SEX AND THE SINGLE SALMON

Sport

In 1950s Australia, the story of Salar the Salmon set a pre-pubescent boy on the road to manhoodéand a lifelong love affair with fly-fishing. The first lure may have been sex, as the author recalls, but the rewards were pure and lasting

ROBERT HUGHES

Unlikely as it may seem, my first identifiably sexual memories are associated with fish and fishing. Back in 1950, when I was 11 years old, I came across a book in my father's library: Salar the Salmon, by Henry Williamson. This short and elaborately written book is sometimes referred to as an "angling classic"—but actually it isn't about angling at all, at least not from the viewpoint of the angler. It is about life underwater, into which human enemies sometimes intrude; it is a novel whose central character is an Atlantic salmon, ascending its home stream to spawn after its long migration. It is pre-Disney, in that it contains no trace of the pathologically sentimental grafting of human characteristics onto nonhuman creatures that has overrun the childish imagination since Bambi, the fawn with no anus, first hit the silver screen. In its depiction of the Darwinian world in which sea creatures actually live, where everything is prey to everything else, it seemed alien and utterly fascinating. At the end of his odyssey, having run the gauntlet of seals, otters, nets, and a villainous lamprey, Salar finally reaches his biological Ithaca: the spawning beds, or redds. There, a hen salmon named Gralaks—"ripe, ready to drop her eggs"—is scooping a trough in the gravel to spawn in. Salar moves in on her. "She jerked and shook on her side, as though trying to touch the back of her neck with her tail. Eggs dribbled quickly from her.... [Salar] moved forward, feeling as though he were being drawn from underneath by a lamprey of sweeter and sweeter sensation. His milt flowed from him in a mist.... For a few moments Salar lay in ecstasy on the redd." And, lucky devil, he just keeps going.

Excerpted fromA Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman,by Robert Hughes, to be published this month by the Ballantine Publishing Group; © 1999 by the author.

"As the days went on, Salar became heavy with weariness. Most of his milt was shed; in slow pulse after slow pulse his life's sweetness had been drawn from him, leaving with each emptiness a greater inflaming desire, which during the day lapped about the wasted body with dreams of an everlasting sea of rest; but when darkness came, and the water was ashine with stars, he felt himself running bright with the river, and sweetness returned to him on the redd beside Gralaks."

Phew. A tad overwrought, you may think, though I didn't at the time. A flagrant bit of R.B.P. (rich, beautiful prose) it may be, though not inherently sillier than the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which of course I had never even heard of. Perhaps you had to be there—a pre-teen with unidentified longings beginning to stir in him, in a family and a culture that were single-mindedly bent on maintaining his purity for as long as possible. In Australia in 1950 there were no sex manuals, magazines full of naked girls with staples in their navels, or novels with "explicit" passages. Even less could you download, from the Web, pictures of alleged schoolgirls doing bizarre things with enormously endowed ponies. Such improvements were far in the future. The strictest censorship reigned in civil life, and in Catholic life it was even stricter. One was meant to confess one's "impure thoughts" to the priest, but this I never did. Somehow it just seemed too complicated to explain to Monsignor O'Regan, in the dark and stuffy confines of the confessional booth of St. Mary Magdalene's at Rose Bay, how I had been led to them by a description of spawning fish. He might have thought I was some kind of pervert in the making, not just an ordinary pre-pubescent sinner. It was one thing to risk the fires of hell, but quite another to look like a fool. Besides which, although Henry Williamson had told me what fish got up to, I was still far from clear about what people did.

People who use live bait on trout are not fit to fish. They are thugs. They are barbarians."

