The Longest Silence (8 page)

The stewardess began a spontaneous rundown of the glories of Our Neighbor to the North. “There is a mountain in Banff,” she explained momentously, “that they’ve named Mount Eisenhower.” She paused to look first at the blank faces, then at the sullen Pacific
beneath us. She exhaled audibly. “After your former president, that would be.”

We flew on for some time in silence.

One of the tour group looked up beaming from the map on his lap. “Strait of Juan de Fuca!” he cried.

I could take it. I was ready for this kind of thing. I was going to virgin country and I still hadn’t got food poisoning and my companion hadn’t yet had to call the house physician to say, “He didn’t even finish his drink.”

They had been to San Francisco and were now doing the résumé. “Filthah hippahs!” said a lady from Little Rock. Then a young man bound for Vietnam announced, “Well, I’m off to defend my country!” in tones that seemed less than totally sincere. So the tour group, for this and other reasons, grew restive and was ready to pile off the plane by the time we arrived at Victoria.

I registered at the Empress Hotel, a stupendous Victorian edifice where the bellhops scurry and the waiters in the dining room murmur the most caring hopes about your meal, exactly the place to sport an RAF mustache. Frank arrived and we talked about our trip north. Then early to bed, with glimpses of the curious Victoria skyline, a pastiche of the high-rise and the venerable.

Every traveler here soon discovers the considerable reverence for the British connection. If the queen ever gets run out of England, this is where you’ll find her holed up; the Victoria Chamber of Commerce will have drawn its wagons in a circle around her.

In addition to such good transpositions as the unmatched gardens of the city or its numerous bookstores, you get double-decker buses imported from London, coats of arms in woolen-store windows and tea and crumpets available everywhere from the Empress itself to the Rexall drugstore.

But to emphasize the town’s studied dowdiness is unfair. It is obvious that Victoria is a town of what used to be called graciousness, and any ride around its perimeter will put the traveler’s back to those unparalleled gardens and his face to the headlands of the San Juan Islands.

There had been heavy weather immediately prior to our arrival,
and long, golden log booms, the shape and color of egg yolks, had been towed inside the bays for protection. Beyond, handsome trawlers were moored under clouds of gulls. If you squinted, it looked like Anchorage or Seattle or San Francisco or Monterey or—squinting tighter—Mazatlán: the Pacific community seemed continuous.

That first morning I picked up the menu downstairs in the hotel. A number of breakfasts were described: “the Charlotte,” “the Windsor,” “the Albert,” “the Edward,” “the Victoria,” and “the Mountbatten.”

“I’ll have the Mountbatten,” I said, “over lightly.”

Frank made a number of order changes to his Edward.

“If you’re going to substitute oatmeal and add an extra egg on your Edward,” said the waitress, “you might just as well order á la carte.”

I was hungry and abruptly ate my Mountbatten.

We spent the day driving as far up the coast as Saltspring Island. At one of the ferry crossings, watching the wind-striped water and high, beautiful fjords, I innocently poisoned myself with a prawn.

A local prawn? I don’t know.

Within hours I had failed to finish my drink. My companion was on the phone to the house doctor. My vision was contracting. My gorge was rising for the tenth time. The Canadian Pacific, so recently thrilling, was now the scene of hopelessness and abandonment.

W
E WERE GOING NORTH
to Smithers by way of Williams Lake. The fellow passengers were more promising than the tour group—a few swells like ourselves, some surveyors, timber cruisers, a geologist. The minute the aircraft had elevation, a country revealed itself that was so tortuous, folded, and empty that some trick of time seemed to have been performed.

The sky came down to a jagged horizon of snow, and for 360 degrees a coastal forest, baleful and empty, rose to the mountains. Past the bright riveted wing, the ranges succeeded each other to the north in a blue eternity.

We landed at Williams Lake on the Fraser River, dropped off passengers, taxied, flew a few yards, landed again, taxied again, took off again, and landed. The pilot came out of the cockpit with his shirt
unbuttoned and remarked with appalling candor that the plane felt like a Model A.

