Fly-Fishing the 41st (36 page)

Behnke had prepared a gourmet lunch of roasted poblano peppers stuffed with prosciutto and cheddar cheese, premixed margaritas carried in mason jars, another jar with homemade gazpacho soup, and corn tortilla chips. Peggy and I sat on wooden benches at a picnic table and Behnke laid the food before us. He poured me a margarita and the three of us ate and drank and talked. I had remembered reading in an interview in
Fly Rod & Reel
magazine that Behnke was born in Stamford, Connecticut. I was born in the same town and over lunch I asked him about Stamford.

He began talking of his childhood and his early fascination with fish. “My youth was spent much like yours,” Behnke said, “chasing wild brook trout in small streams.

“Ever since I was a little kid—I was fascinated looking at fish,” he said to me, cutting one of his stuffed peppers and taking a bite. “I started catching pumpkinseed sunfish in local ponds. Then I caught my first brook trout above a small dam on the Rippowam River when I was eleven. I ran home with it and put it in a tub of water. I was observing it and observing it, and I got so admiring of it I was going to take it and put it back. But I went in to eat lunch, and it jumped out and killed itself, so I ate it.”

Behnke read all the books on fish in the Stamford Library and his “obsession with fish,” as he called it, grew. He took up fly-fishing, and at eighteen he went to work for the Yale and Towne Hardware Company, like his father and half the people in his town, making locks. “One thing I looked forward to each summer if business was slow, I'd be laid off and go on unemployment for a few weeks and go fishing all the time,” he said. In 1952 he was drafted into the army. In the spring of 1952, stationed in Japan, he spent his off-duty hours fishing for the native char,
iwana
and
yamame,
in small mountain streams. When he returned home from the army the Yale and Towne factory had closed and moved south and he had no job. He went to a counseling service in New Haven that helped veterans find jobs. They gave him some tests. “‘Hey, you should go to college,' they told me, but I didn't know what I wanted to study. The counselor asked me what interested me and I said, ‘Fish.' I had never dreamed it was possible.” Behnke studied ichthyology at the University of Connecticut and graduated with a bachelor's degree in three years. As an undergraduate he read fisheries journals nights and weekends and published the first paper on the freshwater fishes of Connecticut since 1844. The star fisheries student received offers from several graduate schools but it was a call from Paul Needham, a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, that led to his future as a preeminent trout scientist. Needham was doing a study on the trout of the western United States, planning to drive from California to Alaska collecting trout, with a fly rod, and he needed a research assistant. He offered the job to Behnke and they traveled together for several months in a pickup truck across western North America searching for trout.

Behnke did his master's thesis on the Lahontan cutthroat trout of Nevada, and then got a grant to study the Salmonidae of the world for his Ph.D. He spent months researching museums and streams in Britain, Russia, and Yugoslavia and received his Ph.D. in 1964. He taught for several years at Berkeley, filling Paul Needham's
position when he died, and then settled in as a professor of fisheries and wildlife biology at the University of Colorado, Fort Collins.

The sky was a brilliant blue. It was a beautiful day by the lake for a picnic and for fishing. After lunch there was a hatch of small sedge and we caught one trout each on dry flies.

In the days I spent with Behnke, returning to fish the pond with greenbacks near Nederland, he was curious about what I'd discovered in my travels, what the countryside looked like, the trout and the rivers. But most of all, he was interested in Johannes Schöffmann, the mysterious amateur trout scientist he'd been in correspondence with for years, and whom he'd never met face-to-face.

“You say he's a baker?—fascinating. I've only known a few like him, an amateur who is as effective or more so than most professionals. Sometimes, you see, the amateur is more efficient because his conclusions are born from his observations and not the other way around.

“I first heard from Johann [as he sometimes referred to him] in 1986. He had written me with information on two very remote and rare species of brown trout,
Salmo platycephalus
of Turkey and
Salmo pallaryi
of Morocco. He determined that
pallaryi
was extinct and that
platycephalus
was vulnerable to overfishing, writing up his conclusions and publishing them in an Austrian fisheries journal. When I read Johannes's scientific papers, the range and depth of knowledge displayed indicated formal training in ichthyology. Now that I know he is a baker, his level of expertise is all the more impressive.”