T he other memory comes from 1952, I the year after my father died, when I I was 13. Gradually the clutter of stuff he left behind in cupboards and drawers had been winnowed out: rods and guns going to my elder brothers, clothes sent to Catholic charities. But a lot of small things remained, and since nobody wanted to throw them away, I would sometimes paw circumspectly through the contents of the drawers, trying to recover some detail or other of the life of a man whom I deeply loved but now would never know as an adult. It was in this way that I came across the first visual image of a semi-naked woman that I had ever seen. It was not a photograph. It was molded, in clear Lucite, on the spool on which an American fly-fishing line had been coiled. The brand name was Rain-Beau, a pun in Art Deco lettering. I forget the manufacturer's name. It had been made in some place called Milwaukee, far away in unimaginable America. Lucky Americans, to have such things on their fishing gear! The scene was a river, with Lucite eddies flowing past Lucite rocks. Smack in the center, next to a rock, was the girl. Her actual height was perhaps two inches, but she looked willowy and. I was sure, tall. A mane of hair cascaded down her back, coiling like the eddies in the water. Though it was Lucite, I was convinced she was blonde. She was fly-fishing. Her rod was bent in an arc under the pull of a trout, which could be seen leaping. Her backside and legs were hidden, although suggestively, in waders. But you could see her bare back and, most important, the profile of her breast. It was perky and, as such dimensions go in two-inch-high girls, quite large. I thought her mysterious and entrancing—a sexpot nymph of the stream. (Indeed, from then on I could not hear the word "nymph" uttered, as it often is by fly-fishers, without thinking of her.) For sure, you never saw girls like that on Rose Bay pier, only other scrubby small boys with freckles, Rugby scabs, and handlines, along with a few old codgers on the dole. Unconsciously, I suppose, I thought of her as a reward of the more refined and difficult kind of fishing that had begun to invade my imagination: fishing with a fly in rivers, not with bait in the sea.

For by then I was deep into fly-fishing, more in theory than in everyday practice, since there were no troutbearing rivers near Sydney. My father had been a keen flyfisherman, and so were my elder brothers. He was a strict purist when it came to any sport, but particularly about shooting and fishing. Assume that any gun you touch is loaded. Never point it at anything you don't intend to shoot at. Never shoot anything alive unless you mean to eat it. And never, under any circumstances, fish for trout with anything but a fly. This prohibition had both practical and moral aspects. The practical one was that flyfishing was usually a more effecti.^ w catch trout than live-baiting: you could, indeed must, figure out what they were feeding on and then choose a fly to match the food, whether that happened to be larvae on the stream bottom, smaller fish, or insects descending on the water. Your fly box, with its wide palette of different patterns, gave you the means to do this more efficiently, and of course more elegantly, than barging around on the riverbank catching beetles in your hat. The moral aspect was related to the elegance.

From the time I was seven or eight, after my father had been released from service as a flying instructor in the Royal Air Force, the whole family—or as much of it as could be assembled—would go camping together on the Murrumbidgee River, in a valley named Yaouk, near Jindabyne, 300 miles south of Sydney, in the foothills of the Australian Alps. The tent—a manyroomed structure of heavy canvas, with a bewildering array of poles, pegs, and guy ropes—would be packed into a twowheeled trailer, along with the rest of the gear: grill, bush oven, kerosene lamps, Primus stove, cooking utensils, a folding table and chairs, rod cases, a pair of shotguns, a .22 single-shot rifle, duffel bags of clothes, food, books, and the Thunderbox, a folding single-hole wooden lavatory seat. The Hughes clan did not travel light, and this mass of stuff, tarped over and roped down, rose quite high above the sides of the trailer. It was as if we were heading for Africa, though without native bearers. The whole shebang was then hitched to the family car, a turtlelike machine called a Chrysler Airflow. We would pack ourselves in and set off. Due to the primitive state of Australian roads then, the trip would take 10 hours, evening to breakfast-time, with occasional stops for car sickness. But it was worth it. One arrived in the dry rackling paradise of the Australian bush: a golden valley, resonant with birdcalls, through which the Murrumbidgee flowed ginclear over its pebbled bed, with backwaters full of undisturbed wild duck. It took all morning to unpack and raise the tent, and then there was lunch, but by afternoon we'd be free to fish.

