The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (34 page)

It's been four years since I left the city. And though New York has never entirely left my thoughts, this is the first occasion I've really had to look back. I live in an A-frame on a lake in central Georgia. Two paintings hang on the wall behind the desk where I write. The top painting is an interior of a subway car rendered in muted grays and browns, with passengers asleep or reading books or gripping subway straps, as my friend Chris and I did when we were 15. The painting underneath it is of the Empire State Building at night, its rows of windows represented by daubs of yellow paint, a full moon burning alongside its glowing blimp tower. From that painting I only have to turn my head a few degrees clockwise to see the lake through the slats of the venetian blinds of the doors that open out to my deck, with the weather-beaten dock from which I swim reaching out over it. As places go, none could seem farther from New York.

From my dock I count 200 strokes to the other side of the inlet and as many coming back. These days, that and a three-three university teaching load is all the ambition I need. Thanks to the lake, I have plenty of water to supply it. Between stretches of work at my computer I swim sometimes as often as three times a day. With every stroke I push the past farther away, and with it my memories of New York City.

Who am I kidding? I'll carry the city with me forever. It's in my bones, my flesh, my DNA, my genes. It's the egg that my father fertilized and that gave birth to me. With every stroke I swim deeper and deeper into the teeming metropolis of my dreams.

FROM
Outside

 

W
E EACH HAVE OUR DREAMS
and if they are meant to mean anything at all you hold tight and don't let them go. You can dream of love or money or fame or something much more grand than a fish, but if a fish swims into your imagination and never swims out it will grow into an obsession and the obsession might drag you anywhere, up to the metaphysical heights or down into an ass-busting nightmare, and the quest for my dream fish—South America's dorado—seems to run in both directions.

Of course the dream is never just about a fish but about a place as well, an unknown landscape and its habitat of active wonders, populated by creatures looming around the primal edges of our civilized selves. A place like the ancestral homeland of the Guaraní Indians at the headwaters of the Río Paraná, near where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay come together. In the Guaraní language,
pirá
means “fish,” and this fish, the legendary dorado, is called
pirajú,
the affix meaning “yellow.” In my dreams the
pirajú
skyrockets out of its watery underworld, a piece of shrapnel from a submerged sun, like a shank of gold an archaeologist might find in the tomb of an Incan king.

After years of unrequited dorado lust, last spring I seized the dream by the gills and finally took off for the Southern Hemisphere. I would be hooking up with a guide known worldwide as the king of dorado, Noel Pollak, the best person wired into the fish and its latitudes, the guarantor of the dream and your insertion into its depths. Six months earlier we had schemed to meet in Bolivia at a Pollak-discovered location that had become renowned as dorado nirvana, but we had not been able to manage that trip, for reasons I'll get to in a moment. Instead, we were now connecting at the end of what should have been the fair-weather season somewhere in Argentina's Iberá Wetlands—an area almost seven times as large as Florida's Everglades—although the specifics of our rendezvous weren't exactly clear to me.
Get on a plane, find me.
Noel was frequently off in the bush, out on the water, and our communications had been last-minute, the logistics addressed in a manner all too breezy and cavalier.

But that's how dreams operate—you fling yourself into their spell and expect it will all work out. What you really must expect however is the strong possibility that such immoderate optimism will be sorely tested.

 

After a daylong flight from Miami, I land after dark in Buenos Aires and check into the Hub Porteño past midnight. No one at the hotel has heard of my final destination, Mercedes, Corrientes. Indeed, even the placard at the airport ticket counter the next morning doesn't identify it on the flight manifest. At our first stopover, everybody disembarks but me and a Chinese businessman, and an hour later we put down in the weather-beaten colonial town of Mercedes, which is probably like flying into Chicken Neck, Louisiana, in 1955. Descending, I can see curls and snakes and catchments of muddy water everywhere, a saturated landscape, a fishery run amok, and I imagine schools of dorado patrolling the floodwaters of the pampas like marauding tigers, gobbling up rabbits and lambs.

