Fly-Fishing the 41st

by James Prosek

  “I’m going to make a kind of tempura of squash blossoms and okra and serve it with the brookies—I’ll stuff their cavities with mint and sautée them in pumpkin oil with a little garlic.” He turned his pipe upside down and tapped it on his waders. Then he stuffed it with fresh tobacco from a small pouch. We sat down to admire the landscape.

  “Some dark clouds moving in,” Behnke observed.

  “It’s nice up here,” I said, lying back in the grass and sage, feeling the cold clean air. Behnke contemplated the brook trout lying on the dry grass next to his fly rod.

  “I think we need to pursue and kill—as Homo sapiens,” he said. “It’s part of what we are. Indeed, we are predators.” He lit his pipe. “You know, I never realized until you pointed it out to me that I’d spent most of my life in two distant cities on the same latitude,” he said. “Stamford, Connecticut, and Fort Collins, Colorado, are both on forty-one degrees north. You chose a good parallel to fish; it may very nearly be the best in the world for diversity of native trout and char.”

  That night we ate the trout in Behnke’s house and drank chardonnay, listening to a recording of Schubert’s Trout (Die Forelle) play in the background. While we were drinking a favorite aperitif of Behnke’s, a Chilean liquor called pisco, a storm was blowing over the pass where we had fished that day, dropping a foot of snow and turning the aspen leaves black.

  HOME

  Denver is not a distant drive from New York if you set your mind to it. Friends of mine have made the trip in twenty-five hours, stopping only for gas. I had no pressing reason to get home, but its gravity pulled me.

  Driving across Nebraska, where the hills at last had become plains, a magpie flew from where it had been feeding on a road-killed deer. The stench of feed lots kept me awake as I drove through broad oceanic fields, cows’ breaths visible and plaster white in the cold day. I crossed the Missouri River and stared again into black water. Then I crossed the Mississippi and rode through Illinois. I did not stray from the nondescript highway until I came to Indiana, ending up at night in Evansville. The small brick town was lit by streetlamps, which reminded me oddly of Paris.

  I ate breakfast the next morning at a small diner beside the Ohio River. Barges, bright and huge, labored against the current. Blue-haired women played bridge at a table by the window. Perhaps it was the painter John James Audubon who led me here. He had spent some time nearby, living, failing at business, and painting birds in Henderson, Kentucky. I spoke only to waitresses, and my memories were jumbled in my head. There is no clarity—through Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Zanesville, and on into Pennsylvania.

  “That’s quite a sculpture,” my father said, looking at François’s masterpiece, the grand bécard vainqueur. But I was dreaming this. I had fallen asleep on the road and caught myself just in time. In my mind the leaves on the sugar maples had turned color and some were falling as we spoke. My father’s hair had become whiter, but I did not find the changes in his face so noticeable at first. “I want to hear about it all,” he said, “but wait until morning.”

  It’s one of the first times in my life I took his advice. I pulled off Interstate 70 and got a room in a motel.

  I took off my clothes and got into bed. I shifted to look out the window at the moon. Home revealed to me what I had secretly feared, that despite having traveled bleak countries, when I woke in the morning I would be only who I was when I’d left.

  I crossed the Delaware, in my mind again, as if the fog had lifted from my brain. I found greater New York and its energy intimidating and foreign. It was too dark to see the Hudson when I crossed the George Washington Bridge, but I could see lights from the city and the cables of the bridge, and an hour from there I was beyond the glow of New York. The lights went out and I was on the dark winding rural roads near my home.

  Then sleep. There was a place, a house in a mountain village roofed with stone shingles shaped like fish scales. Below it was a small pond. It could have been Portugal, it could have been Japan, but it was not, it was my home. I dressed and walked through a cold air that smelled of woodsmoke. Through the leafless trees I saw the pond near my house where I grew up fishing. It had three inches of clear black ice on it. I walked out onto the ice, so clear it felt as though I was walking on the water itself. I lay on the ice, facedown, and shielded the light from above with my arms, peering into the world beneath the surface. The pond is still, I thought, but through the window of ice I saw a mysterious current beneath, one that moved the weeds, and carried small scurrying organisms. Then I felt a cold wetness on my bare neck, and by the time I lifted my head a small white film of snow had concealed the black ice and the window to that other world was closed.

  AFTERWORD

  A LITTLE-KNOWN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARTIST NAMED ILIAZD AND HIS 41°

  Few individuals are aware of the geographic parallel on which they live, and fewer have considered whether they are on that parallel for a reason. One man constructed a life philosophy around it—Ilia Zdanevitch, born in 1894, in Tbilisi, Georgia (the former Soviet republic), on the 41st parallel.

