Fly-Fishing the 41st (4 page)

 

“You won't believe how beautiful Normandy is in spring,” said Yannid as we drove up the hills outside Rouen. “Now I think it looks like Connecticut in December. It seldom snows here, though.” In the leafless treetops were balls of green foliage, an evergreen called
gui,
or mistletoe. “My father used to say, under every Yankee's skin there's a Norman. I think he meant that to mean that my mother is cheap. The irony is that he's the tight one.”

Yannid and I had lunch at a restaurant by the sea. She had a militant and proprietary way of ordering food, insisting that I get the fish that was in season. So I had steamed mussels and a bland fish soup and was happy to be spoken for. We had a little white wine too, which was good for making conversation and warming the fingertips, and after lunch we walked barefoot on the beach. In the distance was a train of horses and riders, trotting along the edge of a light surf.

We crossed little streams of salt water, which rushed and coursed through the sand, and Yannid told me that the French word for channel or rivulet,
rigole,
came from the verb
rigoler,
“to laugh.” “It's a nice way to describe the sound of water, isn't it?” she said.

“I like being with you,” I said to her. “Maybe I can take you to fish for trout. Maybe you could come with me.”

“I'd love to, James,” she said, “only, close by. As much as I'd like to, I can't travel the world with you, I'm a medical student.”

 

Later that afternoon we sat drinking local cider in a dark pub in a small harbor town lined with sailboats. The aroma of apples brought me home, as did the smells of wood burning in a fireplace. On the way back to Rouen we stopped at a wine shop and Yannid bought two bottles of smoky cider and some apple brandy. It was just nice to be with her, to drink and be lost in a place I didn't really know. I wanted to go where the going took me.

 

When we returned to Rouen in the evening we stopped at the apartment where Yannid's mother lived in order to drop off the keys to the car. “Mom's undressed for the night and won't be seen,” Yannid said, “but come inside because I want to show you something.”

It was a two-floor apartment furnished with beautiful hardwood chairs, chests, and tables. Yannid led me to a window beyond a tall armoire. “It has the best view of the cathedral of any apartment in Rouen,” Yannid explained, pulling back the blinds to show me.

“This is the cathedral Monet painted in all its changing moods as storm and sunlight swept through town. It's stunning, isn't it? And yet I don't really like Rouen anymore.” The cathedral was lit mysteriously by floodlights from the ground and behind it was a dark purple sky. Yannid turned from the cathedral to look at me.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked and kissed me.

“If it's what you do,” I answered.

“I can be one of the little fishes you admire so much,” she said and put her arms around me.

“I would like to show you my cathedral, the trout stream.”

“The way you describe it,” Yannid replied, “I want to experience it with you.” She loosened her embrace and kissed me on the cheek. “Let's go back,” she whispered, and we walked through the cool evening along dark streets to her apartment.

 

The first thing I had noticed about Normandy was that the days were shorter than at home (I was decidedly north of 41°N), the second was that it never got very cold and that it rained a lot. It seemed to rain for weeks, and the level of the Seine continued to rise. I found it hard to leave Yannid's cozy apartment, though I contemplated later taking out my fishing rod and trying to catch a fish—it was not for lack of time to myself that I didn't; I think I was intimidated. I rarely saw Yannid because she was either in class or on a shift at the hospi
tal. I began taking long walks along the river, watching it swell with more water before my eyes, and every day, until it resembled a sea with waves, and on windy days there were whitecaps. I couldn't even consider how I would fish it. I needed to find a guide.

M
EETING THE
R
ETIRED
V
ETERINARIAN
P
IERRE
A
FFRE

F
or years before he introduced me to him, my friend Nick Lyons had told me stories about a mad sports-fisherman from Paris named Pierre Affre. As an author, publisher, and traveler, Nick had met many fly fishermen, and all sorts of enthusiasts and aficionados of the rod and line. Pierre, though, through his skill, intuitiveness, dedication, and outright weirdness, was according to Nick above the others, and of nearly mythical status. One of Nick's favorite stories about Pierre was about how he'd managed to get a hook lodged in his penis while tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys.

