Fly-Fishing the 41st (27 page)

Finally, around a small hill, Sasha told us in his own way that we had arrived. Johannes had not expected ample accommodations but at least a shelter. What lay before us was a hollow, with a group of motley-colored tents. Behind the tents, incredibly huge, was the snow-covered peak of Lenin Mountain, 7,134 meters. We stepped from the jeep into frigid air.

A Russian man walked up to us from his red tent. He peered at us through his thick, black-rimmed glasses and zipped his puffy purple down jacket to stave off the cold.

“Hello,” he said, “I am Vadim, welcome to our base camp.”

Johannes, wearing a short-sleeve shirt, groped in his bags for a jacket. Vadim looked at stout and overweight Ida. She was holding her lower back from the pain she suffered on the bumpy ride. Vadim seemed confused when he saw wet suits, snorkels, and fins tied to our backpacks and probably thought to himself, what are these lunatics doing with diving gear in a dry near-Arctic climate at thirty-eight hundred meters?

“What?” Johannes said when he'd found a jacket and put it on, “there are only tents here?”

“Yes,” said Vadim, matter-of-factly, “this is the base camp for expeditions to Pik-Lenina. Trips by foot to the summit begin here.” Vadim looked at Ida again, his brow twisted. “You have no tent?” he said, “no sleeping bags? I think there has been a mistake. What is it you've come here for?”

“
Forel,
” Johannes said, his teeth chattering, “in the Kyzyl-Su.”

“
Forel,
” said Vadim, smiling. He wore a baseball hat, which he took off then and looked at us skeptically, scratching his head through his thick black hair.

“First we must give you a tent and sleeping bag,” he said. “You must realize that this is a base camp. We function on the minimal; it is not meant to be comfortable. It is thirty to forty days by foot from here to the summit of Pik-Lenina. Once they are up, they have to come back down. In 1994 we lost fifty-three people on their return, including guides, to an avalanche.”

Vadim took us into the dining tent for a hot cup of coffee with cognac.

“You are here now, so we must do our best,” he said, sitting down and lighting a pipe. “I apologize, but as I said, this is a base camp in rough country. First of all, to find trout you need to go down, not up.”

“Yes, of course,” Johannes said. He pulled out a map and, laying it on the table, showed Vadim precisely where we wanted to go.

“Where did you get such beautiful maps?” Vadim said, visibly impressed.

“In Austria,” said Johannes. “We cannot find trout without these maps. Here, in this stream flowing into the village of Daraut”—he pointed—“we are looking for a population of the easternmost native brown trout. This is the stream from which the type specimen for this subspecies was named,
Salmo trutta oxianus.
”

“No problem,” said Vadim, his face brightening. “You will need a truck to bring back all the trout that you will catch.” He filled our
empty coffee cups with ice-cold vodka. “Distilled from the tundra lichen,” he said and laughed. “Climbers and fishermen are the craziest people I know.”

 

Vadim's generosity flowed deep into the night, so despite the cold and discomfort, we slept soundly, in a state of inebriated bliss.

Through the night a mixture of snow and rain fell, but by morning the air was clear. The foothills below us were barren, smooth like velvet, and dry, with occasional abrupt rock formations thrusting from the ground. Vadim suggested that the camp cook, Natasha, the girlfriend of one of the guides on Lenin Mountain, accompany us in our trout hunt and act as a translator. She did and proved pleasant company, especially for Ida, who was feeling ill, and appeared to be in serious need of female companionship.

The river where we were headed to fish, Daraut River, flowed from a canyon in the Pamir Mountains and through the village of Daraut on the border with Tajikistan.

Sasha drove attentively on the dusty, uneven, narrow, and treacherous roads. When we had reached the crook of the valley and crossed the rickety bridge back over the Kyzyl-Su, he stopped at a small wooden shack. Fuel was sold there by the bucketful from large tanks. Sasha, with the help of two boys, poured the fuel into the twin tanks of the Vilis through a funnel. As he was doing so, a car pulled up carrying two sahibs.

They were Americans.

“What are you here for?” one asked me.

