Traveling well is one of life’s great pleasures, but the ability to stay coolly unflappable far from home is a moving target. For instance, a few years ago I was standing in a long, slow line at customs at the Montreal airport with my heart in my throat, and there was no reason for it. As far as I knew, my papers were in order; I wasn’t carrying anything on the long list of prohibited items, and my shameful secrets were all too personal to turn up in a background check. Still, I was about to confront a uniformed officer in a foreign country, and the fact that I’d been let into Canada dozens of times over the last thirty-five years didn’t seem to be a guarantee of success.
Finally I stepped up to the booth, where a tired-looking customs guy asked, “Purpose of your visit?”
“Fishing.”
“Good luck,” he said, handing me back my passport.
Up till then I’d felt like a beast of burden with my daypack, duffel, a long tube containing two spey rods, and an inexplicably guilty conscience, but just like that I was light on my feet again: an innocent man going about his business.
There was a minor speed bump when the LED readout on a pay phone insisted on giving directions in French, but then I found and pushed a little shiny button marked “English,” and voilà! Likewise, the desk clerk at the hotel answered in français, but switched seamlessly to my mother tongue as soon as I started to speak. When I finally got to the hotel, I tipped the shuttle driver with some colorful Canadian bills that didn’t seem like real money and said, “Merci.” That’s one of the handful of French words I know, but I hoped it made me sound passably cosmopolitan.
At that point I was still two and a half days and three flights from the coast of Labrador and had all but lost track of the idea of Atlantic salmon fishing, but I knew from experience that I’d regain it by degrees. Two mornings and two provinces later I’d board the first of two small planes with pontoons instead of wheels, and the rod tube would begin to seem less like an awkwardly shaped object I had to lug around and more like the key to the universe. In theory, that is, since Labrador is one of those places—like Alaska or the Northwest Territories—where arranging for a plane is more like placing a bet than actually booking a flight.
In the meantime, stopping for the night allowed me to relax from the hyperattentiveness of travel. After stashing my gear in my room, I went outside for a smoke and thought, Okay, here I am, a man alone in a foreign city on his way to an adventure in the far north.
Cities like Montreal are the final destination for many travelers, but fishermen rarely see much more than the airport and a hotel close enough to hear the jets coming and going before boarding the first in a series of shorter flights on progressively smaller airplanes. I hear stories of traveling anglers having fine meals and taking in the nightlife on stopovers, but my tendency is to eat within walking distance to save cab fare and then try to bank a good night’s sleep against the tiredness that will inevitably arrive in the days to come.
The next night I checked into another hotel, this one in Labrador City, Labrador, a dreary iron-mining outpost that made no effort whatsoever to be rustic or charming. The centerpiece of the small lobby was a large painting depicting lumpish men standing in the snow amid unidentifiable machinery, while in the distance gray smoke belches into an equally gray sky. No scenic rivers or leaping fish.
This was an expensive hotel, not because it was anything special but because even shabby rooms are at a premium in this isolated settlement. The guests seemed to be about evenly split between fishermen in fleece vests and mining engineers in pressed khakis: one group excited about going into some of the last great wilderness in North America, the other just as giddy about turning the whole thing into a slag heap. The engineers were in the lobby working on laptops, while the fishermen were outside talking. I’d been down the street buying a tin of Watkins Bite Balm to soothe the blackfly welts I expected to get in the coming days and spotted this handful of guys in front of the hotel on my way back. They were taking turns holding their hands three feet apart, and I recognized them as members of my own tribe from a block away. One of these guys later told me that the previous year on the Hunt River he’d caught seventeen Atlantic salmon from a single pool in a single day. If he’d said seven, I might have believed him.
