The Codfish Dream

by David Giblin

  I had to visit Troutbreath on a regular basis to keep myself supplied with gasoline. These visits were a social time, not only with Troutbreath but also with the other guides refuelling at the same time. These visits allowed me to keep up on recent events and settle any little problems that might arise with the other guides.

  Troutbreath and I were so engaged one day when a tourist interrupted us. He came to the boatshed carrying a bottle-shaped package and looking for Tom. Troutbreath wore his Brad overalls and had his long hair tucked inside a cap. He smiled, took the bottle from the man, and replied, “Tom’s gone to town on the freight run, but I’ll put this right here where he won’t miss it when he gets back.”

  “Make sure the bottle doesn’t get left in the sun,” the man advised, “it might damage the wine. It’s that Château Kirwan he liked so much the other night.”

  “I’ll move it down here then,” said Troutbreath obligingly.

  This was all part of Troutbreath’s subterfuge. I’d never met anyone who knew more about wine, but he found it much more useful to feign wide-eyed ignorance. The tourists expected to find nothing but backwoods yokels, and Troutbreath especially didn’t want to disappoint them.

  “You get that to him, now,” the man said smiling. “I really want to thank him for helping me and my wife the other day. He really saved my ass.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ve got Dave here as a witness. These guides have to tell the truth, you know, or else they take away their licence.”

  The man clucked and shook his head. After he left I turned to Troutbreath, “Is that the one whose boat was sinking?”

  “Charts,” he said laconically, the one word explaining everything. “He was using a goddamn gas station road map.”

  Troutbreath did a roaring trade selling the proper charts of the area to inexperienced boaters. He kept a large supply of tide books and charts stashed away in the gas shed. He even had several sets of the elaborate and detailed charts describing the flow of currents in the rapids at different times of the tide. He had a chart table set up in the shed, where he kept a set spread out. He made sure they looked well used: dog-eared and coffee stained.

  He was more than helpful to the endless stream of lost souls who found their way to his docks. He took them into the shed and showed them the correct charts and the channels they should take to avoid danger. Invariably they would ask to buy the charts and the priceless information they held. Troutbreath would look pained. He’d suck in his breath and blow it out noisily. These were his only set, he would tell them. Even if he wanted to sell them, which he did, he couldn’t do it. To get replacements meant a trip all the way to Campbell River. He didn’t know when he’d get the chance to get in there again.

  Troutbreath knew how to play it out. I had seen him turn down twenty dollars a chart. By the time he was finished with them the tourists were forking over forty or fifty US dollars a chart, and were so grateful he was invited on board for drinks and even dinner. He would come away with bottles of the best wine and liquor, along with little packets of pâté or tins of caviar. He was so wide-eyed at these wonders, these unknown culinary delights, that his hosts were only too happy to load him up. Troutbreath had one of the finest wine cellars I had ever seen, and a pantry full of accompaniments. Considering he was buying the charts for a buck each from the Queen’s Printer, he was turning a profit that would make even a billionaire blush.

  “You ever get any complaints?” I asked him once.

  “No, no unsatisfied customers yet,” he said. He went on to explain. “Don’t forget it’s their idea to buy them in the first place. I do my best to talk them out of it. They set the price and even throw in the tip. They think they’re bringing civilization to the ignorant locals, and who am I to tell them otherwise. And don’t forget the power of the rapids—they’ve seen the rapids and it gets them, ummm . . . motivated. Free enterprise would go nowhere without motivated buyers. That’s what these guys are. Besides, if they ever did want to find the guy who sold them the charts, the chances are only one in four they’ll find him.” He winked.

  “No, the main problem I have is being too successful. I’m selling so many sets of charts it’s taking up all my free time getting them to look just right. Giving them the right antique quality takes so much time I don’t have any left to get out fishing, and it sucks.”

  twenty THE TROUBLE WITH WET LENNY

  “OH, BY THE WAY, I almost forgot,” said Troutbreath, “I wanted to ask if you were available to guide mid-week.”

