Fly-Fishing the 41st (19 page)

“I know you from the bar, don't I,” the doctor said. “You are Hannes's friend.”

Afterward he sat me down and asked a series of questions. “Do you have a family history of arthritis, are you allergic to any medicines, do you have psoriasis?”

“Psoriasis?” I said, “like the dry-skin condition?” I told the doctor yes, I did have a mild case of psoriasis.

“Ahah!” Peter said, with an enthusiasm I would not have expected.

He looked at me over his reading glasses and squinted, speaking with a heavy Carinthian accent. “I think I know what you have. This,” he said, putting his hand on my swollen joint, “is an imperfect knee.” He leaned forward slightly. “I think you have a rare form of arthritis related to psoriasis called psoriatic arthritis. We don't know much about it, how you get it, what the relationship is between the psoriasis and the arthritis.”

“I don't know anyone in my family who has had this problem,” I said.

“There are some severe forms and cases,” the doctor continued. “But I am hopeful yours is monoarticular, that is, it will attack only this one joint.”

Peter handed me a color pamphlet about the disease. It contained pictures of symptoms, like pitted fingernails and red sores all over the body. It spoke of extreme cases, people whose every joint—wrists, knees, elbows, and knuckles—were swollen. “Sausage fingers” was one term that described swelling in the hands. As a painter this scared me most of all. In truth, the doctor had made me petrified with fear and dread.

“I never heard of arthritis in young men,” I said.

“There are things we can do,” the doctor said. “I'm putting you on a strong dose of an American anti-inflammatory drug. Don't walk on it if you can help it. Take it easy.”

“Doctor,” I said, “I live in a three-story walk-up. I hike, I fish, I like to strain my body. How bad is this going to get? Will I be confined to a wheelchair?”

“I'm not sure.”

“You're not sure? Will I be able to hike and run and walk along rivers?”

“You should,” he said, and stopped making notes on my chart to look at me. “Just not maybe as fast as you used to.”

 

Everyone around me, including Johannes, asked what was wrong, why my knee was swollen, why I was limping so severely. At the bar, people asked Johannes, “What's wrong with James?”

“He hurt his knee,” Johannes said.

When they asked to see it and I lifted up my pant leg I saw disgust in their faces, especially in their eyebrows. I had never experienced being the object of such extreme pity. I hated it. I had no solace except the hope of recovery and the thoughts of all the places I wanted to visit when the weather warmed.

I began to envy those who could walk without limping, even the people I viewed as the ugliest, most miserable souls, and tried to hide my own limp but could not. I knew people could see that I was limping because I could notice it myself in my reflection in the windows of shops in town. I had an intense and increasing fear that I chose not to face, that which told me I might not get better.

In this state I would not be able to do many of the things that were so important to me. I could not help thinking that even the laziest stream would suddenly be an obstacle to me, and that my life was over as I had known it. I began to despair when I thought that I might even get worse, would not be able to paint because my fingers would be swollen, or hike mountains because I could not bend my knee, or walk down a steep embankment to a river, or even leave my bed.

Ida was openly sympathetic, called me her son, and told me I would get better. Johannes could not understand why I was not right, but never did he suggest that my condition would jeopardize our plans for the next summer. “You must get better,” was the only thing he said to me, and he said it only once.

Johannes and I studied maps, sometimes daily, in hissecret
front den, and he gave me scientific papers to read (though I could not read all of them, as some were in German and Russian). The images of the trout in these scientific works, the sometimes primitive drawings in Russian journals published in the nineteenth century, gave my recovery a purpose; I wanted to see those fish in the flesh and paint them on my own.

In the wake of a cortisone shot in my knee the swelling would go down for a couple of days. Then it would fill up with fluid again. Toward Christmas and the New Year my knee was in good enough shape that I could dance a bit, but my mind was so obsessed with the idea of complete recovery that I had little fun. I did not go out much, and essentially for the winter hibernated with my thoughts and memories. That is, until I saw Alex, the girl bartender in Sankt Veit who had returned from Vienna for Christmas break.

