Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  Once we were on the road again we stopped at the first tire-repair stand, a phenomenon of Central Asian highways. We waited in the heat, no trees in sight to find relief from the sun, while our old tire was mended and the inner tube patched.

  The day was hell hot coming out of what is called the Ferghana Valley. On the steppes the wheat was weeping and even the sunflowers could not bear to face the fierce sun. Turkish music played dizzily from the car radio. We drank warm Sprite as sweat beaded up on our arms and dripped from our foreheads into our eyes. Anastasiya had warned that it was hot out on the highway between cities. I had not realized how hot.

  Once the tire was fixed we traveled on, stopping to rest the car at a restaurant beyond an orchard of plums that stretched up toward the distant mountains. The restaurant was just some tables under a makeshift tent with a small brook gurgling by.

  Our driver asked for some melon, which was cut into slices and set on a blue-and-white dish on a cloth of pink and white stripes. The melon had the taste of onion from the knife they cut it with, which disturbed the taste, just as the dust cloud from a passing car fogged the view of a small girl naked in the brook, splashing herself with water from a two-handled urn.

  The dry heat, I thought, drained one of all superfluities.

  In Jalalabad we skirted the border with Uzbekistan. Scrubby purple flowers bloomed on the roadsides. Heading north into the valley of the Naryn River as the sun set, the smooth hills were sometimes green gray and sometimes beige blue. I remembered Anastasiya telling me there were no hills as high as the hills in Kyrgyzstan. Now I believed her and no longer thought of her as a girl who had never seen the sea.

  The Naryn River itself was a blue-green color. The farther up the canyon we crawled the more the river resembled a lake where it had been dammed to form the Toktogul Reservoir.

  Along the edge of the reservoir the road went through a series of long tunnels with no lights in them. Many of the cars that pass through have no lights either, which makes passage dangerous. We traveled through the tunnels very slowly, having only one working headlight, and we passed other vehicles whose drivers held flashlights out their windows. Screeching trucks echoed in the tunnels like whales singing across a deep ocean. When night came it was even more dangerous outside of the tunnels as the roads were narrow and skirted the edges of cliffs.

  We pulled off with our second flat tire at twilight, just beyond where a grain truck had turned over. The driver sat beside his spilled cargo smoking a cigarette. When the sun was finally down there seemed to be four times as many travelers on the bumpy road. The moon was full and lit up the water on the vast reservoir between the canyon walls. I crawled in the car when the tire was fixed and fell asleep.

  Twenty-five hours after we left Osh we arrived in Bishkek (by air the distance is only about six hundred kilometers). Not once had our driver stopped to sleep and the condition of his yellow Volga sedan was not suitable for returning to Osh. He would have to either spend the money we gave him to fix the car, or sell what was left of it and take a bus home.

  We checked into the Hotel Bishkek, a cement-and-steel sore on Erkindek Prospektisi. We rested in our own rooms, but just for a short while. Soon Johannes came and knocked, waking me from a deep sleep.

  “We must make arrangements to travel to our next destination,” he said.

  This was Lake Issyk Kul in the eastern part of Kyrgyzstan near the Chinese border. The tourist agency that encouraged us to go called it “the second largest alpine lake in the world after Titicaca.” Issyk kul in Kyrgyz means “warm lake”—because it is slightly saline and does not freeze in winter.

  The same tourist agency that promised us the second largest alpine lake also found us a driver. Isa was his name, and he came by the hotel, allowing us to approve his vehicle before the trip. It was a van in good condition and we agreed to his fair price. Then he asked if he might take a friend along to keep him company on the road. Johannes hesitated in the negotiation. “Okay,” he said. The van was big.

  The next morning we were picked up in front of the Bishkek hotel by Isa’s friend, an Uighur (from Xinjiang, China) named Marin. He spoke no English but indicated to us to come. After ten minutes we stopped by a row of apartment buildings. Isa walked toward the car, so hungover he could hardly stay on his feet.

  “Wodka drink Isa,” he said, sitting in the passenger seat. “Oh my head, oh mine God.”