  Troutbreath was able to send quite a bit of work my way. The house guides at the Carringtons’ were usually kept busy with fly-in guests. If all the house guides were busy, Troutbreath had to hire independents for the people on the yachts. I always tried to keep him happy.

  “I’ve just had a mid-week cancellation. Maybe I can do it for you.”

  “These people have been up here once before. It’s a big yacht out of Vancouver and they want to start using the resort on a regular basis, mostly family trips. They’re really nice people and the boat owner is a good tipper. Could mean lots more hours if you want them.”

  “Sounds perfect, when do I start?”

  Steady business, nice people, and good tips sounded almost too good; there had to be a catch.

  “There’s one small catch.”

  There it was. I had experienced Troutbreath’s small catches in the past.

  “And what would that be?”

  “When they were up here last time they went fishing with one of the resort guides and they requested him again.”

  “And it was?”

  I had a feeling I knew the answer already.

  “How do you feel about fishing with Wet Lenny?”

  There was a time when I felt sorry for Wet Lenny. When I first noticed him working at the Carringtons’ as a rookie, he seemed shunned by the rest of the guides. I often saw him eating alone or with the shore staff. As the season passed even some of the independent guides started treating him the same way.

  Lucky Petersen had such an aversion to Lenny he would jump in the bushes if he saw him approaching. I had to find out for myself what the problem was. One day in the pub I started up a conversation. This was a mistake. Wet Lenny was so happy to have a guide to talk to he took it to heart. He wanted to be my friend. He wanted to hang out, go fishing together, pal around. It wasn’t long before I was joining Lucky Petersen in the bushes.

  The trouble with Wet Lenny wasn’t that he kept parting company with his boat. It wasn’t that he mumbled when he talked, or even that he had a habit of fiddling with his mustache. The trouble with Wet Lenny—the problem that drove the guides away, caused them to jump behind the nearest bushes when they saw him coming, that left him mumbling on and on to unsuspecting shore staff or sitting alone making endless notes in a loose-leaf binder—was that all Wet Lenny wanted to talk about, the only thing on his mind, was fishing.

  Wet Lenny could tell you in great detail about every fish he had ever caught. He could tell you where, when, how, and worst of all why. It wasn’t as though these were big fish, tyees that put up memorably epic battles. He seldom caught a salmon over twenty pounds, though he didn’t seem all that concerned with the quality of the fish he caught. They were just so much raw data for him.

  Our conversation at the pub went something like this:

  “Hey, Lenny, how big was that fish you caught at the Log Dump this morning?”

  “Ummm . . . not quite twelve pounds,” he mumbled, “almost a ‘smiley’ but not quite, missed it by three-quarters of a pound.”

  A smiley is what the commercial fishermen call a fish over twelve pounds. Salmon this size are sold to restaurants or caterers through a specialty market and earn more per pound. A tyee was beyond Lenny’s imagination, although for Lenny every fish he caught was like a tyee, you could say that much in his favour.

  “Nice spring though,” Lenny continued, “had that funny little yellow spot under the chin they get if they’re from Phil
lips Arm. Why do you think that is, anyway?”

  Lenny never waited for an answer.

  “Something to do with the water there I guess, or maybe it’s genetic. The fish put up a damn good fight though. My guest panicked at first, but I got him calmed down. I had the drag set about two and a third turns, could have played him longer but the hooks weren’t in him very well, just hanging by a piece of skin. I could have lost it any time. I put it in the net the first chance I got. Come in sideways with its mouth open, which might have caught up if I wasn’t careful. . .”

