I’d flown 2,500 miles across four time zones, leaving Crossroads Lake in Labrador in a fifty-year-old de Havilland Beaver floatplane and arriving in Denver thirty-six hours later in a considerably newer Airbus A319, all on three fitful hours of what you could charitably call sleep. On the drive home from the airport I was bone tired, punch-drunk with culture shock, and beginning to wonder if I was getting too old for this shit, but the next morning, after ten hours’ sleep and plenty of coffee, I began to think maybe not. So I got together a pile of dirty clothes that smelled of sweat, fish, wood smoke, and bug dope and asked Susan if she had anything for the wash. She said yes, but she didn’t want her girly stuff in with that mess. At the end of every trip there’s a precise moment when the spell is broken, and that was it.
This had been my ninth fishing trip to Labrador and my sixth to Three Rivers Lodge in the last thirteen years. I understand what sustains a habitual trip—it’s a slippery emotion that falls somewhere between affection and self-interest—but it’s less clear what engenders one in the first place. It always starts with good fishing in the simplest terms, but then the more granular details that comprise familiarity—how to gather and brew Labrador tea, or that white-crowned sparrows throw their heads back when they sing like Robert Goulet—begin to accumulate into something like homesickness. Why this happens in one place and not another is anyone’s guess.
On the Elk River drainage in British Columbia, where I went repeatedly for almost twenty years, it had something to do with the native west-slope cutthroats, the big bull trout that would now and then eat a fifteen-inch cut right off your leader, and a skilled but maniacal guide known as “Speed Bump,” because he once ran over himself with his own car. (Don’t ask; it’s a long story.) I’ve heard that this guy has since married and settled down, but at the time he conducted the kind of love life that would have killed a weaker man—or so he claimed.
That trip finally soured with the advent of crowds and reams of expensive new special permits that turned fishing a wild river system into something that resembled filling out your tax return.
On the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska it was the workmanlike largemouth bass, the 270 species of birds that migrated through every year, and the ramshackle fish camp that had been run by the Ballard family as a sideline to their hog farm since the 1950s. Even after ten years we were still newcomers compared to those who’d first fished the place as children, and who were now fishing with their children, and in some cases their grandchildren.
That one went south when the Ogallala Aquifer that fed the lakes began to dry up from the effects of too many irrigation wells. The last time we fished Rice Lake it had shrunk to the size of a large puddle, and the flooded timber where the bass used to hide was now behind us on dry land. And then the state decided to cancel the Ballards’ lease and bulldoze the old cabins because they weren’t up to code and replace them with a slick new campground and RV park. The fishery was dehydrating and the fish camp was being gentrified. It was time to move on.
Nothing lasts forever, and after a while you start waiting for the other shoe to drop. When you find a place that seems unspoiled, it’s easy to see yourself as the lone wolf running ahead of the pack into new territory, although in darker moments you suspect that you’re simply in the first wave of fun hogs that will eventually use the place up, unless mining, logging, pollution, or climate change do the job first. The days when you could think of the natural world as immutable may well be coming to an end, and regular fishing trips are now like blue jeans: just when they start to get nice and comfortable, the knees blow out. The only alternative to living with regret is to go looking for new water.
When I decided to try Labrador, I found that there weren’t a lot of places to choose from (unlike in Alaska, where there’s an outfitter on every corner) and that travel to the region was complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. But I’d also heard from people I believed that it was blissfully uncrowded and that the biggest brook trout in the world lived there, so it seemed worth a shot. I’ve always had a soft spot for brook trout, and up till then the biggest one I’d caught might have weighed a pound if I’d left my thumb on the scale. In Labrador, two- and three-pounders were considered run-of-the-mill, a “nice” fish came in at four or five pounds, and my biggest on that first trip weighed just shy of eight. I guess you could say I saw the light.
So after sniffing around at different lodges for a few seasons, I found a place I liked and settled in to become a regular: that species of fisherman who’s as persistent as a stray cat, and for the same reason—because he’s getting what he wants. For the cat, it’s regular meals and a spot on the couch. For the fisherman, the payoff comes partly in fish and partly from bear-hugging the folks you once only shook hands with. It’s important to find people and places far from home that you love. If nothing else, it makes the world seem big and friendly instead of small and mean.
On this last trip, a full complement of eight of us flew into camp on a venerable Otter chartered in the nearest town, 150 miles to the south. It was a crowded flight, with every seat filled, our gear stowed behind cargo netting at the rear of the cabin, and the aisle stacked shoulder high with a week’s worth of supplies, ranging “from whisky to ass-wipe,” as a dockhand put it. In an emergency, we’d have had better luck trying to kick out a window than climbing over this pile of stuff on the way to the door.
