Good Lifestyle

Ed Note: This story was originally published in the November / December 2004 issue of the best life.

We sit here a little anxiously to the private sector at Petropavlask airport, waiting to fly 120 miles or the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia to a section Maillie filled with fish from the Zhupanova River, where each casting, it would appear. Stories from other fishermen, brings a strike. This latter leg is the nervous manufacture, which takes place as in the converted helicopters of the Army of the Soviet era. There are eight in our group and to be honest, we are all tensioned on the risk factor for this part that we would like to admit that the Soviet Chopper phrase does not necessarily utter great confidence. In the weeks preceding our departure, a number of friends called, a little annoyed on our behalf. And more poignant, our women asked, "Do you really want to do that?" My daughter and Pal Ellie Berlin, the daughter of the head of our group, Richard Berlin, exchanged their own private anxieties.

Someone from our group - it's like being in the army, where the rumor is always king-says that the Russians are good about that: they know our fears and need the difficult currency and does not dare Not having a crash, and they know the importance of maintenance and thus make a mechanical fly at each trip, just to be sure that the maintenance is first order. But then someone else says it's what they say to the Americans and if the repairer is happening, it's probably once in all 10 trips.

After spending about 2 hours in the waiting room, the helicopter is ready and we think, about 20 people, all of us with far too much material. A lot of weight there, I think. I mounted many helicopters when I reported to Vietnam, and I know how important the weight is and the weight of this machine makes me nervous, as well as the inside of the chopper; With a little slapped tape here, and another bit by placing something, nothing it comforts. Then, takeoff comes and it's sensational: the power of the machine is great and we start gradually to relax.

I was unusually eager to make this trip in eastern Russia, from their side of the Bering Strait, and now I am overwhelmed, supported by the pure beauty of what surrounds me. It is a virgin territory and I think of what he had to love exploring Alaska 100 years ago. Although we are here to fish, at the end, the experience of fishing will be transcended by the beauty of the place-La Belle Rivière, so converted premically arranged, with the volcanoes in the background. It's the most beautiful Vista I think I have ever seen. It is done somehow more sucked by the knowledge that there is no one around miles and miles.

I take this trip very seriously, determined that it will be a new me. As such, I had practiced my fly fly for weeks while staying in my summer in Nantucket. I wanted to improve my stroke. Or, more precisely, develop a stroke. My next birthday will be my 70th, and that's something I should have done for a long time. Over the years, I came to accept my strengths and limits, the things I do well and that the things I do not do well; It's part of being an adult, I'm afraid, learn your limitations and therefore a critical part to come and accept you. But more than most things, my lack of skill with a fly cane grills me on me. I am a serious fisherman and I am well accomplished with a spinning rod and a casting rod, but for a variety of reasons, I handle a rod in flight.

One reason for this is that I did not touch a before I'm in my 50s; Another is that I did not spend a lot of time with that; And finally, because of the winds of the Nantucket, where I do most of my fishing, a spinning rod is usually a more viable instrument when I go after the blues or jargors. If you are a novice fly fisherman, Nantucket's winding shores are not an ideal place to improve the technique. In the past, I ranked like a Fly C + fisherman. Although I can have obtained points in some neighborhoods for this rare display of modesty, I did not win any points with myself.

In recent years, I started taking trips of unusual quality with very accomplished flies fishermen and I'm tired not only with my own limitations, but with my own rationalizations. I'm tired of traveling (three times in Patagonia for giant brown trout) made for a thoroughbred but, in my mind, fishing like a donkey.

At stake here is something very important for me. This is the question of whether a certain age approach, a number that has always marked you as old in this society, you can always feel young, act young, and perhaps the most important, overcome a partially part Defective of your character who has governed you once. Improving my fly fly has then become something bigger: a self-imposed test, and probably a way to try to stay young. It will not be easy.

A good part of my problem was that the only time I pick up a fly rod, it's when I'm on the spot, and I'm going up in a rhythm and I submit my class, only to slide when the Travel is over. Thus, I never support improvement. But this time with the next Kamchatka trip, I did not want my first cast in 6 months to come when we finally reached the water. It seemed wrong to undertake such a privileged trip and not get better prepared; It's as if I owe it to the quality of fishing and the fish themselves to do better. So every morning I went to practice. At the end of the day, I called Richard Berlin, a first-rate fisherman whose immense energies and instincts of friendship lead these trips and we made known how I did.

