Fly-Fishing the 41st (22 page)

This statement left us all staring into the mirror across the bar from us.

 

We spent the night at the hostal de Tajo and the next morning made the journey to the Rio de la Hoz Seca. The barmaid had given us good directions and the trip was the perfect length and degree of difficulty, just challenging enough to make us feel that we were going somewhere. The rewards were remarkable. The river was one to rival in beauty any I had seen. It ran clear, though in its depths it was emerald colored, a spring-fed creek lush with green mosses and weeds. The greenery by the water was in stark contrast to the ochres and earth tones of the bare ledge and earth erupting on either side and forming the formidable canyon from which the river got its name. Most important, there were many trout.

We were very stealthy, because the stream was closed to fishing, and as I worked the banks, deep and undercut, with my fly rod, I thought, I am poaching in Paradise.

According to Garcia's thesis, the fish were what he called an ancient strain of Atlantic drainage brown trout. When I caught some and saw them, I began to formulate my own opinions.

Johannes did not dive in this stream but stood behind me eagerly, waiting to see what the fish that I might pull out of the
water looked like. The trout were not easy to catch, but they were so numerous and large that it was hard to miss if you covered enough water. I caught one of about seventeen inches that fought doggedly and nearly jumped onto the bank in an effort to shake the hook.

“They look like Mediterranean brown trout,” I said to Johannes when we beheld them in our hands. They were a brilliant yellow color like the sun, and we both noticed at the same time, amidst the fish's red and black dots, the verticle bands characteristic of Mediterranean brown trout.

“Yes,” he said, “they have the verticle bands, the
zébrures,
but the Tajo does not flow to the Mediterranean, it flows to the Atlantic.”

If you looked on a map, you would see that although the Tajo flowed west, all the way through Spain and Portugal to the Atlantic, its headwaters were very close to the Mediterranean. “It is possible,” Johannes said, “that the ancient ancestor of the Mediterranean trout crossed over the divide into the drainage of the Atlantic. Or another possibility is that the more ancient Atlantic ancestor was closely related to the Mediterranean trout to begin with, that they split off from each other a long time ago and this is a relict population.”

We were so excited to see this fish that was completely new to us. Johannes and I shared a genuine
loucura
for scrutinizing the biodiversity of trout, the spotting patterns and colorations of what we felt was the most beautiful of all fish.

To celebrate how successful we had been, and the startling realization that we had seen a trout from one drainage that should look like one from another, we ate some cheese and bread and a good sausage and opened a bottle of wine. When we had finished photographing the trout alive in Johannes's glass tank, we released the evidence of our
Schwarzfisching
into the river and took a nap in the tall grass laced with intermittent patches of brilliant red poppies.

 

We made our way south the next day, toward Andalusia, through the region of La Mancha. It was a vast, open country of golden
wheat and the occasional tall dark cypress. I watched the broad yellow fields go by and the occasional big black billboard in the shape of a bull, advertising Osborne whiskey. The dry heat blowing through the olive groves lulled me to sleep.

I woke from my nap sometime later, lost in time and space, in a state of temporary amnesia. I looked at Johannes, driving with the determination of a machine down the highway and I thought, who is this mustachioed person I am spending so much time with? What is my association with him? I breathed in the dusty wheat-scented air and laughed out loud at what I began to see as our mad pursuit.

“Johannes de la Mancha,” I said out loud.

 

By evening that day we were in the mountains again, near upper tributaries of the Guadalquivir River, drinking beer in a rustic bar in a pine forest. Heads of native deer and forest pigs hung on the walls, giving the place an enchanted hunting-lodge feel. We ordered two beers and toasted, “
Salud y pesetas!
”

My life had become a mélange of trout streams and barflies.

Beside us in the dark space, sitting at the bar and resting his powerful arm on a large oak plank that formed the bar itself, was a warden wearing a green uniform with the embroidered insignia
Junta de Andalusia.
He had biceps larger than my calves, and you could barely see his bull-like eyes through the black stubble on his face, prickly like cactus spines. Johannes nudged me and whispered, “That's good for us that he's in the bar and not on the stream.”

