I guess it is possible to do so.”

  The bumpy return trip to Osh was a great strain on Ida’s lower back. The air in the valley was hot and dusty, and having undergone such extremes of temperature, Ida was visibly suffering. I tried to be affectionate and sympathetic as she drank bottle after bottle of mineral water, but the person she required tenderness from was Johannes.

  We had planned to explore tributaries of the Kyzyl-Su River until Saturday. It was only Wednesday and we already had returned to Osh. We were told that no flights to Bishkek were available until Monday, so unless we returned overland we had five days to kill. I knew how I wanted to spend the time.

  The next morning I told the receptionist at the Osh Hotel that I wished to make a phone call. She took me into a small dark room with a telephone on a table. I wrote down the number I wished to call, and the receptionist dialed it for me and gave me the receiver.

  “Anastasiya,” I said when I heard a girl’s voice.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s James.”

  “Oh, hello, James, how are you? I can barely hear you.”

  “We are back early from our trip south and I thought you might like to spend some time together?”

  “Sure,” she said, “when?”

  “Is tomorrow good?”

  “Yes, tomorrow.”

  “We can meet at the Osh Hotel in the morning.”

  “Maybe at ten,” she suggested. “I will bring us a lunch and we can go up in the canyon and see the falls on the river.”

  “Great,” I said, “I’ll be waiting for you in front of the hotel at ten.”

  At half past nine the next morning, I was waiting on the hotel steps for Anastasiya. She was dressed in shorts and a tank top, as if she were ready for a day at the beach, and she ca
rried a small backpack. Her hair was tied back off her slender neck and the sun had worked a lovely pattern on her freckled shoulders.

  “Aren’t you going to bring your fishing rod?” she asked, seeing that I had nothing with me.

  “Yes, if you think I should,” I said.

  “You can swim too.”

  “Are you going to swim?”

  “Yes, I think I will.”

  “I’ll bring my shorts then,” I said. “I just have to go to my room to get them.”

  I went to my room to get my fishing rod and shorts and she followed. Anastasiya found nothing strange in coming down the dingy hall, over the old green rug to the flimsy door and into my hotel bedroom.

  “Have you seen people fishing there—in the canyon?” I asked as I pulled my rod out of my bag. She stood beside me and I could almost feel her breath as she talked.

  “Yes, people fish in the river,” she said. “I don’t see anyone there often, it’s kind of my spot, or I like to think of it that way. I’m usually there alone.”

  I could feel my face was flush and tried to dampen the color with the back of my hand.

  “Okay,” I said, “I think I’m ready.”

  “I have a feeling you don’t like my town,” Anastasiya said as we were walking from the hotel to the bus terminal.

  “No, I think it’s beautiful,” I said. In its own way it was, though it looked as though it had recently suffered a bombing. We passed a hedge of bushes with blue blossoms.

  “My father planted one of these bushes at home,” I said. “I don’t remember what they’re called.”

  “It’s rose of Sharon,” Anastasiya said, redoing her ponytail. We walked on.

  “Osh is sometimes beautiful, but it’s not what you would call convenient,” she said. “The telephone lines are sometimes down for days.”

  “How was it to see your little sister the other day?” I said.

  “She was kind of being a pain. She came to my bed too early my first morning home and started jumping up and down on my bed. I wanted to sleep.”

  The bus to the canyon was not operating, so Anastasiya and I took a taxi. Our driver was a tall Kyrgyz man who wore a starched white shirt and pleated gray pants. Anastasiya talked to him in Russian, telling him where we wished to go.

  “I hope you like where we are going,” she said to me, “as I told you, it is one of my favorite places.”

  “What is the name of the river?” I said.

  “The Ak-Burra.”

  “What does Ak-Burra mean?”

  “I was afraid you would ask that,” Anastasiya said. In her deep Russian locution she asked the driver what it meant. “He says Ak-Burra is Kyrgyz for male white camel. When the male white camel is in mating season he is very furious, just like the river as it tumbles off the mountain. The falls are white as well, like the animal itself.”

  Anastasiya had little to no imperfections on her body. Unlike the country people, she did not have gold or copper teeth, missing digits, scars, or wandering eyes. She had not been exposed to the harsh climate, did not have to smoke cigarettes to punctuate idleness. Her toenails, which shone through her sandals, were perfect. Her legs were long and fine. Her shorts and tank top were clean and pressed.

  “I have traveled abroad, more than most people in this country,” she said, as she had told me before. “Most people in Kyrgyzstan who have traveled complain about the discomforts of their home when they return. A proud Kyrgyz like our driver is rare.” She pointed to a sticker above his mirror, which read: Proud to be a Citizen of Kyrgyzstan. “But I think we have things here that you don’t in America. Though I have not been.”

  It had taken about forty minutes to get to where the river rushed from the narrow canyon. We stood at the edge of a sharp decline that looked down into the Ak-Burra. Anastasiya told the driver to come back in four hours.

  “It is an angry river,” I said to Anastasiya.

  The depth of the canyon was impressive, the mass of exposed rock bewildering, and still it looked as though the carved mountain was straining to hold back the power of the moving water. The only person in sight was a Kyrgyz man walking his goat.

