by James Prosek
When morning came, after sleeping the dark hours to dawn, I lit the woodstove with the summer stock-market tables. The heat produced from capitalism burning expanded the stovepipe and made a percussive boom. On the face of the stove was written COLE MFG. CO.
CHICAGO ILL.
I heated some water to make oatmeal and hot chocolate and pretended I was a frontiersman. The heat from the stove became oppressive and I had to back off from it. Maybe I was in a ger camp again on the fringe of the Gobi Desert. The driver Gambatar had already come into the low dark tent to light the stove. Or I was a soldier then in the army of Genghis Khan somewhere on the desolate steppes, fighting for an empire in a desert. Empires were just illusions. Battles had been fought in places where rivers ran and cows grazed; at the battles’ ends, such places were peaceful again—Gettysburg, Normandy, a beet field on the Elbe. What about “the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the peaceful woods, and smiling fields” that Darwin wrote about in his journal in 1839.
I stepped out on the porch in my long underwear to survey the yellow hills. My breath drew out in a smoky plume and I embraced myself in the cold. It was that precise time in the morning when the stars begin to disappear and a blueness pervades from horizon to horizon. Before me the sun was rising but its warmth had not yet reached the ground. I turned around and looked at the cabin, its front door glowing in the soft light, and then looked above the door to the small triangle of attic space beneath the wood-shingled roof.
Thinking the attic was too small to accommodate the animal I had heard the night before, I walked around the cabin to see if there was a hole somewhere big enough to justify my creature’s entry. Finding there was not, I reasoned that the animal had found its way in as an infant and grown up there, which of course was absurd. During the four nights I spent in the cabin, I never heard it stir as long as the sun was out, but after dark, without fail, it began to move. Was it a bat? If so it was porcupine-sized at least.
Soon the western sun, the same sun I’d seen everywhere else, was high and warm and my early fire in the stove burned to embers. I was standing on the porch preparing my fly rod, thinking about where I should start my fishing. The scene before me was close to my mental images, as I had never been, of the African savannah. From anywhere amidst the tall grasses, dry and golden, I was prepared to see the sandy shoulder of a lioness.
Down in the meadow sloughs of Upper Blacktail Creek, as the creek was called, there were water buffalo, though really they were bison, and on the hills above were scavenging hyenas, though really they were coyotes. The roads along which moose and elk can sometimes be seen were beyond sight, no trails led to this spot. I was alone, in my khaki fatigues, bracing my over and under, smiling and squinting in the dry sun, taking my emerging mustache with thumb and forefinger, contemplating the creek winding through the willows and sage.
As soon as I walked off the porch into the grasses, I noticed that every plant had its unique way of hitching seeds to my pant legs, socks, and boot laces. I carried them some distance up Blacktail Creek and then circled toward where the sun had risen and walked up a hill from where I could see much of the area, and my cabin. At the crest of the hill there was a massive boulder that must have been ten feet high. I wanted to be on top of it, so I sank my fingers into the rock and pulled myself up. I lay facing the sky, watching the sun emerge from and disappear behind large white clouds. After a while, the wind picked up and two small raindrops fell on my cheek. The air became cool and I was very hungry, as I had eaten only a bit of oatmeal that morning. I got down from the boulder and returned to the creek to fish.
I have always found it difficult to fish on an empty stomach, and the wind was making it difficult for me to cast the fly in the water and not in the grass. After fishing four bends in the creek with a dry fly, I had not seen or caught anything. Then I came to a large pool with a small cascade at the head of it. In that pool were many brook trout, and before long I had two strung through the gills on a willow stick. It was early afternoon and I returned to the cabin to cook them.
They were females, and each had a pair of golden masses of roe. Still speckled, like the nighttime sky, I laid them on the kitchen table, filled a skillet with oil, and lit the woodstove. After about half an hour I found I could not get the stove hot enough to cook on, so I lit a small open fire behind the cabin and roasted the trout on willow skewers like marshmallows. I ate them like a cob of corn; their flesh was sweet, as if they had been marinated in sugar water. I licked the willow stick clean and put out the fire. Then I took out a book and read on the porch with a glass of whiskey. I sampled the book and sipped the whiskey until the light grew dim and the first star (probably a planet) showed in the sky. By and by, the creature walked again in the attic.