We kept an eye on the warden through the mirror in the bar. The warden and the bartender were watching the bullfights on television. When he turned to ask the bartender to fill his glass, the warden took a long look at Johannes and me. Did he know we were
Schwarzfischers?

 

Having successfully sampled a prohibited stream the next morning (a tributary of the Guadalquivir River) and caught indigenous trout,
also with the stripes or
zébrure
markings, we headed to the next group of native trout streams on Johannes's list, tributaries of the Guadalquivir that flowed out of the Sierras near Granada.

I had been to Granada more than a year before when my latitude travels had just begun. At that point I had been alone and eager to procure a license to fish a stream near town for introduced trout. Now I had been indoctrinated into the cult of the wild and pure trout (and became an autonomous native trout snob).

We spent the night in the center of Granada at the hostal Perla. As I walked around town I remembered my visits to the palace of the Alhambra, watching the goldfish in reflection pools, walking through orange groves dreaming about princesses. I now felt more aware than I had been, that my senses were heightened. Why had I not seen the snowcapped mountains, clearly visible as you walked down the carril de Picón?

That night in Granada we had a bad meal for too much money and danced with tourists at a flamenco festival. Johannes expressed his disgust for cities.

 

We fished two tributaries of the Guadalquivir the next day not twenty-five kilometers from the city center. In the first, Rio Dilar, I caught a very strange-looking trout of a cool turquoise-blue color with very fine black and red spots. Johannes said the small and numerous spots on the sides reminded him of trout he had caught in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

“It makes sense that they should be similar,” Johannes said, “because Morocco is geographically very close to us here in southern Spain. The fish likely shared a common ancestor. But you notice, they have no
zébrure.
”

I had caught the fish with live mayfly nymphs from the stream bottom that I had strung on a fine wire hook. The trout to me was astounding in its uniqueness. I held in my hand another piece of the evolutionary puzzle. By fishing and photographing what we
caught we were collecting data, though the living data were returned to the stream unharmed. For some reason Johannes was not collecting tissue samples on this trip, perhaps because Garcia had already done genetic work on many of them.

We put the trout in the tank and observed it.

“You just know when you see a native trout. There is a look to the indigenous fish that you don't see in introduced ones.”

“Yes,” Johannes said. “I think when you have seen enough trouts, thousands, and looked closely at them, you know whether or not they are hybridized.”

“The pure trout just looks correct.”

“They are also different,” Johannes added. “From every stream the native brown trout are slightly different.”

 

We camped that night on the coast in the town of Huelva and the next day made our way west toward Portugal through a sparsely populated region of eastern Spain called the Estremadura. In this region many of the bulls headed for the corridas were born and raised. We passed them along the road, brown-black
toros
with broad muscular necks grazing under cork trees.

As we headed north through the desolate country toward the middle of Portugal, we saw the tents and carts of
gitanos.
They were not unlike Gypsies we had seen in Turkey, with large wheeled carts pulled by mules and tall conical canvas tents. The air was warm and soporific. Abandoned buildings beside the road were host to nesting storks.

We had fished the upper Tajo River days before, where it was a small trout stream. As we neared the border with Portugal we crossed it again, but here it was broad and huge. The Portuguese called it the Tejo River, and we did too when we crossed the border. We entered Portugal at Segura, a town, Johannes told me, known for its cherries. Ripe cherries were being sold by the basketful by stout ladies standing on the sides of the narrow and winding mountain roads.

The two rivers we were heading for, the Zêzere and Mondego, were small tributaries of the Tejo purported to have native trout. Johannes had garnered the information about native trout in Portugal from a paper published by several scientists at the University of Porto. The rivers were in a national park called Serra da Estrela (star mountains) with peaks pushing two thousand meters.