“We're looking for native trout.”

“Fascinating,” the other said.

“And you?”

“We are geologists.”

“Don't tell me,” one said, “your name is James.”

“Yes,” I said and looked to see if it was written on me.

“I am a fly fisherman, I have your books,” the man said.

We exchanged addresses and would have talked more, but Johannes was urging me on. I got in our jeep.

“It's not every day that you meet a fan in Kyrgyzstan,” I said to Johannes.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

Sasha drove us up the road into the village of Daraut. We stopped by a pair of old men wearing
khalpaks,
seated in the sparse shade of a plane-tree grove.

“Are there trout in the Daraut stream?” Natasha asked them.

“Yes,” one said, “but you must walk a long way.” He looked at the jeep. “You can only drive so far. A rock slide has blocked the road. My son and some other men are working to clear it, but it could take weeks.”

“How far should we walk?”

“About five kilometers.”

We followed the stream on a dirt road and after twenty minutes came to the rock slide. Three men were working with a bulldozer to clear it.

“This is it,” Natasha said. We parked beside a beautiful bank of wildflowers that grew lush and colorful by a small spring. Ida was sick and stayed behind to watch the car and our things. I sympathized with her; I felt a little dizzy myself, maybe from the altitude or the intense dry heat. She didn't like to hike very far anyway.

Johannes, Natasha, and I went by foot with food and fishing gear up the stream. The gradient was steep and the flow was fast and angry. After we had hiked a kilometer or so, we came to a mud hut. Natasha greeted the man, woman, and three children who lived there. The father offered us flat bread, honey, and butter.

We sat on some large boulders in the sun to eat. They were covered with beautiful orange lichen. A breeze moved the dry grasses.

“It looks like that stream in Portugal we fished,” I said to Johannes.

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said, “the Zêzere. The only difference is that you can't find a good bottle of wine around here.”

I laughed a bit. “But the honey is good,” I said.

I picked some yellow and purple wildflowers and pressed them into my sketchbook. With a feeling of optimism I rigged up my fly rod.

At nearly twelve thousand feet this was possibly the highest-elevation native trout habitat in the world. The ancestors of the fish in this rushing headwater stream originally swam up from the Aral Sea. They would not be easy to catch with a fly, I thought, the stream was too swift. We hiked farther to look for nice deep pools, but the stream was just a glacial-blue froth. When I started to fish I put several pieces of lead on my line to sink the fly, hoping I could get it to a fish by dropping it in an eddy behind a boulder. I fished a hundred yards of river.

I came to a small turn where the current was slower and the stream ran beneath a grassy bank. I coaxed my fly into the spot and got a strong tug. I was so excited I yanked the fish in one pull out of the water and onto the dry path behind me. I threw down my rod and leaped on the fish like a boy chasing a frog. When I caught it and beheld it, half covered in dust, I marveled at its sparse vermilion and black spots and the gentle daffodil yellow sides.

I yelled for Johannes to come.

“Good, you have caught one,” he said, taking out a plastic bag to fill with water and carry the fish live back to the jeep so he could photograph it in his tank.

When we were done with the fish, we clipped its adipose fin (a small stubby fin behind the dorsal) and placed it in a vial of alcohol, preserving the tissue for DNA analysis. Then we let the small trout go.

 

That night after dinner we drank hot coffee with cognac. Vadim congratulated us on our catch.

“That's fine,” Ida erupted. “But I am not feeling well. I want to return to Osh.” Johannes thought about it, slowly drinking his coffee.

“Well,” he said, “we have caught our fish, I guess it is possible to do so.”

The bumpy return trip to Osh was a great strain on Ida's lower back. The air in the valley was hot and dusty, and having undergone such extremes of temperature, Ida was visibly suffering. I tried to be affectionate and sympathetic as she drank bottle after bottle of mineral water, but the person she required tenderness from was Johannes.

We had planned to explore tributaries of the Kyzyl-Su River until Saturday. It was only Wednesday and we already had returned to Osh. We were told that no flights to Bishkek were available until Monday, so unless we returned overland we had five days to kill. I knew how I wanted to spend the time.