I still could offer no explanation for it and crept slowly to my bed. Shortly, I fell to sleep.
When I woke the sun had already risen. I lit the woodstove and sat by it. The sun beamed strongly, and I moved a chair out onto the porch to sit and listen to the creek. When the sun was high enough to reach the water, I undressed and walked barefoot through the sage to bathe in a deep pool of the creek where I had caught the fish. There the water was deep enough to cover my body. I could not take the cold water for very long and I stood up, climbing onto the grassy bank, returning to the cabin to dry off. I put on jeans, and my khaki safari shirt, and sat in a chair on the porch.
I tromped again that day through the golden hills and valleys. At dark, the nameless creature walked in the attic.
VISITING DR. BEHNKE
On October third I drove along Route 40 toward Fort Collins, Colorado. Groves of aspen, nestled in the crooks of hills, were changing to yellow and orange like bowls of ripening mangoes. Eastward toward the Continental Divide there was not a breath of wind. Just before dark every lake was still. The pristine reflections of the changing aspen were disturbed only by the rings of rising trout.
At Rabbit Ears Pass I drove in minutes from the drainage of the Colorado River and the Pacific to that of the North Platte and the Atlantic. Night came completely as there was no moon, but I could hear the rushing currents of the Cache la Poudre River out of my open window. I saw no sign of anyone on the narrow road until I came to a roadside bar and heard music. It was filled with college students from the state university. Some miles beyond I came to the town of Fort Collins.
Behnke lived with his wife, Peggy, in a modest ranch house on East Prospect Street, just outside of town and the campus of Colorado State University. I arrived there the next morning and was greeted by Bob Behnke at the door. He smelled of sweet pipe smoke. “Oh, James, come in,” he said in a slim, nasally voice. “Did you have any trouble finding my place?”
In the living room, the first room on the left, there was nothing that resembled fish, but the hallway was stuffed with renderings of trout in all media. There were more paintings of trout one floor below in the television room, and in the adjacent kitchen. It was a well-used kitchen with full spice racks, dried sage, rosemary, and flowers hanging from a beam, liqueurs with sticky bottles, some blackened pots, and a gas stove. I sensed that if Behnke were the true Schwarzfischer I expected him to be, he would hold cooking, eating, and drinking wine on a level with his fishing.
We exited the house by a door in the kitchen and Behnke showed me his yard. Beside the house was a red barn where he kept a mule, and beyond the mule was the garden where he and his wife grew tomatoes and peppers, squash, sage, rosemary, and several varieties of mint. Beside the garden were small fruit trees, and on some there were ripe apples. The yard sloped down behind the garden to a pair of small ponds thickly lined with willow and cottonwood. Three white geese honked at us and the mule by the barn brayed in response. Behnke stared into the ponds.
“Before these willows and Russian olive grew up and sucked all the water out, I had trout in this spring hole—some Snake River cutthroats up to twenty-three inches.” Behnke talked continuously in his nasally voice, as if he were trying to share ev
erything he knew. He touched his touseled reddish hair. “The Russian olive is a pretty tree,” he said, looking at one, touching its leaves and taking out his pipe. “It’s introduced but I like them, they provide a lot of cover for the birds.” He paused to stuff tobacco in his pipe and light it. “I’ve got a special spot for us to fish this afternoon,” he said.
Later that morning, Peggy joined Behnke and me on a pond near the town of Nederland, east of and above Boulder. The pond was a sort of fishing club that Behnke and some friends had organized and stocked with greenback cutthroat trout. The greenback cutthroat, native to headwaters of the North Platte and Poudre rivers, was thought to have been extinct by the late 1960s, but Behnke did not believe that to be so. As a scientist-angler he set out to survey some very remote streams with a fly rod hoping to find some. He did and was instrumental in establishing a recovery program, reintroducing greenbacks to much of their native range.
