All Fishermen Are Liars (14 page)

I fished tenkara rods off and on through the season, taking plenty of time off for bigger water and bigger fish where I wanted a longer cast and a reel with backing and a good drag. Switching back and forth became seamless. Like any specialized tackle, a tenkara rod is versatile and efficient in the range of conditions it was intended for, but it becomes less so as you deviate from the ideal until eventually its advantages become frustrations and you feel like breaking the thing over your knee.

I was surprised at how quickly I absorbed the novelty of tenkara and ended up just fishing. Early on, I’d sometimes giggle out loud at the long reach I had and the beautiful drifts I was getting in normally difficult pocket water, but then I just got used to it. Playing and landing most of the trout I hooked was straightforward enough, and now and then I’d get one that provided the kind of drama that keeps you fishing. I’m not sure I caught any more fish than usual with the tenkara rod, but on the right kind of water I was more likely to do it with that elusive smoothness we all strive for.

By the time Daniel came out to fish in August, I thought I’d
become a reasonably adept tenkara fisherman. I’d learned to cast in fairly tight quarters, to keep my fly out of the trees (usually) and to play and land fish deftly. I’d also picked up the neat trick of collapsing the rod and coiling the line around my hand to bushwhack through thick bankside brush, which alone is worth the price of admission. I’d lost a few fish, but I couldn’t blame any of them on the tackle. I’d also landed trout up to fifteen inches in fast current and had watched Ed bring in a sixteen-inch splake. It turned out that hooking a fish on a tenkara rod was a surprisingly businesslike procedure. You’d either land the fish or lose it, but either way it would happen quickly.

I’d even prepared a succinct explanation about this strange rod I was using for fishermen who were curious, but oddly, no one ever asked.

I’d been fishing the usual sparse selection of flies in my small-stream box on an upstream or across-stream dead drift—usually a single dry fly, sometimes with a nymph dropper. I’d also done well a few times fishing a wet fly on a short down and across-current swing and dredging shallow pockets with a brace of nymphs. In other words, I was fishing the way I always fished, only with slightly different tackle.

Daniel said he also started out with his old favorite patterns, but after a second trip to Japan, he switched to tenkara flies. These are the simplest imaginable patterns, often just a thread or floss body with a reversed hackle that flares forward over the eye of the hook. A few of these patterns have a flash of color, but most are drab and plain as dirt. What Daniel calls a “pure tenkara fisherman” is a total presentationist and may do all his fishing with a single one of these patterns, carrying two or three identical spares of the same size in a small glass vial with a cork stopper and fishing them dry or wet as needed.

Tenkara flies are traditionally fished on a more or less tight line with a series of subtle swings, skitters and gently pulsing lifts and
drops, always keeping in mind that whatever slight motion you make with your rod hand is multiplied by as much as fourteen feet of rod. (It sounds and even looks easy, but the easy part is to overdo it.) In the water the fly looks very much like an insect struggling weakly toward the surface, while the flaring of the reversed soft hackle does a good impression of a breaststroke. The overall effect is convincingly lifelike, and one afternoon I watched Daniel tease up any number of trout on the kind of catch-and-release tailwater where anything but a dead drift is considered to be heresy.

The long rod gives you lots of reach, but there are still times when you need to employ some stealth. There can be lots of crouching and kneeling, and Daniel favors a brand of wader that comes with built-in kneepads. For all its simplicity, the traditional tenkara strategy has an air of impatience. Rather than compulsively changing patterns looking for the right one, you give each fish a shot at biting your one fly, and if it doesn’t, you shrug and move on with a distinctly non-American acceptance of the fact that you can’t catch them all.

I never did become a pure tenkara fisherman because it didn’t seem necessary. There are days when I enjoy the refreshing lack of clutter the method provides, but then there are other days when I find great comfort in the old familiar clutter that has taken me a lifetime to accumulate. In the end, I’ve come to think of tenkara less as a style of fly fishing and more as a useful thought experiment in which you ask not, How much do I need? but, How little can I get away with?