“Get over it,” she said to me in the bakery one day, more or less, “don't languish like a pussy, everyone's got problems.” And she walked out the door.

Later she came to my room and told me about her semester at school.

“I'm sorry you can't come skiing with me,” she said. “You
will
get over it.”

She stayed with me that night and her tenderness gave me hope. That was just about all I could ask for.

 

I did get over it. Though I was not back to normal by the time I packed my bags for a trip to Japan in late April, my knee was good enough that I could walk around without much pain or a noticeable limp. I feared doing something that would set it off again and was overly conscious not to bang or twist it in any awkward way.

After months of limited mobility I had been given freedom to walk again. My recovery coincided with spring and that made it even more magnificent. It was then I realized that the adversity I'd faced that winter was something I had secretly wished for my whole
life, a fault or imperfection that might help to push and challenge me and wipe complacence away forever. I hoped even more deeply that my problem would not return and continued taking the drugs the doctor had prescribed for me.

H
OKKAIDO
, J
APAN
, 41
°
N—A G
IRL
W
HOSE
N
AME
M
EANS
L
ITTLE
R
IVER

M
y next journey on the latitude was with my friend Dawn Ogawa, who was tall and thin with straight black hair. In Japanese her last name meant little river. When she graduated from Yale (where we had met and dated) she returned to her home in Hawaii (where she grew up with her Japanese father and American mother), and shortly thereafter left for Japan on a Fulbright Fellowship to do cancer research in a hospital in Kansai.

When Dawn invited me to visit her in Japan, she of course knew that my idea of a trip would involve trout. “That's okay,” she said through e-mail, “it will give me an opportunity to see a countryside I have not yet seen.”

We chose May for our travels because Dawn would be on holiday, and I researched where we might find good fishing.

An indispensible resource in the planning for our trip was a man named Katsuhiko Yoshiyasu, an ear, nose, and throat doctor from Kyoto. As with Johannes Schöffmann, he was introduced to me as a trout specialist by Dr. Robert Behnke. Behnke had received a copy of Dr. Yoshiyasu's beautiful new book on native Japanese trout and
encouraged me to contact him. I wrote him and began a correspondence, sharing books and photos concerning our mutual passion.

In my last letter to Dr. Yoshiyasu, sent from Austria in the midst of my miserable state, I expressed an interest in fishing Hokkaido, Japan's northern island, explaining to him that Hokkaido was on the 41st parallel, which I was writing a book about. As the doctor did not speak or write English very well I told him that further arrangements would be made through my Japanese friend in Kansai.

Dawn wrote Dr. Yoshiyasu in March and he replied to her with a twelve-page handwritten letter. He included maps (favorite spots marked with a yellow highlighter), appropriate flies, meticulous diagrams showing how to fish for the native trout, and pictures of the fish with the names spelled in phonetic Japanese on the back. Also included were his regrets that he could not join us. “Hokkaido is beautiful,” he wrote, “though it's a little cold in May.”

 

I arrived in Kansai the week before the boys' day holiday, meeting Dawn in the airport and taking the train with her to the suburb called Nishinomiya, where she was living. The symbol of boys' day is the fish, and from every high pole, rooftop, and car antenna colorful fish flags were flying against a blue sky.

As Dawn showed me around Nishinomiya, I admired the colorful fish flags and noted that fish were just as at home in air as they were in water. Tubular in shape, the flags filled like sails and swayed in a slight breeze or darted in a stiff wind.

I also observed the many rock gardens in people's yards. “They're called
Kare Sansui,
dry mountain stream,” Dawn said. “They're supposed to express the spirit of Zen through only rocks and sand. The sand around the rocks is usually raked into a design to create the effect of movement like current in a stream.” The fish flags and the rock gardens resembled each other, I thought, in that they both represented the beauty of water, through suggestion, without water.

