Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  The fish matched descriptions of Littledale’s fish but we were not on the southern slope of the Altai on a stream flowing south to the Gobi Desert. We were fishing in a north-flowing Siberian watershed.

  “Maybe Littledale had discovered the fish in a river draining north and had been disoriented by the snakey meandering of the rivers,” I said. “It’s easy to be disoriented out here. I think that altaicus was just a local variety of this fish.”

  “Yes,” Johannes said, “perhaps Dr. Duemaa was right and there are no grayling on south-slope rivers. In order to find out for sure, though, we need an entire summer, maybe two, and a helicopter. So then, we have an excuse to return to Mongolia.”

  When it was dark we returned to the village.

  Bolt walked into the ger first and lit a candle. Good-teeth lit a small gas stove and put a woklike pot on it filled with four ladlefuls of water from a jug. He handed a lump of dried mutton to our driver, who cut it up in pieces with his pocketknife. The driver added shoelace-sized pieces of dried mutton to the pot of water.

  Meanwhile, Good-teeth got a second pot of water boiling and put a lump of something that looked like an owl turd in it.

  “Mongolian coffee,” he said and smiled, showing his white teeth.

  He served the hot drink with a dollop of butter in it. It tasted like Louisiana chicory coffee. A woman entered the small space. She lit a second candle, illuminating a young and beautiful face. Kneeling on the earthen floor, she slowly added water to a bowl of flour, kneading it into a dough, until it was the right consistency to roll out and cut into strips. Good-teeth pointed to the girl and indicated that these noodles were called sah. They were added to the pot with the mutton and Good-teeth stirred them.

  Smoking and talking, we waited for the soup, and when it was ready we slurped it out of small bowls. Loud slurping was proper ger etiquette, as was accepting all offerings with your right hand; the left was sinister. Glasses of wheat vodka were passed around, but I made only the first round before I fell asleep.

  Having successfully caught our grayling, we returned to Hovd the next morning. On the way we had our fourth and last flat tire. We at last were stuck on the wide and desolate windswept earth. Bolt and our driver puffed continuously on packaged cigarettes until they ran out, at which time they started rolling loose tobacco in pieces of newspaper. How long were they prepared to sit there? Several hours passed, then a motorcycle rode by and stopped to pick up our driver in his sidecar. Several hours after that we spotted our driver on the horizon, rolling a tire in front of him.

  We arrived in Hovd late that evening, and the following day we flew back to Ulan Bator. We had enough time left in Mongolia to spend a day in town and go on a short trip east of the city to fish the headwaters of the Amur River (one of the biggest rivers in Siberia).

  Compared to Hovd, Ulan Bator seemed the pinnacle of the civilized world. Back in the comfort of the Zaluuchuud hotel we had clean linens, firm beds, and running water. We contacted our journalist friend Bat-Orshikh, and he arranged for the return of our faithful driver, Gambatar, to take us east.

  Bat-Orshikh recommended a trip to the Natural History Museum of Mongolia.

  “You may see some interesting fishes there.”

  After seeing it, I thought, there is anthropological value in touring a country’s Natural History Museum. Paris’s was just strange, the statue of a giant orangutan strangling a young man in the lobby, the obsessive cataloging of rooms of bones, the skeleton of a human cyclops and other birth deformities in glass cases. New York’s was not so edgy but de-gritted for the American imagination—magnificent dioramas with elegantly rendered backdrop paintings, clean and well lighted. Ulan Bator’s was a natural historian’s basement. At the door we were given a flashlight and apologies that the electricity was not working. Some of the rooms had no light at all and the eyes of poorly taxidermied snow cats, the stitches of the craftsman’s art showing in places, gleamed yellow in our handheld lights. The experience was altogether odd and fantastic; I felt as if I had to protect myself or light a fire in a corner to keep the beasts from the mouth of the cave. There were fishes, yes, but they looked more like giant raisins with teeth.