And along those same lines, there’s the obvious paradox that in the ongoing search for a kind of blissful simplicity, I’ve gone ahead and gotten myself yet another fly rod.

14

KODIAK

Every location on earth has its unique morning sounds. Just before dawn on Uyak Bay on the west coast of Kodiak Island, it’s the steady breathing of the surf, a single muffled splash that could be a salmon or maybe a sea otter, the first few herring gulls beginning to wake up, and faintly, from far off across the bay, something that doesn’t really sound like elephants trumpeting, but that’s the closest comparison I can come up with.

I go back inside the lodge, pour a second cup of coffee and ask
John Pearce, the camp manager, what it might be. He says, pleasantly, “I have no idea” while making a visible effort to keep from rolling his eyes. John has been in the sport fishing business for a long time and would have said that by now he’d heard it all, but elephants in Alaska? Jeez!

A few minutes later when the owner, Bruce Kososki, comes in, I ask him the same question. With the coffeepot in one hand and a cup in the other, he frowns for a moment, then brightens and says, “Oh, it must be sea lions.” Of course, sea lions. I give John a triumphant look, which he ignores, and another day of fishing begins.

At about this time the day before, the predawn sounds included muffled crowd noise, recorded announcements and unidentified electronic beeping at the Anchorage airport. This could have been any airport in any city except that businessmen wearing ties and carrying computers were far outnumbered by rougher-looking customers with cased rifles or fishing rods. It wasn’t always clear who was coming and who was going except for two men, each with a week’s growth of stubble, who were checking enormous moose antlers at the oversized baggage-counter.

I’d flown in from Denver and was on my way to catch the Era Aviation flight out to the town of Kodiak on Kodiak Island. Once we were in the air, the man across the aisle from me got out an expensive-looking, disk-drag fly reel and proceeded to tie on a fresh leader. He looked over and gave me a maniacal grin, which I answered with a thumbs-up. We were two strangers going fishing, and although our respective trips could still go either way, just being in Alaska meant we had upped the ante.

In Kodiak, I walked across the wet parking lot to Island Air Service for the hop across the island to Larsen Bay with its dirt airstrip, Russian Orthodox church complete with an onion-shaped steeple, and thirty-nine year-round residents. Then there was a van ride to the lodge, where I changed into waders, took another short van ride
down to the harbor and climbed aboard a lovely 1957 de Havilland Beaver floatplane. We were headed to the source of the Dog Salmon River at Frazer Lake, where I would finally get down to business.

At the lake we strung up 6-weight rods and hiked downstream, talking loudly to let any bears that were around know we were coming. Bears don’t like surprises. Nine times out of ten they’ll just run away when they’re startled, but it’s that tenth time you’re hoping to avoid. For emergencies, the two fly-fishing guides, Chuck Mercer and Trent Deeter, were each armed with 12-gauge pump shotguns loaded with rifled slugs. Our pilot, Jay Wattum, was carrying a lever-action .45-70 carbine done up for the wet climate in stainless steel with fiberglass stocks. (A tourist brochure on safety in Kodiak bear country warns that the usual .44-magnum hog leg “may not be adequate.”) These riot guns were comforting in a way, but you understand that they’re a last resort that you’ll go to great lengths not to depend on. We Americans can feel naïvely safe when we’re packing firearms, but honestly, few of us have either the skill or the nerve to calmly take down a charging bear at a range of twenty-five yards.

We were there for the rainbows and Dolly Vardens that were following the spawning sockeye salmon to feed on their dribbled and dislodged eggs. By then the sockeye run was nearing its end, but that hardly mattered. The rainbows and Dollys had been gorging on eggs from one salmon run or another for most of the summer and were hard-wired to pick up anything small, orange and egglike drifting in the current. That would include our plastic beads rigged slightly ahead of size 10 barbless hooks and slightly behind a single small split shot. There are those who wouldn’t consider this a proper fly and in another context I might agree, but Alaskan fly fishers tend to bypass fine points of style in favor of practicality, and the attitude is contagious.