  At seventeen Ilia Zdanevitch moved to St. Petersburg to study law but soon gave up his studies to paint and write poetry, assuming the name Iliazd, a combination of his first and last names. Through his brother Kiril, who also lived in St. Petersburg, Iliazd met the futurist painters Victor Barthe and Mikhail Ledanter. He became part of their avant-garde circles, continuing to live in that city as a confirmed futurist for six years, developing his modernist ideas.

  Iliazd returned to his home city of Tbilisi in 1917 and settled in the Caucasus Mountains working as an apprentice to a publisher. Shortly thereafter, with the help of two poet friends, Iliazd founded a small modernist magazine intended to house the literary experiments of himself and his friends (including writings in a language of their own invention called zaum, which advocated a redefinition of language based on word sounds). They named their magazine the 41st Degree, a reference to the latitude of Iliazd’s home.

  In Iliazd’s mind, the 41st latitude seemed to connect his small Georgian town of Tbilisi with a culturally rich and politically powerful world abroad. “It is at forty-one degrees,” Iliazd wrote, “that most of the great cities of light are located—Madrid, Rome, Constantinople, Beijing, and New York.” Numerologically speaking, 41° harbored other relevance to Iliazd. “Jesus remained in the desert forty days and forty nights,” he wrote, “and on the forty-first came out cleansed and emerged stronger. Forty-one degrees Celsius is the body temperature at which a feverish delerium takes over the body and we die.”

  In 1921, despite such strong feelings for nationalism concerning his native latitude, Iliazd moved away again, this time to Paris. He was known later for saying that “although Paris was not on the forty-first parallel (it’s on the forty-ninth), it should have been.” Now, at the age of twenty-seven, his plan was to impose his futurist ideas (language of zaum and avant-garde use of typography in printing) on Parisian and expatriate artists by establishing what he fantasized about calling the University of the 41st Degree. His vision for the university was as

  A society for the building and exploitation of the world’s political ideas—Peking, Samarkand, Tbilisi, Constantinople, Rome, Madrid, and New York. Sections at: Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Teheran, and Calcutta. Universities producing books, newspapers, and plays useful for the progress of the idiot literate. 41° is the most powerful organization in the van of the avant-garde in the field of poetic industry. Its beginnings go back to the first decade of this century when, thanks to the work of its collaborators and pioneers, there were discovered in various parts of the terrestrial globe extremely rich and unexplored areas of language. At the present time, 41° embraces more than sixty linguistic systems, including new territories, and attracts new capital with each succeeding year.

  But Iliazd’s attempts to start the University of the 41st Degree failed. What ensued for him was a creative desert that lasted eighteen years. In
1940 Iliazd emerged as a printer of art books of some renown, creating the works that he is best known for today.

  Through 1974, Iliazd published twenty livres de peintres, painters’ books, each in editions of fewer than one hundred. These books, illustrated by a handful of preeminent artists whom Iliazd had courted as collaborators—Picasso, Miró, Giacometti, Matisse, Max Ernst, and Jacques Villon—conveyed their subjects not only through the meaning of the text but through their typography, illustrations, and materials. In these books he had finally accomplished in print, at least in part, a few of the ideals he had created for himself to live by.

  In the words of Françoise Le Gris-Bergmann, Iliazd’s view of the book was “both as an object and a receptacle, as a site as well as a stage, as an emanation of the Word as well as of a kind of choreographic imaging.”2 Ultimately, however, Iliazd’s vision of the perfect printed book may have exceeded the possibilities of the tactile world.

  His standards for production were uncompromising, he wanted total control, was idealistic and noncommercial. It was a feat for him to find willing collaborators at all, but he did. “He searched for the perfect paper stock as though he was hunting for treasure,” wrote Audrey Isselbacher, “and sometimes invented his own typography to best convey the meaning of the text. Always his subject is the unknown artist or poet, the nobody.”3

  In his book Le Frère Mendiant, a tale of a voyage through Africa by an anonymous fourteenth-century Franciscan monk, Iliazd chose materials that he thought would best express a narrative of geographic exploration and movement in order to create a harmony between the book’s subject and its appearance. “On any page of Le Frère Mendiant,” says Bergmann, “we can read the sinuous outlines of the coast of Africa through the initial letters of each line, their slight or radical unevenness creating for the navigating eye the entrances to grottoes, lagoons, steeply rising cliffs—and, beyond, the vast spaces of the horizon and the sea. Paragraphs, indentations, the unevenness and gaps of the lines—all constitute the cartography of the page, its geomorphology, the material of a spatial and topical representation.”