Across the street from the hotel was Peace Park, the town’s only real attempt at civic improvement. It consisted of a brick sidewalk, a bush, and two benches in an otherwise open half acre of dandelions. To the left of that was Jubber’s Convenience store; to the right was a McDonald’s and a Pizza Delight, and on the corner there was a billboard advertising “Cain’s Quest: The most challenging snowmobile race on the planet” with a $100,000 purse. (Labrador is affectionately known to locals as “the land God gave to Cain.”) Nothing here seems fabulously exotic, but so few Americans know where Labrador is (some think it’s next to Norway) that it seems to exist outside the normal boundaries of geography.
These can be some of the great moments in fishing. I know it’s supposed to be all about screaming reels, silver slabs, and drinks at the lodge—and it will be eventually—but sometimes just getting there is the largest part of the exploit. Mostly it’s just the normal drudgery of travel: time, money, boredom, and the looming possibility of lost baggage and canceled flights, punctuated by odd uncomfortable moments, as when the scanner beeps and a security guy approaches with the electronic dildo they playfully refer to as a “wand.”
But there’s the possibility of real disaster, too. I once said that at a certain age, going down in a floatplane on your way to fish a remote river begins to look like one of the better ways to cash out, but however much you might mean that, it’s still the kind of thing you say to friends over coffee as a way of sounding bravely levelheaded. If a plane really did auger in, I’d spend my last seconds like anyone else: bargaining with God and wetting my pants.
I end up pondering these things because some trips seem interminable and there’s too much time to think, but at least I know I’m getting close to the fishing when I end up in a tiny airport like the one in Marquette, Michigan, where there were only two other people in the waiting room, one pecking at a computer, the other sleeping. When I said to the lady behind the ticket counter that it was “Kinda slow today,” she said, “Oh sure, but, you know, by the time your plane comes there’ll be fifteen or twenty people in here.”
Or the one in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, where I was informed that my plane would leave an hour and a half late not because of weather or mechanical problems but because “Some guys flying in from Winnipeg are running late, so we’re gonna wait for ’em.”
It’s less common for strangers to speak to each other in airports than it used to be—people are now mostly swiping at the screens of smartphones like monkeys intrigued by shiny objects—but it does still happen. A few kind souls recognize me from my books, but most just pick me out of the anonymous crowd as a fellow fisherman. In Portland, Oregon, a man tells me, without preamble, that he’s going sturgeon fishing in the Columbia River, where he’ll be using a saltwater spinning rod, shark hooks, and half a chicken as bait because the fish grow so big. Why should I, of all people, care? It’s obvious to both of us.
In Minneapolis a man in a suit carrying a laptop nods at my rod case and says, “I’ll trade you this computer for one of those fly rods.” I say, “No thanks,” and we grin at each other as if we’d just improvised the best gag ever.
In Seattle a man carrying a backpack and a rod tube asks me if I’m going fishing.
I say, “No, I’m on a book tour.”
“Well, better luck next time,” he says.
And an odd thing happened the last time I passed through Montreal. Always before, people had spotted me as an American from a block away—no telling how—but on the last trip strangers suddenly began addressing me in French. What was that about? Had repeated exposure to the north woods finally given me enough regional ease to seem French Canadian? Whatever; at a coffee kiosk in the airport I noticed that the barista was speaking French, so I took my best shot, ordered a “Petit café, s’il vous plaît” in what sounded, even to me, like a Colorado accent, and got a look that seemed to be equal parts incomprehension and disgust.
Cultural misunderstandings—large and small and usually harmless—come with the territory. Once, years ago on a stopover in Inverness, Scotland, on the way to the River Beauly, a man told me, “We have a statue here of the greatest poet who ever lived.”
“You have a statue of Allen Ginsberg?” I asked.
“No, lad; Robert Burns!”
Long drives are preferable to flying in many ways, but they can produce their own brand of misery. If you have company, there’s usually a few hours of conversation that eventually sputters into a companionable silence and then the kind of boredom that’s somehow more oppressive than if you were by yourself. But boredom is preferable to the seemingly endless games of “Name This Band” that two amateur rock historians I often travel with fall into, in which they go back and forth playing the first few bars of obscure deep cuts from thirty years’ worth of rock and roll—roughly from Iron Butterfly to Nirvana—trying to stump each other.
