Fly-Fishing the 41st (25 page)

“What is it?” I asked her in a half whisper.

“It is calendula oil.” I looked up at her, where she sat on a chair by the bed, and she had no smile or expression on her face. “I think it will help you get better.”

That day, Johannes went with Marat to sample a nearby stream and I rested by the lakeside and read books. Nuné stayed by my side and kept me company.

H
AMLET THE
F
ISHERMAN

T
hat night a rainstorm blew over the lake and brought cooler and less hazy weather behind it. The next morning, out beyond the dark muddy surf, the water of Lake Sevan was a milky lime green. Where we stood it was sunny, but in the distance cobalt blue clouds dropped needles of rain to the water's surface.

Long after first light, but still in the morning, Marat, Nuné, Johannes, and I were on a dirt road through a semidesert land following another tributary of the lake, the Masrik River, to its source. The road was lined with Queen Anne's lace and yarrow, and looked largely devoid of human activity.

Nuné explained that the villages we passed in this valley were once occupied by Azerbaijani Muslims who fled across the nearby border with Azerbaijan. “We are still fighting them over a region east of here called Nagorno-Karabakh.” Some Armenians had found opportunity in the vacant homes.

Up ahead, an old shepherd tended his flock on the barren landscape. He wore a large green poncho and rested his hands on the curved handle of his cane. Other villages deeper in the mountains had been occupied again. Women, young and old, cast suspicious
glances at us from open doorways, children played in a cemetery, and the land was again cultivated, mostly with potatoes. We stopped on a bridge over the Masrik River and a man came out of his home to greet us.

“I am the mayor,” he said, “welcome to my village.” Nuné asked him if there were trout in the river.

“Farther up the road,” he said.

“How much farther does the road go?”

“Not very far,” he said. “It ends at the pass by the border.”

At the end of the road, in a village nestled in a bowl-shaped valley, our car stalled and would not start. A heavy cool mist soon turned into a drizzle and then rain. An old man appeared, as old men had a way of doing, with one hand on his white beard and one behind his back.

He examined our car, peering over Marat's shoulder as he looked under the hood. The man encouraged Marat to leave the car alone and to follow him to his house.

“Come in,” the man said, waving us toward his home. We probably wouldn't fish until the rain passed anyway, so we went with him.

After a short walk, we entered a small stone house. It was two stories, and we followed him up a dark steep stairwell, which I had some trouble climbing. At the top of the stairs and through a door was a large room where the old man introduced us to his wife and two daughters. He put on a gray suit jacket, sat in a chair by a table, and lit a cigarette.

My eyes migrated to a far wall of the room where a large color map of the former Soviet Union was hung on the wall. I stood up to look at it. Armenia appeared in the same shade of yellow as the Siberian tundra. I assume that the key indicated this as a dry climate with extreme temperatures. On a table below the map was a small Armenian Orthodox Bible embossed with a silver cross. There were four beds in the room, one against each wall, and a wood-burning
stove in the center that radiated heat and suppressed the damp chill.

One of the old man's daughters, a middle-aged woman herself, spread out a tablecloth on the table where her father sat. We all sat around it too and were served a warm yogurt-based soup with cracked wheat and cilantro called
spas.
Then she brought a plate of
lavash
(flat bread), with sour cheese, cilantro, violet-colored mint leaves, and arugula. Through a window I could see the rain falling and puddles forming on the once-dry earth. It had grown dark outside.

The old man ate little, but lit another cigarette when a loud clap of thunder resonated in the small valley.

“Twelve of my sheep were killed last night by wolves,” he told Nuné. “You can see the remains up the hill; they ripped open the bellies and ate the entrails but left the meat. I'm aiming to go up and fetch it and eat it myself.” Nuné made some attempt at sympathy and let a few moments pass before she asked about trout in the Masrik River on our behalf.

“There are trout in the stream,” he said, “but very few.” As the rain was pouring down he told us about a giant trout his cousin had caught in Lake Sevan just weeks before. “It was the biggest one I've ever seen. He is with some seasonal fishermen, a dozen or so, on the southeast shore. They are from Tsovagyugh but they camp for the summer on the opposite side near Aregooni.”