Within the walls of the backyard gardens were also small bonsai in pots and some larger trees trimmed, wired, and trained to grow in a manner that suited the gardener's taste. Dawn told me that the controlled trimming and shaping by the Japanese evolved out of a desire to make their landscapes look like those in Chinese brush paintings and create the illusion of distance in a small space.

 

Dawn's host family, the Tanakas, lived a short distance from the train station. At the door to the beautiful home we took off our shoes and entered. Dawn led me to a small room with rice paper walls and a small lamp where I could put my things. Her host mother, Mrs. Tanaka, was busy preparing dinner—homemade pumpkin soup, stir-fried spinach, squid sashimi, chicken, and fried rice with pork—and did not come out immediately to greet us.

When we ate, Mrs. Tanaka complimented me on my deftness with chopsticks. “Dawn taught me,” I said and smiled. There was a clean cool smell in the room like there is in the air filtered by a deep forest.

Mrs. Tanaka was confined to a wheelchair. She had lupus (a disease that affects the skin and joints) and for the past ten years had little to no use of her legs or feet. For five years she crawled to get around the house because the floor was made of woven reeds, tatami, which would be destroyed by a wheelchair. Then, the greater Kansai area had one of its worst earthquakes on record. In Nishinomiya, the earthquake came at 5:30
A.M
., when people were still in their homes. Many people died, but Mrs. Tanaka was an ironic beneficiary. The damage created by the earthquake gave her and her husband, an elementary school music teacher, insurance money with which to remodel their home, now friendly to Mrs. Tanaka's needs.

Mrs. Tanaka's passion was cooking, and during my stay there I ate many home-prepared Japanese meals. She spoke little English, but was able to communicate to me when slicing raw squid one day that she was holding her favorite sashimi knife.

After dinner, Mrs. Tanaka helped set up the futon I would sleep on. My room was the only one in the house that still had the traditional tatami mat floor. She could not ride her wheelchair in so she propped herself out of it and crawled about the room setting out this sheet and that pillow, carefully building up my nest. I sat on the floor with her and showed her photos of some Japanese char (a fish similar to trout with light spots as opposed to dark spots), and streams they came from. She nodded at their delicate beauty and their colors, perhaps wondering to herself how she might prepare them. She mouthed the names of the trout, almost at a whisper, written by the doctor on the back of each photo in Japanese:

Dawn and I left Nishinomiya on the morning of the first of May for Sapporo, the capital city of the island of Hokkaido, north of Japan's main island (called Honshu). My limp had all but disappeared, and though I could still feel fluid in my knee I could walk and carry our camping equipment without a problem.

The airport was jammed with people because it was the first day of Japan's spring holiday, “golden week.”

As Dr. Yoshiyasu had predicted, Hokkaido was cold in May. An overcast sky and cool breeze chilled Dawn and me though we wore several layers of clothes. We walked around the city of Sapporo browsing in bookstores, where I bought several beautiful books on fishing in Japan. It was apparent from photos that the average trout caught by a Japanese angler was small, probably six inches. Dunking flies in small fern-covered pools, however, seemed an appropriate extension of an already well-established aesthetic, for enjoyment by the Japanese of small things in small places was well
known and documented. For me fishing small brooks for small trout was the purest and most enjoyable form of angling, and therefore I felt at home in Japan.

 

There were three main freshwater trouts caught by Japanese anglers—the landlocked cherry salmon,
yamame;
the Dolly Varden trout,
oshorokomo;
and the white-spotted char,
iwana.
The words
yamame
and
iwana
were usually spelled out in hiragana (the phonetic alphabet) but there were, in addition, special kanji, or characters, for them. The kanji for
iwana
combined characters for mountain, stone, and fish, presumably because they lived in rocky, mountain streams, while the kanji for
yamame
taken separately were mountain, woman, and fish. Why woman was part of the kanji for
yamame
was something I was interested in pondering further. In Latin languages, trout was always feminine
—la trotta, la trucha, la truta, la truite
(and also German,
die Forelle
). I later learned that the Japanese character for woman was present in many other Japanese words, like “noisy” and “inexpensive.”