Not that I was—at first. At nine I was not old and responsible enough to have a trout rod of my own. These rods were precious and, in postwar Australia, irreplaceable. They were exquisitely slender, split-cane rods, handmade before the war by the English firm of Hardy's. The days of the mass-produced fiberglass or, later, boron-graphite fly rod were far in the future. Cane rods were inordinately prone to damage, and a whole etiquette of handling attached to them. You couldn't lay one on the ground, in case you stepped on it and broke it. You had to lean it up against a tree, always vertical. Walking to the river, you had to carry the rod in three pieces, never assembled, so as not to run the tip into a bush and bust it. And so on and so forth; a samurai in dealing with his sword could hardly have been more circumscribed by ritual usage. The first year I went to Yaouk, I was not allowed to touch the rods, though I would do so, surreptitiously, marveling at their lightness and finesse. The second year I was allowed to practice casting, always under adult supervision. Not until my third visit there was I turned loose on the water, on my own. The result was not good.

I can see the pool still. Half a mile upstream from camp, with perfect solitude and a silence broken only by a crow saying at intervals, as Australian crows morosely do, fark. Thirty feet wide, glass-clear, with deep dark overhangs. In the middle, several rocks; and behind each of them, hanging in the eddy, a trout, just like the ones I had studied in the river before and scrutinized in the diagrams of my various trout books. Except that now I had a rod and some flies. All over the pool, fish were rising, not just dimpling the surface with demure rings, but slashing at the grasshoppers falling into the stream. The air was alive with grasshoppers. All thumbs, I managed to tie a fly to my leader. The first clumsy cast snagged me in a bush. The second, in a gum tree. The third landed in an ugly hurrah's nest of tangles on the water. The fourth, likewise. It was a nightmare. And when I finally got some semblance of rhythm into my casting, the trout ignored the flies, which didn't look like grasshoppers. This went on for half an hour, maybe more. Finally, sweating with frustration, I decided to break the great taboo. I got out my pocketknife, scraped the feathers off the largest fly I had, knotted the bare hook on, and impaled a fat, kicking hopper on it. Then I flipped it into the water. It floated, struggling, past the nearest rock. Instantly there was a swirl, and for the first time in my life, I was connected to a trout, and through it to the rest of the universe. It wasn't a giant—a brown, maybe two pounds—but it fought like a Kilkenny cat, making long, erratic runs and jumping into the air to show its golden spotted flanks. I did everything right. I dipped the rod tip when it jumped. I didn't freeze on the reel when it ran. I led sideways to tire the fish more. I knew what it was going to do and saw everything it did. I was in ecstasy. And at last, having fumbled the landing net from the hook on my belt, I was floating the exhausted fish into the mesh when the voice of Jehovah fell on me, like a ton of bricks, from the sky.

Let that fish go!" it commanded. straightened up and looked wildly about me. Nothing. Then, to my horror, the head and chest of my father rose into view from where he had been watching everything I did, behind a big fallen eucalyptus trunk on the far bank.

"Release that fish!" he boomed.

I twisted the hook from its jaw and watched it half drift, half swim away downstream.

"Now come over here."

Filled with foreboding, I waded across the pool. I noticed, with worse foreboding, that Dad had unbuckled his belt and was pulling it out of the loops. He gently took the rod from my hand, leaned it carefully against the fallen trunk, and then less gently seized my arm, spun me around, and delivered a slashing stroke of the belt to my backside. It didn't hurt much.

"I saw that," he said grimly. "You got that trout with a hopper. You will never do that again. People who use live bait on trout are not fit to fish. They are thugs. They are barbarians. They might as well be using dynamite. Now, get back to camp."

