New Hope, Familiar Despair, and an Inspirational Sandwich

When I look back at the past year, I mostly see haze and fog. Which makes the memories that remain gleam like islands of hallucinatory clarity. One of these is of Sarah and I standing in a bar, drinking cold beer and eating a revelatory combination of bread, pork, wine, and garlic known on Madeira as sandwich carne vinho d'alhos. Another is of walking toward Powell's in Portland and seeing my name on the marquee.

That night included an on-stage conversation with the Wild Salmon Center's Ramona DeNies, a question-and-answer session, and many vivid reminders of why I launched the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition in the first place: for the sake of the river.

Although that event went unrecorded, you can listen now to my conversations with Aaron Millar of Armchair Explorer and Tim Harden of The Venturing Angler, with another podcast to come from Chris Mortensen of All Creatures.

Rowing to Baikal was reviewed favorably in Library Journal, Foreword Reviews, Gray's Sporting Journal, Good River Review (by old friend Greg Pape), and Harvard Magazine, among others.

Spurred by alternating bouts of hope and despair emerging from Egypt's COP27, a chapter from an early draft of the book was posted on Rivers without Boundaries.

Another excerpt from the book—with several pages of photos by myself, Lanie Galland, Misha Skopets, and Guido Rahr (now of The Takes)—as well as an interview with Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch, appears in the latest issue of Modern Huntsman.

I returned to the river in June, where the guides and staff of Mongolia River Outfitters continue to work against the threats posed by poaching, habitat degradation, and climate change.

Later in the summer, Sarah and I left Algeria. One of the last things we did there was to visit the cave where the creator of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, was imprisoned from 1575 to 1577 (though he would not be ransomed until 1580). One of the best things was a close encounter with the Algerian nuthatch, an endemic bird that somehow avoided the attention of European scientists until 1976.

For "What We Talk About When We Talk About Taimen," see issue 37 of In the Loop Magazine. 

For an account of my sojourn on Slovenia's River of Dreams, visit Orvis News.

Rowing to Baikal, the book

I would call myself a slow writer but that feels willfully understated. The 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition took place a scant five years ago. My first book, Principles of Navigation, was begun in 1983 and published in 2013. (I’ll trust you to do the math.) My second, The Coconut Crab, originated as a story told to my daughter in 1999—and was released in 2022. Rowing to Baikal ships on December 5. So at least I'm getting faster with age.

Though not really. It still takes a maddeningly long time to scribble out the sentences, identify their weaknesses, fix their faults, cobble their connections.

This one happened more quickly because if I’d waited twenty years to get the paragraphs right, the river might have been gone. And with it, so many things that have sustained me and countless others. Things worth loving. (For the record, 50 percent of the royalties from this book have been allocated to the International Taimen Initiative.)

Elsewhere, you can find my story about the pleasures of friendship in issue 15.1 of The Flyfish Journal, while issue 15.2 will include a brief musing on mayflies—or, in other words, youth and fragility—and the epic of Gilgamesh.

And the most recent issue of Destinations, a publication of Fly Fisherman magazine, features a description of a revelatory moment with the guides of Salvelinus in the foothills of the Pyrenees, arranged by my friends at Orvis Travel—with art by Rob Benigno—while Fly Fisherman’s annual Gear Guide closes with the origin story of my guiding career, which began way back in 1979.

But this year, the book has been the focus of most of my waking hours, even on the river in Mongolia, where I made some pre-dawn edits using my phone and then, thanks to the miracle of LTE, passed them along to the publisher before getting down to the more serious business of catching taimen on the fly. (Thanks to Matt Koerber for the pic.)

Lost and Found

In the Summer 2021 issue of Sport Literate, I wrote about a group of feral dogs in Tangier, Morocco, who had welcomed me as one of their own: “They were not really stray dogs but street dogs. Unrestrained and untended. Of all the pack members, current and former, only I am truly a stray. None of my dog friends actually wandered away from her proper home or lost himself in transit from one place to the next. But I have, over and over and over.”