They sent us into Williams Lake to eat while they fixed the plane. In the cab we learned the airline we were using was bankrupt, and so it had come to seem. But at the restaurant they told us to return to the plane immediately.

When we boarded, the pilot said, “I hope it goes this time. Occasionally you’re not lucky.”

So we flew over the increasingly remote wilderness, hoping that we would be lucky and that the plane would work and be better in all ways than a Model A.

At Smithers, the seaplanes rested very high on their pontoons beside floating docks. A mechanic tapped away at a workbench nearby as we boarded a De Havilland Beaver.

Within a short time we hung precariously over a long, gravelly mountain ridge. The pilot craned around looking for mountain goats, while Frank and I exchanged nervous glances and judged the drop.

On either side of us stood implacable-looking peaks and ridges while underneath, blue-and-green lakes hung in saddles and rockwalled cirques. Occasionally the entire groundscape shone amid delicate water meadows, and in a short time we had landed and were taxiing toward our fishing camp. I thought of the trout under our gliding pontoons.

“How is the fishing?” Frank inquired routinely of Ejnar Madsen, the camp’s co-owner.

“Extremely poor,” said Ejnar.

“Really!”

We put our luggage down on the dock as it began to rain. There had been an Act of God and we could not be philosophical about it. I asked what had happened. The biggest summer rain in many years had raised the lake and turned the river almost black with runoff.

Next day we floated disconsolately down the slow, ineffably northern river in a twenty-five-foot, Indian-built, spruce riverboat. The rain poured off our foul-weather gear and made puddles in our laps.

Between long spells of silence we burst into absurd conversations:

“Neighbor’s cat crawls under the hood of the car. Next morning the neighbor starts the car. The fan does a job on the cat.”

“Apropos of what?”

“Wait a minute. They take the cat to the vet. He shaves the cat’s whole tail except for the end. The cat looks like a lion. Pretty soon the cat thinks he’s a lion.”

“In what way?”

“Forget it.”

Now the rain was going sideways. You’d cast a fly and it would vanish long before it got to the water. We knew gloom.

Some very small, very stupid trout came upon our flies and ate them. We caught those trout. Of the large smart trout known to live in the lake, we took none. Some hours later we sat around the Air-Tight heater, for all purposes blanked.

We were fishing for rainbows in their original watershed. In such a situation they can be expected to be magnificent fish, quite unlike the hatchery imitations, which have, in effect, besmirched the species. They are strong and fast, and rise freely to a dry-fly. We were, moreover, in an area that produces fish of a rather large average size.

In the spring and early summer the fish here herd and pursue sockeye fry, including the sluggish little alevins, the very young fry, tadpole-shaped, with their still-unconsumed egg sacs. Ideally, the big rainbows are to be found chasing the bait on top, where they can be cast to, rather like pelagic fish. We liked this image. We would cast, fight, land, and release until our arms were tired. The rainbows could also be taken on dry-flies. There were mayflies and grasshoppers to imitate and in the lower stretch, stoneflies.

Though we hadn’t made much of a beginning, our hopes were still running high. The next morning we were fishing by six, hunting feeding rainbows. It is “hunting” if you find something. If you do not, it is driving around the lake in an outboard.

“We should’ve brought the water skis.”

“Oh, come on.”

We continued hunting, as it were. And we didn’t find anything, not one thing. When more of the unseasonable rain blew in from the exaggerated
sky, we sat, fly rods in hand, like drowned rats. I began to take an interest in the details of the bilge.

Later, when it had cleared a little, we headed down the lake to an Indian village inhabited by a branch of the Carrier tribe, so named because its widows once carried the charred bones of their husbands around on their backs. The village is situated prettily on a high series of hills and looks out on the lake and river where the two are joined. There are a couple of dozen buildings along a wooden walk and a small Hudson’s Bay store.

When we passed the upper part of the town, a man worked on his outboard while a girl in an aniline-blue miniskirt pulled sockeye salmon from a net. Ravens and gulls screamed and circled overhead, waiting for a chance at the offal from the gutted salmon. There were a hundred thousand or more sockeyes in the river now. Many of them came up out of the wilderness with bearclaw marks on their flanks.