  Iliazd not only created unique books, he also made elaborate containers, covers, folders, envelopes, and slipcases in several layers of paper to create the atmosphere similar to a stage curtain, to veil what was within. The anticipation of the book for Iliazd was foreplay. “At times,” wrote Isselbacher, “the dramatic quality of his volume’s architecture is contextually relevant, as in the narrow verticle format of La Maigre, a biting satire on the vanity of a thin woman written by Arian de Monluc in 1630. Its stiff parchment cover is impossible to open—one must remove the leaves to read them—and even the fibrous folder around the parchment is rough and dry to the touch, like the brittle and rigid character so vividly described by Monluc.”

  Each of Iliazd’s books, through a harmony of text, image, and material, was meant to be a world in itself, a landscape, a geographical site, and always that site was marked with Iliazd’s imprint—41°. The forty-first parallel in Iliazd’s work was not only a geographic location, but also a philosophical concept.

  THANKS TO:

  johannes s., ida s., pierre a., jennifer p., julia h., françois c., marie-annick d., andré s., philippe b., larry a., elaine m., joe d., krista s., bob b., steve p., vincent g., judith s., hill a., whitney t., joe h., jim mo., jim mu., greg m., louis p., lynn p., kristina h., terry h., etay z., david t., bob c., steve s., taylor h., harold b., maria h., valerie g., ryan r., greg b., nick l., agnes p., kevin d., monte b., and all others who helped with my travels, contributed to my learning, shared their enjoyment of life, or aided with the manuscript. brazil wins today!

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The idea to travel a latitude line around the world was my editor’s, Larry Ashmead at HarperCollins. To travel my home latitude was my agent’s, Elaine Markson. The idea to live and raise his son in Easton, Connecticut, on the 41st parallel, was my father’s. To infect me with a love of fish—I’m not sure who’s responsible for that. These factors determined the route of my trip.

  About the Author

  JAMES PROSEK is the author and illustrator of several books, including Trout of the World and Joe and Me. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, James graduated from Yale University where, at the age of nineteen, he published his first book, Trout: An Illustrated History. In 2003 Prosek won a Peabody Award for The Complete Angler, his documentary about Izaak Walton. When not out fishing the globe, Prosek resides in Easton, Connecticut. Find out more about James and his work at www.troutsite.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise for Fly-Fishing the 41st

  “[Fly-Fishing is] filled with odd characters, rough places, and the clandestine activities of La Sociedad Internacional de Schwarzfischers, an authority-evading society invented by James Prosek and monomaniac travel companion Johannes Schöffmann.”

  —Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole

  “Prosek’s enthusiasm is captivating. His finely written memoir, a hybrid of sporting and travel genres, is likely to awaken the locura in armchair travelers and anglers alike.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “The famed fishing writer loops the planet along one of its most interesting latitudinal lines…. A hit not only with sport fishermen but with any one who likes to read a well-written adventure.”

  —BookPage

  “Avid fisherman and evocative writer, Prosek effectively combines the memoir and travelogue forms. [James Prosek] recounts his explorations in passages notable for stunning slices of imagery that linger in the mind; it’s not hard to close your eyes and see these faraway places in all their Old World beauty. Resonant and lyrical.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[Prosek’s] voice is self-effacing, direct, and occasionally lyrical…. Hispassion for the subject…firmly insists on your attention.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “James Prosek has eloquently demonstrated that angling is a kind of universal language, and that doors open to fishermen in disparate cultures that are open to no one else. We are blessed that we have such an original and meticulous observer in James Prosek: He has taken us on an unforgettable journey.”

  —Thomas McGuane, author of The Cadence of Grassand The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing

  ALSO BY JAMES PROSEK

  Trout: An Illustrated History

  Joe and Me: An Education in Fishing and Friendship

  The Complete Angler:

  A Connecticut Yankee Follows in the Footsteps of Walton

  Early Love and Brook Trout

  Trout of the World

  Copyright

  FLY-FISHING THE 41ST. Copyright © 2003 by James Prosek. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061853197

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  1 Sarah Faunce, Courbet. New York: Abrams, 1993.

  2 Iliazd and the Illustrated Book. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1987.

  3 Ibid.