Traveling Light: A Year of Wandering, from California to England and Tuscany and Back Again
240
Traveling Light: A Year of Wandering, from California to England and Tuscany and Back Again
240Paperback
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Overview
Here is a travel book with a difference: ten chronological chapters from a year of wandering, from the Pacific Northwest to Tuscany and back again to the trout-laden streams of California. Join Bill Barich as he travels the globe, from the trout streams of Northern California to the auction ring at Saratoga, where millions of dollars may be gaveled away for a yearling thoroughbred; from seedy London pubs to a run-down Florentine palazzo during a glorious Italian spring. Learn the science of English beer brewing, the art of fly tying, how to generate hydroelectric power, the proper analysis of the Daily Racing Form, and the best way to eat artichokes.
Freshness, wit, and Barich’s distinctive voice create a luminous travelogue crackling with an inimitable curiosity and an elegance of style that marks every step of this remarkable journey.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781629144238 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
WEST AND EAST
Allons! the road is before us!
— Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
* * *
Steelhead on the Russian
The river on which I used to live — the Russian, in northern California — was named in honor of the fur traders who established settlements near it almost two centuries ago, beginning in 1812, when Ivan Alexander Kuskoff, a one-legged adventurer employed by the Russian-American Fur Company, leased several acres of coastal land from Pomo Indians, in exchange for blankets, breeches, horses, axes, and some beads. It has its headwaters in the mountains north of Redwood Valley and flows south and west for a hundred and ten miles, to Jenner, on the Pacific Ocean. During the dry summer months, it's a slow, green stream, thick with algae and pestered by canoers. But in November, when the winter rains start, the Russian is transformed: it grows wide and deep and sometimes rises to the limits of its banks and then swamps them, flooding downriver towns like Guerne-ville and Duncans Mills. It looks majestic at flood stage, seems as broad as the Mississippi. Uprooted trees drift by, along with fences, unmoored boats, rusted agricultural tools, plastics, and hubcaps. If you stand on the cliffs above Jenner and watch the procession of objects sweeping past, you get the feeling that entire communities are being borne to oblivion on the tide. Seals congregate at the river mouth, dipping into the turbid, muddy water in search of migratory fish. Large numbers of salmon, shad, sturgeon, and striped bass used to ascend the Russian to spawn in its tributaries, but their runs have been badly depleted. The only anadromous ("running upward," in Greek) fish that still persists in any quantity is the steelhead, a subspecies of rainbow trout.
Steelhead are members of the Salmonidae, a family that includes all salmon, trout, and char. They are known scientifically as Salmo gairdneri — Salmo from the Latin verb meaning "to leap," and gairdneri for the nineteenth-century naturalist Meredith Gairdner, who helped Sir John Richardson collect specimens of Columbia River fish for the Hudson's Bay Company. Steelhead have a stronger migratory urge than most rainbow trout but are not dependent on an anadromous existence; if they're planted in a lake, they'll spawn in tributaries of that lake, skipping their saltwater wandering. Most Russian River steelhead opt for anadromy: they're born in freshwater, migrate into the Pacific between their first and third years (at sea, their upper bodies turn steel blue, a change that accounts for their common name), reach sexual maturity in from one to three years more, and return to their natal stream to spawn. They recognize the stream by its unique chemical composition and follow its trail like bloodhounds. Once they've paired off and chosen an instream spawning site, the female digs a redd, or nest, using her body and tail to clear away gravel, then deposits some of her eggs. Immediately, her mate fertilizes them with his milt, a chalky secretion of the reproductive glands. The process is repeated until two thousand eggs have been deposited.
Pacific salmon die after spawning, but some steelhead — perhaps, twenty per cent — survive, and may make the journey from ocean to river two, three, or even four times. Steelhead are notoriously elusive at sea. They are seldom snared in a commercial salmon net, although they frequent the same waters as salmon. Nobody knows how they avoid the nets, because marine researchers haven't been able to track them once they enter the Pacific. They disappear — off to the Bering Sea or Baja California or Japan. Anglers find them just about as difficult to catch. In the winter of 1954, the California Department of Fish and Game sponsored a steelhead census among anglers on the Russian; the figures showed that the average angler caught 0.55 fish per day. There are probably fewer steelhead in the river now — the annual run is estimated at about fifty thousand — but the weather in which they thrive hasn't changed: cold, foggy mornings and evenings, relieved on occasion by brilliant afternoon sunshine that warms the bones and stipples the water with light.