“Now a tarpon, as you know, is a big fish with a hard mouth,” Nick explained as he told it, “so you need a sharp hook and a big hook. I don't know how he did it, but it was a windy day and the line came sweeping by his pants as he cast it, and there it was. I'm in pain every time I think of it.”

I later collected many of my own Pierre stories; one in particular that I heard from his close friend Peter best exhibits his true
loucura
for fishing. “I used to accompany Pierre when we were in our twenties to Iceland to fly-fish for salmon in summer. As you know, it's near the Arctic Circle and in July there are no nights. Pierre used to
take speed pills so he could fish 'round the clock. He's a mad fisherman; I don't think he slept or ate for five days, he just fished.”

Nick shared with Pierre an understanding of the fisherman's (and thereby the predator's) folly. Fishing is a philosophy to them, a lifestyle, a source of frustration, and also of comfort, the same philosophy understood by the man who had introduced them to each other, the late hotelier Charles Ritz.

 

After months of anticipation, I called Pierre one morning in his office on rue Dauphine in Paris, in the sixth arrondissement. “Ah, James,” Pierre said softly yet urgently, “I have been expecting your call. Nick wrote me a very nice letter about you and sent a copy of your book. We have a lot to discuss. It is important for you to come to Paris as soon as possible to see me.”

“Okay,” I said quickly, for I was very excited too. “I will get a room in town.”

“Don't worry about a room,” Pierre said more strongly, bringing out his French accent, “you can sleep in my office. I would put you up in my apartment but I have three young children and no space. Anyway, Nick tells me you are with your fiancée in Rouen. Well, it won't take you long to get here. And keep in mind that in two weeks is the big French fly-fishing exposition, Le Salon de la Pêche à la Mouche. I am organizing it now for the fifth year; you will enjoy this immensely. If you come a few days before the
salon
you can help me with the setup. You will meet some fantastic fishermen from all over Europe, good guys, from Russia, Iceland, and Holland especially.”

I pictured Pierre speaking from a dark apartment in downtown Paris surrounded by books with the river nearby and the rain falling. I had only communicated with him by letter, so it was a privilege now, and a bit surreal, to ask a question and get an immediate response. “Can we fish the Seine?” I asked.

“It is a bit high now, but of course we will fish the Seine. The better fishing is in May and June, but we have an unusual fishery
now off the Ile Saint-Louis. I will tell you all about it when you arrive. We catch big pike and zander and even the occasional sea trout, do you believe it? In downtown Paris. It is an amazing fishery, as you will see.”

T
HE
O
LD
B
ROTHEL ON
R
UE
D
AUPHINE

A
s it turned out I could not go to Paris immediately because I had planned a trip with Yannid to go skiing in eastern France. But I called Pierre the moment I returned. When he answered the phone, he was breathless with excitement.

“You must come quickly,” he urged. “We've been having fantastic fishing in the Seine. I have never seen it like this before. We're catching
silure,
up to thirty kilos. You won't believe it.”

Silure,
I learned, is a catfishlike fish with a flat head, a wide mouth with six whiskerlike barbels, and a long tadpolelike tail, which it uses to stun its prey. The
silure
's cone-shaped body is designed to eat and digest big things like other fish, small ducks, geese, and garbage on the river bottom. This accounts for its immense size—it is the second largest freshwater fish in Europe after the sturgeon, and specimens have been caught in excess of two hundred pounds (the largest from the Po River in Italy).

 

What made Paris extraordinary for me was its intimacy with the Seine. At so many points you were drawn to walk beside it, or across it on its diverse bridges, acknowledging it as an artery without which the city's beauty would pale.

Pierre's narrow street, rue Dauphine, was perpendicular to the
Seine, an extension of Pont Neuf on the Left Bank not far from Notre-Dame cathedral. The entrance to rue Dauphine from the quai was one of those magical points in Paris where in just several paces you crossed from the majesty of the riverine city to the narrow street of a seemingly smaller town.

