Fly-Fishing the 41st (23 page)

There was something beyond the so-called purpose, though, and that was my love of catching fish. Besides a fascination for the fish itself, I enjoyed the stalk, the capture, and the entire predatory act. I was satisfying an urge that was thousands of years old. In most cases I did not kill my prey; the catching was enough.

I liked to sit on the moss-covered banks and think about catching a trout. The anticipation was a great deal of the excitement for
me. Johannes and I saw so many beautiful rivers on our way through the Basque country, beyond Bilbao and toward the French border—the Trubia, the Pisuerga, the Irati (where Hemingway trout-fished in his Pamplona days), the Nive. I wished to return to them and spend more time in each place.

For now, though, I was fixed to Johannes's agenda. I did, however, persuade him to make one cultural detour, to visit a building in Bilbao, the newly built Guggenheim Museum of Art on the Nervion River. I knew that the architect's design had been inspired by what he has described as an “obsession with fish,” and therefore I thought that we should see it. The influence of the fish's form was apparent on first sight. The titanium plates of the building's exterior produced a wavy silver armor, like scales over a fish's body. As you looked at it, the building mesmerized, like the effect of staring into a pool of water. Johannes found little interest in it and drove by.

“We have no time to stop. It's not on our agenda,” he said.

“Whether you like it or not,” I said to Johannes, “the man who designed it shares a passion with us. He likes fish.”

 

“Eventually, whenever I'd draw something,” the architect of the building, Frank Gehry, once said, “and couldn't finish the design, I'd draw a fish as a notation…that I want this to be better than just a dumb building. I want it to be more beautiful. Sometimes I think fishes are all there are in the world.”

 

We crossed the Pyrenees into France at St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and spent two days looking for trout in brooks that percolated from thick mosses and the roots of giant fine-leafed beech trees. We had found a nice campground with good facilities on the river Nive, called, appropriately, Camping de la Truite.

As we drove through villages in the beech forests near the headwaters of the Irati River, I noticed aspects of the homes that mimicked fish, like rounded slate roof shingles assembled like giant carp scales.

Johannes displayed a boyish and scientific curiosity as he dove in the rivers, a sweet expression of the
loucura.
Our last afternoon in France, which was relatively warm, we swam in the Nive behind the campground. Johannes caught a large sucker fish with his bare hands and laughed gleefully as it flopped against his chest and slipped back into the river. As far as I could see, this was not part of the agenda.

At dinner in St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, we discussed how different our next and quite distant destination on the latitude would be. We sat outdoors and were waited on by men in white-and-black uniforms. While we waited for our roasted duck, Johannes surreptitiously threw pieces of bread from our basket to the large trout below.

41
°
N, E
ASTWARD
—Y
EREVAN
, A
RMENIA

W
e did not have an easy time getting to Armenia, a small country on Turkey's eastern border. Our flight from Austria to the capital, Yerevan, should have taken five hours, but instead took three days. We arrived in this desert city exhausted, nearly delerious, on a blazing hot afternoon.

At the airport we were met by two people who would accompany us overland in search of trout; a lady translator named Nuné, and our driver, Marat. I had made the arrangements by e-mail and phone and was happy to find that in person they were both amiable people. The first place we visited in the ancient city of Yerevan (founded in 782
B.C
.) was the central market.

“We must get some supplies,” Johannes told them.

Beneath a high-ceilinged warehouse-type building we walked alongside piles of sour cheese, dried sausage, butchered beef, whole chickens, and live carp in water-filled oil barrels. I watched the fish for some time. My exhaustion momentarily left me.

“They are from the Arpa River,” Nuné told me. She was quick to answer my curiosities even before I raised them. “I like to see the fish swimming too,” she said.

While Johannes was buying fruits and several bottles of vodka and beer, I rummaged through a large freezer and discovered two frozen trout. I brought them to a spot on the floor where light spilled in from a hole in the ceiling and photographed them.

“Don't waste your time with those,” Johannes said, “we'll see plenty more at the lake.”

“Can't I decide what I want and don't want to photograph,” I snapped. We were both a little irritable from the trip.

 

We next had a cup of coffee at a café in the main square of Yerevan, amidst the municipal buildings that were noticeably in disrepair. Nuné pointed out that you could see Mount Ararat from where we sat. It was barely noticeable in the haze, but once you saw it, you could not miss its peak covered in snow. There was a quiet, depressed feeling in the dry air, which approached 106°F.

“We were on the other side of that mountain one year ago,” Johannes said, “in Turkey.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.

“You travel a lot?” Nuné asked.

“He does more than me,” I said.

Johannes lit a cigarette and offered one to Nuné, which she smoked. He offered one to Marat as well, but he refused.

“It should be several degrees cooler by the lake,” Nuné said, taking a drag.

