All Fishermen Are Liars (17 page)

17

ADLATOK

My salmon guide on the Adlatok River was a man named Jordan Locke. We’d met and fished together on one of my previous trips to Labrador and I knew him to be hell on brook trout, but he’d made it clear even then that his real expertise was Atlantic salmon. He told some wild stories about his salmon trips in Newfoundland that I chose to believe. That’s partly because when you’re fishing for some of the biggest brook trout in the world you’ll believe anything, but also because, in my experience, Newfoundlanders are reliably honest.
These are not only inherently good-hearted people, but as a practical matter many of them live in small, insular communities where bullshitters are always caught out in the end.

Jordan has all the attributes of a good guide, including the most important one of really wanting you to catch fish. If he didn’t like you, I don’t think he could hide it convincingly, but it wouldn’t make a difference. He’d still be deeply invested in your success as a matter of professional pride. I could also understand him, which made things easier. Some of these guides have such thick accents that they might as well be speaking Gaelic. Given time and repetition, I could work out that, for instance, “trimmer ook” was Newfie for “streamer hook,” but in day-to-day conversation I was often reduced to smiling and nodding like an idiot.

The only thing that makes me nervous about Jordan is that he’s a rock hopper. I mean that he leaps around these boulder-strewn rivers like Rudolf Nureyev, either forgetting or not caring that we’re hundreds of miles by floatplane from the nearest place where you could get a broken bone set. He’s young, agile and sure-footed as a goat, but over the long haul the odds seem against him.

I remember some grainy cellphone footage of Jordan netting a fish. He’s seen high-stepping at a dead run through a knee-deep riffle, going down hard and coming up dripping wet with a brook trout that weighed eight pounds in the net—the brook trout of a lifetime for the client who’d hooked it. There was some discussion about this back at the lodge. Jordan claimed it was an intentional diving catch, but some others thought it looked like an accidental fall topped off with a miraculous save. My feeling was, as long as he came up with the fish in the net, it was Jordan who deserved to make the call.

There are only two good pools on this stretch of the Adlatok, each with steep rapids above and below and lying just upstream from tidewater on the North Atlantic. We came on them along a high ridge that gave us almost an aerial view and stopped for that first long look.
There’s no telling what will go through your mind at this moment: confidence, dread of failure, or sheer amazement at having gotten this far. So many expedition-grade fishing trips begin and end as idle talk, joining the exercise machines, language tapes and other self-improvement schemes that never quite panned out. Why one plan withers on the vine and the next puts you four travel days and twenty five hundred miles from home on the ragged-ass coast of Labrador is a complete mystery.

We climbed down to the Presidential Pool, named for former president George H. W. Bush, who had once fished it. Two years earlier I’d fished another Presidential Pool named for the same senior Bush on the Tree River in Nunavut, and I wondered briefly if I’d done something karmically disastrous and was now fated to spend the rest of my life breathing the exhaust of this elderly Republican.

This was the kind of sublime pool salmon fishers see when they lean back in their office chairs and close their eyes. It sat in a shallow gorge of weathered rock with a fringe of black spruce at the top: low, dark, tight-needled trees that gave the impression of holding on for dear life. The pool itself was the size of a small mountain lake. It was deep, clear, braided and foamy at the head and with a glassy tailout where dozens of salmon were fining lazily. They looked half asleep as holding fish do, but now and then one would detach itself from the pod and jump before backing down and parking in its original spot. Experts disagree about why the salmon do this. Some say it’s to loosen the eggs, others claim it’s to shake off sea lice, and still others say it’s pure exuberance, that salmon jump simply because they can. It’s a question that has troubled great minds for centuries.

We waded in along a sheer granite cliff and went to work. Jordan looked in my fly box, picked out a size 8 Green Machine and tied it on with a riffling hitch. On the third skating swing, a salmon rose calmly from the bottom to look at the fly, backed down with it for an inch as we held our breath, and then turned away. The fish showed
no further curiosity after several more swings, so we tried a little Brown Bomber with an orange butt, a Copper Killer and then a Blue Charm, all of which the fish did a good job of ignoring.

I was beginning to feel stumped, but only a fool walks away from an interested salmon. I asked if we should rest the fish, but Jordan said no, picked out a smaller Green Machine—a size 12—and tied it on. He’s one of those guides who insist on tying up your terminal tackle even if you’d prefer to do it yourself. His reasoning goes without saying. There’s a better than even chance that Atlantic salmon won’t bite, and even if one does, much of what happens next is out of his control. If a client flubs the set or plays the fish poorly, there’s not much he can do about it, but Jordan is not about to have his best efforts ruined by inept knot tying.

On the first swing with the little Green Machine, the fish rose up and casually inhaled the fly as if that was the one he’d been waiting for. When I set, he jumped as high as my head and I bowed to the fish, dropping the rod tip so he wouldn’t land on the tight leader and break it when he came down. Then there was a long run and another jump near the top of the pool, far enough away that I had to remind myself it was my fish. I bowed again and the fish stayed on. I was fighting back an escalating sense of panic. Jordan leaned casually on his long-handled net and said, “I guess they likes green, ey?”

I first learned about this river when I talked to my friend Robin Reeve, owner of Three Rivers Lodge in Labrador, back in January. He told me about an Atlantic salmon camp on the Adlatok that was for sale for what the current owner described as “any offer that isn’t an insult.” The place had been abandoned for ten years, the guy was eager to unload it and Robin was cautiously tempted. Exactly
why
it had been abandoned for ten years is the first question I asked. Robin said the guy had been vague, but that the list of things that can go sideways at a remote wilderness camp is a long one with bankruptcy and burnout both near the top.