It is then a test of not really fishing, but of life, to stay young. I am not one of these self-help enthusiasts, buying a new book every year in the hope of a new start on life; I do not think about this late date that I can create a new me, nor for this case, I want. But I want to stay as young as possible, physically, intellectually and emotionally. I have done well to that, it seems to me that in my professional life, always working, finding projects that late in my career always albeit, mixing more serious political books with shorter books on sport , who are more fun to do; My job always gives me pleasure, perhaps even more pleasure than when I was young and my professional anxieties were larger. I did not think that retirement writers never retire anyway; They continue to write until one of the two things happening: no one has been buying their books, nor they die. The danger for someone like me, a non-fiction writer, does not concern your legs that give or become tired after 4 hours of writing; Instead, it's about losing your curiosity and your feeling of excitement about life around you.

Finding ends in the moments I do not work is more difficult than when I work, because I'm sure it's for many American males of my generation. Work hard-a singular professional use - easily came for us; We were children of meritocracy, raised to work hard and lucky in many cases to find work we liked. Many of us came from economically limited backgrounds - in the generations that preceded our ours who sailed, traveled, played in tennis or golf, or about it lived long enough to retire. We have not been prepared for a life with leisure time, to deal with the other part of our lives.

From the beginning, fishing was one of my selected ways to find this extra excitation to help feel young. I'm not sure why I grew up like to fish so much, why the pursuit of it gave me so much goal and pleasure, but it is clear from whom I am. There is no pure rational answer to the question of why no fisherman will deploy thousands of kilometers to a distant place, spending a lot of money on the trip to catch a few fish and, of course, free them immediately in the waters. that they have just come. It's something I thought about a big part of my life. There was a day on the Zhupanova when it was raining and everyone was cold, really cooled, and we all watched and felt more than a little miserable, and nothing seemed so delicious as one of these packets of soup -In-a-package. We sat at that day and we laugh, how if it was something other than fishing, we would never spend all this money, traveling all this distance, getting up so early in the morning, handle a bad time like this and loves it somehow.

So, it's a question that has long perplexed me. Why do I fishing? Where does it come from? Why does this take so much for me? Why will I get up at uncompical hours to go fishing? Why, when I was a boy, I was more impatient than any other member of my family, with the exception of my uncle Beloved Moe to fish? Why did I catch every day, catching small fish fish day after day, maybe the same fish repeatedly? I fished partly because my father fished. He did it when he could and took a considerable pleasure of this one, but I do not think it was a passion for him because it was for his elder brother.

Uncle Moe, back in my childhood, back when we lived in the northwestern Connecticut, sometimes present mysteriously at home and drops a large number of huge fish in our cooking sink. They obviously did not come from Highland Lake, 50 feet from our house, because the Highlands were one of the great lakes fucked throughout the country. They are almost surely from the Winchester tank, about 2 miles away, where fishing was illegal and where he had done an illegal night night. Is it in your genes pool, a mysterious and a little secret part of your DNA? Was there a distant ancestor in the old country that will sneak when he was supposed to study the Torah to go fishing? Why can a big fish strike perhaps more precise from the opportunity to strike a big fish so important?

Why is it so sweet part of my life, and why is it less fierce than other things I do? Over the 30 years I lived on Nantucket and fished there for bass striped and bluefish, I tended to underestimate the size of my fish. When I fished with my friends, I did not need to catch the biggest fish or the fish, although I do not like being closed. I was not animated by trophy. I have never had desire, like a boy or a man, to mount a fish - and not that my wife would leave a fish mounted in the house, not even in my office.

The nearest I came at any time of the ego was about 30 years ago, when I fishing, the beautiful Nantucket arm. I fished by myself, who was rare, and I met a great giant bluefish school, all, it seemed that in the chain of 17 to 20 pounds and all in a voracious mood. I had two stems with me: a rigged light fenwick with a 10-pound test line, which is light enough for this type of fishing and a fenwick even lighter, a freshwater rod, rigged with a test of 6 Books, which was almost too light for the area, especially on a light stem. At that time, if I remember, the world record for a blue test on 6 pounds was about 18 pounds, and it was clear to me that I had the chance to break it.

I thought - it was not one of my best moments - that I could be able to fix the record of a blue test on 6 pounds and even worse, I must admit that my thoughts jumped to a minibo imagined with the 'back of my next book. In addition to indicating that I won the Pulitzer Award in Vietnam, that would say, "Mr. Halberstam also holds the world record for a blue fish on a 6-pound test line ..." I saw myself. Fish and rush to my friend Bill Pew's Tackle Shop to weigh him before losing weight. But it did not work this way, which is, I'm sure, just as well. With this light a line, I needed a heavier stem to move the fish, and again and again and again they ended up muscling and breaking. I tell this story - a confessional, and not a little attractive - for the first time, more than a little embarrassed by this one, my beautiful moment of ego to fishing, who came and went happily.

