All Fishermen Are Liars (11 page)

That’s what I was thinking when a squall hit. We heard and saw it coming upstream for a few seconds: a roaring sound, trees leaning dangerously and an opaque wall of water I thought was rain and Rob later said was a cloud of spray boiling off the river. We just had time to grab the spare rods and hang on before this thing spun the boat around on the anchor rope, pushed boat and anchor several yards upstream and slammed us against a high bank. We came within inches of swamping; the bank side oar shot out of its lock and into the river and the temperature dropped thirty degrees.

It lasted a few minutes and then things went back to normal except that the rain-spattered river was now littered with good-sized tree branches. Scott asked, “What the fuck was that?” but there was no answer. Rob was busy putting the spare oar together so we could catch up to the one we lost before the takeout. I thought “microburst,” but didn’t say it out loud because it was just a word I’d heard somewhere in connection with weather.

Rob left after dark that evening in order to make the long drive home in time for work the next morning, and Scott went outside to check in with the guide we had booked for the next few days. Cellphone reception on the coast is worse than spotty, but Scott had discovered that if you stood in the rain on the bottom porch step you could get a signal.

I was fussing with the cranky flue on the stove when Scott came back in and said, “The guide’s not coming.”

“What?”

“He’s not coming. He said he checked the weather forecast and the flow and it’s pointless.”

“Really?”

We decided to put in one more day on our own. No telling why except that there’s something resembling a work ethic in operation here. Or maybe it’s just the good-natured stubbornness I like to think of as uniquely American whereby no one wants to be the first to call it quits. Not that there’s anything heroic about fishing. Remember that when a nonangler sees one of us casting in the rain, his likely thought is, Now there’s a guy with nothing better to do. Still, I couldn’t help thinking how sweet it would be to land a steelhead after the guide had said it was no use. You wouldn’t be mean about it, but you
would
e-mail him a grip-and-grin shot of a stupendous chromer with the message “Sorry you couldn’t make it.”

We ended the next day standing on the bridge where Rob and I had seen the kayakers. We’d spent hours driving up the river, casting halfheartedly to some runs and simply looking at others that would have been beautiful at half their current flow. At some point we stopped carrying our rods down to the river, a sure sign that we’d quit fishing and were now just sightseeing. Of course, the run Rob and I had fished a little over twenty-four hours ago was now a shapeless torrent. I could pick out where the tailout and the handy gravel bar had been, but there was now no sign of them.

As we stood on the bridge in the rain, possibly looking a little dejected, a rusty pickup pulled up behind us and stopped. The driver rolled down his window and asked, “How’s the fishin’?” We turned to reply, but then saw that he was wearing the lopsided grin peculiar to fishermen who already know the answer to that question.

11

LODGES

As commercial enterprises, fishing lodges are rarely big moneymakers, which is one of the reasons the turnover and mortality rates are so high. The editor of a sporting magazine once told me it’s not all that unusual for him to assign a destination story on a lodge only to have the place change owners or close before the article runs. Think about it: you’re operating what amounts to a hotel, a restaurant, a guide service, a travel agency, a small airline, a modest navy and occasional medical evacuation unit, and you sometimes have to
make your nut in a season that can be as short as eight or ten weeks.

You’re also in a remote location inaccessible enough that, by the time you get it there, gas for the generators and outboards can end up costing in the neighborhood of $25 a gallon. That same price structure applies to every pound of hamburger and roll of toilet paper, and logistics are a nightmare. Chances are there’s a single flight each week that can bring in whatever supplies there are room for along with the next group of sports. In between, you can’t just send someone down to the store for a gallon of milk.

Add to that the needs, wants, strengths, weaknesses, eccentricities and unexamined fantasies of the fishermen, occasional tiffs with or between staff, guides and clients, endless maintenance and repair of anything and everything, scheduling glitches owing to floatplanes grounded by weather and broken-down outboards, the vicissitudes of the actual fishing, plus the usual shit-storm of bonding, insurance, various dealings with federal, state or provincial governments and/or tribal councils and a bunch of other things I haven’t thought of because it’s not my job. (My job at a fishing lodge consists largely of showing up on time for breakfast.) It no longer surprises me when things go wrong at fishing lodges. What surprises me is that things so often go right.

The most well-adjusted lodge owner I know once told me that he’d made his money elsewhere (not an unlimited amount, but enough), that he loved spending his summers in the far north among fishermen, guides and bush pilots and, although he wasn’t against turning a profit, all he really needed to do was break even. Most years he did. We were sitting up late talking in one of the cabins at the lodge. I glanced at my watch and mentioned that the generator would be turned off in five minutes and the lights would go out. He smiled and said, “I own the place; the lights go out when I say they do.” Then he added, “Or when the generator breaks down.”