Someone named Ricardo has come to fetch me in his mud-encrusted pickup truck. Hello, I say, how do you say mud in Spanish?
Barro.
We drive through somnambulant streets to a two-lane highway and then onto a deeply rutted dirt track, its surface melted to goo.
Mucho barro,
I say to Ricardo, who struggles mightily with the steering wheel. Too much rain,
sí?
Sí,
he nods. The fishing has been affected,
sí?
A little, says Ricardo. We pass through endless flat ranchland, small rivers swollen with floodwater, the pastures lapped with water, sheep and cattle crowded onto the high spots. The clouds roil overhead, looking ever more threatening, the truck sliding in and out of the ruts until we finally skate sideways off the roadbed, axle-deep into the slop.

It's midafternoon by the time we mud-surf into Pirá Lodge. Pirá is the first five-star lodge dedicated exclusively to dorado fishing, built in 2000 by an outfitter called Nervous Waters. The compound is quietly welcoming, an understated outback haven for one-percenters, although put me to bed in a cardboard box, for all I care—my idea of privilege is limited to landing a ferocity with fins.

Of the original team of hotshot guides at Pirá, only one was Argentine, a fish-crazed kid from the capital named Noel Pollak, a self-described “born fisherman” who looks like most of the sinewy, bantamweight rock climbers I've known. In 1987, when he was 13, Noel decided he was a fish geek and taught himself fly-fishing, practicing at a lake in a city park. At 21, he dropped out of university to become a professional sport fisherman. For him it wasn't a decision, it was beyond intelligence, it was a calling, like entering the priesthood in waders.

He started giving fly-fishing lessons to friends and writing fishing articles for a magazine,
Aventura.
Then Argentina's largest newspaper,
La Nación,
asked him to write a biweekly column. But after two years on the beat, Pollak was sick of it all, fed up with writing—actually, fed up with being edited—and he walked away from the job. Instead of buying a car with his savings, he bought a skiff and began guiding in the nearby Paraná delta, 45 minutes from downtown Buenos Aires. Then Pirá Lodge came into the picture. He guided at Pirá for 10 seasons; by the third he was promoted to head guide, eventually managing the place. Then in 2006 he took an off-season trip to Bolivia, where he would encounter both glory and betrayal.

 

Noel takes me directly to the boat dock, where the lodge's pair of Hell's Bay flats skiffs are tied up on a channel of swift, caramel-colored water, providing access to the marshes and lagoons and the headwaters of the Río Corriente, a tributary of the Paraná. Both the Paraná and the Río Uruguay farther to the east eventually merge north of Buenos Aires to form the Río de la Plata, the widest river in the world.

Standing on the dock, even a newcomer can see that conditions are not normal here. The channel has overflowed its banks, submerging the lower trunks of willow trees, sending water up the lawns of the lodge. Two days earlier, a low-pressure system over the Amazon basin descended into Argentina and dropped 20 inches of rain in 48 hours, resulting in the worst flooding in 10 years. Not to be deterred, Noel fished the downpour with his last stubborn client, Jimmy Carter, who had left the lodge that morning to dry out in BA.

My moment of truth has now arrived. I'm an agnostic, an unapologetic philistine, one devolution away from fishing with dynamite. Noel puts his gorgeous bamboo fly rod in my hands, wants me to feel its craftsmanship, wants me to love it, wants to see what I can do, but it might as well be a nine-foot piece of rebar in my clumsy grip, and so I show him just how graceless an otherwise competent man can be, stripping out line like an infirm monkey, noodling my cast up and up until it plummets ineffectually midway into the channel. Because he has teaching ingrained in his personality, Noel seems to think he can help me overcome my deficiencies, and he probably could, but there's too little time, and I have no intention of spending it feeling frustrated and dumb. “No one who is learning should ever feel stupid,” Noel says, trying to console me, but honestly, screw it. For once the art is beside the point. I don't want to learn, I want to fish, and I know how to handle my spinning rod.

Noel, unlike the majority of fly-fishermen I know, is an easygoing, tolerant guy. He maintains his composure in the face of my blasphemy and we go fishing.

 

We blast down the esoteric maze of pathways through the marshlands, the channels no wider than a suburban sidewalk. Noel pilots the boat like a motocross driver at full throttle, slaloming through serpentine creeks, making hairpin turns, rocketing ahead across small lagoons into seemingly solid walls of vegetation, the fronds of the reeds whipping my face.