  “Okay,” Johannes said, shrugging his shoulders, “so what’s new, our driver is drunk.” I think Johannes found Isa’s state was not so much disturbing as endearing. Marin drove east out of town to a straight dirt highway.

  Two hours later when he had gained consciousness, Isa was friendly, sharing photos of his family. He was from Dagestan. His father named him Isa after an Italian friend, Isangeli. When he turned, you could see the profile of his large chiseled nose shaped like an eagle’s beak.

  Johannes instructed our pair of guides, by pointing on the map, that we wished to stay on the south shore of the lake. That shore dropped off quickly and would be good for diving. Johannes had read that there was a fishing village called Balykchy where sometimes giant trout rumored to be thirty kilos were caught. These trout were not native but had been introduced from Lake Sevan in Armenia. Since we had observed the same trout in its native habitat we were eager to see if it retained its original markings after seventy years in a new environment.

  The road to Lake Issyk Kul followed the Chu River. Many men and boys were fishing for whitefish using slender long poles baited with yellow caterpillars. As many women stood on the side of the road selling the fish dried or smoked, strung through the eyes with wire. We stopped to buy some from a lady fishmonger. She heard us speaking English.

  “Do you need a translator for your trip?” she said to us.

  “A translator?” asked Johannes, looking at me. “Why? We can hardly understand each other.”

  The sun broke through a deep layer of clouds as we caught our first glimpse of Lake Issyk Kul. Behind the far shore off in the distance were smooth ochre hills and high peaks of the Tian Shan range.

  On the road to Tamga, the village where we had agreed to stay, we passed over six or seven rivers flowing north into the lake from melting snowfields in the mountains. Some were clear and others were opaque and milky, and all of them were raging.

  Tamga was a village of homes once occupied seasonally by prosperous Russians. Now they were occupied year-round. Each had a garden plot with plum, peach, and cherry trees and a dog barking behind an iron gate. The area once attracted summer tourist traffic, its spas sourced by hot springs, beaches, and restaurants renowned throughout Russia. The resorts on the lake were abandoned, weeds growing through the tennis courts, rusted jungle gyms engulfed by untrimmed hedges, unkempt perennial borders revealed by an occasional bloom.

  At the heart of the village, through a pair of tall metal gates, Marin drove us into an endless circuit of roads that wove around concrete buildings. In its first life, this place had been a recreation site for the Russian military, built by German POWs in World War II; in its second it had been a resort. Now it was hardly attended, a few people occupying rooms, eating prepared meals in the central dining hall, taking hikes to the lake and in the mountains.

  We sat on a couch in a little room waiting to pay for our stay. A woman behind a reception desk shuffled papers for fifteen minutes, pretending to be busy, before she spoke to us. We agreed to pay six dollars a night per person for four nights. To compute this, the woman insisted on using her calculator. Then she made meticulous notations with a pencil in a book, sharpening it each time she started a new line, slipping a piece of carbon paper under every sheet so a copy would be made.

  An hour passed before the transaction had been made. We put our bags in our rooms and went to the cafeteria, vast and largely vacant, to eat the dinner included in our room rate. As the five of us ate a simple borscht, a young man came over and sat with us.

  “My name is Vadim,” he said i
n good English, and spoke some cordial introduction. “What would you like to do during your stay?”

  “We would like to catch trout,” Johannes said.

  “Ah, trout,” Vadim said, testing the collar of a stiff, starched white shirt. I saw that his black pants were pleated and his black shoes shined to a mirrorlike polish. “There are many in rivers going into the lake.”

  “Yes?” Johannes said.

  “Yes. They are beginning to come up out of the lake for spawning.”

  “You know a lot,” said Johannes.

  “I have an acquaintance who is a fisherman on the lake. It is his profession.”

  “Can we catch them too?” I asked.

  “I think with Kolya you can.”

  “Then we want to meet him.”

  After dinner, Vadim walked us to our rooms. On the steps outside the building was another sharply dressed young man, just like Vadim, except he wore a leather vest. Ida had recognized a clandestine tone to our transactions. “Il mafioso,” she whispered to me.

