To the Ponoi
I’m finally on the river, but Spey-casting is a bother. I step off the foredeck of our jet boat and hand my rod to guide Dan Podolski. Dan and I are far from camp, which is far from the nearest village, which is far from anywhere. Each pair of anglers had been allotted a guide and a beat at random the previous night, and we’re fishing the Ryabaga’s topmost beat, an hour upstream of camp by boat.
The morning fog lifts gradually, carrying my hangover with it, and my eyes are clear. In the past, I’ve fly fished through a myopic lens, favoring the small streams of my native New England. I am used to delicate presentations made with delicate rods, and I’ve grown accustomed to delicate fish. New to Spey casting, and beset by an ego that loathes a line that refuses to fall in a tight loop, I’d handed the rod to Dan in order to watch one of the world’s finest casters.
Dan grew up with a Spey rod in his hands, and his movements exhibit a beautiful economy of motion. In a subculture of anglers fascinated by the arcane, he is a master of a particularly esoteric craft. With a flat, flicking motion, he paints a shallow C with his rod tip that opens downstream and lays the leader up above him. He sweeps the rod tip back, charging the line behind him in a loop that leaves only the tiny fly on the surface of the river. Dan’s body cocks like a corkscrew over his shoulder, pausing as the line loads. All motion stops. The river rushes, and the clouds move with glacial sloth while Dan and his cast become a frozen moment. Then he uncorks it, powering forward with a flick of elbow and wrist that drops the rod tip nearly back to the water. In an instant, he is perched like a heron, smiling as the fly sweeps an arc across the current, nearly 150 feet from where he stands.
I look downstream at the track of Dan’s fly, where it rides under the surface. Something surges behind it, and Dan moves quickly, stripping in the line and clucking his tongue.
“Good fish there. You cast now,” and he points toward the receding swirl. I take the rod and do my best, trying consciously to think of other things and let the rod do the work. It feels good and unfurls toward the fishy place, but nothing moves. “Again,” says Dan, and I cast again, thinking way too much this time, and the line piles up. I strip in and try to cast again, but the strain of a botched attempt and a big fish have me unglued. I bungle the whole thing and slap my rod on the water.
Then, as I’m thinking about chucking my rod in the river, an Atlantic salmon eats my fly.
It must have been almost under the boat, and it took a fly that was just hanging there, attached to a defeatist bastard with entitlement issues. It likely knew that, for it took off like a shot, presumably thinking in its primitive brain, As soon as I start pulling, this son of a bitch is gonna decide he can’t land me, and I’ll take whatever’s left of him waaaaay upstream.
Atlantic salmon are known for their power, but they can play things close to the vest. They can be coaxed through the current, making you second-guess all the rumors you’ve heard, and then they see the boat, or the net, or the guy in the river with the stick in his hands. That’s when they smoke you. They explode with an aerial escape plan that sends them spiraling hundreds of feet from the rod tip, twisting and head-shaking until physics puts demands on the hook that it can’t hope to live up to. I’m watching the fish skipping away over the shimmer of water and I realize, with the release of line through my fingers, that none of this makes sense at all.
This fish is flying away yet staying attached somehow, and there is, communicated through the line and into my hands, a wildness that is beyond the physical, or perhaps elementally physical. I don’t understand this fish, the things it has seen on its journeys, the reason it chose to become acquainted with me. But we are now connected and waging a sort of ludicrous war, and I’m trying to convince it that I’m not a bad guy, that I just want to get that sharp thing out of its lip. We struggle back and forth, and finally I swing it near and lift its head. It materializes, blazing under the sheen of water. Dan stabs with his net, and there we are, in the presence of, but somehow not in possession of, a slab of August silver.
The Big Picture
The bank below camp is broad and flat, but the cobbles are hard to walk over. There are big boulders, and tributaries that trickle off the tundra, joining the main river. Lunch is laid out by the water, and a birch fire keeps the no-see-ums down. The moist wood will lend some smoke to the salmon fillets we’ve kept for lunch. A shore lunch on the Ponoi features soup, tea, bread, cookies, and always cucumbers. And when a salmon takes the hook fatally, it features fish.
The guides are unapologetic about this, and they thump the fish soundly and serve them almost at once. Some are grilled over live coals, and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Others are slivered into sashimi that is the very temperature of the river. From my vantage up here on the bank, I watch Max Mamaev hunched over his cutting board. The fillets that fold off his knife are sunset pink and command the scene. Carter and Heidi sit on a boulder drinking Grolsch beer and laughing at Breuer, who is dancing around in his waders, gesturing wildly. I can’t hear his story over the rush of water, but his pantomime is spectacular, and I smile, too.
Beyond my friends flows the river, where salmon show in their telltale leaps. Beyond them is the sheer far bank, collapsing in places to the water. Above the ledge a sky sweeps over the lip of tundra all the way to the North Pole. At this moment, I realize how far I am from anywhere I know, and yet how familiar it all is. I’m a fisherman, seeking the same universal connection as at home.
I sit down at the edge of a tributary pool and watch the ravens spinning off the far cliff. I look down at Breuer, Carter, and Heidi, who’ve fished across the continents for hundreds of species. I watch Max peeling back the flesh of a salmon that, an hour before, was traveling its timeless homeward path, but instead becomes part of our day and part of our collective memory. Dan Podolski pokes the fire with hands full of angling artistry. We are far from anything, and right next to all the mystery in the world, and I’m suddenly full of gratitude. I might even understand why we’ve come.
The guests in camp, the guides, Ilya . . . they have chosen to lean against something that eludes them, to present themselves at the hands of an essential mystery that transcends mere success or failure. Just as the rivers will rise and fall, the salmon will bite or not. Regardless of our skill, or entitlement, or money, they cannot be cajoled. We seek their communion with outrageous precision, crave the rich colors that lie beneath the skin, all the while knowing that our effort is for naught. They will be the ones to decide. The salmon understand this, and return again and again to remind us.
Reid Bryant hunts, fishes, travels, and writes from his home in southern Vermont. A return to Ponoi is somewhere in his future, once his liver recovers, and he learns to cast a Spey rod with a bit more grace. His first book, The Orvis Guide to Upland Hunting, will be released this fall.