I took off the ten-pound tippet and tied on a six pound, determined to break out of the chain of logic that was causing me to miss this fish. My next challenge to the fish was to say, “Here’s one that’s way too small for your feeble eyes.” My inspiration was a tiny Blue Charm, an insectlike speck of wizardry on a single hook. I tied it to the tippet with a loop to assure maximum wiggle and cast it much closer to the lie than I’d been doing, so as to subject my small offering to fewer vagaries of current and fewer needs to be mended, fewer chances of refusal.
The fish went straight to it in a deep-bodied swirl. The line tightened on the water before me and I felt the weight in my left hand. I lifted the rod and the fish was hooked. I remember only my conviction that things were completely out of control. I had waded deep among large, submerged boulders, then wedged my feet for the long time I had been casting. Behind me was a high bank. It was not possible to get to better ground where I could control the angles. The fish controlled the angles. I had to just stand there during the violent runs and ferocious, heedless jumps. It seemed marvelous that all the quasi-reasoning behind the fly changes, the fussiness over the line mending and the constant revision of my views as the fish and I moved toward closure would end in such an uproar. Though we were well inland here, this struggle had the power of the northern ocean. I wanted to cry out, Fook! Wot spawt!
Finally I worked the tired fish toward me, leading it through boulders and finally to the beach and the net. She was a powerful, heavy hen not long out of the sea, with subdued black dots on gunmetal and silver. I held her around the tail into the current, feeling the deep curve of belly and fat shoulders, running a finger over the small wonderfully shaped head. When I released her, she picked her way out among the boulders in an unhurried progress to deep water. I found myself at a great altitude yet with all of my life in which to come down. Indeed, as I write this years later, those moments are inescapable and vivid. What a thing to own.
ONE OF THE CHARMS of any trip to the Whale was the annual evening of ghost stories in which the anglers tried to frighten the staff with accounts of the supernatural. Many of the people helping things to go ’round are inhabitants of tiny, unchanged towns on the rocky North Shore of the St. Lawrence. Their traditions and innocence are remarkably preserved, if overlaid by information and images that fly through the air into their TVs and radios. But their culture allows them, it seems, an astonishing ability to suspend disbelief and enjoy stories told them, no matter how implausible. My observation was that all the stories were implausible and yet absorbed with a kind of thrilled and grateful credulity. Jackie, one of our country’s most outstanding architects, delivered a dizzily mechanical version of the old chestnut Skyborg, which had the staff screaming with terror. When our host, who insists on being called “the Benevolent One,” came to tell his story, I noted that it was entirely plotless. Clearly the Benevolent One had little in mind when he set out, but in the growing awareness that he had an expectant audience he rather desperately, I thought, began to punch up the plot details of his feeble narrative with the sinisterly intoned repetition of the word “evil.” The staff, having listened to his maunderings in wild surmise, now invested all their energy into irrationally reacting to the repitition of this disconnected word. “Evil,” came the muttered imprecation, and the kitchen girls, guides, and cook screamed in terror. Few noticed that the Benevolent One had nowhere to go from here and indeed revealed, even through his mutterings, a look of hangdog creative defeat. “Evil,” he croaked once more to manifest success.
But the best came last. John, a New York merchant banker, told a ghost story meant to be heightened at its denouement by the sudden rise of flames in the fireplace behind him. Achieved by covertly tossing a snifter of Calvados into the glowing coals, this had the unfortunate effect of introducing real terror into both staff and cynical anglers when the chimney caught fire. Fearing the worst, we all ran outside into the Labrador night. The chimney was blowing sparks and fire fifteen feet into the night sky. Fascinated, I watched John detach himself from these events and take a purely objective interest in what threatened to destroy our housing in the arctic. But gradually the fire subsided and as our evening wound down I heard our architect friend inquire of the Benevolent One, once the chief financial officer of a large movie company, as to the prospects of a film sale of the Skyborg project. While the B.O. refrained from throwing cold water on his hopes, he later confided to me that he thought an experienced studio executive like Sherry Lansing would find Skyborg “thin.”
NAT’S FISH was going berserk, not so much jumping as bouncing angrily off the water as though it were stone. Nat ran down the river past me, reel squalling, and said rather calmly, “Number ten light wire Icelandic shrimp. I’ll never land this fish.” But I saw him a while later, bending to make his release. I photographed Nat with his fish but again the pictures came back with the high-latitude hoodoo, and Nat was transformed into an incubus holding a glowing reptile.
At the end of the day we picked up Dr. Hobie, who recited a rather morose saga. He had waded out to a thin spit of bottom where one could barely stand up and hooked the biggest fish he had ever seen on the Whale. After a long battle, the fish was within a rod’s length but would not accompany Dr. Hobie ashore, nor could he bring it to hand. At this stalemate, the man and fish faced off for a long time, the latter making no further bid for escape and the former unable to cross the deep trough to the beach. A prolonged acquaintanceship ensued, at the end of which the hook pulled and the fish went on to its next appointment. If there was a philosophical overview to grant this moment of closure, it was lost on Dr. Hobie. Fate had dealt him a heavy blow.
“Fook, wot spawt.”
Izaak Walton
THE COMPLEAT ANGLER owes much of its interest to cycles of turbulence, starting with the one within which Walton wrote. In the years shortly before the Restoration, social discord, especially among the literate classes, rose to a genuinely dangerous level. The austerities of Cromwell were undertones of an ominously gathering future. Quietist dreaming, gentleness and contemplation, rusticity and the ceremonies of country life, including fishing, beckoned compellingly. From the Restoration until now, The Compleat Angler has been renewed by turmoil, none more conspicuous than the Industrial Revolution, which produced an explosion in the popularity of angling and an idealization of the pastoral life. Its cousins, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne and Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, profited similarly. Armchair anglers and the various harried people of the western world have elevated these books to scripture.
Today’s faithless reader will be somewhat baffled by the long shelf-life of this unreliable fishing manual, until he realizes that it’s not about how to fish but how to be. Of this fact even Walton was unaware; thus its inescapable persuasiveness and the bright, objective picture the author has left of himself, without which all quickly deteriorates into the quaint or, worse, the picturesque.