  The next day we headed east with Gambatar in a cold rain to a river called Kherlen Gol. The river ran through a thick evergreen forest with lush undergrowth, a landscape unlike any we’d seen in Mongolia. We settled in a ger camp spread over a large meadow.

  During the day Johannes and I dove and fished in the cold river. The water was clear and there were many lenok for me to catch with my fly rod. Gambatar joined us by the river and cast my spinning rod. It was still summer, late August, but I could feel the coolness of autumn, reminding me of home.

  The conversation at dinner after some vodka was clever and playful, a conglomeration of words that Johannes, Ida, and I had picked up on our travels together. Ida and I were drunk and she held me closely to her side. She kissed me over and over on the cheeks and called me her son. I had to come visit her in Sankt Veit, she demanded. “Don’t leave me with Hannes,” she said in front of him. “You understand, you understand.” Gambatar did not understand. He lit a cigarette and offered one to each of us, smiling.

  Well liquored, the four of us went to sleep in the ger under thick wool blankets with the woodstove piping hot. Hours later, in the cold morning, Gambatar woke me when he lit the fire again, which had gone out. Then he went back to bed.

  While they were still asleep I snuck out of the ger to the river with my spinning rod and on the second cast I hooked a huge fish. Upstream it went, down it went. It jumped, leaving the water completely, and touched its head to its tail. It embodied François’s sculpture le grand bécard vainqueur, the one that should be in America waiting for me. The one I will watch this winter, I thought, as snow falls outside my window. Well, here it is, a line and a hook and you try to get the fish to take the hook. And there he is finally at the end of my line, a monster running up and down the river, myself and it; it weighing probably half my weight and what shall I do, what shall I do?

  Ida smiled deeply at me, her eyes slimming to nearly shut. Any amount of effort it took to speak to her or Johannes was smoothed by the beer we drank in the airport bar as they waited with me for my flight to depart.

  I sat beside Ida and she scratched my back, massaged my shoulders, which eased a nervous excitement I felt at the prospect of being alone.

  “Don’t leave me with Hannes,” Ida whispered to me in the broken form of Spanish we had come to speak, and then laughed.

  “But you will be back in Sankt Veit soon,” Johannes said. “There is still Algeria to search for trout, and I have new information on a stream in Sicily.” A minute or two passed. One or two cigarettes were smoked and Johannes spoke again. “So, amigo, I think it’s time you catch your plane.” We stood up. I hugged Ida and shook Johannes’s hand.

  PART IV

  The Transit Lounge in Seoul, Korea

  They say that the time spent fishing is not deducted from a person’s days on earth. When you consider that stress is known to exacerbate every illness from the flu to schizophrenia, this does not seem so far off; that the gentle art of fishing is not only a pastime, but a tonic. In the seventeenth century, when the average life expectancy of a man was forty, the father of modern angling and author of the Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton, lived to be ninety years old.

  I flew from Ulan Bator to Seoul, Korea, and was now alone, in transit, examining my passion for fishing within the context of my life.

  I walked slowly by the duty-free shops in the Seoul airport, their neatly stacked wares, the flight attendants in pristine uniforms. I sat in the transit lounge across from a beautiful young woman who was reading a Russian crime novel.

  She looked up and saw me staring at her.

  “Hello, I am Katya,” she said, “in English my name is Kate.”

  “I am James,” I said.

  “You want a smoke? I was going to the smoking lounge.”

 
; “Sure,” I said.

  “And where were you?” she said as we walked. With her heels she was nearly my height.

  “I was in Mongolia with two friends.”

  “Ooh, Mongolia,” she said, half mockingly, “you are a wild man! And what were you doing in Mongolia?”

  “My friends and I were fishing for a rare kind of fish.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s what keeps you going, isn’t it?” She laughed. “You seem a rare fish yourself. I have been fishing just yesterday near my home in Vladivostok.”

  “For what?” I said, sitting next to her in the lounge full of smoke.

  “Oh, the fish with two eyes on the same side of the head.”