We were the usual odd mix of sports—a couple of borderline but still serviceable geezers, the rest fit enough by varying degrees—and we’d each made this pilgrimage to catch the brook trout that were unimaginable in any other part of the world. Some of us already knew that these fish could induce the kind of hysteria that causes a normally self-possessed fly-fisher to prematurely yank his fly from the jaws of a hog (a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as the Labrador Effect), and the rest would find out soon enough. On a day when your nerves get the best of you, it’s possible to miss more sheer tonnage of brook trout here than you’d seen in your life up till then.
If you learned to love the carefree little brookies sipping mayflies in the creeks and beaver ponds back home, these Labrador brook trout will seem like a separate species. It’s not just that they’re so much bigger, but that they got that way by eating mice, lemmings, and large sucker minnows. That’s what gives them the broad shoulders and the hair trigger you don’t recognize in the pretty little fish at home. You naturally bring dry flies, and sometimes they work beautifully, but the more dependable patterns are often the largest available deer-hair rodents and giant, articulated streamers fished on a nearly slack leader to mimic an injured bait fish.
There’s an enormous amount of water here in the form of large, sprawling lakes, but you only fish the short riverine channels that string them together at wide intervals, because that’s where brook trout congregate. Some days you spend almost as much time traveling by floatplane or canoe as you do fishing. Once you get where you’re going, the water is often big and fast, and this is geologically young country, so the rocks haven’t yet been worn smooth or shimmed in place with sediment. The bottom is uneven, angular, and teetery, with sudden dark holes. It helps if you’re a strong wader, but sometimes you can make up the difference with heroic casting.
The brook trout here are what biologists call “locally common,” which means they’re either there or they’re not, and they’re known to travel long distances for no apparent reason. A few years ago a large brook trout was caught and tagged at Fifth Rapids, then was caught the next day thirty miles away, and then a few days later turned up back where he’d started. Why the sixty-mile round-trip in less than a week? No one knows.
So fish are sometimes absent in what are considered the most dependable places, but the flip side is that any of these riffles can be like a good steelhead run that didn’t produce yesterday but today is full of fresh, eager fish. And of course, sometimes they’re there—stubbornly hugging the bottom—but they refuse to bite. Maybe they fed heavily before you got there and are now full, or maybe they just swam thirty miles and they’re tired.
There are noticeable differences among spring, summer, and fall, but on any given day throughout the short season the weather can be warm and sunny, cool and cloudy, cold and breezy, drizzly, rainy, or so windy it blows your hat off and makes casting in any direction but one impossible—or, worse yet, grounds the floatplane and keeps the boats at the dock. Now and then a front rolls through from the north Atlantic pushing low clouds that look like the undersides of battleships, and you know your ambitious plans for tomorrow are about to be ambushed by weather.
On warm, calm days in midsummer it’s a good idea to wear a bug shirt, a kind of hazmat suit for biting insects, with tightly cinched cuffs and a hood with a mesh face mask. There are blackflies and no-see-ums, countless mosquitoes, an assortment of generic deer flies, and the giant caribou flies known locally as “Cockwallopers.” Cockwallopers are like the zombies in all those horror movies: they’re slow, dim-witted, and easy enough to kill, but they keep coming, and there are so many of them that they’ll eventually get you.
Robin, the lodge owner, likes to say that Labrador is “inhospitable in every possible way,” but he says it with the affectionate smile you’d reserve for a big, lovable puppy.
It’s all worth it for the big brook trout, but even then it’s not for everyone. The odd number-cruncher can land four or five brook trout of a lifetime every day for a week and go home disappointed that there weren’t more of them. And there’s the headhunter who begins his week in ecstasy over a five-pound fish, but then later finds himself inexplicably dissatisfied with the eight-pound slab he managed to land. Over dinner one evening he asks—as if it has just that moment occurred to him—if bigger brook trout are ever caught. He’s told that every once in a great while something in the nine-pound range turns up, and that there are persistent rumors of double-digit fish. For the rest of his time on this incomparable fishery, he acts like a man with an itch he can’t quite reach.
That first day in camp, after a big, late breakfast, a couple of us motored down to Vezina Narrows with Anthony, a guide whose thick Newfie accent I’ve learned to decipher as long as he’s not shouting over the noise of the outboard. I landed a couple of brook trout on a dry fly that were on the small side for Labrador—but still three times bigger than anything back home—and an eight-pound lake trout on a deer-hair mouse. It was a good half-day shakedown, and I rode back to the lodge in the canoe watching the endless, stunted forest of spruce and tamarack, thinking about the bone-deep rightness of running water, and looking forward to the meal Frances would be cooking right about then. Unlike some camp cooks who aim for a rustic version of haute cuisine and usually miss, Frances dishes up the kind of plain, good food you want to eat when you’re actually hungry.
