Fly-Fishing the 41st

O
ne day, I left in a straight line from home at 41 Kachele Street, east along the 41st parallel, following my passion for fish. It was a journey not only away from home, but toward it; which is the beauty of traveling in a circle, and the irony of adventure. This suited me, for in the event that I strayed—as I would likely take some latitude with the latitude—as long as I could find my way back to the 41st parallel I would not get lost.

My home latitude, 41°N, contained along its length some of the great cities of the world: New York, Lisbon, Madrid, Naples, Istanbul, Tashkent, and Beijing. It was the approximate median of the ancient trade routes from China to Europe known as the Silk Road, the location of Mount Ararat, where post-flood life on earth, according to the Bible, began, and the northern end of civilization's beginnings in Mesopotamia. It harbored a rich variety of peoples, governments, climates, religions, and regions through Spain, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, and Japan. Many laymen, heroes, and conquerors had marched the 41st, among them Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great. They had crossed many rivers—the Tajo, the Danube, the Amu Darya—at which I intended to stop and fish.

T
HE
A
TLANTIC

M
ay the tablecloths be dry,” my father said when he dropped me off at the bus station in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I had heard the expression from him before, and it sounded to me now as almost a clichéd metaphor for good luck—when the ship is pitching in a storm the steward wets the tablecloths in the dining room to keep the plates and silverware from sliding off the table. As a former merchant marine my father liked to speak about the journey.

It was early December and it had begun to snow.

I was catching the bus to JFK airport, then flying to Savannah to board a freighter to Valencia, Spain. As I stood on the platform, a navy blue overcoat, a slim figure within, caught my attention. Peeking from beneath the hood of the coat was the face of an attractive girl. She followed me to the back of the bus and seated herself across from me, looking somewhat distressed.

“Excuse me,” she said, addressing me with a half smile. “Do you know, is it possible to have money wired to the airport? I left my wallet in Guilford down the coast, and there is no time to turn around and get it.”

She had saved me from trying to speak to her first. “Where are you going?” I asked her.

“To France, where I live,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed like ripe persimmons. “And you?”

“I'm going fishing along the latitude of my home.”

“Oh,” she replied. “I like to fish. I feel about fishing the way I feel about Turgenev, and all things I know about the country.”

The bus began to move.

“Why were you in Guilford?” I asked.

“My father lives there. I grew up in Guilford, but my mother is French. I moved back to Normandy with her when they divorced.”

“I don't know your name,” I said, “I'm James.”

“Yannid,” she responded. “But where are you headed?”

“To Spain, then Italy, where I plan to spend Christmas with a friend. I'm coming to Paris in the New Year to meet a fisherman.”

“Rouen is only one hour to the northwest by train. Don't stay in some cheap hotel room, stay with me.”

“Be careful,” I said, “I may take you up on it.”

“It's not an idle offer.”

She took some paper and a pen out of a small brown leather bag and flattened her blue coat to make a platform for writing.

Yannid Browne, she wrote, 23, Eau de Robec, Rouen.

“I'm a student of medicine at the university in Rouen,” she said.

The bus labored through New York traffic and at last stopped at the airport terminal. Yannid stood up and got off, wishing me a good trip, and I wished her one.

 

My plane from New York landed on time in Savannah, Georgia. I spent the afternoon walking along the Savannah River looking for fish, watching the pearlescent currents swirl. It smelled of both the city and the sea.

 

I boarded my ship at Garden City Terminal the next morning, accompanied by the port manager, Michael Tomlin. We walked together up the tall stairs of the container ship to its deck. It was there I met Ulrich Günther, the captain.

Dressed in his heavily starched white shirt with bumblebee epaulets, Günther sat us down in the ship's conference room and reviewed my papers. He and Tomlin spoke informally between business matters.

“Join us in the mess at seventeen hundred for dinner, Michael, will you?” Captain Günther said.

“No, thanks, sir, I'm going home to spend time with my wife.”

“I wish I was with my wife,” Günther said and took his black mustache between his forefinger and thumb.

“We're puttin' up the Christmas tree,” Michael said, licking a chubby finger. His face looked fresh and tubbish beside the lean and weathered Günther.

“Early, isn't it?” Günther asked, “or is it a fake?”

“It's a fake one.”