I knew nothing about steelhead when I moved into my house in Alexander Valley. I assumed they were neither more nor less intractable than other trout, but I was wrong. The first winter I spent fishing for them proved educational in the extreme. For more hours than I'd care to count, I waited by the river, casting lures into the current and wondering why I never got a strike. In fact, I don't think I would have hooked a fish all season if it hadn't been for Paul Deeds, my friend and mentor. Deeds is a gentle, ordinarily taciturn soul of forty-two who occupies a ramshackle cottage on a thirty-acre prune ranch. He has as little tolerance for pretense as anybody I've ever known. Once, on his birthday, I gave him a reprint edition of Zane Grey's classic Tales of Fresh-Water Fishing, which contains a marvelously florid story, "Rocky Riffle," about fishing for steelhead on the Rogue River, in Oregon. The book was a risky gift, because of its pervasive floridness, and also because Deeds is not much of a reader — he sticks to the evening paper and supermarket scandal sheets. He thanked me for the book, then leafed through it and looked at the pictures, stopping when he came to one that showed Grey, in a flat-brimmed hat, cavorting on a snowy hillside with three bears. The photograph was captioned, THE BEARS ON THE WAY TO CRATER LAKE — TAME, BUT NOT VERY!
"What's this got to do with steelhead?" Deeds asked.
I explained that Grey, like Jack London or Ernest Hemingway, was a larger-than-life character.
"You can't be larger than life," said Deeds. "That's a contradiction in terms. Here, listen to this stuff. 'The steelhead lay flat on the gravel. I stared, longing for the art of the painter, so as to perpetuate the exquisite hues and contours of that fish. All trout are beautiful. But this one of sea species seemed more than beautiful. He gaped, he quivered.'"
"You've got to take it with a grain of salt, Paul," I said. "It's from another era."
Deeds closed the book, smiled superciliously, and flipped over the record on his turntable. He has a vast collection of blues albums, ranging from Bessie Smith, through B. B. King, to John May all. I was forced to listen to most of it the first time I met him, back in mid-December of my frustrating educational winter. He helped me regain my sanity. I'd become something of a steelhead monk, locked into an unvarying — and unproductive — routine. Every day, I woke at dawn, built a small fire in the Ashley stove, ate a solitary breakfast of shredded wheat and tea, and dressed in my fishing uniform: jeans, turtleneck, flannel shirt, Pendleton jacket, two pairs of woolen socks, and a black-knit watch cap. Outside the house, I put on my waders and cinched them with a belt, buckling it tight as a precautionary measure against seepage in case I fell into the water — something I'd done often in the past. From my available gear, I'd assembled a kitful of lures and a makeshift steelhead rig — an eight-foot fiberglass rod and a medium-sized spinning reel wound with twelve-pound test — and I took it in hand and walked off into a seemingly static landscape that could have been painted by Hokusai: twisted live oak trees, barren willows, new winter grass, and vineyards laced with yellow mustard flowers, everything cloaked in river mist.
In spite of this ritual behavior, I didn't even see a steelhead, much less get a bite, until I ran into Deeds. This happened about eleven o'clock one bitter-cold morning, while I was taking a break from my listless casting. I was sitting on a strip of sand and blowing on my numb fingertips when I heard noises in the brush behind me — the scuffing of rubber boots over pebbles and then a hacking cough. Deeds emerged from the trees. His beard was moist with drizzle; he was wiping his wet lips on his sleeve. When he noticed me, his eyes widened in murderous circles, because he was unaccustomed to seeing strangers.
I told him I'd just rented the old Fratelli place.
"You rented it?" he asked incredulously. "You rented it, and you like to fish?"