We docked at the lower end in a pounding rain and hurried up the hill to get under the eaves of the wooden schoolhouse. A notice in the window read:

In two or three places on the walls of this wilderness school were dabbed the letters
LSD
, which did not stand for League of Spiritual Discovery. The letters were put there, doubtless, by someone who spoke English as a second language.

When the weather relented a little, we hiked up the hill to the old cemetery, which was mostly overgrown. The epitaphs were intriguing: “To the sacred memory of our brother killed by a gunshot wound.” I found two old headmen’s graves, “Chief William” and “Chief Agusa,”
whose titles were purely titular; the Carriers gave their chiefs little power. The cultural overlay seemed rather bald on the last stone I looked at. Beneath a conventional crucifix it read, “In memory of Ah Whagus. Died 1906. Age 86.” Imagine the fishing when Ah Whagus was a boy.

We walked around the village. The shy people smiled at the ground or stayed inside when we passed. On the boardwalk someone had written “Big Fat Sally Do Your Stuff.” Beyond the LSD graffiti and the noise of a transistor radio playing Dolly Parton—“I’m a lady mule skinner from down ol’ Tennessee way”—black-shawled Indian women were taking the salmon down the river to a lower island and smoking them against a winter that was probably more imminent to them than to us. The older people were locked in some intense dejection, but the children played with familiar, maniacal energy in the deep wet grass with their salmon-fattened dogs.

It had rained enough that our simple cabin with its Air-Tight heater acquired a special and luxurious glamour. When we got good and cold, usually the result of running the boat in one direction while the wind took the rain in another, we would head for the cabin, put some wood in the heater, douse it with coal oil, and throw in the magic match that made everything all better. This was the romance of the heater. We played with the flue, adjusted the draft, and while the logs rumbled and roared inside we tuned the thing like a violin. One afternoon, when a view through any of the windows would have suggested that the cabin was Captain Nemo’s vessel and that we were at the bottom of the sea, Frank leapt to his feet with an expensive Japanese camera in his hands and began to take picture after picture of the tin heater rumbling peacefully, our wet laundry hanging around it in homage.

One of the exhilarations of fishing new places lies in rendering advice into some kind of obtained reality. Cast the fly, you are told, right along the bank and the trout will rise to it. So you cast and you cast until presently you are blue in the face and the appealing syllogism you started with is not always finished. When it does not work, you bring your vanquished person back to the dock, where there is no way to weigh or measure the long face you have brought instead of
fish. At the first whiskey, you announce that it has been a trying day. Then someone else says that it is nice just to get out. Irrationally, you wonder how you can get even for that remark.

But once, when the British Columbia sky made one of those spectacular partings we associate with the paintings of Turner or the handing down of stone tablets, we saw what had been described to us in the beginning.

Large fish, their fins showing above the water, were working schools of salmon fry: a setup. We started the engine and ran upwind of them, cut the engine, and started to drift down. We had the goods on them. When in range I false-cast a few times, made a long cast beyond them, and gently retrieved into their midst.

I hooked a fish instantly. After a strong first run, it mysteriously flagged. As I reeled, it came obediently to the boat, where Frank netted it.

“What is that?” he asked. In the net was some kind of giant minnow.

“It looks like Martha Raye,” I said bitterly. Later we learned that it was a squawfish. No one ever caught one on purpose.

Not until almost our last day did the river began to disclose itself. We made a pass along the Indian village, where we were seeing occasional rises. The problem was a river so clouded that the fish were unable to see the fly, a condition blamed on a nearby stump desert the loggers left in their wake.

We began to drift, blind-casting large Wulff flies ahead of us, mending the line to keep the river from bellying it and dragging the fly. In very short order, a bright band appeared beneath my fly, moved downstream with it and inhaled. I lifted and was solid to a very good fish, which was netted some minutes later. It bumped heavily in the bottom of the boat until I could get the fly out and release it.