We sat under a red umbrella that advertised Coca-Cola. I stared, through the distortion caused by the heat, at our Russian four-wheel-drive compact car parked on the street. It would be our means of travel for the next three weeks.

“It is called Niva,” Marat said, looking at the car.

“Yes,” Johannes said, “they marketed those in Argentina, but in Spanish
ni-va
means
doesn't go.
” Johannes spoke in English. His English had greatly improved since I had known him.

Yerevan was the first city of a former Soviet republic I had visited. It made a strong impression. Every dark-haired, thick-eyebrowed woman and man walked with their heads hung low and many of them carried something in a plastic bag. There was a beauty in the concrete-and-steel ugliness of the town, in the inconveniences I imagined existed, but it seemed a little drab and sad (like a glimpse of Dickensian poverty). Vendors sold sugar melons and bottled mineral water. Old Russian sedans—Volgas, Ladas, and Jigulis—in white, yellow, and baby blue moved up and down the uneven streets, their
tires bald and patched, their wheels missing hubcaps. It was my first taste of Russian dysfunctionalism, viewed before the silhouette of Mount Ararat, from which, according to the Bible, post-flood life began.

 

The lake Nuné had referred to at the café was Lake Sevan, our destination, which looked on the map to be roughly one-tenth the surface area of the country. “Though Armenia is relatively small as countries go,” Nuné explained, “Sevan is still quite large. When you stare across it, it's like you're standing at the edge of the sea.” She paused. “But I wouldn't know exactly, because I've never been to the sea.”

Lake Sevan, the outflow of which runs to the Caspian Sea, once had four separate races of brown trout that occupied different niches in the ecosystem and spawned in the rivers entering the lake every month of the year except June. “I'm confident we will be able to find trout,” Nuné had e-mailed me.

The only written documentation Johannes and I had on the trout of Armenia was a paper published in Russia in 1896, during the reign of Czar Alexander. Johannes could read the Cyrillic alphabet, so he at least could pronounce the names of the rivers where the trout spawned. Our information was unfortunately over a hundred years old and sadly out of date. Since the late nineteenth century, Lake Sevan had greatly changed. In the 1930s it was drained sixty feet for the purpose of exposing what the government thought would be arable land beneath, but the dry earth turned out to be infertile and nonarable, mostly rock and sand. Realizing its error, the government subsequently built a fifty-kilometer pipeline through the Geghama Mountain Range to bring water from the Arpa River to the lake in an effort to fill it up again.

“They won't be able to,” Nuné said, addressing the subject, “but at least the level has remained stable.”

The draining of the lake had caused the extinction of at least one of the native races of trout, that known as bodjak, which had
spawned on the now-exposed shores. We had little information to substantiate the existence of the other three types of trout, but Nuné was optimistic that we would find them.

“The trout of Lake Sevan are somewhat legendary among Armenians,” Nuné said with a prideful air. By this point we were out of the city and making our way to the lake itself. “We call it
ishkhan,
or the prince fish, and the legend is that there was once a Urartian prince [the Urartu people preceded modern Armenians] whose beloved drowned in Lake Sevan. He wanted to live with her forever so he asked a magician to turn him into a trout. That is why it is the prince fish.”

 

One of the books I had brought with me to read was
The Hunting Sketches
by Ivan Turgenev, stories about Russian serf life in the nineteenth century. Turgenev was a landowner but wrote sympathetically about the peasants bound to his land. Looking out of the car window at the villages we passed I thought the lifestyle of the people here, subsistence farmers living in stone homes, was not much different from those I read of. The only difference was that the Armenians were not serfs, but citizens of a struggling democracy.

“People are prepared to work, but there is no work,” Nuné said, sensing what I had been thinking. “I tell you, many lament the fall of Communism. They say, ‘At least back then we had jobs.' Now the country is dependent on loans from the World Bank and contributions from the Armenian diaspora, mostly Armenian Americans in Los Angeles and New York. The leaders are involved in a kind of Armenian mafia. The money never gets to the people. Our biggest and newest opportunity lies in tourism, but in the West you read about how our prime minister and his cabinet members were assassinated last year, you think we live in chaos and it is not safe to come. Now there is a great opportunity to see Armenia. Westerners could not enter the country until the mid-nineties. We have much history. We were the first nation to adopt Christianity—in
A.D
. 301—and we have some of the oldest and most beautiful churches in the world.”

“Don't bother telling Johannes,” I said, “he doesn't care about churches, he only cares about trout.” I realized I had begun to sound like Ida.

“Well, trout are just another reason to be here,” she said.

Eventually, in the distance, we saw Lake Sevan through a light blue haze. It lay as a kind of alpine sea, nearly six thousand feet above sea level. At first it looked no different from the pavement distorted by the heat waves, but then we smelled it, moist and not unlike the ocean, and saw clearly that it was indeed the vast inland sea Nuné had said it would be.