Sniveling, hot with shame, I followed him. I was allowed back on the river the next day, and I have never since fished for trout with anything but an artificial fly. Perhaps in some spirit of expiation toward the god of fishing purity, I began to transfer the hobby mania that kids are apt to have away from building model airplanes and onto the tying of trout flies. There were copious examples at home, together with pattern books and the gear you needed to make flies: a tiny vise with pointed jaws to hold the hooks, forceps, thread, wax, varnish to seal the final knot behind the hook's eye, and dozens of small cellophane envelopes containing feathers. I turned them out by the score, perky confections of fluff and hackle that, for all I knew, had no similarity to Australian insects; but the ritual, that was what mattered. And sometimes they worked.

The first time 1 caught a trout on a fly of my own making was on a stream called Spencer's Creek, a tributary of the Snowy River that flowed down a bony, bare hillside near Mount Kosciuszko, the highest peak in Australia. I remember the near-abstract perfection of that stream: no entangling bushes, just big ledges of elephant-gray rock, snow-worn into gentle voluminous curves with sudden facets where the boulders had broken off, with the hillside mantled in wiry flattened grass and snow daisies rising out of the water. I was 13 and fishing on my own, having walked a long way in from the road. There was a pool, maybe a hundred yards long, clear as green glass. I looked down on it from a smooth spur of granite. And there, hovering behind a large sunken rock, was a big trout. These elements—fish, rock, water, landscape—came together with astounding clarity, and I felt like their possessor. To complete the circle I must catch the fish with a fly I had tied myself, and no other would do. I picked out a March Brown, knotted it to the leader, and made one cast. I felt what tennis players or golf players do when the stroke is as sweet as it can be. The line shot out with a slight upstream curve; the leader turned over just as the books said it should; the fly parachuted softly onto the water, the transparent current bore it past the rock, and the fish rose to it. Fifteen minutes later 1 had him on the bank: a deep-bodied rainbow. I made a fire of snow-gum twigs and, when it had burned down, roasted him in the embers for lunch. The charred skin and scales came clean away, and his flesh was a deep pink from his diet of crayfish. I ate every scrap of him. I had never tasted anything as delicious, or as sacramental. Later, on the way back to the road, it occurred to me that I had at last done something, in relation to fish, of which my father would have fully approved. But he was dead, and beyond approving anything.

Just how the salmonids —trout, salmon, char, grayling, and their various relatives—came to be regarded as aristocratic game fish and the numerous other freshwater species as coarse is an interesting question with no simple answer, but no sociologist (or none that I can find) seems to have gone deeply into it. The discrimination began in the 18th century and had become fixed in England by the mid-19th. My own guess—perhaps a rather obvious one—is that it descended from the intense concern with property laws in Georgian England. Stable property, and the absolute right to control public access to it, was one of the prime clear signs of social stability for a landowning class that often felt threatened from below by agrarian unrest. One of the highest marks of a desirable landholding was that, to use a much later phrase, "a river runs through it," and that this river should hold fish, whose safety from proletarian intrusion must be upheld by law. Georgian England witnessed a continuous struggle between fish thieves and fish owners, spurred not so much by the economic importance of the fish to the landowner as by its symbolic value. The monster of all property acts, the Waltham Black Act of 1723, was passed in response to some minor agrarian uprisings in Hampshire, and it prescribed the gallows for some 50 different offenses to property, including the theft of live fish from streams and ponds—this at a time when attempted murder of live humans was still classed as only a misdemeanor. In English social portraiture, the creel of freshly caught trout joined the game bag of dead fur and feathers as one of the marks of the gentleman, at ease in his acres.