The old man encouraged us to spend the night in his home, but we declined his hospitality. The stream was blown out from the rain, it ran high and off-color, so we decided not to spend time fishing it. When we were walking out to the car I remembered that it had failed to start, but when Marat turned the key it did. Maybe it needed a rest.

 

Early that evening, we met with the fishermen on the eastern shore of Lake Sevan near the town of Aregooni. As the old man had told
us, there were a dozen men living there, all their possessions packed in old sedans, sleeping in tents on the beach near the lapping waves. They had four boats with outboard engines and the carcasses of expired engines sat on the gravel beach.

“Hello,” one said, extending his hand through a haze of cigarette smoke. He was drunk on
oghee,
a kind of grappa, and his whole body smelled of it. Nuné told them we were interested in seeing trout. A young fisherman named Hamlet invited us out in the boat to check his gill nets.

“My name is Hamlet,” he said, “after Shakespeare.”

He started the motor and we made our way out into the lake. The boat looked to be homemade from scrap metal and did not ride true, but meandered in the horizonless blue of the lake. When we had gone about a half mile there was no land to be seen.

The nets were hung beneath plastic bleach bottles and sunk with lead weights. Hamlet pulled the nets, which he said were set at twenty-five meters, but he caught no trout, only carp and barbel, which he did not even bother to take out of the net.

“They will be eaten by crayfish,” he said. “We haven't caught a trout in two weeks. Let's go back.”

 

The fishermen may not have had trout but they had plenty of grappa. Soon we were drunk too, sitting in their grubby midst. They all had stiff black beards, shirts caked with dried fish slime, and pants sequined with scales from carp and whitefish.

“We have to go into town, to Aregooni to find a place to spend the night,” said Nuné. The stars were brilliant overhead. “No,” Hamlet said, “you must stay with us.” He ran over to two small tents and began to clean them out. The four fishermen who had occupied them said they preferred to sleep near the surf, next to the piles of empty bottles. Marat hesitated to stay, but the fishermen were insistent, so we slept that night on their blankets, which smelled of smoke.

The sunburned fishermen smiled in the reflection of the campfire coals as they threw fish spines and tails from their own repast into the flames. Some fell over and passed out, and only a few were up at first light to pull the nets.

 

My knee became so swollen that I decided I should rest it even though I had lost hope of its getting better. Nuné stayed in the car with me and talked, or I read Turgenev stories to her, while Johannes and Marat walked up streams looking for trout. I felt bad not only for myself but for Johannes. He had counted on me to be an able travel partner and now I could not accompany him or help catch fish.

“Just get better,” he said when he spoke to me. I must, I thought, or it would be difficult to carry on the rest of the summer in terrain possibly more difficult than this.

Nuné rubbed calendula oil on my knee every day. She also concocted other remedies. One day she encountered some beekeepers off in the distance and walked through the tall dry grass to get a jar of comb honey. She spread the honey on
lavash
bread and had me eat it. “This will help,” she said. Another day, far from the lake now, we had come to a region near Jermuk known for its therapeutic springs. Nuné bought me bottles of mineral water and had me drink them. After several days of staying off it, watching Johannes bring fish he'd caught in tributaries of the Arpa River back to the car, my knee began to improve.

By the time we had returned to Yerevan the pain and swelling were nearly gone. As a final cure, Nuné invited us to her home and cooked a piece of sturgeon meat.

“It is an ancient and strong fish from the Caspian Sea,” she said. We ate the fishy-tasting fish, and I had an extra-large helping.

C
ENTRAL
A
SIA

E
xtending in a horizontal band between western China and Turkey, Central Asia is a largely dry and desolate region that travelers have always been eager to cross. In this sense it has never been the center of anything, except perhaps conflict. Historically, Central Asia supported a commercial network known today as the ancient Silk Road; the same roads are now used to move opium. Most were part of the Soviet Union until the early nineties, when the area was split into a half dozen or so countries with their own governments, informally called the
stans:
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. When I began doing research for my trip, I learned that the
stans
were difficult to enter and politically volatile, that rebel groups ran the hill country like nineteenth-century American bandits, looking for foreigners to take hostage. These were risks a
Schwarzfischer
secretly invited.