I’ve met a few lodge owners who were all about business plans,
projected earnings and inane policy statements about “reconceptualizing the paradigm,” but the happiest and, oddly enough, many of the most successful, seemed to do it simply for love and a modest livelihood. I knew a man in Alaska who went there initially to hunt brown bears. He eventually killed one and decided he never wanted to do it again, but by then he’d fallen in love with the region and in the fullness of time ended up owning a fishing lodge where the guides weren’t allowed to carry firearms and the fishermen were required to sign liability waivers. He said he went into the lodge business with his eyes open, understanding that if he wanted to get rich he should do something else. One night every week he’d stand gravely at the head of the table after dinner and recite Robert W. Service poems from memory. (“There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold” and so on.) Meanwhile, the same midnight sun would shine through the window casting amber light on that moldering old bearskin.

I enjoy and appreciate fishing lodges, but not everyone does. Balls-to-the-wall types may see regular mealtimes and other necessary regimentation as a waste of valuable fishing time. Self-styled experts sometimes chafe at having guides tell them where to go and what to do, although most of us would do well to let go of old certainties and learn. Do-it-yourselfers used to handling things on their own are sometimes uncomfortable being waited on. And even at a real wilderness outfit, some adventurers can feel confined to water they think has been fished too hard by too many others before them. A precious few of these folks will end up mounting their own expeditions, but for most of us that’s beyond the practical limit. That’s why there are lodges.

Every fishing lodge is different, but most visits begin the same way. You step off the floatplane onto the dock, shake the hands of the camp manager and guides and, if you’re smart, make real sure all your gear is unloaded. Then you schlep your luggage to your room
or cabin and assemble in the lodge for the short orientation meeting. Here you get the lowdown, which can be simple or complicated, depending on where you are.

At a lodge in Labrador that’s known for its catch-and-release fishing for large brook trout, the owner said, “There are only two hard-and-fast rules here: One, no brook trout will be killed. Ever. And two, if your guide tells you to do something, do it. We can argue about it later.” Up till then it had all been hot coffee and good-natured hospitality, but there was a change in tone that suggested these two items went right to the heart of the matter.

Sure enough, a few days later we were two hours from the lodge across a big lake fishing a river outlet; three of us in an eighteen-foot flat-stern canoe with a ten-horse outboard. The fishing was good and the only reason I noticed that the wind had stiffened and changed direction was that the mosquitoes abruptly stopped pestering me. But then our guide appeared at my shoulder and said, “Reel in, we gotta go.”

It took ten minutes to hustle back to the outlet where the canoe was beached, and before we even got there, we could feel the new chill in the air and see whitecaps building on the lake. The crowns of spruce trees bobbed in the wind and the pearl-colored overcast darkened to a soggy gunmetal gray. We motored up the windward shore, staying in the shelter of the trees until we got directly upwind of the lodge. Then we turned and made the run across the lake. By then the wind had really picked up, the air had turned cold and big rain drops hit the backs of our slickers like gravel fired from a slingshot. A hundred yards off shore we were in serious rollers.

A lesser boatman would have just made a dash for it, but our guy was smart enough to feather the outboard as we rose lazily on the big swells and then gun it into the troughs so we didn’t fatally ship water over the stern. I had a death grip on the gunnels of the canoe, as if that might help. This seemed to be going okay, but it was easy to see
how that could change. As we neared the camp, we spotted the entire staff waiting for us on the dock. The owner was watching through binoculars. Two guides were in an aluminum dory with the motor idling, ready to come for us if it looked like we wouldn’t make it.

But we did make it and the head cook, a sweet woman named Frances, herded us over to the lodge for hot coffee and an embarrassing amount of fussing. Our own mothers wouldn’t have been any more worried about us or any more relieved that we were back safe.

That storm trapped us in our cabin for the next two and a half days. There was horizontal rain, gale-force winds, and it was cold enough for a daytime fire in the woodstove. Boredom closed in, but every time I started to mourn the fishing I’d left, I reminded myself of the two alternatives to coming in when we did: We could have waited and tried to cross the lake in even rougher seas and most likely drowned, or we could have stayed where we were to spend the next sixty hours out in the spectacular havoc of one of the worst storms I’ve ever seen with no provisions and no shelter.

The moral is, if your guide tells you to do something, do it. On subsequent trips to that lodge, I’ve sat through the same speech nodding wisely, now the old hand who knows the score.