Though Behnke was no longer teaching, he still kept his office in the basement of the old veterinary medicine building, Wagar Hall, on the campus of CSU, and I expressed a wish to visit it. My secret wish was to have a week to pore over his files, read papers and letters and books and look at specimens, but I would not press such an agenda on this trip. On one of the sunny afternoons I spent in Fort Collins we walked across campus to see his office.

It was just as I had pictured the office of a world-class trout taxonomist, piled with books, photos, and papers, and no larger than a big walk-in closet. He had a separate examination room where jars of preserved specimens—fish he'd collected over forty years—stood on tall shelves. He took me into the specimen room and we walked among the fish. By a small sink and table where he performed his examinations there was a refrigerator. In it he kept specimens he was examining at that moment, but it was also stocked with jars of his homemade gazpacho soup. It seemed he took his gazpacho as seriously as his taxonomy. He took out a jar and poured a cupful for me, handing me a spoon.

“I taste it and add ingredients until it suits me,” he said. “This batch is two weeks into the tasting process—it sometimes takes me a month to finish a batch. I start with a base of tomatoes and cucumber ground up in a blender, then I add any number of the following ingredients: cilantro, cumin, garlic, lime, onion, basil, habañero tabasco, sour cream, balsamic vinegar, and poblano peppers.” He showed me around the lab as I ate the gazpacho. “You like it?” he asked.

Among the fish, motionless in the bottoms of jars, were specimens Johannes and I had collected in Turkey and Central Asia and mailed to him from Austria.

Back in his office, Behnke gave me papers on the trout of Lake Ohrid, Macedonia, and Lake Sevan, Armenia, of which he had duplicates. He showed me a beautiful old book with color plates of the fishes of Japan and then sat down in his reclining chair behind his desk to light his pipe. We made plans for fishing the next day, my last in Colorado before I returned home. Behnke suggested as we were both Connecticut Yankees that we should go up to a tributary of the Poudre near Cameron Pass and fish for brook trout (which were not native to Colorado but introduced from the east). The trout were plentiful and we could keep some to eat for dinner.

“I don't mind harvesting introduced trout,” he said. “Even though they are wild and beautiful.”

 

The next day we drove up Route 14 toward Cameron Pass to Behnke's fishing spot. Behnke included me that day in an annual ritual of his and Peggy's, to go up on the pass and drink a bottle of inexpensive champagne while watching the autumn colors on the aspen leaves.

“Well, I suppose this is what retirement is supposed to be like,” Behnke said as he lowered himself carefully to sit in a meadow by a series of ponds that beavers had dammed in the creek. I sat next to him. He lit his pipe and poured more champagne in my cup. It was a gorgeous day, the sky was deep blue, the water in the creek was black, and the aspen in the crooks of the hills were golden yellow. “What do you say we catch a half dozen small trout for supper?” Behnke said.

I watched him string up his fly rod and tie on a small bead-head caddis nymph. He walked to the soggy bank, made several casts, and hooked a brook trout. Smiling and laughing Behnke pulled the trout onto the bank, pouncing on it in the grasses. He then unhooked it and put it in his creel.

“Take a look in the shallow end of some of the beaver ponds and you can see the trout spawning,” Behnke said. The females were digging redds by sweeping silt from the gravel. The males were waiting to fertilize the eggs that would be laid there. Purple clouds spread across the sky and their reflection made it harder to spy on the trout.

I fished in the deep parts of the ponds and caught four trout, which I strung on a forked willow branch. They were small and delicate, though their delicacy was partly an illusion, as trout evolved in the most indelicate of geological circumstances. I thought how peculiar it was that trout buried their eggs in gravel and were born
from beneath the stones in the river bottom. When I returned to Behnke's side an hour later, he was sitting in the grass with a half dozen brook trout, already speaking of how he meant to prepare them.