After 20 minutes, the marshes open up into bigger water, providing a clearer picture of why the Argentines call this region Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. The horizons are tree lined, but out here vast clumps of floating islands composed of reeds and their root systems define the ecosystem. As the water gets deeper and as wide as the length of a football field, horses are suddenly everywhere in the stream, washed out of their range. Only their heads are visible, nostrils flared red, chased by swarthy gauchos in pirogues trying to herd them back to terra firma. Farther on, where the marshlands pinch in again at the headwaters of the Corriente, Noel cuts the motor and climbs atop the poling platform bolted onto the stern and we drift, El Maestro calling out advice and wisdom to me, poised in the bow.

To fish for dorado requires the hyper-accuracy of a marine sniper, every cast by necessity a bull's-eye or you're in the vegetation. Of course, as a marksman, Noel uses the equivalent of a bow and arrow, and I'm firing a rifle. His mantra is persistent but gentle—
Cast at that riffle, cast at that inlet, cast at that confluence.
After dozens of fruitless casts, I'm thinking, Fine, let's do dozens more. That old man Jimmy Carter bounced around out here in hard rain for two days and boated eight dorados.

Try over there, says Noel, pointing to an eddy line where a channel runs out of the reeds into the main current.
Kaboom
is the noise you don't hear but feel when a dorado strikes, and the next thing you know the beast is in the air, a solid-gold furious thrashing bolt of life, and the next thing you know after that is farewell, goodbye, it's gone, and you are inducted into the Hall of Jubilant Pain that is dorado fishing. The fish launches out of the water with a hook in its bony jaws and razor teeth and when it comes back down after a three-second dance it's perfectly free and you're bleeding internally, experiencing some pure form of defeat.

“If you love fishing you're going to fall in love with this fish,” Noel declares. “But they make you suffer, hombre. Like the woman who you really fall in love with, they always keep you at the edge. I will admit it, I like the difficult fish.” With the sun about to set, I conjure a second fish into the sky and lose it, too.

 

At breakfast Noel jokes that he'll wear his lucky hat today, “the one I was wearing when I discovered this place in Bolivia,” but then again, Bolivia didn't turn out so well. We take off in the skiff down the channel into the marshlands but the flooding is now unprecedented; its surge has separated vast platforms of the vegetation, breaking apart floating islands and jamming together new ones. We finally plow our way out into the Corriente and pole and drift the edges, both of us fishing for three hours. Nothing. We try every possible combination of structures and depths. Nada. Shit. Noel has never seen these waters like this. The Paraná—a four-hour drive north—will be better, he promises. The drainage is different, the riparian geology less susceptible to the washout here in the marshes. We head back to the lodge, pack up, and hit the road.

Fishing guides are in many respects the most innocent people in the world, always believing in the best, believing in the next cast, another chance, embracing a type of aesthetics and idealism found most bracingly in nature. Fly-fishermen especially are dismayed by a cretinous mentality, unable to comprehend a certain type of laziness and a certain type of greed.

Noel and I go to the Paraná because we can't go to Bolivia, where he and his investors built what became a legendary dorado camp, the Tsimane Lodge, up in the jungled foothills of the eastern flank of the Andes. Days of walking through the jungle, days of shitty fishing, then a flight in a bush plane and days more being paddled upriver by bow-and-arrow Indians in a dugout canoe, until finally the murky water cleared, the air brightened, the river was beautiful, and Noel experienced the most amazing day of dorado fishing in his life. They were all giants, and they came to him one after another. “I almost want to cry, remembering this,” he tells me.

Three years of discovery and development, three years of fabulously successful operations, and then the money disappeared, all the profits—even the staff's salaries—vanishing into a wormhole. Noel doesn't want to air the details, but suffice to say that his greatest success was also his greatest ass-kicking, a pattern that seems close to the essence of existence, dorado style. Back in Buenos Aires, he couldn't even lift himself out of his bed for months. But he had left Nervous Waters, the outfitters of Pirá Lodge and in his opinion the number one fly-fishing outfit in the world, on good terms, and when his depression lifted Noel and Nervous Waters hatched a scheme for a new partnership built around a dorado trifecta—day trips out of Buenos Aires to the delta, a future lodge elsewhere in South America, and the first dorado operation on the upper reaches of the Paraná. This new place, called the Alto Paraná Lodge, based out of a 100,000-acre estancia named San Gara, would open for business in October.