At the time, I’d been living in Morocco for seven years. And now, in the winter of 2022, I find myself on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Though perhaps find is too strong a word. You can read about that transition in issue 14.2 of The FlyFish Journal.

While I was looking for a place to land, a handful of other stories also found their way into print. 

Issue 13.3 of The Flyfish Journal features my story about the most endangered species of trout on the planet: “The Ocean Under the Mountain.”

The spring 2022 issue of Guidefitter Journal offers a look back at my first visit to Mongolia. 

The March 2022 issue of High Country News published my essay, “Hard Lessons from Poker Joe.”

“The Necessity of Success,” in Strung magazine’s spring issue, once again paired my words with the images of artist Frederick Stivers.

Another excerpt from my upcoming book about the 2018 Baikal Expedition appeared in Plants & Poetry Journal. Oddly enough, it is not about a taimen but a porcupine fish. (If you click on this link, be forewarned that it takes a long time to load and you must scroll persistently to find the story.)

And the summer 2022 issue of The Montana Quarterly includes my tribute to the dog who underlies my appreciation of all dogs . . .

Trading a Pair of Oars for Pen and Keyboard

 During the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, the easiest thing for me to do on any particular morning was to get in the boat. After all, it’s what I want to do on nearly every morning, what I would choose if water, especially new water, was always and everywhere available. The relief I felt on picking up the oars some days was palpable, as if a dark sky had perceptibly brightened or the load on my shoulders had shifted to a more comfortable position.

Since March 2020, however, my opportunities for rowing a boat on a Mongolian river have literally dried up. For consolation, I’ve been telling myself stories, some of which have since found themselves in print.

More than one describes the expedition itself: “Rowing to Baikal” appeared in the fall 2020 issue of The Drake, while “The Messenger from Heaven” was published in Politics/Letters in May 2021.

“The Ocelot and the Caiman,” set on Tsimane Lodge’s Sécure River, appeared in the February–March 2020 issue of Fly Fisherman. 

“On Safari, Fly Rod in Hand” ran in the summer 2020 issue of Strung and describes my stay at African Waters’ Gassa Camp in Cameroon.

Two stories can be found in Volume 12 of The Flyfish Journal: “The Word for ‘Fish’ in Speyside” in Number 2 (Winter 2021), with some fantastic art by Frederick Stivers; and “On the Way to Dragon Island,” set in Morocco’s Dakhla Bay, in Number 4 (Summer 2021). 

Moving closer to home, “Solace of the Pack”—about my friendship with an athletic gang of Tangier’s feral dogs—appears in the most recent issue of Sport Literate. 

And more work is forthcoming before the end of the year, including another story about the expedition in Litro’s nature issue, along with a novel for children and adults from Green Writers Press . . .  

 

 

 

 

The Sixty-Second Martini

At the end of any busy day, I love nothing more than a sixty-second martini. And by this I do not mean the martini that follows the sixty-first. I mean a drink that takes less than a minute to make, from your hand’s first contact with the olive jar to the bracing cocktail’s blessed intersection with your parched lips. With nothing to clean up afterward.

I didn’t become an expert on this topic by doing research or writing a book. I did it the old-fashioned way: by drinking. For weeks, months, years, decades. Through many trials and some near-grievous errors, shaken, stirred, and on the rocks (me, not the martini).

 

 

This recipe bears no relation to what you may have previously encountered in hotel bars or James Bond movies. It requires neither a jigger nor a two-piece shaker. Though fastidious, it is not fussy.

This is what I believe: martinis should be cold and they should be sipped. They should not be blasphemed with vodka or water. One is enough to get you to dinner. (Most of the time.)

I call it the sixty-second martini not because I am in a rush to drink it, but because that’s all the time you need to prepare for its charm. My motto: gin without haste, enjoy in leisure, no repentance necessary.

 Ready to begin? Then reserve a place in the freezer for your bottle. That’s where it should live. Always. Store the olives and the vermouth in the refrigerator. I prefer fresh, green, unpitted olives, each about the width of a thumbnail, and extra dry vermouth. (Later, to reinforce some sense of self-respect, you may wish to experiment with other vermouths, a twist of lemon, or even a slice of cucumber.) You’ll also need a martini glass, preferably stemless.