Robin isn’t a salmon fisherman himself, but he thought this might make a nice fly-out camp for the few weeks late in the season when the salmon were in the river in good numbers and, coincidentally, when the brook trout fishing closer to the lodge was beginning to wind down. He also thought there’d be a neat aesthetic fit, since fishing for trophy brook trout and Atlantic salmon both redefine success outside the usual numbers game.

All Robin knew about the Adlatok was that Lee Wulff once described it as “a crown jewel,” that the fish there were said to have a weakness for skated flies and that the height of the season was in early August. That’s when he thought we should fly out and take a look at it.

He said, “You fish for Atlantic salmon, right?”

“I
have
fished for them,” I answered, carefully not claiming to be the consultant who could properly evaluate this fishery from a business perspective, but not exactly denying it, either.

The camp was out on the coast, roughly 360 miles round-trip from the lodge and well out of range of the de Havilland Beaver floatplane crammed with gear and provisions. Bush pilots calculate fuel by figuring the distance to be traveled, eyeballing the load and then adding something like a half hour’s worth of slop in either direction to allow for headwinds, detours around weather and such. Half an hour each way cuts it close for my taste. Once, while driving across Wyoming, I inadvertently ran my tank down to fumes and got pretty nervous, but even if the worst had happened, my pickup wouldn’t have plummeted out of the sky.

But even with the most generous estimate, a full tank in the Beaver would get us there and only halfway back. So a week or two earlier when the plane could be spared from the usual daily fly-outs from the lodge, Robin and the pilot, Gilles, had flown out halfway and stashed a load of aviation gas on the shore of a handy lake for a refueling stop. This was a time-consuming and expensive errand—like
everything else in this country—but Robin really wanted to get out to the Adlatok.

The flight to the river was long, but uneventful as these things go. The gas was where it had been left in five-gallon jerry cans, so we topped off the tank and took the rest with us, cracking the windows to vent the fumes. Closer to the coast we flew into the kind of low, broken overcast pilots call “scud,” and at one point Gilles put us right on the deck to duck under a squall rather than waste fuel flying around it. And then near the mouth of the river, there was a moment of confusion as we circled looking for the camp. The roofs of some wilderness camps are painted red or orange so they can be easily spotted from the air, but not this one. But then there it was, more or less where it was supposed to be. After a pass upriver to make sure the water was deep enough and there were no obstructions, Gilles landed and taxied to the beach.

There had once been a dock, but after a decade of neglect, wind and shifting ice, there was nothing left but the pilings, so we waded ashore and tied the plane to a sturdy alder. The camp was in no better shape. Bears had torn up two of the four plywood cabins foraging for food; a third was doorless, windowless and ankle-deep in dead bats; the storage shed stood open to the weather with the door hanging by one hinge. We stashed our gear in the one cabin that was still more or less intact, and while Robin and Gilles swept up dead flies and mouse turds and otherwise tried to make the place livable, I headed for the pools with Jordan.

The camp’s fiberglass canoe was still serviceable, but the outboard had been left with gas in the tank that after ten years had turned the consistency of asphalt. We managed to locate some old paddles that weren’t too badly dry-rotted and paddled downstream through a mile of frog water to the head of the first rapids, where we beached the boat. From there it was nearly another mile to the pools over steep rock ledges, thick spruce woods and alder thickets
humming with black flies. The owner had told Robin it was an easy fifteen-minute stroll from the camp to the pools. Maybe he remembered it wrong.

When we got back that first evening, I reported that I’d landed two salmon and hooked and lost a third that I was still secretly stewing over. I tried to invoke my better self by quoting Izaak Walton’s dictum “No man can lose what he never had,” but my true self kept interrupting with, “Damn it, that was my fish!” Robin and Gilles had spruced up the cabin nicely. It was still a borderline ruin, but the worst of the crap had been swept out, sleeping bags and pads had been placed on the floor between the stains where the roof had leaked and they’d managed to get the propane stove going so there was coffee on. Some of the screens were still in the windows, but a missing chunk of wall off the kitchen big enough to drive a truck through made the screens a moot point, so several mosquito coils were smoldering to keep the bugs at bay. All in all, it was real homey.

The next morning I tried the bottom pool for a while. I’d seen a salmon roll down there the day before, but what I really liked about it was its open back cast. Standing in front of the granite face at the Presidential Pool, I could manage an adequate cast with the 13
½
-foot spey rod, but I was paranoid about ticking my fly on that rock. Ted Leeson once said that hooking a salmon on a fly “borders on religious experience and happens about as often,” so if you missed a take only to learn that you’d been fishing with a hookless fly, shooting yourself would be your only real option.

In the course of three passes with three different flies—a Green Machine, a Black Bear Green Butt and a Green Highlander—I decided I didn’t like this run after all. It had looked good from a distance, but up close the current seemed too fast and there was nothing I could bring myself to believe in as holding water. The fish I’d seen rolling may have just been moving through, and it’s an article of
faith that traveling fish won’t take. Still, I fished out all three passes diligently, fussing over the drift and following the best advice I ever got on anadromous fish by starting higher in the pool than I thought I should and swinging farther into the tail than I thought was necessary. Jordan had stayed upstream with Robin, leaving me to tie my own knots. This was either a vote of confidence or simply the realization that he couldn’t be in two places at once.

Back at the Presidential Pool a salmon refused my Black Bear Green Butt, coming so close that the fly rose on a transparent bulge of water with a silvery fish shape visible inside. I was still staring at this heartbreakingly empty hole in the water as the fly swung down into the lip of the rapids, where another, larger salmon rolled on it heading downstream and came tight. Since he was facing into the white water anyway, he just continued in that direction. I’d been afraid of this. The rapids stretched for eighty yards into the next run and the bank was a jumble of polished, furniture-sized boulders that it had taken me fifteen minutes to pick my way through when I went down there earlier. It was a prescription for a lost fish.