The morning I arrived from Rouen on the train it was drizzling in Paris, and by Pierre's reports it had been raining for days. Though I was not familiar with the Seine's normal flows, when I crossed by foot on the pont Neuf, I could see that it was in flood, so high that barges with tall loads could no longer slip under the bridge arches. The water was opaque and yellowish, a combination, I thought, of suspended silt and reflections of the sandstone buildings on either bank. There was no way to see a fish in it—the visibility could not have been more than two inches.

I walked in a nondescript door at 23, rue Dauphine and up a warped spiral staircase to the third floor, where I approached a red door in a dark corner of the hall. I assumed it was Pierre's because there were six scales from a giant tarpon nailed to it in a circle. I knocked and heard quick footsteps across a creaking wood floor. The door opened and a man of average height stood in the frame.

“Please,” he gestured, “enter.”

He looked like my mental version of a rural apothecary, blue eyes staring at me through elliptical wire-rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of a cheerful gnomish nose. He wore rubber boots, a plaid shirt, and corduroys, and had two days or more of stubble on his face. His hair was matted on the back of his head from sleep, his sea blue eyes not alert but aware.

When my eyes adjusted to the small space I saw there were two rooms. Against the walls were shelves from the floor to the ceiling choked with thousands of objects: books, magazines, terrariums with taxidermied fishes, fish spears, harpoons, plaster casts of fish, reels, rods, silk lines, and carousels full of slides.

In the second room by a pair of frosted windows was a desk piled
with books and paper and an antiquated computer. On top of it all Pierre opened a world atlas and bade me to sit on the opposite side. Flipping pages gently, he perused parts of the 41st parallel and made suggestions on where I should go based on places he had been.

In his forty-five years, Pierre had fished many of the world's major rivers: the Volga, the Nile, the Amazon, the Amur. I pulled my chair closer. “What's your favorite fish?” I asked him.

“Oh, I like them all,” he replied, “but if I had one day left to fish I would probably go to Sierra Leone for giant tarpon. My favorite fish though is the Atlantic salmon. In my twenties I was a guide on several salmon rivers in Iceland. I wrote my thesis for veterinary school on the Atlantic salmon, which by that time, in the mid-seventies, was in very poor shape in France. The Allier, a tributary of the Loire, is my favorite salmon river in France, that and the Gave d'Oloron in Basque country. The salmon once ran the Allier by the thousands.” He flipped to a map of France. “They congregated here, between Brioude and Chanteuges, to spawn. Now we would be lucky with a run of three hundred. For fifteen years I fished the Allier, an average of twenty days a year, and I caught one salmon.” Pierre paused to clean his glasses on his shirt, then refocused his attentions on the map.

“While fishing the Gave d'Oloron I became friends with an old man who fished for salmon commercially with a fly rod. He averaged a hundred salmon a year, and back then, to a poor man, two salmon were equivalent to a month's wages. That old man taught me how to fish for salmon. I loved him.”

Pierre talked about native brown trout in the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan—“When the shah was still in power in Iran it was possible to drive there from France.” He also spoke of a strange trout that lived in spring-fed streams in the Balkans, the giant brown trout of the Aral Sea, the taimen of Mongolia. It was alternately drizzling and raining outside the dirty windows as Pierre spun his tales.

“I landed a huge taimen one night in the Orhon River, or
Gol,
thirty kilos! and tied a rope through its jaw and around a log hoping to take photos when first light came the next morning. I was up with the sun and left the
ger
[a Mongolian tent for which the Russian word is
yurt
] for the river carrying my rod. The big fish was still in the small eddy where I left him the night before—there must have been three feet between his dorsal fin and tail—he was still alive; I intended to photograph and release him. What would I do with such a big fish? I went away to fish a bit and wait for ideal light. Two hours later I returned to the spot and the fish was gone. The ground was covered with hoofprints. Some bloody Mongolian stole it. Probably fed the whole village.