“I'm going to make a kind of tempura of squash blossoms and okra and serve it with the brookies—I'll stuff their cavities with mint and sautée them in pumpkin oil with a little garlic.” He turned his pipe upside down and tapped it on his waders. Then he stuffed it with fresh tobacco from a small pouch. We sat down to admire the landscape.

“Some dark clouds moving in,” Behnke observed.

“It's nice up here,” I said, lying back in the grass and sage, feeling the cold clean air. Behnke contemplated the brook trout lying on the dry grass next to his fly rod.

“I think we need to pursue and kill—as
Homo sapiens,
” he said. “It's part of what we are. Indeed, we are predators.” He lit his pipe. “You know, I never realized until you pointed it out to me that I'd spent most of my life in two distant cities on the same latitude,” he said. “Stamford, Connecticut, and Fort Collins, Colorado, are both on forty-one degrees north. You chose a good parallel to fish; it may very nearly be the best in the world for diversity of native trout and char.”

That night we ate the trout in Behnke's house and drank chardonnay, listening to a recording of Schubert's
Trout
(
Die Forelle
) play in the background. While we were drinking a favorite aperitif of Behnke's, a Chilean liquor called
pisco,
a storm was blowing over the pass where we had fished that day, dropping a foot of snow and turning the aspen leaves black.

H
OME

D
enver is not a distant drive from New York if you set your mind to it. Friends of mine have made the trip in twenty-five hours, stopping only for gas. I had no pressing reason to get home, but its gravity pulled me.

Driving across Nebraska, where the hills at last had become plains, a magpie flew from where it had been feeding on a road-killed deer. The stench of feed lots kept me awake as I drove through broad oceanic fields, cows' breaths visible and plaster white in the cold day. I crossed the Missouri River and stared again into black water. Then I crossed the Mississippi and rode through Illinois. I did not stray from the nondescript highway until I came to Indiana, ending up at night in Evansville. The small brick town was lit by streetlamps, which reminded me oddly of Paris.

I ate breakfast the next morning at a small diner beside the Ohio River. Barges, bright and huge, labored against the current. Blue-haired women played bridge at a table by the window. Perhaps it was the painter John James Audubon who led me here. He had spent some time nearby, living, failing at business, and painting birds in Henderson, Kentucky. I spoke only to waitresses, and my memories were jumbled in my head. There is no clarity—through Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Zanesville, and on into Pennsylvania.

“That's quite a sculpture,” my father said, looking at François's masterpiece, the
grand bécard vainqueur.
But I was dreaming this. I had fallen asleep on the road and caught myself just in time. In my mind the leaves on the sugar maples had turned color and some were falling as we spoke. My father's hair had become whiter, but I
did not find the changes in his face so noticeable at first. “I want to hear about it all,” he said, “but wait until morning.”

It's one of the first times in my life I took his advice. I pulled off Interstate 70 and got a room in a motel.

I took off my clothes and got into bed. I shifted to look out the window at the moon. Home revealed to me what I had secretly feared, that despite having traveled bleak countries, when I woke in the morning I would be only who I was when I'd left.

I crossed the Delaware, in my mind again, as if the fog had lifted from my brain. I found greater New York and its energy intimidating and foreign. It was too dark to see the Hudson when I crossed the George Washington Bridge, but I could see lights from the city and the cables of the bridge, and an hour from there I was beyond the glow of New York. The lights went out and I was on the dark winding rural roads near my home.

Then sleep. There was a place, a house in a mountain village roofed with stone shingles shaped like fish scales. Below it was a small pond. It could have been Portugal, it could have been Japan, but it was not, it was my home. I dressed and walked through a cold air that smelled of woodsmoke. Through the leafless trees I saw the pond near my house where I grew up fishing. It had three inches of clear black ice on it. I walked out onto the ice, so clear it felt as though I was walking on the water itself. I lay on the ice, facedown, and shielded the light from above with my arms, peering into the world beneath the surface. The pond is still, I thought, but through the window of ice I saw a mysterious current beneath, one that moved the weeds, and carried small scurrying organisms. Then I felt a cold wetness on my bare neck, and by the time I lifted my head a small white film of snow had concealed the black ice and the window to that other world was closed.