I usually don’t take part because they know this stuff better than I do, they’re quicker, and, frankly, because in middle age I’ve begun to form a kind of immunity to music. It’s not that I don’t like it anymore; it’s just that my fondest memories of music involve concerts and guitars on back porches, while now it’s blared indiscriminately in public places with the intention of making shoppers more docile. You can’t get away from it, and it’s invariably the kind of corny top-forty schlock from the 1970s and ’80s that made my teeth hurt even when it was new.
Anyway, this game eventually begins to rub me the wrong way, because just when I get into a tune and start to boogie a little, someone names the band and they turn it off and go on to another cut. The urge to scream wells up, and somewhere around the three-hundred-mile mark I begin to wonder why these guys are my friends and why we’ve traveled and fished together for so long. But to be fair, at four hundred miles even the Dalai Lama would start to get on my nerves.
But eventually the game, like the conversation, peters out, and there’s nothing much to think about except the precise dosing of the coffee (enough to keep you wired, but not so much that you’re peeing every half hour) and the timing of gas stops. In large parts of the American West, gas stations are few and far between, so I make it a practice to fill up at half a tank, just in case. That’s a habit left over from when I drove a 1966 V8 Ford that got a whopping seven miles to the gallon. In the course of those years, I stopped at least once at every gas station in five western states. The good news was gas cost forty cents a gallon. The bad news was the minimum wage was two dollars an hour, and as a trout bum I worked for the minimum wage, when I worked at all.
But I do love driving around the Mountain West, even though the distances can be daunting. (Why is a question hardly worth asking. Sometimes it’s as simple as that there are no steelhead in my time zone.) I got the bug as a kid growing up in the flat, domesticated Midwest watching John Wayne westerns, but not even Cinemascope could adequately convey the wide-open spaces. I remember my first live view of the Rocky Mountains through a windshield in the late 1960s. From a vantage point somewhere in eastern Colorado, I mistook the snow-capped peaks on the western horizon for an enormous storm front and began to brace for bad weather. When I realized my mistake, I had to pull over and get out of the car, not so much to enjoy the view as to come to terms with my disorientation.
The same kind of thing still happens forty-some years later. I’ve gotten used to the scale of things and do take it all for granted at times, but now and then I’ll be pumping gas in ninety-degree heat while gazing at snowfields that don’t seem all that far away, even though I now know they are. I’ll think, Between here and there are two rivers, a dozen tributaries, and hundreds if not thousands of trout. Holy shit!
So you keep one eye on your destination—which can be days away—and the other on the fabulously empty and constantly changing landscape, reminding yourself that tourists make this trip for its own sake. Driving anywhere in the West is like traveling by hot-air balloon: it takes forever to get anywhere, but you can’t beat the view.
Still, the monotony can be mind numbing, especially when you’re alone. I usually drive the regulation five or six miles an hour over the limit that folklore says any cop will give you, but real speeding is no longer the temptation it once was. It’s probably an early symptom of geezerhood that the speed limits I once assumed were made by and for old fogies now seem about right. For that matter, my fifteen-year-old pickup will go eighty or ninety in a pinch, but when it does it always reminds me of that scene in every episode of Star Trek when Scotty calls the bridge to say, “If I push her any harder, she’ll shake apart!” I avoid using cruise control, because keeping my speed where I want it gives me something to do. So does grazing the radio dial, if only to see how many stations are simultaneously broadcasting Rush Limbaugh.