  “A flounder,” I said. Katya took out a cigarette with her slender fingers.

  “That’s right,” she said and lit her cigarette. “How old do you think I am?”

  “Twenty-two,” I said.

  “No, I am eighteen.”

  “Where are you headed?” I asked.

  “Australia,” Katya said, putting out her cigarette. “Would you like to eat something with me?”

  “I would,” I said, “but I have no cash.”

  “Okay, then I will buy the American his lunch.”

  We walked side by side to the transit lounge cafeteria.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Katya asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not—you are a priest maybe?”

  “I’m sure I am not a priest,” I said.

  “You have a girlfriend, then?”

  “Sure.”

  While we were waiting in line for food at the cafeteria, a Chinese man asked Katya and me if we would like to join him at his table. We introduced ourselves when we sat down.

  “You are not married, then?” the Chinese man asked. “Oh, but you would make a nice couple.”

  The Chinese man was impressed that I ate my noodles with chopsticks and tried to teach Katya how to use them.

  “Do you know who I am?” he said after a bit. “My maternal grandfather was the first prime minister of China.”

  His name was Mr. Chu and he lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Chu liked to talk and his words intrigued me, but Katya was bored with him.

  “These transit areas are timeless, aren’t they?” Chu philosophized. I was thinking about how we were all going different ways.

  KAMCHATKA, THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST

  I was flying from Seoul to Petropavlovsk, the largest city on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. There I would attend a meeting of international fish biologists, the Arctic Char Fanatics, an organization founded by a Swedish scientist, Johan Hammar, for the purpose of studying arctic char. The forty or so members of the Fanatics (there were at least two from various northern countries) met once every two years in a different near-arctic location to talk about char, deliver papers, fish, and consume large amounts of alcohol. I was invited along by one of the members, a biologist from the state of Maine, my friend Fred Kircheis.

  When I landed in the small airport on the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula, I saw Fred, for the first time in two years. He and several other members of the society had just arrived from Alaska.

  “The last time James and I saw each other,” Fred said to another colleague, “was on a short expedition in search of blueback trout in Rainbow Lake, Maine. We spent a week in a small cabin taking samples with gill nets.” I was delighted to hear his Maine accent again.

  Of the thirty-two scientists on the trip representing eleven countries—Sweden, Finland, Norway, Scotland, America, Canada, Japan, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany—I was the only one whose bags did not arrive. They had never, in fact, left the plane, which was on its way to Anchorage and would not return until the next day.

  Our Russian hosts, a handful of ichthyologists from Magadan, Vladivostok, and Moscow (which included two members of the Duma, or Russian parliament), greeted us at the airport and assured me that someone would stay behind with me until my bags arrived. The rest of the party would move north up the peninsula to the mouth of the Kamchatka River and occupy a rustic research facility on a tributary called the Raduga.

  Being left behind I began to see as a blessing. I was alone with a pair of Russians, a tall young man named Igor and a young woman meant to be a translator named Sasha. As we waited in the airport for papers to be processed, Igor offered me vodka and we enjoyed some laughs together. He and Sasha gave me a tour of the port city, which differed from other Soviet cities I’d seen in that it was on the sea. Because of the influence of salt water it also had another color in its palette of earth tones, the brilliant orange of rust.

  I was put up in a small boardinghouse with a view of the harbor. The ships moored there were massive, like prehistoric whales. The sea was cold but the weed and rust smells were somehow inviting.

  Early the next morning Igor and Sasha picked me up, but a third Russian was driving, a girl named Olga. My bags had arrived and Igor had already fetched them. We were heading north to join our party.

  The Fanatics were at a boardinghouse two hours north of Petropavlovsk. I was sitting in the backseat beside Sasha and briefly I caught a glimpse of Olga’s eyes in her rearview mirror. They were strikingly green and her reddish hair was as wild as if an electric current ran through her. We rendezvoused with the Fanatics for a late breakfast and afterward were on the road, in a caravan of four vehicles heading north on the dusty road. In the rearrangement of people and vehicles, I had been separated from Olga.