In the following days we fished some of the usual places, with the mixed results you come to expect. At Third Rapids three big brook trout in a row ate my size-10 Parachute Wulff, even though they hadn’t been rising, and the biggest bug on the water was a size-18. Then at Fifth Rapids we couldn’t buy a take, even in the fishiest water, and ended up dolefully staring at several large brook trout tucked behind a big rock, agreeing that we were out of options. But then right around the corner at Little Fifth, I hooked and landed a six-and-a-half-pound fish on a big olive streamer. I thought this was a heartbreaker when it took me into the backing in white water, but then the fish wallowed in a big pool until my guide Michel and I managed to stumble down through the willows and loose rocks to net it.
I spent several days fishing with Michel, who describes himself mysteriously as a “French-speaking Spaniard” from a long line of guides and explorers. I even bandaged his thumb one day when he sliced it to the bone on a razor-sharp hatchet while building a fire at lunchtime. It was a bad cut, but with an antiseptic pad, gauze, and adhesive tape, I stopped the bleeding. By way of thanks, he said, “You’re like a father to me.”
At first glance Michel could be anywhere between a weather-beaten forty and a well-preserved sixty, but it’s impossible to guess the age of someone who’s worked outside in harsh conditions for decades. Many of these guys start guiding in their teens, and that ageless, leathery squint develops early and lasts for the duration. Michel did tell me that this was his thirty-seventh straight year of guiding fishermen in the summer, hunters in the fall, and snowmobilers in the winter. He said he’s home so seldom that when he does drop by he opens the front door, tosses his hat inside, and waits on the porch to see if his wife throws it back out again. “If she does,” he said, “I try again the next day.”
One afternoon a fisherman had a banana in his lunch, and I offhandedly mentioned to Michel that where I come from, a banana in the boat is considered bad luck. Apparently this superstition hadn’t yet made it that far north, and he reasonably asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why is it bad luck to walk under a ladder?”
“Is it?” he asked.
By dinnertime that evening the news had swept the camp like an airborne virus, and I was sorry I’d brought it up. Several of the guides asked me about it, not exactly buying into it but willing to keep an open mind, and Frances asked, “What about my banana bread?” She was clearly worried by the idea that her fabulous baked goods could put a hoodoo on anyone’s luck. I seem to remember her actually wringing her hands, but she might just have been drying them on a dish towel.
From my newfound position as an authority on the supernatural properties of fruit, I took a flier and pronounced, “It’s only whole bananas. Once they’re peeled, mashed, and baked into bread, the curse is broken.”
One day we flew out to Indian Rapids with Kevin. He’s the camp manager, but still takes days off to guide, especially in the places he likes and knows so well that you’d be at a real disadvantage if he weren’t there. At Indian Rapids he’ll lead you to a spot that looks like every other place in this wide, nearly featureless channel, and then stand there leaning on his long-handled net. Like the others here, Kev guides in the hands-off style that some don’t recognize as a professional paying you the compliment of assuming you know what you’re doing. This is especially puzzling to those who are used to the American model, in which the guide all but hooks the fish for you and then hands you the already pulsing rod.
If you ask Kev about a fly he likes, he’ll say, “Yes, that’s fine.” To one he likes less he’ll say, “Well, it could work.” In this way you end up catching fish on flies you appear to have chosen yourself.
Kev is short, lean, wiry, and pushing seventy, but he regularly out-hikes much younger sports while carrying a large, heavy pack and wades fast water as if he were strolling across a paved parking lot. He and Frances have been married for years, and as a mature couple they now exude the quiet dependability of a surrogate mom and dad, but it’s said that when he was younger Kev was fond of drinking and brawling. You’d believe that the old, angry scars on his neck were the result of a bear attack or a chain saw accident, but I’m told they’re from a broken bottle in a bar in Halifax, and you should see the other guy.
It’s a testament to the amount of water here that after six trips, some longer than the regulation week, there were still places I hadn’t seen. One of those was a small, fast, rocky creek that reminded me of the mountain streams in Colorado where a ten-inch brook trout will make your day, except that this one held some really impressive fish.
I tried a dead-drifted dry fly and got nothing. Then I skated a two-inch-long Bomber and got flashes, but no takes. I asked Michel about putting the two tactics together, and he shrugged. (As I said, at least until proven otherwise, these guys are willing to believe that your guess is as good as theirs.) So I tried a size-10 Stimulator on a down and across-current swing.
That did it for a couple of nice ones, including a hook-jawed seven-and-a-half-pound male that took the fly in slow motion along the rocks against the far bank. There was plenty of time for me to pull the fly right out of his mouth, but I didn’t, probably because it was late in the trip and my nerves had finally settled down. This fish was heavy enough to have run me down the creek and out into the lake if he’d wanted to, but he chose to fight it out in the pool, where I steered him around boulders and deadfalls with my heart in my throat until Michel got the net under him. He was a big double-handful with an orange belly and white-bordered fins wearing the universal dumbstruck expression of a caught fish. I told myself that brook trout like this will always be here, and maybe they will be, but the physical sensation of setting up on something big, heavy, and intensely alive was already fading as I slipped this one back into the creek.