The next morning I told the receptionist at the Osh Hotel that I wished to make a phone call. She took me into a small dark room with a telephone on a table. I wrote down the number I wished to call, and the receptionist dialed it for me and gave me the receiver.

“Anastasiya,” I said when I heard a girl's voice.

“Yes?”

“It's James.”

“Oh, hello, James, how are you? I can barely hear you.”

“We are back early from our trip south and I thought you might like to spend some time together?”

“Sure,” she said, “when?”

“Is tomorrow good?”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

“We can meet at the Osh Hotel in the morning.”

“Maybe at ten,” she suggested. “I will bring us a lunch and we can go up in the canyon and see the falls on the river.”

“Great,” I said, “I'll be waiting for you in front of the hotel at ten.”

 

At half past nine the next morning, I was waiting on the hotel steps for Anastasiya. She was dressed in shorts and a tank top, as if she were ready for a day at the beach, and she carried a small backpack. Her hair was tied back off her slender neck and the sun had worked a lovely pattern on her freckled shoulders.

“Aren't you going to bring your fishing rod?” she asked, seeing that I had nothing with me.

“Yes, if you think I should,” I said.

“You can swim too.”

“Are you going to swim?”

“Yes, I think I will.”

“I'll bring my shorts then,” I said. “I just have to go to my room to get them.”

I went to my room to get my fishing rod and shorts and she followed. Anastasiya found nothing strange in coming down the dingy hall, over the old green rug to the flimsy door and into my hotel bedroom.

“Have you seen people fishing there—in the canyon?” I asked as I pulled my rod out of my bag. She stood beside me and I could almost feel her breath as she talked.

“Yes, people fish in the river,” she said. “I don't see anyone there often, it's kind of my spot, or I like to think of it that way. I'm usually there alone.”

I could feel my face was flush and tried to dampen the color with the back of my hand.

“Okay,” I said, “I think I'm ready.”

 

“I have a feeling you don't like my town,” Anastasiya said as we were walking from the hotel to the bus terminal.

“No, I think it's beautiful,” I said. In its own way it was, though it looked as though it had recently suffered a bombing. We passed a hedge of bushes with blue blossoms.

“My father planted one of these bushes at home,” I said. “I don't remember what they're called.”

“It's rose of Sharon,” Anastasiya said, redoing her ponytail. We walked on.

“Osh is sometimes beautiful, but it's not what you would call convenient,” she said. “The telephone lines are sometimes down for days.”

“How was it to see your little sister the other day?” I said.

“She was kind of being a pain. She came to my bed too early my first morning home and started jumping up and down on my bed. I wanted to sleep.”

The bus to the canyon was not operating, so Anastasiya and I took a taxi. Our driver was a tall Kyrgyz man who wore a starched white shirt and pleated gray pants. Anastasiya talked to him in Russian, telling him where we wished to go.

“I hope you like where we are going,” she said to me, “as I told you, it is one of my favorite places.”

“What is the name of the river?” I said.

“The Ak-Burra.”

“What does
Ak-Burra
mean?”

“I was afraid you would ask that,” Anastasiya said. In her deep Russian locution she asked the driver what it meant. “He says
Ak-Burra
is Kyrgyz for male white camel. When the male white camel is in mating season he is very furious, just like the river as it tumbles off the mountain. The falls are white as well, like the animal itself.”

Anastasiya had little to no imperfections on her body. Unlike the country people, she did not have gold or copper teeth, missing digits, scars, or wandering eyes. She had not been exposed to the harsh climate, did not have to smoke cigarettes to punctuate idleness. Her toenails, which shone through her sandals, were perfect. Her legs were long and fine. Her shorts and tank top were clean and pressed.

“I have traveled abroad, more than most people in this country,” she said, as she had told me before. “Most people in Kyrgyzstan who have traveled complain about the discomforts of their home when they return. A proud Kyrgyz like our driver is rare.” She pointed to a sticker above his mirror, which read: Proud to be a Citizen of Kyrgyzstan. “But I think we have things here that you don't in America. Though I have not been.”