The lake itself was green and clear. The air was cool by the water. The shores were lined with resorts from a time when prosperous Russians took vacations there. Many of them were half finished and almost all of them were abandoned. We took the road part of the way around the lake to a peninsula, on the tip of which, Nuné said, the president of Armenia had his summer residence. As we turned onto a road down the peninsula, we encountered a man dressed in colorful costume wearing makeup on his face, like a clown. Behind him, high above the ground, his friend walked a tightrope strung between two poles. It was all very bizarre.

“Am I dreaming?” I asked Nuné.

“No,” she said, “they are doing it for money.” Sure enough the man walked up to the car and we gave him some dram, the Armenian currency.

Farther down the peninsula we came to a large building of overlapping concrete discs, cantilevered over a cliff, like something out of a Russian futurist's imagination. It looked precarious.

“The building is supposed to look like a fish's mouth,” Nuné said.

It was one of the few resorts still operating. Marat stopped and we walked into reception to check in.

When we had settled in our rooms, each with his or her own
balcony that hung over the cliff, the four of us walked down a path to the beach for a swim. Marat and Nuné sat on the beach in the sun cutting up a watermelon. Johannes and I jumped in the water.

I lay floating on my back with my face to the warm sun and Johannes, wearing his mask, dove to the bottom to look around. He swam back to shore with a large crayfish and I swam back too to look at it.

We watched Johannes photograph the crayfish from every possible angle.

“He's a little crazy,” I said to Nuné.

“I admire the depth of his curiosity,” she said. “It makes life interesting.”

When Johannes had finished with the crayfish, he let it go.

“Can I show you where we would like to go?” he said to Nuné. Johannes took out maps to show to her and Marat, unfolding them on the beach.

“Where did you get such beautiful maps?” Nuné asked.

“They are old Russian military maps,” Hannes said.

Nuné squinted in the sun. “They are really something,” she said. “It all is.”

“So,” Johannes said out loud, looking across the open lake. “Do you think there are trout?” He pointed to the streams that flowed into the lake where he wished to fish.

“I've arranged to meet with fishermen in the villages around the lake,” Nuné said. “We will know tomorrow whether they have been catching trout in their nets lately, or if the trout are extinct.”

We sat in the sun and ate slices of the bright pink-fleshed watermelon. The sweet smell was hypnotic. I put on my diving mask and swam in the warm clear water, watching the light play in all imaginable geometric patterns over the sandy bottom.

 

That evening before dinner, Johannes, Nuné, and I walked through a grassy meadow on the peninsula to a ninth-century stone church.
The sun was setting over the lake and a breeze was blowing from the hills behind us.

We ate dinner at the hotel, on a terrace overlooking the lake. A young girl brought out a plate of oval flat bread, called
matnakash,
and fried
siga,
or whitefish. The next course was yogurt soup and sour cheese. When we had finished the bread the girl brought more, and a plate of peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes stuffed with beef and onion. We each drank several bottles of Armenian beer, Kilikia, and at the end of the meal a glass of Armenian cognac.

I slept very well my first night in Armenia.

P
EPAN THE
F
ISHMONGER

T
he next morning, having all slept well through the cool night, we visited a small fishing village called Tsovagyugh, on the northernmost shore of the lake.

There, in the rosy dawn light we saw women with knives dressing out whitefish for smoking. Once the fish were cleaned, the women strung them on sticks and suspended them in the cavity of an oil barrel, at the bottom of which a small pile of wood barely burned. After several hours over the smoldering wood, the silvery whitefish had become a rich golden amber.

Nuné interrupted the women at work and asked them who in town might have trout for sale. The brawny women in full-length dresses and aprons, like those in a Winslow Homer painting, stood upright still holding their knives and addressed her.

“It is late June,” they said to her in Armenian, “the season for trout closes in May.”

As we drove farther into the village we found the fishermen themselves. When Nuné asked them for
ishkhan
they shook their heads.

“My friends here just want to see the trout and maybe buy some for dinner,” she explained to them.

“Go see Pepan,” one suggested. “Pepan catches more trout than anyone. He might have some in his freezer. Go down the road a bit and turn right, or better yet, I'll take you there.” The man hopped in our already crowded Niva and showed us the way.

Pepan lived in a two-story sandstone house and he came out to talk with us. He was a big man, a little less than six feet tall and broad like a bull. Despite his menacing appearance, he was a friendly man, exuding the kind of warmth derived from being powerful and secure. We handed him a bottle of cold Kilikia beer as a gesture of greeting and he embraced it in his big black arms covered with thick tawny hair. He pulled off the top of the bottle with the fingers of his plate-sized hands and the neck of it disappeared in his black beard as he chugged it down.

“Do you have any
ishkhan
we could see?” Nuné said to Pepan.