Music of my own choosing helps, but the radio is unreliable, and I don’t carry a large supply of my own. (My most recent used pickup is new enough to have a CD player instead of a tape deck, but I’ve been slow to upgrade and have only a handful of CDs.) Bob Dylan almost always works, but something like “Visions of Johanna” can put me into a poetic spiral that makes me want to stop and sit staring at the clouds. And once, while listening to Willie Nelson, I had a disturbingly detailed vision of myself as an old man living alone in a trailer in eastern Wyoming, drinking instant coffee, reading used paperbacks from the Goodwill store, and feeding a dozen stray cats. There’s nothing wrong with spending time in your own head, but it’s best not to start turning over rocks to see what crawls out.
On the other hand, I sometimes fantasize about moving for a season to one of the river towns I pass through, where I’d patiently learn the water—mostly on my own, but also with occasional advice from friendly locals—and then write a book about it. This wouldn’t be a fish-choked destination river, but a second- or third-class stream two or three states from home; someplace that is uncrowded, unremarkable at first glance, with a town where I could rent a trailer or maybe an unused summer cabin stuck in limbo between the death of the surviving parent and the eventual sale by the grown kids. I learned decades ago that if you’re itinerant and persistent, you can usually sniff out a cheap, temporary place to live. Maybe I could even find free digs in return for caretaker and handyman chores and draining the pipes when I leave.
I’d go light, with just fishing tackle, clothes, a box of books, and a laptop. In the book I’d write I would cleverly leave the river unnamed and its location unspecified in order to make it seem mythological. I’ve given this a lot of thought, but I’ve been careful not to compose even a single sentence of the actual book, because that could ruin the fantasy. E. B. White said that a book is never so good as it is just before you start writing it.
I’ve never actually done this, and that might be for the best. When I confessed this pipe dream to an old friend he said he liked the idea, but added, “Knowing you, you’d probably just end up working in a gas station and dating a local widow.”
I’ve found it’s also best to avoid reliving old slights, wrongs, and grudges on long, solitary drives. These things are always in there somewhere, and they can be earworms that slip through the smallest cracks in your concentration and into the light of day. Without warning, and seemingly out of nowhere, you’re livid all over again at the dickwad boss who fired you for no reason back in 1971, thinking of all the things you should have said and done but didn’t, and filling your system with useless adrenaline. When this begins to happen, immediately loosen your grip on the wheel, take long, deep breaths, and go to your happy place while you still have one. It all happened over forty years ago, and the guy was old even then. Surely he’s dead by now, while you’re alive and well and going fishing.
Falling asleep is another constant hazard. You’ll see the early symptoms of highway hypnosis in others whenever you pull into some roadside joint for a break. Everyone in the parking lot over the age of thirty-five is unfolding themselves stiffly, rubbing cobwebs off their faces, and blinking at their surroundings as if they’d just come out of comas, which in a way they have. I’ve never fallen asleep while driving, although I’ve learned to identify the telltale signs of dreaminess, like passing through small towns without noticing or imagining that the tumbleweeds blowing across the road in failing light are actually a flock of wild turkeys. But I’ve been a passenger in vehicles where the driver did fall asleep, and there’s no more helpless feeling. This has happened three times in my life, and the odds seem slim that I’d survive a fourth.
And of course on any solitary drive lasting ten hours or more, I invariably fall deeply, though briefly, in love with at least one truck stop waitress. I remember a girl somewhere along Interstate 15: early thirties, long blond hair, black halter top, extremely short cutoff blue-jean skirt. She’s wearing the bemused expression of someone who’s used to being stared at by strange men just passing through, while the men themselves seem furtive and tight-lipped from the effort of holding in their potbellies. Maybe she hopes she has a future somewhere far from the Flying J Truck Stop in Idaho, with its perfume of grease and diesel fumes. For an instant you imagine she’s just waiting for someone—possibly an older man with experience—to take her away from all this.
On the way back to the pickup it suddenly occurred to me that I’d left the reel with the 8-weight line on it at home, so I unlocked the topper and desperately pawed through my duffel bag looking for it. It was there, of course. No problem. I just got a little rattled for some reason.