That's why, at this late date, I finally decided to commit myself to improve myself and my casting. At first, it was difficult, not so much hard work and frustrating, working on something that seemed just out of reach. The shot came and went. Sometimes everything went too fast. There were times when I was in a great sense, when almost like magic, I seemed to have pushing her, then just as fast as he was gone, and I was predictably trying to the muscle. When it happened, the rhythm has completely disappeared and my mussels died on me. But gradually, day after day, I improved, and soon I had a real stroke. More, I have come to love the endless repetition, the almost stubborn effect on me, as if the rhythm itself was the goal, and I found that without realizing myself, I lost myself in the act of sinking even when there was no chance to catch a fish. I stayed at the rate for even longer periods, and whenever I slipped, I did not try to muscle. I was delighted with improvement. I had to have good distances on almost every casting; I was finally ready for Zhupanova.

I had been intrigued from the start with the idea of ​​the journey, the fly fishing in the external reach of what was for most of my life the Soviet Union, a place forbidden not only to Westerners (especially Journalists like me, that the Soviets always considered spies) but also to the Russian people. Kamchatka is not Russia more than most Alaska is really America; It is a land so vast, so far from the nucleus of the rest of the nation, that it does not seem to belong to anyone. This is where itself.

The non-warm quality of this extent fascinates a man named Peter Souvenil, who is on our trip. Sveril has negotiated with the Russians for the rights of Americans to fish here and, perhaps more importantly, constantly lobbies for maximum conservation practices like the head of a group called wild salmon center. ("Czar Peter" is what Mike Michalak, flight store, a Fly Fishing Store of California, calls it. Mike manages fishing trips for Americans and is a member of our group.) The question , Of course, is whether in the long run Kamchatka can be protected. We fish in strict guidelines, not just stripping and liberation, but also with crossbrew hooks that give fish a better chance to throw the hook and make it infinitely easier to release them when they are caught.

The fishing here is very good. The brochures for it seem like if the fish had never met with fishermen or artificial lures before and that each casting will therefore produce a strike, but of course it is never so easy. Even here we have to win our fish; If it were easier, then in a way, it would not fish. The first day, my biggest fish is a good size kundzha, or charcuterie, a strong combat fish with a pike. On the second day, I take two more respectable kundzha and a nice coho salmon, about 15 pounds. But it is the rainbows that we are looking for, the trout that will run very large in these waters and that those I catch in the first days are relatively small. As the week progresses, I continue to catch big kundzha and small rainbows, and I took me calling the king of the Kundzha. But it is late in the afternoon the last day I finally connect myself with the rainbows. I use a mouse, which looks like a popper, and it's on the surface, where I love it. When the lure is on the surface, the fisherman looks more like a hunter because he can see the strike as happens.

I put in a niche along the littoral, where a tree and its roots unleashed. During my first case, a fish, a rainbow, I'm sure, starts dragging the mouse. There is an electric feeling for any fisherman when this happens. The 250 preceding boxes may not have moved nothing, but when a fish follows, everything tends to accelerate. There is a tendency then to recover too quickly (or too slowly), and I try to control me and keep the speed constant. Fish follows but does not hit. This is my meaning, based on the size of the whirlpools, that it is a good size fish. I go to bed again. This time, there is no suite. I throw a third time, again, not right away. Now, I put for the fourth time, and again, there is a whirlwind of good size but no strike. And then I throw again, 3 feet further in the shore, and I get another whirlwind and then a shot, and there is a fierce fight; These are strong fish. I do not know how long the fight hard, because it becomes this magical point when the weather seems to stop. In the end, I bring the rainbow, perhaps 22 inches and the journey from New York is worth it.

And with that, I think I have the answer also to the question of why I fishing. Part of this one is pure camaraderie, the friendship of the men I love and I fished with before, the heat and the pleasure of doing so, the meaning of support we have for each other , and even the terrible stories God we tell ourselves at night funny here but not funny anywhere else. But something more important is the leads, and it comes up to the whole idea of ​​goal. I think it's pure optimism of fishing because it is a sport, above all, anticipation. At the heart, belief is the conviction that the next trip will be the best, that the next distribution will bring the biggest fish of the day and, of course, most of the bases, that the last launch of the day will always bring a strike.

It was true for me when I was a boy, and it matters even more for me now. As I get older, I think I have a much greater need to hope; I am also determined not to be one of those men who become lazy as they get older because they have too little goal in their lives. Often, as they glide emotionally, they slip physically, as well. And so it's here, on this trip, exhausting as it was, that I managed to feel younger because I'm preparing to come back that I look when I arrived.

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