  A dry path led down to the water. Anastasiya seemed to know where she was going. When we came to the edge of the river, Anastasiya laid out a green cloth and sat on it. The river stones were small and rounded.

  “We can sit here and you can fish behind that boulder where the current is broken.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “You’ve done fishing already?” she said, laughing. “Is that how you do it?”

  “For now, I think,” I said.

  She offered me a seat on the green blanket beside her.

  “This is my place,” she said, “I come here after exams to calm my spirit. Do you have places like this at home?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I have places where I go.”

  “No,” she said, “I meant, do you have places like this in your country, with such a river like this one?”

  I did not know what to say. We did have rocky canyons and raging rivers in the States, but that’s not what she wanted to hear. In my silence, she continued.

  “The colors of the rock,” she insisted, “the black lines coming down the red stone, and the yellows there. And look at the distant hills. I’m sure the hills in Kyrgyzstan are the largest in the world.”

  “We have such places but not exactly like this,” I said. She seemed impatient with that answer.

  “I think people would travel to see this,” she said, “but people think it’s dangerous to come here.”

  We walked up the river, barefoot in the shallows along a rock wall, until it became difficult because of the steepness of the canyon. Anastasiya was intent on getting out to a rock separated from the wall by a chute of fast water four feet wide.

  “I think it’s too deep,” I told her, but she kept going. She found herself in the middle of the chute for a split second before turning back toward the wall again.

  “A month ago you could walk out to that island,” she said. “Now the water is too high.”

  We returned to the green blanket and Anastasiya took some food from her backpack. I had submerged a glass bottle of mineral water in the river some minutes before and now it was halfway out of the river.

  “It looks like the river went down,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and joked, “you know it could be the moon. What do you call that when water is moved by the moon?”

  “The tide,” I said. The Ak-Burra River never made it to the ocean; it flowed into the Amu Darya and then dessicated in the desert (or barely made it to the Aral Sea). It seemed sad to deprive a river of the ocean.

  “The tomatoes were grown in my mother’s garden,” Anastasiya said, pulling them out of her backpack. “She picked them this morning. She also baked this bread. It is Russian bread. It needs a little salt.”

  “You have a good mother,” I said.

  “Nothing in this world is perfect,” she said, “but my mother is perfect.”

  We sliced the tomatoes and ate them on the bread, and when we finished her mother’s bread we tore off pieces of nan and ate it with cubes of salted pork fat.

  I took a drink of mineral water and then tried fishing with a piece of pork fat for bait. I dunked the pork behind the boulder weighted with some lead. I thought about Johannes back in Osh with Ida. Were he here with us, he would have said something offensive, like, “What! You fish for Muslim fish with pork!” I would have been embarrassed and annoyed.

  I lay down in the sun beside Anastasiya until I fell asleep.

  She woke me, I’m not sure how long afterward, but she said it was time to hike out to meet our taxi.

  I did not notice how hot it was until we left the bank of the river. The heat had a wonderful effect on the smells of the hillside flowers.

  “I think you will not find smells like this anywhere else in the world,” Anastasiya said, smiling. “This smell we call poleen.�
� She picked a bouquet for me as we sat on the dry ground waiting for our car and watching grasshoppers. “You can take it with you,” she said, “to remember Kyrgyzstan.”

  After a time, we started walking down the hill toward Osh. Some way down we saw our driver washing his car by the river, where it had broken down. His hands were black from tinkering with the engine, but he had somehow managed to preserve his starched white shirt and the pleat of his pants. He told us reluctantly that we should leave him there and hitchhike back.

  We walked until the sun was near the horizon. I asked Anastasiya if she’d like to join us for dinner. “We may not be back until later than that,” she said. “No, I think I’m going home. If you are around tomorrow, though, we can do something else.”

  We walked into the starry night. Finally a car passed us and picked us up.

  THE YELLOW VOLGA, TO BISHKEK AND LAKE ISSYK KUL

  The next morning out of my hotel window I saw Johannes in the street talking with several drivers beside their cars, inspecting the trunk spaces and the tires. I dressed and walked downstairs.

  “What’s going on?” I said. I felt healthy and at home; I was thinking of Anastasiya.

  “We’re not waiting here any longer,” Johannes said, “we have too much to see, Ida is feeling better. I think we should go overland back to Bishkek instead of waiting for our plane.” He paused. “How was the time with your girlfriend?”

  “It was fun,” I said, though I was a little bitter.

  “I think we will leave in an hour,” he said.

  I didn’t argue. I called Anastasiya and she met us at the hotel to say good-bye. We said we would write to each other.

  Johannes and I settled on a lemon-yellow Russian sedan called a Volga, driven by a small good-looking Kyrgyz man. His car looked best suited for the journey and so did he. He also gave us the best price.

  About thirty kilometers outside of Osh we had our first flat tire. The driver took all our luggage out of the trunk and was searching at the bottom for his wrench and jack. The spare tire, from what we could see, was scarcely better than the old one. All of them were bald as river stones.