 

Now things start to happen fast. Place an olive in the glass. Tip in just enough vermouth to cover the olive. Firmly grasp your freezing cold bottle of gin. Pour slowly and steadily, aiming a thin stream of gin at the olive’s rounded edge. (This is easy with the built-in flow regulator that comes with many brands.)

See how the differing viscosities of gin and vermouth conspire to turn the olive like a little green pig on an invisible spit? That’s Bernoulli’s principle in action—and all the stirring your drink needs. Continue pouring until the liquid reaches a polite distance from the rim of the glass.

That’s it. Your first sip will be a revelation: cooling, healing, and invigorating all at once.

Please Help Me Find This Book

Last summer, on a rare visit to our home in Montana, I took pains to investigate each and every one of the dozens of boxes of books stored in our garage. None of these boxes had been opened in a decade. 

I was looking for a paperback with a yellowish cover, published in Great Britain, by a woman whose name escapes me. The book is about a character who travels alone by train, drinking and smoking and pondering the big questions. As far as I can recall, it was bought in London in 1983, from a used bookshop in Marylebone. 

I can remember loving the sentences, feeling like their author had somehow toured the inside of my haphazard brain. But I can’t resuscitate the details necessary to purchase another copy. Note: It is definitely not the late, great Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train, which wasn’t published until 2002.

I have thought about this book a lot, even dreamed about it, recalling the feel of the paper between my fingers, the jolt of recognition I experienced with every resonant scene. I have tried to find it by searching key words and phrases online, such as “favorite novel about train travel.” Frustratingly enough, it is easy for my entangled neurons to summon a hazy image of the cover, but the title and author just won’t resolve into clarity.

Illustration by Russell Chatham from Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game (Clark City Press, 1990)

While I was hunting for this maddeningly crucial and yet somehow forgettable book, I set aside some other titles to bring back to Morocco: Richard Nelson’s The Island Within, Jim Harrison’s Just Before Dark, Guy de la Valdène’s Making Game. And Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, now 53 years old.  

Perhaps the problem is that my memory storage device is even more of a museum piece than that . . . .

Trying Not to Count the Days

This is the math I do in my head: 1,500 divided by 25 equals 60. That’s the length of the Selenge River and its uppermost tributary in kilometers, divided by an anticipated average distance per day, meaning that after 60 days, I’ll be rowing an inflatable boat atop the biggest body of fresh water on the planet: Russia’s Lake Baikal.

Because 60 days is only 2 months, which does not seem long at all, I redo the arithmetic, starting at the river’s headwaters in the Ulaan Taiga, a sparsely populated region well-known among Mongolians for its shamans and reindeer herders, then continuing downhill, to that unknown place where the initial trickle will gather first into a brook and eventually become a navigable stream. 

At this point in my calculations, the expedition should be barely a week old, though no doubt our forced reliance on horses and camels will make it feel like a much longer span. Seven days, perhaps, before we can climb into the boats, before it’s all riffles and pools and very few bridges: the floating, Russian army-surplus monstrosity below Bayanzurkh, the concrete model near Mörön, the highway span north of Bulgan that I know only by hearsay.

Here’s another bit of math: of the river’s 1,500 meandering kilometers, I am familiar only with about 10 percent, a mere 100 miles or so. By that reckoning, embarking on this expedition from Mongolia to Siberia is akin to setting out on the road from Paris to Budapest and only knowing the way to Reims.

That is, it would be like that, if we were riding bicycles instead of rowing boats, along a route liberally populated with restaurants, hotels, and other travelers’ conveniences. But we’re not—and for that I’m grateful.

 

Instead of sampling roadside cafés, we will collect data on water quality, mayfly populations, taimen genetics, and angler effort, among other things. And my obsessive calculations? A symptom, perhaps, of both anticipation and anxiety, like a rookie guard mentally rehearsing plays before tip-off, or a teacher counting heads before a field trip.

For more information on the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, visit baikalheadwaters.org. To donate, please go to fundrazr.com/baikalheadwaters.

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