We fished in the pond at Nederland from an aluminum boat while Peggy sat on shore. Behnke stripped streamer flies quickly through the clear water, catching several greenback trout and pointing out their distinguishing characteristics. He held the fish as if it were the first he had seen and then let it go. He stopped to stuff his pipe and then suggested we return to the bank to eat.
Behnke had prepared a gourmet lunch of roasted poblano peppers stuffed with prosciutto and cheddar cheese, premixed margaritas carried in mason jars, another jar with homemade gazpacho soup, and corn tortilla chips. Peggy and I sat on wooden benches at a picnic table and Behnke laid the food before us. He poured me a margarita and the three of us ate and drank and talked. I had remembered reading in an interview in Fly Rod & Reel magazine that Behnke was born in Stamford, Connecticut. I was born in the same town and over lunch I asked him about Stamford.
He began talking of his childhood and his early fascination with fish. “My youth was spent much like yours,” Behnke said, “chasing wild brook trout in small streams.
“Ever since I was a little kid—I was fascinated looking at fish,” he said to me, cutting one of his stuffed peppers and taking a bite. “I started catching pumpkinseed sunfish in local ponds. Then I caught my first brook trout above a small dam on the Rippowam River when I was eleven. I ran home with it and put it in a tub of water. I was observing it and observing it, and I got so admiring of it I was going to take it and put it back. But I went in to eat lunch, and it jumped out and killed itself, so I ate it.”
Behnke read all the books on fish in the Stamford Library and his “obsession with fish,” as he called it, grew. He took up fly-fishing, and at eighteen he went to work for the Yale and Towne Hardware Company, like his father and half the people in his town, making locks. “One thing I looked forward to each summer if business was slow, I’d be laid off and go on unemployment for a few weeks and go fishing all the time,” he said. In 1952 he was drafted into the army. In the spring of 1952, stationed in Japan, he spent his off-duty hours fishing for the native char, iwana and yamame, in small mountain streams. When he returned home from the army the Yale and Towne factory had closed and moved south and he had no job. He went to a counseling service in New Haven that helped veterans find jobs. They gave him some tests. “‘Hey, you should go to college,’ they told me, but I didn’t know what I wanted to study. The counselor asked me what interested me and I said, ‘Fish.’ I had never dreamed it was possible.” Behnke studied ichthyology at the University of Connecticut and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in three years. As an undergraduate he read fisheries journals nights and weekends and published the first paper on the freshwater fishes of Connecticut since 1844. The star fisheries student received offers from several graduate schools but it was a call from Paul Needham, a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, that led to his future as a preeminent trout scientist. Needham was doing a study on the trout of the western United States, planning to drive from California to Alaska collecting trout, with a fly rod, and he needed a research assistant. He offered the job to Behnke and they traveled together for several months in a pickup truck across western North America searching for trout.
Behnke did his master’s thesis on the Lahontan cutthroat trout of Nevada, and then got a grant to study the Salmonidae of the world for his Ph.D. He spent months researching museums and streams in Britain, Russia, and Yugoslavia and received his Ph.D. in 1964. He taught for several years at Berkeley, filling Paul Needham’s position when he died, and then settled in as a professor of fisheries and wildlife biology at the University of Colorado, Fort Collins.
The sky was a brilliant blue. It was a beautiful day by the lake for a picnic and for fishing. After lunch there was a hatch of small sedge and we caught one trout each on dry flies.
In the days I spent with Behnke, returning to fish the pond with greenbacks near Nederland, he was curious about what I’d discovered in my travels, what the countryside looked like, the trout and the rivers. But most of all, he was interested in Johannes Schöffmann, the mysterious amateur trout scientist he’d been in correspondence with for years, and whom he’d never met face-to-face.
“You say he’s a baker?—fascinating. I’ve only known a few like him, an amateur who is as effective or more so than most professionals. Sometimes, you see, the amateur is more efficient because his conclusions are born from his observations and not the other way around.