This business of camp rules is a matter of style and every lodge handles it differently. Some, like the guy in Labrador, keep it simple. Others list everything that could possibly go wrong and either confuse you or scare you to death. A guy at a bass camp in south Texas just said, “Watch where you step. Everything down here will stick you, sting you or bite you and most of it’s poison.” On the other hand, I was once at a place in New Mexico where the manager, a tall man in a cowboy hat and snap-button shirt, grinned widely, slapped me on the back and said, “There’s only one rule here, and that’s that
there are no rules
.”

I understood this to be hyperbole, and in fact I learned from the head guide that earlier that year this guy had booted a famous movie
star who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, control his two large, troublesome dogs. Angry words were spoken, something to the effect of “I don’t give a shit who you are. I want you out of here now.” Sometimes the biggest glad-handers turn out to be the ones with the shortest fuses.

Now and then, there are rules you abide by without ever knowing it. At a lodge in Alaska, the head cook—who also happened to be the owner’s wife—finally got tired of fishermen coming in early on slow or stormy days to hang around asking for coffee, wanting to talk and otherwise getting in the way while she prepared her labor-intensive meals. So one day she sat the guides down and said, “I don’t care how bad the fishing or the weather is, I want you to keep these people on the water and out of my kitchen until dinnertime.” Later that season a fisherman was heard to say, with undisguised admiration, “Man, these guides are gung ho. They won’t come in no matter what.”

One thing that never changes, though, is the moment you step off the floatplane or boat onto the dock and into the gaze of the assembled guides who have come to size you up. I’ve seen people strut and preen and bluster, but it’s pointless. These guys will know all they need to about you in the first ten minutes on the water. The only thing you can say to a guide that will impress him is, “I’ve never fished here before. I’ll appreciate any help you can give me.”

Of course, tipping is mandatory except in the kind of extreme circumstances that I’ve heard horror stories about but have never actually experienced. How much is up to you, your wallet and your conscience, but an enormous fish is worth a little extra. So is heroic effort, whether it results in fish or not.

Some lodges put their tips into a kitty to be divvied up later, which begs a couple of questions: Do the cook and the camp manager get the same cut as the guides?
Should
they get the same cut? When I think my guide has gone above and beyond, I’ll put some money in the pot, then get the guy alone and slip him an extra hundred. I tip as much as I can. More often than not it doesn’t seem like enough.

Every lodge eventually develops its own subculture, which is the result of an initial plan that’s been gradually informed and sometimes
de
formed by the people who run the outfit, as well as the realities of water, weather and fish. An Atlantic salmon or steelhead lodge where two or three fish can make for a bang-up week will naturally have a different sensibility than a place with five species of Pacific salmon where catches of commercial proportions aren’t unheard of.

Part of lodge culture has to do with what we’d now call the level of service. Some outfits go heavy on the sumptuous accommodations and leisurely gourmet meals on the correct assumption that those are the only things they can control, while most of the things that can go wrong with the fishing are what an insurance agent would call “acts of God.” I was once at a place where the salmon run was canceled when a nearby volcano belched tons of evil-smelling sulfurous sludge into the river. Not much anyone could do about that.

As long as the fishing is good, I have nothing against palatial lodges with vaulted ceilings, deer-antler chandeliers and five-course meals, and I know there are some who really enjoy that sort of thing. I once met a man at a fancy lodge who said, “I know it’s a little over the top, but I work hard: I deserve this once in a while.” Fair enough, but I prefer places that think more along the lines of providing three squares a day and a dry bed so you can fish. I’m happy with a clapboard lodge where you eat a plain breakfast on a plank table at first light and sleep in a comfortable shack. For one thing, those places are usually cheaper. For another, they leave me feeling less like I’ve checked into a good hotel and more like I’m out in the sticks having an adventure, which is sort of the whole idea.

Any fishing lodge can be good, but you naturally develop preferences over time. Given the choice, I’ll take a smaller lodge over a bigger one. That is, a place that has eight or ten fishermen in for a week instead of an outfit that has thirty or forty. This has less to do with the fishing than you might think. High-volume lodges usually have access
to enough water and fish for everyone. It’s just that a crowd that size in a remote location can be oppressive and at mealtimes the dining room can resemble a factory cafeteria.

I prefer older lodges to newer ones. For one thing, they often have the weathered, lived in, just barely out of the elements feel I like with lemmings living under the front steps and bats in the rafters. For another, places that have survived for a while probably know what they’re doing and have sent home lots of happy fishermen to tell their friends. And if the place doesn’t exactly run like a finely tuned sports car, it at least runs like an old pickup that’s owned by a good shade-tree mechanic.