This wasn’t the main event for anyone. I’d come in mid-September hoping for silver salmon, the one species of Pacific salmon I’d never caught. Dick Matzke and his two sons, who were also staying at
the lodge, had come to winch halibut out of three hundred feet of salt water and shoot Sitka blacktail deer. This side trip was just the kind of harmless showmanship some lodges like to engage in on the first day. By the time most of us have finally gotten where we wanted to be in Alaska, we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time schlepping from one airplane to the next without a decent meal or much more than a catnap. Enthusiasm can still trump exhaustion, but at this point it’s a toss-up and catching a whole bunch of beautiful fish without much effort is the surest way to tip the collective mood into positive territory.

After lunch we hiked back to the plane for the short flight down to the mouth of the river to look for silver salmon. (Rivers that rise on islands aren’t long because they don’t have room to be. No place on Kodiak is more than fifteen miles from the sea.) After we’d banked downriver and over the tidal flat where the Dog entered a small bay, Jay asked over the intercom, “Did you see all the silvers in those first two pools?”

“No,” I replied, “I was watching the bear.”

“Yeah, the bear’s a good sign,” he said. “He’s lookin’ for salmon just like we are.”

By the time I’d spotted this big adult, he was already trotting away from the racket of the plane. His brown fur rippled like silk in the thin sunlight, and as he glanced at us over his shoulder, he looked more annoyed than scared.

Jay beached the plane at the edge of an alluvial fan several hundred yards from shore, checked the tide chart and announced that we had to be back by four-twenty. Otherwise the outgoing tide would strand us there until tomorrow.

“Can you remember that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t have a watch.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “Somebody’ll have one.”

In the days to come, I’d learn that “That’s cool” was Jay’s automatic response to just about everything. Like some other bush pilots
I’d met, Jay could seem like a wing nut on the ground—all bluster and bad jokes—but it was either an act for the benefit of tourists or some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing because in the air he was all business and there was no one you’d rather have at the controls.

We waded ashore and Chuck checked me out at the top of the second long pool. He said most of the fish would be lying in the deeper current near the far bank about a fifty-foot cast away. He pointed and on cue a large salmon rolled. “Cast down and across, give the fly a minute to sink and strip it back in short jerks,” he said.

On my third cast the fly stopped as if it had been slammed in a door and the fish ran downstream and then back up with startling speed, making porpoising jumps and rapping my knuckles with the reel handle. There was the usual moment of panic. The fish seemed too big. The 8-weight rod seemed too small. A few minutes later I had my first silver salmon on the beach: a twelve-pound buck, thick and deep with a grotesquely undershot kype that was the very face of grim determination. He was still within sight of salt water, but already his silver flanks were beginning to flush pink. I’d come on this trip hoping to see a Kodiak bear and catch a silver salmon, and both had happened in the space of twenty minutes. It seemed almost too easy.

The next fish was a chrome-bright female of about ten pounds that had a more troutlike face and fought no less ferociously for being two pounds lighter. There were some others after that and then everyone was reeling in and wading back out toward the plane. I had no idea what time it was, but there was no outgoing current on the flat, so we’d beaten the tide and wouldn’t have to spend the night. I glanced over my shoulder for the charging bear my imagination had been concocting all afternoon, but there was nothing but beach grass and driftwood.

One rainy morning we flew out to the Karluk River, skirting a high rock cliff shrouded in mist and then turning south along the Shelikof Strait. We landed on a wide tidal lagoon on the lower river amid no
less than a thousand herring gulls, every last one of them alternately picking at a salmon carcass and screaming at the top of its lungs. The riverbank was littered with dead salmon: mostly spawned-out sockeyes—some nearly whole, others just gull-picked skeletons—as well as what was left of some larger silvers that had been recently eaten by bears. The river itself was a thin stew of decomposing fish parts, bear and bird crap and shed gull feathers. It smelled, not unpleasantly, like an alley behind a sushi restaurant.