  “Marcel,” Vadim said, addressing the young man, “tell my new friends about your friend in Barskoön who is a professional fisherman.”

  The young man touched his head in thought, revealing that his hair was set hard like stone with grooming gel. “You can pay him to be your guide,” Marcel said simply, with a high, agitated voice.

  “How much?” Johannes said.

  “Are you interested?” Vadim asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Vadim replied, turning to discuss the price with Marcel. “How about thirty dollars a day.”

  “Thirty?” Johannes said, putting his chin in close to his neck and looking disturbed. “How about ten.”

  “Twenty,” Marcel said with a greasy smile.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Okay,” Johannes conceded. “We go with the fisherman.”

  “When?” Vadim asked.

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Let’s meet here in the morning and we can work out the details,” Vadim said. “We will talk tonight with the fisherman. And one more thing: All money is to be paid to Marcel.”

  The opportunity to observe a man who made his living as a fisherman in Central Asia was exciting to me. It made me feel safe to sleep confidently; I felt somehow that the guide would be good.

  The morning was misty through the window of my room and the lake was hidden from view. I could hear a light drizzle falling on the roof when I first awoke. As I prepared my fishing gear it began to rain harder.

  “It’s good weather for fishing,” Johannes said when we met for breakfast, though we feared the rivers would be too high if the rain continued. Vadim met us at breakfast in perma-pressed polyester clothes and communicated the plan to us as well as to Isa and Marin. Marcel would arrive shortly with the fisherman and we would go.

  I returned to my room, put on my rain jacket and rubber boots, grabbed my rod, and waited for Vadim and Marcel to arrive with the fisherman. After a few minutes, a small bruised sedan pulled up and in the backseat I saw him. The fisherman stepped out of the car and was introduced to us as Kolya.

  As he shook Johannes’s hand, I noticed how strong he was and how large his hands were. A thick leather jacket hung wet from his broad shoulders—had he been out fishing already?—and baggy canvas pants were tucked into his tall rubber boots. We were now quite the motley expedition team.

  When we all piled into the van, I realized how much mass and speed we had accumulated, like a snowball rolling down a hill. We were now eight, bouncing westward along the lakeshore. After a short way, we turned south, up a road along a small river called the Tosorka. We had passed it the day before on our way to Tamga, and I had thought it too swift and muddy to be good for trout fishing.

  When I stepped on the banks, wet from the rain and fragrant with sage and lavender, I thought, this could be a trout stream. When I stood beside the high and mad river, I was again discouraged. The fisherman assured us the fishing was good. He told Vadim that a week before he had caught a three-pound trout, and that there were bigger ones to be had.

  Kolya stepped out of the car and took out his rod. It was a sturdy blue telescoping pole that extended to about nine feet. The blue of the rod was peeling and revealed an ochre-colored fiberglass. At the butt of the pole a small reel was attached, silver with a black patina. It was not a casting reel; the bait was dropped or lobbed, and Kolya wound the line by turning the spool of the reel with his finger. The line on the reel was thick, about the diameter of angel-hair pasta, and at the end was tied a hook with a chunk of lead above it and a Styrofoam float.

  In his jacket pocket the fisherman carried an aluminum can with worms. He threaded a worm on the hook and dropped the rig in the eddy behind a rock and in the slower currents near the bank. He fished each possible spot carefully, holding the line in his left hand and the rod in his right. Sometimes he waited for minutes with his line in the water, circling in the eddies. He approached the better-looking holes like a cat, low to the water and slowly, not bothering to wipe the rain dripping down his face. He fished one large pool for a long time and eventually, with both hands on the pole, Kolya heaved a large silvery fish onto the bank.

  It was a gorgeous trout with violet cheeks and huge black leopardlike spots, streamlined and elegant like an Atlantic salmon. Johannes and I were beside ourselves, laughing excitedly at the sight of this magnificent fish, patting the shoulder of Kolya’s leather jacket. He smiled like a child. I took the fish, cleaned it off in the river, sketched it, and photographed it. It looked, as we had expected, precisely like the fish we had seen from Lake Sevan, but was a more exquisitely formed specimen.

