Never the Same River Twice

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Dad claimed to have had two epiphanies the night before our fly-fishing trip. “One was about the vastness of non-being,” he reported the next morning, gazing up from his hotel bed. “The other was that we should just step back and let these fish do their thing.”

The first thought is one that my 84-year-old father understandably wrestles with. I can barely imagine how large the prospect of death might loom over an octogenarian with heart problems, just as I can barely imagine the emotional impact that Dad’s eventual passing will have on me.

The second one pertained more immediately to the task at hand. In fact, it called this whole elaborate rendezvous into question. We were headed to eastern Quebec in pursuit of Atlantic salmon, which return from the sea every year to their rivers of origin for spawning. Dad and I have gone after them for nine of the past 10 summers, joining the thousands of anglers who set out to snag these long-traveling fish on hooks hidden beneath artful combinations of fur and feathers.

We’re talking catch-and-release salmon fishing here, which is for the angler’s enjoyment only. To back out now could be considered virtuous — enlightened, even. But it would also mean abandoning the possibility of a very particular type of happiness: the joy of landing and then liberating an Atlantic salmon.

It would mean abandoning associated pleasures, too: the push of the river against your legs, the skill and repetition involved in casting, and the scrubbed-clean feeling of peace and satisfaction that settles over you after long hours of doing both. Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula has natural beauty in abundance. The river that Dad and I usually fish there, the Bonaventure, has a staggering blue-glass clarity that renders the salmon as eerily visible as dream images. Were we really ready to say goodbye to that?

The most meaningful time that Dad and I spend together is when we’re fishing. Our annual attempt to catch salmon on a fly — “the sport of kings,” in which flamboyantly hand-tied lures are christened Blue Charm, Green Highlander, Jock Scott, Picasse — elicits confessions and old memories from my father that more prosaic outings don’t. The plain fact is that fishing is just about the only remaining outdoor activity he can manage. Skiing, skating, hiking, and cycling have been left behind as the years have accumulated. But give him at least one helper (usually me) and a boat and he’s in the game. I’m convinced that the anticipation of going fishing once more helps power him through Maine winters.

So I tell myself that “epiphany” is too strong a word for the incipient doubts that Dad is feeling that morning in our provincial hotel. For the moment, he says nothing more about letting the salmon be. We pack up our gear, eat a quick breakfast, and get on with it.

Twenty-four hours later finds us, somewhat unbelievably, on an upper branch of the Grand Cascapedia. This is coveted water, admission to which is extremely limited. Unless you’re spending the week at one of the Gaspé’s celebrated, century-old private lodges, gaining entry to the Grand’s prime salmon water requires both luck (for the lottery draws) and handiness with French-accented bureaucracy.

And yet we’ve managed to score a slot on the Grand without either. We owe our presence here to my friend Ben, a lifelong salmon angler who plans his annual Gaspé trips the way Tom Cruise choreographs stunts for action movies.

We’ll report back to Ben and the seven other fishermen in his party at day’s end. For now, we’re enjoying the rare feeling of getting a three-mile stretch of river to ourselves.

As our young local guide, Dominik Bujold, prepares the canoe, Dad and I follow a footpath to a pool just below the put-in. Dad’s wobbliness on uneven ground requires me to hook his left arm in mine, a form of filial dependence that always gets him hunting for something — anything — else that we can talk about. Within seconds, he’s jabbing his walking stick at a chewed tree limb. “Beaver’s been there,” he says. “Just keep your eye on the trail, Dad,” I say.

He stops short of a tricky step down onto the rocks, content to watch from the forest’s edge. I’m about to cast out into the pool when a 25-pound salmon leaps right in front of me. “A leaping fish is not a taker,” Dad intones from the bushes. If past trips are any indication, he’ll be reciting this hidebound mantra several hundred more times. Still, where there is one fish there are often others. I swing a fly through the pool for another 20 minutes, nodding silently whenever Dad offers unsolicited casting advice. The same big salmon jumps once more, but otherwise there is no action.

I help Dad into our 20-foot canoe and Dominik poles us down the river. It’s already midmorning, but a chill still hangs in the air. There’s less birdsong than we’re used to; the birch leaves have turned yellow. This is our first late-season trip here, and fishing-wise it’s a trade-off: there are fewer “fresh” and therefore gullible fish around this deep into September. There are also fewer anglers to compete with, a major reason we’ve managed to score this private beat on the Grand.

The river is low, rarely above the knees, with a rock-and-gravel bottom that’s easily visible through lightly bog-stained water. If our usual Bonaventure is a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, this is a glass of aged single malt. Eroded slopes above us burn cinnamon red. Cedars lean out here and there from the banks, on their gradual way to toppling.

Dad has loved being in canoes as long as I have known him. What he loves even more is what he’s lost — being in control of a canoe — and he compliments Dominik’s poling, an old-timey skill that Dad prides himself on once having, while paradoxically keeping an anxious grip on the gunwales. We stop at several known holding places that morning, during which Dad relaxes, and we carefully pass flies through them. No takes. We spot one or two fish that might have been enticed, but only after approaching them in the canoe, by which time they’ve spooked and the opportunity has vanished.

Catching an Atlantic salmon on a fly rod is hard, nothing like the bloodbath that casual spin-fishers partake of in Alaska. Even if you spot a fish and work it for an hour, dangling one fly after another in its face, there’s a good chance you won’t so much as move it.