When I started fishing there were five bears in sight on the far bank: two larger males spread out upstream and a big sow with twin cubs downstream. While we were there, two younger males moseyed around the bend downstream, gave us long, disgusted looks as Trent and Chuck walked toward them yelling “Hey bear! Hey bear!” and then waded casually across the river to the far side, never once glancing back.

Casting along fifty yards of river, I landed several nice-sized sockeyes of five or six pounds. These weren’t the fish I was after, but they’re so bizarre-looking that they’re always fun to catch. When a sockeye enters freshwater and begins to mature sexually, its jaws lengthen and enlarge, its teeth grow big and snarly and its now-deformed head turns a sickly green color. Meanwhile, the body swells up into a tall hump and turns bright red. Compared to the silvery, streamlined ocean form of this fish, a spawning sockeye looks like a werewolf in a Santa Claus suit and is always worth a photo to show the folks back home.

The silvers were lying deeper than the sockeyes in the slow current, and it was possible to target them after a fashion by giving the weighted streamer a little more time to sink. These were bright fish fresh from the salt that would make two or three long, fast, angry runs before they tired enough for the bulldogging endgame.

At first I thought it was just my imagination when, after a couple of hours, the current seemed to slow down. By the time it stopped
altogether and then began flowing in the opposite direction, I’d figured out on my own that the tide was coming in. The fishing shut off abruptly, and as I continued to cast without a strike, a particularly gruesome dead sockeye that had drifted past fifteen minutes earlier bobbed by going the other way.

On the flight back we made a detour to scout for more silvers. We flew up the Zachar River with our right wingtip tight to one ridge. That happens a lot and it used to make me nervous until I learned the reason for it. From time to time a pilot flying up a narrow valley is faced with the necessity of turning around because of weather, engine trouble or whatever. If he’s out in the middle of the valley, he may not have room to bank in either direction without hitting one ridge or the other, but if he’s hugging one side, there’s a better chance he’ll have room to turn.

We didn’t spot any salmon, so we banked over a low saddle and flew down another smaller stream toward Brown’s Lagoon. It was just a boggy trickle at first, but it took on more volume until, a half mile from the mouth, it widened into a single long bend pool with a dark stripe down the outside that Chuck said was a pod of maybe a hundred silvers.

Back at the lodge the crew was busy cleaning halibut, the largest of which weighed about eighty pounds, and on the porch outside the mudroom I nearly tripped over the caped-out head of a nice blacktail buck. It had been a good day all around.

That evening a friend of the owner’s, a commercial fisherman named Pete, came to dinner. He was just what you’d expect: ropy arms, big chest, frost-colored beard on a wind-burned face and dressed only in a T-shirt on a chilly, rainy evening. When we were introduced, we looked at each other suspiciously, and Pete asked, “Do we know each other?” I said I thought maybe we did, but I couldn’t quite place him either.

We eyeballed each other all through the meal and afterward went
out on the porch in a light drizzle to pick this thing apart. It took an hour of comparing lifetimes, but we decided we could only have known each other in passing in San Francisco in the summer of 1964, which would also account for our fuzzy memories. Maybe we ran into each other at parties or free concerts, or the City Lights Bookstore, or the Coexistence Bagel Shop or even at the very corner of Haight and Ashbury itself. We probably hadn’t been close friends, but we’d have had to be more than just faces in the crowd to each other for the memory to have stuck this long. We stared at each other in the light leaking from the warm, dry lodge, wondering what forgotten adventures we might have shared. And here we were forty-six years later in Alaska: gray-haired survivors, alive and well and each chasing salmon in our own way and for our own reasons. It was heavy, man.

The next morning Trent, Chuck and I were dropped off at Brown’s Lagoon by a party of saltwater fishermen from the lodge with the promise that they’d pick us up at high tide in the afternoon. We hiked upstream through a narrow canyon that at low tide was steep-sided and slippery with mud and kelp. At the top of this cut, we broke out into a pretty valley ringed with low, forested mountains half hidden in clouds and followed the little river upstream to the pool full of salmon we’d seen from the air the day before.