“Oh,” said Günther, looking down at the papers. “Last year we bought our Christmas tree in Portland, Oregon; this year it will be in La Spezia, Italy. We will spend the holiday in the United Arab Emirates, which I don't like very much.”

At dinner, as the only passenger on the 750-foot freighter ship, I was instructed to sit beside the captain. We could hardly hear ourselves over the din of machinery working to unload large steel containers filled with cargo. Loud metallic booms and bangs echoed throughout the ship. Sometimes the cranes screeched under the weight of a container and bellowed like a whale song; sometimes the raucous bangs sounded like a Dumpster full of raccoons.

At breakfast the next morning I met the ship steward, Kokoria. He introduced himself when he came to serve me my eggs and ham. He put down my food and orange juice on the checkered tablecloth and extended his chubby hand. “I am Kokoria,” he said.

That afternoon, under the guise of delivering tea and butter cookies, Kokoria came into my small cabin without knocking.

“I am from Maiana Island,” he told me, putting down the tea on the table where I was reading. “It is part of the Kiribati chain in the South Pacific.” I found the purple aloha shirt he wore amusing. He licked his fingers like he had just been eating a cinnamon donut—his balding head with kinky strands of hair looked rather like a coconut. I put down my book and laughed a bit.

“You are happy, sir?” he said. “Where are
you
from?”

“I'm from New York,” I replied, assuming he would not know where Connecticut was.

“I have butter cookies for you too,” he said, looking at me. He took an interest in what I had been reading. “Good book, sir?”

“It's the
Odyssey.
You heard of it?”

“No, sir, I cannot read.” Kokoria sighed. “But I am learning. What is it you do, sir?”

“I write books and illustrate them, mostly about fishing.”

“Oh, good sir, that is good work.” He sat down on my bed and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind, sir?”

“Not at all.”

He lit his cigarette and puffed at it delicately between his indelicate lips.

“You should come to Kiribati and write about my island,” he said. “But there is not much to do. We only fish and catch lobsters and gather coconuts. You may find that boring. We make wine from the coconut flowers, we catch land crabs to eat. We get our fresh water from a well. We have no electricity, only the sun—equal days and nights all year. Twelve hours of the day we fish, twelve hours of night we, ha ha ha.” Kokoria laughed. “There wouldn't be much for you to write about. The women only like it in one position, and if you do it any other way they slap you in the face.”

The day grew dark as Kokoria told me stories about life in Micronesia. “You can go down to dinner if you'd like,” he said. “No one else will be there, though. The ship is preparing for departure.” I stood up to look out the window. We had not yet moved. Detritus edged down the river with the ebbing tide and a yellow moon rose over a wide field.

Finally a horn sounded throughout the ship. “Oh, I must go, sir,” Kokoria said, “we are departing.”

At half past ten, the moon disappeared from my window as the ship turned south to face out of the channel. I climbed the metal steps
to the bridge, where all the ship controls were. A crew member stood at the helm of the ship, directed down the channel by the pilot. Captain Günther handed me a pair of binoculars as we passed historic River Street in downtown Savannah. “It is Savannah tradition to watch the windows in the Marriott for women as we pass to the sea,” he said.

Through the binoculars I watched the quaint street decorated for Christmas. Then, as the ship moved, the festive street with restaurants and shops gave way to an abandoned train yard. In the dense scrub that grew there, a fire burned. The moonlight sank and seemed to melt over the breakwater and the lapping waves.

 

Five hours after we left Savannah, we were pushing through a dark sea under a black sky. Standing astern with my hands on the cold railing, feeling the dried salt on steel, I watched the boat's turquoise legacy. We were sailing within the current of the Gulf Stream. The Homeric Greeks had been right to think of the ocean as a giant river surrounding the world.

Captain Günther was always last to leave the mess at meals. After eating, he reclined and enjoyed several cups of tea with spoonfuls of honey. I sat with him. We were now at sea.

“A beer, maybe, in my cabin?” he said, standing up. “How about nineteen thirty?”

“Sure,” I agreed.

Günther kept a good stock of Rostocker pilsner, brewed in his hometown on the Baltic Sea.

“I hope you like it,” he said, pouring some in my glass. “I don't know if it's good. I drink it because it reminds me of home and my wife.”

“My father was a merchant marine,” I told him.