“I first heard from Johann [as he sometimes referred to him] in 1986. He had written me with information on two very remote and rare species of brown trout, Salmo platycephalus of Turkey and Salmo pallaryi of Morocco. He determined that pallaryi was extinct and that platycephalus was vulnerable to overfishing, writing up his conclusions and publishing them in an Austrian fisheries journal. When I read Johannes’s scientific papers, the range and depth of knowledge displayed indicated formal training in ichthyology. Now that I know he is a baker, his level of expertise is all the more impressive.”
Though Behnke was no longer teaching, he still kept his office in the basement of the old veterinary medicine building, Wagar Hall, on the campus of CSU, and I expressed a wish to visit it. My secret wish was to have a week to pore over his files, read papers and letters and books and look at specimens, but I would not press such an agenda on this trip. On one of the sunny afternoons I spent in Fort Collins we walked across campus to see his office.
It was just as I had pictured the office of a world-class trout taxonomist, piled with books, photos, and papers, and no larger than a big walk-in closet. He had a separate examination room where jars of preserved specimens—fish he’d collected over forty years—stood on tall shelves. He took me into the specimen room and we walked among the fish. By a small sink and table where he performed his examinations there was a refrigerator. In it he kept specimens he was examining at that moment, but it was also stocked with jars of his homemade gazpacho soup. It seemed he took his gazpacho as seriously as his taxonomy. He took out a jar and poured a cupful for me, handing me a spoon.
“I taste it and add ingredients until it suits me,” he said. “This batch is two weeks into the tasting process—it sometimes takes me a month to finish a batch. I start with a base of tomatoes and cucumber ground up in a blender, then I add any number of the following ingredients: cilantro, cumin, garlic, lime, onion, basil, habañero tabasco, sour cream, balsamic vinegar, and poblano peppers.” He showed me around the lab as I ate the gazpacho. “You like it?” he asked.
Among the fish, motionless in the bottoms of jars, were specimens Johannes and I had collected in Turkey and Central Asia and mailed to him from Austria.
Back in his office, Behnke gave me papers on the trout of Lake Ohrid, Macedonia, and Lake Sevan, Armenia, of which he had duplicates. He showed me a beautiful old book with color plates of the fishes of Japan and then sat down in his reclining chair behind his desk to light his pipe. We made plans for fishing the next day, my last in Colorado before I returned home. Behnke suggested as we were both Connecticut Yankees that we should go up to a tributar
y of the Poudre near Cameron Pass and fish for brook trout (which were not native to Colorado but introduced from the east). The trout were plentiful and we could keep some to eat for dinner.
“I don’t mind harvesting introduced trout,” he said. “Even though they are wild and beautiful.”
The next day we drove up Route 14 toward Cameron Pass to Behnke’s fishing spot. Behnke included me that day in an annual ritual of his and Peggy’s, to go up on the pass and drink a bottle of inexpensive champagne while watching the autumn colors on the aspen leaves.
“Well, I suppose this is what retirement is supposed to be like,” Behnke said as he lowered himself carefully to sit in a meadow by a series of ponds that beavers had dammed in the creek. I sat next to him. He lit his pipe and poured more champagne in my cup. It was a gorgeous day, the sky was deep blue, the water in the creek was black, and the aspen in the crooks of the hills were golden yellow. “What do you say we catch a half dozen small trout for supper?” Behnke said.
I watched him string up his fly rod and tie on a small bead-head caddis nymph. He walked to the soggy bank, made several casts, and hooked a brook trout. Smiling and laughing Behnke pulled the trout onto the bank, pouncing on it in the grasses. He then unhooked it and put it in his creel.
“Take a look in the shallow end of some of the beaver ponds and you can see the trout spawning,” Behnke said. The females were digging redds by sweeping silt from the gravel. The males were waiting to fertilize the eggs that would be laid there. Purple clouds spread across the sky and their reflection made it harder to spy on the trout.
I fished in the deep parts of the ponds and caught four trout, which I strung on a forked willow branch. They were small and delicate, though their delicacy was partly an illusion, as trout evolved in the most indelicate of geological circumstances. I thought how peculiar it was that trout buried their eggs in gravel and were born from beneath the stones in the river bottom. When I returned to Behnke’s side an hour later, he was sitting in the grass with a half dozen brook trout, already speaking of how he meant to prepare them.