The only person I'd met who had been to Central Asia was a fellow trout hunter from southwest Scotland named Robin Ade. He had heard about my first book on trout and contacted me while on a trip through North America. He stayed two nights at my father's house; we fished local streams, and Robin shared stories of his travels.

He had lived in Afghanistan in the early seventies, back when it was a hippie hangout, like Nepal was in the 1980s and 1990s, with much available hashish and opium. He had not been back for over twenty years and then returned on a solo expedition in 1998 to search for the easternmost native brown trout,
Salmo trutta oxianus.
This trout lived in rough territory, in streams and lakes on the border with Pakistan, some of the highest elevations for native trout in
the world. It was just short of impossible for Westerners to enter Afghanistan legally at that time.

Sitting by my favorite brook trout stream in Connecticut one warm April day, Robin told me his story. “For several months in my home in the southwest highlands I grew out my beard. I bought a ticket to Islamabad, Pakistan, and from there took a jeep to Chitral. In Chitral, my beard nearly two feet long, I exchanged my Western clothes for local dress and walked to the Doruh Pass, forty-five hundred meters in elevation. From there I snuck across the border into Afghanistan as if I were a local.” Robin puffed on his pipe. “It helped that I speak Farsi.

“My destination was a lake at the head of the Konkce River, a high headwater of the Amu Darya River [what the Greeks called the Oxus, which flows to the Aral Sea]. In the days following I caught many trout. The scenery was beautiful.” Robin paused to puff on his pipe. “I was also traveling near a region of northern Pakistan where native people were fair skinned and blue eyed like me, so I really fit in quite well.”

“Did you encounter any hostility from the people?” I asked.

“The people, no,” he said. “Apart from a guy who chased me with a hatchet for trying to photograph his wife, the Afghans are warm people. But one day, an eagle swooped down and hit me from behind while I was fishing on a high ledge above the lake. I felt the wind first, and then it struck me with its talons. It nearly did do me in; I imagined it was trying to drive me off the cliff to kill me, as they do sheep and goats. Two weeks after I crossed the Doruh back into Pakistan, the Taliban fought the Pakistanis on the shore of the lake where I'd been fishing. I was very lucky with my timing. If I had stayed I would have been taken hostage or killed.”

Despite the risks of being caught in the midst of a skirmish, or killed by an eagle, Robin had a positive attitude about Central Asia and its largely nomadic peoples. “No matter if they are Russian
Orthodox, Muslim, or Buddhist, the country people will treat you well. Islam especially is a religion based on hospitality. You have to tolerate inconvenience, though, and accept that travel there is unpredictable and fickle. The borders are disputed, the people have no work, and you can get unlucky.”

When he left my house he wrote the following in the guest book:

“In appreciation of two days with James, not counted against our allotted span—catching magical brook trout and discussing the finer points of our esoteric researches.”

Johannes and I had focused our sights on Kyrgyzstan (which borders Tajikistan on the south, Kazakhstan on the north, China on the east, and Uzbekistan on the west), a newly formed democracy risen from the rubble of the Soviet Union. From the little information we could find, Kyrgyzstan appeared to be the most stable former Soviet republic, and one of stunning alpine beauty (ninety percent of the country is mountains). It also had populations of the easternmost native brown trout, living in streams originating in the Pamir Alay Mountains.

 

We flew from Yerevan, over the Caspian and Aral seas, enormous bodies of water, and a large desert expanse of the 41st parallel to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Once we had landed, Johannes and I waited in Almaty all day in the terminal for Ida's arrival. We were afraid that if we left the terminal that somehow we would not be able to return. Our valid transit visas were supposed to hold us over until we got to Kyrgyzstan, but we were not allowed to stay very long in Kazakhstan.