“Then he knows. I'm sure he has many stories, as I do.” Günther took a drink of his beer from the glass and reclined in his seat. “So you understand, too, what the sailor's life is like.”

We finished our beers.

“Good night,” Günther said.

Every day, the ship sailed farther north and farther east, and every day the days were shorter. The wind blew thirty knots at our stern, faster than our speed, which caused the ship to pitch. Lying in bed in my cabin reading, I paused to stare at the blank ceiling. It could have been night or morning, light or dark, I would not have known were it not for my human clock, Kokoria.

The sounds of the crashing waves and constant hum of the ship's engine were soporific. The ocean, besides being a river, was a watery desert, with waves for dunes.

“This is the North Atlantic in winter,” Günther told me at our next meal. “Twenty-foot swells. We are nearly at your parallel, thirty-nine degrees north now.”

The seas calmed a little the next day, which happened to be Sunday. The captain invited me back to his cabin for afternoon tea, this time with the first mate and chief engineer.

As I entered Günther's cabin I heard a familiar tune. It was “Oh, Christmas Tree,” playing in German, as I had first heard it in the house of my Czech grandfather in New Rochelle:
O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum!

Günther handed me a cup and saucer and looked at my face, which I think must have looked pale.

“
Ja,
so,” he asserted, “we are getting a little stormy weather. Please sit. You forget it is Christmastime out here on the ocean. That is why we have the ritual of tea and cake.”

The diminutive flames of three candles burned beside the plates and the warm sweet cake.

“The Russian cook has made this cake for us,” Günther said. “I suppose we should be thankful even though I have to teach him how to cook German food.” He cut the cake and gave us each a slice, which we tasted.

“It's not bad,” the chief engineer mumbled.

“No,” Günther said. “I am surprised.”

Several clay gnomes were arranged around the coffee cups. Each gnome had a small pipe, and when the incense beneath their caps was lit, smoke escaped in aromatic tendrils. The three men and I watched the powerful storm begin to wane outside of the window.

 

The next day at lunch, the first mate, white haired, sallow faced, and overweight, was slathering his customary quarter inch of butter onto a piece of bread when his hand unsuccessfully groped for the mustard.

“Mr. Kokoria,” he grumbled like a cave beast. “Mr. Kokoria!
Der Senf—
the mustard!”

Captain Günther looked across the table at the first mate. “Just don't call him Mr. Coconut,” he said, “he doesn't like that.”

The German officers burst into uproarious laughter, dropping their forks on the floor and pounding their fists on the table. They tried to hold their smirks when Kokoria entered the mess with the mustard.

“Kheem,” Captain Günther cleared his throat. “We can proceed to make our ham sandwiches now.”

That night on our circle route, we grazed the 41st parallel and headed on a course almost due east toward the Azores.

The next morning Kokoria came to my room to tell me more stories about life in Micronesia. He leaned forward with a childlike glimmer in his eyes.

“I miss the heat on the equator,” he lamented. “The crabs, the coconut-flower wine, and the fishing. We have big red snapper. I like to sit in the shade of a palm tree and listen to this old man I know. He knows the Kiribati the way they used to be.

“When a man died, all the people who loved him prepared him for a party. They wrapped him in a blanket of woven palm leaves and then left him in the home until the heat got to him and the water started to come out.”

“The water?” I said, putting down my book and leaning forward. “Out of the body?”

“Yes, water starts to come out of the body, just a week or so after death. And when the water comes, the people in the village take him outside and invite all his loved ones to a party. They bring bowls of a mashed root called
papay
and kneel beside him, all helping to unwrap the body. Then, taking scoops of the
papay
in their hands, they sop up the water from the dead man's body and eat it.”

“Eat it!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, horrible, I think,” said Kokoria. He laughed and slapped his chubby knee.

Nine days later I was standing on the deck with my hand on the railing, a stiff and mild southeasterly breeze blowing at my neck. I heard the captain's voice behind me.

“Land,” he said, almost at a whisper, “do you see it through the haze? It's the coast of Spain.”

Soon I saw other ships and the ferry to Tangier. As we came closer to shore I saw windmills. We passed through the strait above Morocco and sailed up the east coast of Spain.

I gave my copy of the
Odyssey
to Mr. Coconut, and when he asked what it was about, I told him, “It's about a guy who's trying to get home.”

S
PAIN