As the English countryside was transformed by the Industrial Revolution, both the old landed gentry and the new mercantile one, whose coal mines and ironworks were fouling the streams and blackening the meadows of an earlier England, naturally wanted to have their own unpolluted crystal rills, the image of whose purity was the trout. It was an Arcadian fish, which could live only in clear running water, unlike the lowly tench or carp, which could stand any amount of mud and gunk. Its flesh was firm and delicious. It looked supremely elegant, with its quicksilver flanks and rosy speckles. Its proportions were refined and its presence mild and elusive (the grayling was also called an umber, from umbra, Latin for "shadow"). Trout were fastidious. They spooked easily, thus summoning from the fisherman his reserves of those gentlemanly qualities, delicacy and circumspection. To fish "fine and far" (with a light leader, standing well back and making a long cast) was first enjoined as a practical technique by Charles Cotton, who in 1676 added the section on fly-fishing to Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler: by the 19th century it had become a stylistic imperative, a sign of class, like keeping a straight bat at cricket, which was also in those days a gentleman's sport. Trout fought bravely but surrendered gracefully. Once in hand, they could not jag you with spines, cut you with their gill covers, or inflict bites with their teeth. Nor were they covered with thick slime. The gear of fly-fishing was clean, minimal. One handled a neat little tuft of feathers. One did not have to bother with the sometimes noisome baits used for coarse fish: slimy minnows, smelly pastes, the "ground bait," or chum, or especially the pallid maggots, known euphemistically as "gentles," associated with corruption and the grave. (You wouldn't want to know what went into some of those compound baits. One 17thcentury recipe included human fat and powdered bones, "mummy," cat fat, and grave earth—everything but Tartar's lips and the liver of a blaspheming Jew.)

The whole iconography of trout lishing befitted a gentleman—that is, a person of independent income, preferably landed, with ample leisure and a calm, philosophical disposition. Such a man, wrote James Saunders in The Compleat Fisherman (1724), "must have all his Passions at his Command, he must govern his Temper with an absolute Sway, and be able to sustain his Mind under the greatest Disappointments." In sum. he ought not stamp on his rods in frustration, curse and swear, or—as one particularly gross Australian media mogul did in the presence of a friend of mine in Alaska a few years ago—yank out a hogleg .44 magnum and blow to shreds a landed salmon in pettish rage at being told he must release it. The true gentleman angler could not, by Saunders's reckoning, be a "Man of Business," because if he left his countinghouse to go fishing he "makes the Sport become a Vice in his Morals; his Angling is a Crime." Nor should he make fishing into a business, which lowered its tone. Such assumptions permeated the English literature of angling, which grew large through the 19th century and into the 20th. Not only was the artificial fly better than natural bait, but the dry fly, which floated on the surface of the water, was morally superior to the wet fly, which did not; and both had a stylistic edge over the nymph, which had no wings and drifted along the bottom, emulating the larval stage of the insect. To catch a trout on a tiny fly, tied on a No. 16 or even No. 18 hook attached to a leader of gossamer thinness, was clearly a more elegant achievement than getting one on larger tackle. In due course, the whole Victorian-Edwardian Bushido of fine-tackle, dry-fly fishing would migrate from the chalk streams of Kent to the rivers of America, where it grew enormously. The chief transmitter of this fanaticism was an Englishman, Frederic M. Halford, whose bizarrely snobbish book Dry-Fly Fishing: In Theory and Praetiee (1889) won numerous converts in the United States. Though they got rid of Lord North and George III long ago, Americans are ravenous for Anglo-derived signs of style, and large businesses, such as Ralph Lauren's fashion empire, have been raised on packaging these fictions to eager customers. Hence the annual appearance on the rivers of New England, such as the Batten Kill, of dedicated anglers wielding implausibly fragile two-weight rods, preferably made of oldfashioned bamboo rather than state-of-the-art synthetics. With these they "present" (the verb, with its ceremonious aura, is significant) diminutive flies to trout rarely more than a pound in weight—fish so jaded from being caught and released that they can tell an Orvis-tied Gray Wulff or Rat-Faced McDougal from a homemade one. In the country of gorge-and-puke consumption, the catch-and-release angler rejoices in his ethical apartness. And quite right, too, because if American anglers killed the trout they caught, there would soon be no trout left.

I had at last done something, in relation to fish, of which my father would have fully approved.

Catch-and-release, apart from its virtues in preserving the fish population, is the liar's friend: all trout grow when you let them go.