  The first part of the two-day journey to the research station was across a flat green land. In the distance was the tall peak of a massive volcano, perfectly formed like an isosceles triangle.

  “That is Mount Cruchevskaya,” Igor said, pointing. “It is thirty-nine hundred meters high.”

  The van was cramped and hot but I didn’t mind because I was forced to sit close to the Russians and I could study them. I was with Sasha and Igor, and another young woman, Oxana, and our leader, Dr. Glubakovsky, who looked a bit like Gorbachev. Each had some mystical oddness to his or her appearance. Oxana was like a faerie with long delicate ears. Sasha had one brown eye and one blue and the blue never looked precisely at you. Other Russians in our party looked like wolves or foxes.

  Our caravan drove on through the night, stopping at a guest house in the village of Milkowa for dinner. Vodka flowed like small clear brooks, babbling from tall bottles into teacups. The scientists—thirty-nine men, and one woman from Wisconsin—conversed loudly, and when the magic took effect, they danced on the unfinished wood floors.

  The next morning, awake in a location where few could remember arriving, we drank shots of vodka with breakfast and bathed in hot springs down a dirt road from the guest house. On the way back from the springs wrapped in towels, we spotted a bear in a cage.

  “Typical of the Russians to put a bear in a cage,” said Fred DeCicco, an ichthyologist from Alaska.

  “Ten years ago an American walking in Kamchatka would have been shot, or caged like this,” said Markuu, a Finnish scientist with a white beard.

  Half drunk before noon, my Russian companions and I joked in the van. The driver was moving fast over dry sand and the roadside trees were white with dust. As the day warmed I took off my jacket and wrapped it around my head. The Russians laughed at this and called me Arafat.

  The driver stopped on the road by a patch of wild blueberries. He offered me a Bulgarian cigarette. The blueberries were flavorful and their leaves were mottled green and bright red. Autumn was taking hold. The rest of the caravan stopped behind our van and the scientists fanned across the berry patch, identifying everything they saw. Markuu pissed on a plant and said, “Hey, what’s this?” Fred inched up the hillsides, looking. There was a tall red mushroom that none of them had seen before, a purple beetle, a yellow feather.

  Beyond the blueberry patch the caravan stopped on the bank of the wide Kamchatka River to await a ferry. T
he scientists searched along the river’s high-water mark, their heads bent, lifting dead sticklebacks from the dried mud where the water had receded and left them stranded. Amidst the sticklebacks was a dizzying pattern of overlapping bird prints, accentuated by the sun-cracked mud. They raped the soil with their eyes wishing to identify it all. A rusted sawblade, what species? Sawbladus crosscutticus rusticus.

  Humans and vehicles had crossed the cold silty river, and then down the road, the caravan stopped at an open market. We tasted some smoked sockeye salmon and drank a liter of vodka to the health of the vendor’s daughter.

  “Fuck that the economy is dead,” Igor said, toasting, “fuck that the ruble is worthless.”

  We drove another forty miles over sand and through mud to the Kamchatka River again, which had snaked around to meet us a second time. Three iron boats shifted between off-kilter pilings and one rusted man stood in each waiting to take us across. This time the vehicles stayed. We would travel thirty kilometers by boat down the Kamchatka River, and then up the Raduga River to the research station.

  Dr. Glubakovsky, our host and Duma member (deputy chairman of the Committee of Education and Science), stood on the bank of the wide river. “Before this day,” he said, “only two Westerners have ever been to this remote station, the president of Finland and the head of the East German KGB. I helped build this station myself as a young biologist in the 1970s. I hope you feel welcome there.”

  We pushed off the muddy bank and our boat headed across the vast river. It was nearing twilight and you could see the opposite bank, but then a fog set in and our engine caught on fire. The Russian operating our boat filled a bucket with water and threw it on the fire. It took a second and third bucket to put it out, then he slowly approached it as if it were a meteor that had struck the earth.