Not for nothing are these salmon called the fish of a thousand casts. If you’re the Hartmans, it’s more like ten thousand. The last time Dad caught an Atlantic salmon was 12 years ago, when his footing was still solid and he embarked on these trips without me. I’ve caught just one adult salmon in the past decade. One, though, was enough to feel it all: the shock of connection, the awesome energy of even a medium-sized salmon on a fly line, the anxiety over landing this precious fish cleanly, and the elation that swoops in once you’ve done so. In our case, the elation was shared. Dad was as over the moon about that 18-pounder as I was.

I’ve also experienced the boredom and frustration that can accompany long hours spent not catching salmon, whether through no fault of my own or (agonizingly) a costly split second of incompetence. As an old Quebecois fisherman once said to me, “You don’ ‘ave to be crazy to fish for salmon. But it ‘elp.”

The sunk costs enhance the payoff, of course. Even so, I sometimes wonder if I’m crazy enough for this sport, if I shouldn’t just save myself the heartache and the 15 hours of driving and stick to more accommodating fish like trout — but that’s just me. There’s also Dad.

We get out of the canoe for lunch, and I gingerly walk Dad (“Look, some moose tracks there…”) over to the folding chair that has been set up for him. Out of the riffle in front of us spills a long, deep run that Dominik assures us contains a heap of salmon. Another leaper (“remember, not a taker”) almost immediately proves him right.

I finish my sandwich and, throwing superstition to the wind, take a glug of the whiskey that was intended for celebration. (Then again, maybe holding Lagavulin in reserve for celebrating is the jinx. Typical salmon-fishing thoughts.) Dominik ties on a chartreuse-and-black fly that I’ve never heard of called a Watch Out!

Polite and soft-spoken, Dominik has proven to be an ideal audience for Dad’s tales, and I hear him begin to unspool an old one (“Have you heard of Richard Adams? He was guiding Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter on the Matapedia this one time….”) as I step into the river.

A few casts in, everything suddenly changes. There’s a distinct weight at the end of the line, which has now tightened. I raise the rod, and the weight races downriver. Dominik is within earshot now — “Keep the rod up!” — and Dad echoes him.

The salmon takes me into my backing — the emergency line wound onto a fly reel for moments like this — and eases off, allowing me to reclaim yardage while steering the fish out of some boulders. It’s about 100 feet away when it leaps for the first time. Five minutes later, the line springs loose and I see my fly lofting toward me. My salmon has come unhooked.

I feel despair creeping up on me — or is it just Dominik? He’s come to inspect the fly and leader. Both are in fine shape, and I realize that I did nothing boneheaded during this lost battle. Sometimes breaking off is just what fish do. I glance back at Dad, hunched in his parka and looking neither too happy nor too sad. “Go catch another one!” he urges, attempting to raise my spirits. I’m not quite ready to do that, but nor do I feel crushed. A lot of what I came up here to feel happened in those 10 crazy minutes. Look on the bright side, I tell myself. You’ve got two-and-a-half, maybe three days of guided fishing ahead of you.

I should have known better. That ended up being the only salmon that either one of us hooked all week. “Well, too bad you didn’t catch one,” Dad said at the end of the last day, which he spent recuperating at the rental chalet and which I, with his enthusiastic blessing, spent on a pair of main-stem Cascapedia pools that neither of us had ever dreamed of fishing. Even on those legendary beats that are full of fish you can get skunked, I philosophized. “Blanked,” Dad said, using the classier English term.

Even so, it was a good week. Good because about half the fishermen in our group, great guys I was mostly meeting for the first time, caught salmon. Good because Dominik got a video of my lost fish leaping. Good because Dad, after letting me treat us to a day of easier fly-fishing from a flats skiff in the nearby Baie des Chaleurs, landed one so huge that the guide declared it a local record “for a striped bass caught sitting down.”

Not bad, as consolation prizes go. Dad’s grin stretched his jowls as wide as I’ve ever seen when we got that fish in, and I’ve got the photos to prove it. For him, a striper will never carry the symbolic weight of an Atlantic salmon; the degree to which I accept or reject this way of seeing things says a lot about our relationship.

One of Dad’s favorite fishing stories is from way back when I was 12 and barely conscious of the outlook he was imparting to me. I hooked my first salmon, then lost it during a netting mishap.

In his telling, I then turned to him and said, “Why are you crying, Dad? It’s just a fish.”

I wouldn’t say that now.

Classic Cascapedia sporting camps own exclusive water rights and operate like private clubs. If you don’t have a close friend (or grateful business partner) who can get you in, try booking at The Salmon Lodge, a 19th-century camp on an 80-foot bluff overlooking the Cascapedia. They will at least take your call, even if they can’t guarantee you’ll be fishing the Cascapedia; rates start at $4,650 per angler for a three-day fishing package.  •  The same owners run Camp Bonaventure, a modern lodge built in traditional style on the banks of its namesake river. The surroundings here are woodsier, the gin-clear waters are less restricted, and the light-filled main room features a 30-foot-tall stone fireplace; rates start at $4,350 per angler for a three-day fishing package.  •  For a wonderful history of the region and its legendary salmon camps, seek out Hoagy B. Carmichael’s two-volume The Grand Cascapedia. (Hoagy B.’s son Ben Carmichael shot the images accompanying this story; Hoagy B.’s dad was the Hoagy Carmichael.)

Darrell Hartman is the author of Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media. He lives in New York City and Livingston Manor, N.Y.