He seemed crestfallen at the idea of competition. But after we had talked for a while, and he realized that I was a rank amateur, he was much more accommodating and pleasant, and I invited him to come up to the house for lunch.
"Wait a minute," he said. He vanished into the willows and returned with a steelhead he'd caught that morning. The fish weighed nine pounds or so — about average for the Russian. It was a steel blue along the spine; below, it had a bright silver color, which camouflaged it from ocean predators.
"Male or female?" I asked.
"Female," said Deeds. "Look at her mouth. See how nice and round it is? Bucks, they have hooked jaws."
"Has she been in the river long?"
"Nah, she's fresh-run. She'd be much darker and have a red streak on her side. She hasn't spawned yet. Feel," he said.
He jabbed my finger into the steelhead's belly. It was hard and protuberant, full of eggs. There were some gashes above the ventral fins, and I asked about them.
"Sea lion almost got her," Deeds said.
At the house, I gave him a bourbon while I made a couple of roast-beef sandwiches. The bourbon was a bad mistake. Deeds seldom drinks, because liquor unleashes torrential energies in him. He rambles on and on, discussing stride piano or prune horticulture or other esoterica, then suddenly loses his near-pathological fear of travel — ordinarily, he hates to leave the valley, even for emergencies — and decides that the best thing to do under the circumstances is to jump into the pickup and drive right to Reno, preferably at ninety miles an hour. But I didn't know this at the time. We ate the sandwiches, along with pickles, coleslaw, and a few underripe winter tomatoes, and had another drink, and then Deeds slapped his palm on the table and insisted that I visit his cottage, immediately.
We went over there. I was not prepared for the disarray — clothing covered most of the available furniture. In the living room, a large golden retriever named Honey was stretched out on a divan, gnawing audibly on a steak bone. Deeds patted her, dropped his coat on the floor, and led me into the kitchen. He spread some pages from the Star on the counter, slit the steelhead's belly, and removed her roe. It peeled away in two pearly, salmon-pink slabs, which Deeds dusted with borax, then double-wrapped in cellophane and aluminum foil.
"Best bait there is," he said, stuffing the package into the refrigerator and simultaneously extracting two beers. He told me how he shaped the roe into "berries": he cut a fingernail-size chunk from one of the slabs, set it on a two-inch square of maline — a fine red mesh material that blends with the roe — and then twisted the maline tight at the top and tied it securely with red thread. The finished product resembled a strawberry. "You got to fish 'em on a gold hook," he said. "Otherwise, you're wasting your time."
"Why do steelhead strike their own roe?"
"Cannibal instinct."
"Do you ever use flies instead of bait?"
"Listen," he said. "I'd rather fly-fish than anything. But the river's too high and discolored most of the time. If you want action, you go with bait."
We went back into the living room, and Deeds brought down a quart of Jim Beam from an antique highboy. The bottle had spiderwebbing trailing from its cap; the tiny faces on the label were faded from the sun. I don't recall very much after this, although I know I stayed for dinner. Deeds fed me steelhead. I watched in awe as he concocted his special barbecue sauce — mayo, ketchup, A.I., Lea & Perrins, brown sugar, onions, garlic, and corn relish — and slathered it on the skinned fish, then jammed the whole reeking mess under the broiler. It tasted fine, though — at least, to my numbed palate.
After the meal, Deeds embarked on a lengthy monolog about the demise of the Russian River. He showed me some photographs in support of his case; they would have done Zane Grey proud. "That's 1964," he said, pointing to three big steelhead arranged on a bed of ferns. "I caught them in thirty minutes. You won't see that happen again. Too much junk in the river. Chemicals. Garbage. Sewage. Damn kids drive their dune buggies down the creek beds, right through the water. Can you imagine that? They run over steelhead fry. Death by tires. It's incredible. I'm talking about incredible. Don't they understand that creek beds are out of bounds? Only fish that are in the river are fair game." His mood became elevated again when he brought down a second bottle of Beam. He showed me a few more pictures — all of his former wife, from whom he'd been recently divorced — and then said, "I'll bet you'd like to hear some music," and proceeded to play his way through the blues collection. When I left, shortly after midnight, he was using his rod tip like a baton to conduct a medley of Howlin' Wolf tunes.