  I lay the trout on a large boulder of pink granite beside a bouquet of wildflowers that Ida had picked.

  We all had a drink that night at the bar in the old military camp. Kolya drank modestly and smiled shyly, his hair, though dry, still matted down from fishing in the rain. Isa on the other hand drank furiously. He spoke loudly with his face so close to my ear that I could feel his spit on my cheek. When he wasn’t speaking boisterously, he looked about the room like a nervous rabbit, his big Dagestani nose sniffing the air. I was relieved when his acute olfactory sense led him to the nearest available hooker, and he disappeared.

  When Isa had gone, a calm descended on the bar and I could study and befriend our fisherman, Kolya. He had only three fingers on his left hand and with those he held his glass of vodka. More ladies came into the bar and I danced under the tall ceilings of the room.

  We were so pleased with Kolya that we arranged to fish with him the next day. He arrived in the morning at the front of our residence, with several friends who wished to follow us up a mountain pass to fish for a small chublike fish called osman. Isa arrived at the van with the woman he had found the night before, but Johannes objected to her coming along. She stayed. The rain had gone and the air was dry and cool.

  Isa drove away from the camp in silence, east, toward the border with China, and then south up a good gravel road along the Batshkan River. The higher we climbed, the cooler the air became, and snow still held in large masses on the hills of brittle rock. Wild poppies, orange and yellow, grew wherever there was a patch of soil. They fluttered amidst the seeps and trickles from the melting snow that cut trails and rivulets in the rock. Their petals were like delicate veined paper and they quaked in the breeze and bruised when touched.

  As we neared the pass we saw higher peaks with fresh snow that looked like powdered sugar. Kolya told us through Vadim that the mountains had wild goats and that there were a few leopards. Not far from the pass, he said, he had a friend who lived in a cave for part of the year and hunted wolves and lynx with a trained eagle.

  We stopped at a small bridge to fish in a milky gray pool of water. We caught many of the osman, a fish with irregular black spots, olive yellow sides, a white belly, and small whiskers, like a cross between a trout and a catfish.


  It was cold enough on the pass that I needed to put on a wool hat and a sweater. Kolya’s friends came over to where Johannes and I were fishing to invite us to partake of the lunch they had spread out among their catch. They had brought boiled eggs, boiled potatoes, a container with salt, and vodka. I was handed a cup of vodka and a potato. Johannes and I toasted with them. Ida missed lunch, as she was out on a walk photographing wildflowers.

  After lunch, I took a walk across the treeless landscape. At every step I encountered a different type of wildflower. I picked some and pressed their delicate petals in the pages of my sketchbook. By the time I had returned to the fishing spot the Russians had gathered up their piles of osman in burlap sacks and were ready to leave.

  Johannes, Ida, and I had dinner at the cafeteria in the old military compound, and afterward we sat and watched Kolya and his friends play backgammon, which they played very quickly. When the gaming was over we all went to the bar to celebrate the beautiful day.

  That night there was an energy among our comrades and the drinking was aggressive. We danced as the bar filled up with people. Isa invited people to drink with us. A young woman took me by the hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. Her hair was bleached blond and she had cool dark eyes. I don’t remember returning to my room, just that I ended up there, my head spinning on my pillow. I remember that I kissed her and wondered why she was not with me.

  We paid Marcel, il mafioso, the next morning at breakfast.

  “Here’s my number in Bishkek if you need anything before you leave,” said Vadim. “I should be back in town tomorrow, that’s where I live most of the time. And let me take your address. If I find out any more about Kyrgyz trout I will write you.”

  We were headed away from Tamga before most of the town had awakened.

  Marin was driving and Isa was passed out in the passenger seat. We stopped at a beach on the lake so we could skin dive. Isa took off his shirt and spread himself out in the sand to quiet his hangover. The water was warm enough that Johannes and I could swim and dive comfortably without wet suits.