  There was, of course, much more of this, but you get the idea by now. In a way it was quite amazing. Lenny could remember fish he had caught right back to his rookie year. He could recall the depth, time of day, hook type and size, even the size and cut of the bait he was using. He kept copious, meticulous notes and approached fishing in the most logical and scientific manner possible. He kept careful track of the tides and the phases of the moon. He used a barometer and each day at breakfast and dinner he took down the barometric pressure. Lenny was out to find the unifying principle of fishing, the thing that would make it more predictable. He was looking for a set of guiding elements that would enable anyone to catch fish. Lenny was out to find the unified field theory of fishing.

  “I was trolling on the other side of the inlet for that one.” He was on about another fish he had caught that day. “Doing a north-south pass over in Bear Bay. I had thirty-seven and a half feet of line out using a three-ought hook with a medium size cut-plug with a left-hand roll. I think the direction of the roll makes a difference on that side of the inlet. The salmon there come out of the left side of the river, I think that determines their orientation, you know, kind of how some people are left-handed? I think fish are even more influenced because they function on a more primitive level.”

  There were a number of points that were unclear here, but then I didn’t get much chance to ask questions.

  “Then we got a thirteen and a quarter, a nine and a quarter, and the eleven and a quarter. Except for the one we caught at the Log Dump, all of them were on the left-handed spin. Of course, none of the coho would bite on the bait, but we could see them jumping. The barometer was rising and the wind was changing to westerly . . .”

  Wet Lenny’s brain was so full of theories and stratagems to catch fish it had no room to entertain the possibility that the other guides might not be so interested. Lenny’s brain certainly wasn’t ready for Lucky Petersen.

  Lucky was terrified of Wet Lenny. He was convinced Lenny’s approach to fishing made him a toy of the Fish Gods. Just talking to Wet Lenny was enough to queer Lucky’s fishing for a week. Lucky didn’t believe you could interpret fishing or begin to make predictions about it, and to try was a sign of tremendous arrogance. The Fish Gods enjoyed making life difficult for people that didn’t show them the proper respect, and did so with a bizarre sense of humour. Lucky explained all this and more to me one day as we huddled under some bushes waiting for Lenny to pass by.

  Lenny’s guests, on the other hand, were always impressed. Most of them shared his methodical approach to things. They were mostly middle management and company directors who all shared a similar worldview. They agreed there was a rational explanation for everything and encouraged Lenny in his quest, even as they caught nothing but little wimpy fish. As for Lucky Petersen, they would smile indulgently, maybe even a little embarrassed for him, if he ever shared his views with them. They didn’t change their minds, either, as he hauled in monster spring after monster spring; well, he was just lucky.

  Lenny, however, impressed them. The boy had a system, and systems were what they could understand. None of this mystical voodoo fishing for them; their whole life was based on a system.

  There was something else that worked in Lenny’s favour. Most of our guests, especially the ones who flew in to the resorts on package tours, fished only once, maybe twice, over the whole season. They would relive the memory of some thirteen-pound fish all through the winter. They would show pictures of it at cocktail parties and keep one on their desks at work. The fish would magically grow in their memories, though the guides would have long forgotten them by the time they returned.

  (Guides always had to deal with some guy greeting them enthusiastically, shaking their hands, and going on about some fourteen-pound fish they caught two years before. The guide could only reply weakly, “Uh, why sure, I, uh, yeah, I remember that, it ummm . . . it was a great fish! Yeah, for sure, put up a hell of a fight.”)

  Lenny, on the other hand, could quote the time and place, the depth, even the barometric reading that day.

  twenty-one LUCKY PETERSEN

  LUCKY PETERSEN HAD always been able to catch fish. Even as a small boy, hanging a line off a dock, he caught the biggest and the most. When he got old enough to go salmon fishing in the rapids he proved to be a natural. He never missed. He quickly began to outfish the adults he went out with. Some of them grumbled that he had a special smell on his hands that was attractive to the fish. Others said it was the funny way he put a cut-plug on his leader. But most of the adults couldn’t think of anything else but that he was lucky. He was doing basically the same thing as everyone else, but for some reason the fish just seemed to jump on his line.