I didn't expect to see Deeds for a few days — not in the wake of such carousing — but he came by the next afternoon and apologized for not offering me a ride home.
"You offered, Paul," I said, "but you wanted to go through Reno first."
Deeds laughed. "I meant to give you these," he said, digging into his pocket and handing over a jar containing five berries. "And these" — an assortment of lead weights. "And these" — three twenty-five-pound-test leaders. Each leader had a knot in it, so it could be attached to a regular monofilament by means of a swivel. Below the knot, the leaders were divided into two uneven strands. "You tie your weight on the short one," he said. "You want it to bounce along the river bottom, down where the fish are. Not too fast and not too slow — tick, tick, tick." He was demonstrating with an invisible rod, keeping his eyes fixed on the line. "The bait follows behind. If you feel the bait stop, wham!" — he jerked back the rod — "you set up. That drives the barb of the hook through the fish's lip."
"How should I play the fish?"
"With steelhead, you don't play," said Deeds. "You pray.
That evening, just as the sky was turning, I stationed myself near a deep pool below a rocky outcrop and started casting. Deeds's weights were much heavier than the lures I'd been using. The one I tied to the shorter strand of leader bounced properly on the bottom — tick, tick, tick, like seconds passing. Suddenly, the berry stopped in transit, as if a fish had mouthed it. I lifted my rod, preparing to do battle, but I felt no resistance. Soon enough, I reeled in a fat sucker; it flopped onto the shore like a sack of mush. Suckers are trash fish, insults to divinity. They have chubby humanoid lips and appear to be begging for cigars. It's possible to envision them wearing suspenders and sitting on park benches, acting like heirs to the continent's watershed. I released mine, stifling a desire to kick it, and moved toward the center of the pool. I put my next cast under some willows on the opposite shore. Tick, tick, tick: again the bait stopped, and again I set the hook. This time, a steelhead shot out of the water. I played, or prayed, the fish for ten minutes, certain that I'd lose it, but my luck held, and I was able finally to draw it into the shallows and beach it. The fish was small, about four pounds, and male; so much milt leaked from him that a white puddle formed on the sand. I dispatched him quickly, suffused with guilt, but the guilt changed to atavistic pride once I had threaded a willow branch through his mouth and out of his gills and begun the uphill trek to my house. I stopped on a rise and looked back at the valley, which was vanishing in purple haze. As Zane Grey put it, "the sunset was beautiful, resembling ships of silver clouds with rosy sails that crossed the lilac sea of sky in the west."
Deeds became my nemesis as well as my friend. Never again would he grant me the license of undisturbed water. If I was fishing, he was fishing, too — often just ahead of me, combing the better pools and riffles before I had a chance at them. The situation would have been intolerable if I hadn't continued to learn from him. He persuaded me to buy a longer, sturdier rod and a bait-casting reel; taught me to use bobbers in bright red, pink, and chartreuse to attract fish; instructed me in the basics of steelhead anatomy; and gave me a short course in how to cast a shooting head — a twenty-eight- to-thirty-foot-long, single-tapered line that allows an angler to cast great distances without exerting much effort.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Traveling Light"
by .
Copyright © 1984 Bill Barich.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1 West and East
Steelhead on the Russian 3
Revenge at Golden Gate Fields 24
J. D. Ross's Vision 39
O'Neill Among the Weakfish 65
Horse-trading at Saratoga Springs 82
2 England and Italy
At The Fountain 97
Jumpers at Kempton Park 133
Tuscan Spring 156
Sfida at the Hippodrome 180
3 California Again
Hat Creek and the McCloud 201
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Witty, knowledgeable, good writing...start Barich now and keep reading him.
Barich is a wonderful writer. His angle of vision is his own, his prose is a delight.
I had a fine time with Traveling Light. Barich is a splendid prose stylist.... I will continue to look forward to anything he writes.