There were no highways across Portugal, just miles and miles of winding mountain roads. As we neared our destination, the mountains grew taller and more jagged and the roads more difficult. We came into the national park and the valley of the Zêzere River. In the village of Manteigas we stopped to ask for information on how to get to the stream. We bought a good map of the park and followed it to the upper Zêzere. This brought us to an ancient-looking place, with small villages that reminded me of Turkey with no sign of electric lines and smoke rising from the chimneys of small stone homes.

Large rounded boulders, as if strewn by a giant, dotted the hillsides, and a brisk cool wind blew down the steep canyon through which the trout stream flowed.

“Every place we visit is more beautiful than the next,” I said to Johannes as he drove. He grunted in approval. I don't know if he saw the shepherd watching his flock from the top of a large boulder, or was charged like I was to see people living in this old subsistence way. He did, I know, see the water, but I don't know if he acknowledged its pristine beauty as it appeared and disappeared among the massive beige-gray rocks.

Wheat fields were tossed in the wind, farmers walked holding their hats to keep them from blowing off, everything was covered in lichen. I could not help believing that native trout lived in some of the most remote and beautiful places left in the Northern Hemisphere (trout are not native to the Southern Hemisphere, though they have been introduced and now thrive in beautiful places there as well).

Though the stream was remote, it was open and visible and we did not want to risk using a fishing rod. Johannes volunteered to dive and we found a spot hidden among the boulders where he could do this. He dove without a wet suit because he said it would take too long to put it on.

“Ah, the water is so cold,” he cried in a half whisper, stepping out. He had been in it for about eight minutes and it was only about fifty degrees. But in that time he had managed to catch two small trout. The fish had characteristics of Atlantic brown trout, white halos around the black and red spots, and white rims on the ventral and anal fins. But they also had the characteristic we had identified as Mediterranean, three dark verticle bands on the sides.

Over dinner that night in a restaurant near Manteigas, we enjoyed sharing our theories on why the trout looked as they did.

 

We fished other streams in Portugal, the Avé, the Estorãos, and tributaries of the Lima. The deep green forests they flowed through reminded me of those behind my home in Connecticut. The farther north we drove along the Atlantic coast, the fewer the trout with vestiges of Mediterranean trout characteristics. These trout had large black spots with cream-colored halos and no trace of the
zébré
bands on the sides.

When we neared the northern town of Chavez (on the 41st parallel) in a region called Trás-os-Montes (between the mountains), I shared with Johannes a bit of my family history.

“Luiz de Oliveira,” I began, “my father's maternal grandfather, was born in Chavez. He moved to Brazil in 1910 with his wife, Alicia. In Santos they gave birth to my grandmother, Amelia de Oliveira, who became Amelia Prosek when she met and married my Czech grandfather in São Paulo.”

“So your father was born in Brazil,” Johannes said.

“Yes, in Santos. My father always told stories about his Portuguese grandmother in Brazil. How she lived in a house with a dirt floor and let him drink coffee with lots of sugar.”

For little money, Johannes and I ate like kings: home-cooked meals in small mountain villages, with delectable dried hams and cheeses, drinking refreshing
vinho verde
or newly pressed wine. Across the border back in Spain we had wonderful Galician fish soups with toad-fish, scallops, crab, and calamari, and more dried hams. When we didn't want to spend money for dinner we went to a bar and filled up on the tapas of olives, anchovies, and dried ham that came gratis with our drinks.

As we drove along the coast, I looked at the Atlantic Ocean with fresh thoughts and feelings. After spending so much time on gentle mountain streams, the beach with crashing waves seemed more formidable than before. This was the home of the ancestral trout from which all the ones we had studied evolved.

After two days in Galicia we began to head east again, toward Asturias, where there were many beautiful salmon rivers. The pace of river hopping and sampling Johannes kept was a bit frantic, though we found many healthy and well-protected streams full of native trout. We had burned through regions, drainages, languages, mountain ranges, climates, and currencies. The winding mountain roads taken from site to site had dizzied me into a timeless warp. But still, I believed that we remained true to the purpose of the expedition: to document the diversity of the trout of the Iberian Peninsula.