  Lucky Petersen was favoured by the Fish Gods. But far from making him feel happy, it reduced him to jittering insecurity. He knew they were capable of changing their minds on a whim, out of nothing more than a warped sense of humour. It reduced him to obsessing over every fishing-related thing he did.

  One afternoon we found ourselves behind the same bush, with Wet Lenny approaching in the distance. We talked about Lenny and Lucky’s reasons for avoiding him. I also learned about some of Lucky’s rituals.

  “I tell ya, just saying hi to the guy will shut me down for the rest of the day. I made the mistake of talking to him at the pub once and I didn’t get so much as a nibble for the next three days. I’ve never gone that long without catching a fish in my life. Oh, he’s a jinx all right. He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing. That’s what makes him so dangerous. If he was out to bugger you up on purpose, well, you could get mad at him. But he’s so damn earnest and well meaning. He really thinks that all I want to do is talk about fishing. You can’t get mad at him.

  “The Fish Gods have such a warped sense of humour. They’re screwing with his head and he doesn’t even realize it. He really thinks all them notes of his are going to tell him something. Fishing has nothing to do with graphs and pie charts. I’m sure I was a fish in a past life or something. You just have to be able to think like one. I’ve been catching ’em all my life and I still don’t know how I do it.”

  Wet Lenny had passed by, but we sat under the trees and I listened as Lucky continued to talk.

  “The first time I ever went guiding I was just a kid. I had this old boat . . . I’m amazed I ever went out into the rapids in the damn thing . . . I was using an old stump to sit on and my guests were sitting on a bench with life jackets under their asses to keep their butts from going numb. I didn’t have a proper cutting board, so I used an old broken paddle to cut my herring on. We caught so many fish that day we were throwing back twenty-five-pounders. I still use that paddle to cut herring. It’s inconvenient as hell—the herring keep sliding off cause it’s sloped from the centre, but I wouldn’t feel right replacing it. I still keep my bait in a white plastic bucket even though the boat I have now has a fancy built-in bait tank. I use it to keep beer cold. The white of the bucket makes the herring turn that bright greeny-blond colour like nothing else I’ve tried.

  “But there’s more to it than that. The bait tank in my boat is square, and that’s not good for the energy of the herring. The herring get confused and keep bumping into the side and bashing all their scales off. It does something to them, being in a square tank. Circular, like the bucket, is much better.

  “Of course, I always dip my own herring, and it’s not that Troutbreath knocks all their scales off either
. . . It’s just . . . well, I always make sure there are an odd number of herring in the dip net and an odd number in the tank when I’m finished. Even numbers aren’t good—they mess up the energy the same way squares do. I always use odd numbers. I fish at depths with odd numbers like 147 feet instead of 146 or 148. Even when I tie my leaders, I always use seven wraps on a one-ought hook.”

  “You use a hook that small?”

  “Of course, what the hell do you use? I’ve seen some of these guides use a hook big enough to anchor my boat with. They don’t need to be big, just sharp. But the herring is the most important part of it. If I don’t feel good about the herring or I don’t like the look of the way it rolls, it’s gone. That voice is telling me something and I’ve got to listen to it. Some guests might get upset at all the time spent out of the water, but after they’ve caught fish with me they don’t seem to care what I do.

  “And these guides that let their guests hold the line or the weight, I never let them touch anything. I mean, handling the line with suntan lotion all over your hands, or even the smell of cigars . . .

  “Hey, did you ever see that jackass who did those videotapes with the underwater camera? You know the guy I mean—couldn’t fish a doughnut out of a paper bag. He did an experiment where he dipped a herring into the bilge water—the bilge water, for Chrissakes!— and they followed it underwater to show the salmon still came after it. That’s just another example of the Fish Gods having a little fun with us. They’re just putting on a show for the camera to see how many idiots will actually go out and try it.

  “Anyway, I never let them touch the line. You never know what kind of smell or bad energy these guys might be carrying.”