Ludwig was formerly a schoolmaster. He had once been a Fulbright Fellow in the States. He was a fine-boned, handsome, weathered man of around seventy, a fly fisherman and ptarmigan hunter, a driven golfer, and a navigation instructor. When I asked where he sailed, he said Greenland, Poland, different places. He taught for thirty years beneath the glacier to our north, and when he moved into Reykjavik to be near his six grandchildren, he chose a house with a view of the glacier in the distance. Ludwig loved every season of Iceland, even the long, dark winter. The weather seemed to me to be remarkably varied, impacted as it was by many seas, the Gulf Stream, and the high latitudes. “In Iceland,” said Ludwig, “we don’t have weather. We have examples.”
Our cook, a man of rare talents who presented us with marvels of local provender — langoustine, sea fish, lamb with wild icelandic berries, still-living scallops, regal salmon, char gravlax — had a very short fuse and was intolerant of things going wrong at any level. “Our cook explodes,” said Ludwig, “and we love him for it!”
We took in all this fishing with the blithe purity available only to those who are guests. We were guests of my dear friend Bo Ivanovic, who too often impedes his superb angling abilities by looking after his friends. At a fleeting moment of semidespair, he allowed that it was hard to “keep these gears and wheels turning.” This looking after other people is trying to anglers as serious as Bo, who are happiest as solitary wolves intent on enmeshing themselves in the skein of signals and intuitions that tie the angler to the fish. Triangulating wind, tide, and weather isn’t made easier when a guest totters up in his robe and asks if you “haven’t a little something for the Hershey’s squirts.” The social savagery of anglers is such that they are liable to point out to the very host who has seen to their food, shelter, and transportation that they’ve caught more fish than he has. That the host rarely passes among his guests with a heavy sword is a testament to the depth of character in those who take on this role. The day comes, however, when they tire of all this and tell some repeater-sponge, unhappy that the staff is late in changing his sheets, to go fuck himself. One instance of this, after years of benevolence, and the host necessarily acquires an indelible reputation for being a short-fused spoilsport. By now, most any host realizes that he can turn this to his advantage. Fish camps are filled with dour former hosts who stay to themselves, read in their rooms, and push off early for the best pools.
My luck might have been better had I quit plying Ludwig with questions. I may have been more interested in him than in the fishing. But I did want to catch a salmon, and he was anxious that I succeed. We went to a beat where low water had almost brought the current to a stop. While there were plenty of fish, it was necessary to stay well back, lengthen and lighten the leader, and strip the fly. As I fished, Ludwig told me the story of his childhood. His mother died when he was a boy, and since it wasn’t possible for his father to keep him at home, he was sent to his uncle’s farm on the north coast of Iceland. He and his father missed each other tremendously and throughout Ludwig’s boyhood they wrote to each other at every opportunity. His father saved Ludwig’s letters and years later gave them to him. We talked about his idea of using them to write a biography of the boy who wrote them, the boy he’d been, tilting this idea around a good bit but then, still without a fish, drifted off into a chat about Pablo Neruda.
A gyrfalcon — Ludwig called it an Icelandic falcon — appeared in the distance, coursing over the land with extraordinary power, certainly the most impressive bird of prey I’d ever seen. It intersected the river about a quarter of a mile above us and turned down the bank, searching. I could hardly believe my luck as the bird rode right down the bank opposite me, the heroic falcon of dreams, a stark medieval-looking raptor, every bit of its shape refined to heraldic extremity. It hovered slightly as it passed us, swept downstream thirty yards or so, banked up to slow the velocity of its turn, then came right up the same bank. Directly in front of me, the falcon crashed into the deep grass of the far bank. A bleak cry issued from some creature and the falcon lifted off with a duckling in its talons. When it soared off to a spire of rock with its prize, the mother duck tumbled into the stream and, pushing her two remaining babies ahead of her with urgent, plaintive, heartbroken quacks, paddled away. Ludwig was holding his heart; it was really very sad. I felt an ache until that night when our English companion, David Hoare, said, “That falcon has a nest of babies to feed.”
Time was running out and I didn’t have a fish. I suppose that, technically, this was a streak of bad luck, several half-day sessions without a take, when all others in camp were doing fine. I was even mourning the duckling who would never be a duck and its mother, by now down to two babies out of what had probably been eight.
I tied on a Red Francis, a horrible tube fly that looks like a carrot with feelers on one end. Certainly it is a shrimp imitation but fish react to it strangely. Often they ignore it, yet sometimes it seems to drive them crazy. In the last minutes of daylight, the latter obtained. Every fish in the pool ran around violently — if it’s supposed to be a shrimp, why would they do that? — and one large fish won the race. A bite! I fought this very strong fish in a most gingerly manner up and down the pool and landed him, a fifteen-pounder, with the clear understanding that my bad luck streak was over. I don’t know how you know this, but you do. Ludwig’s pent-up emotion boiled over too as he, at about 150 pounds, lifted me, at about 190, into the air with my fourteen-foot double-handed rod waving overhead. I had played this fish so carefully that reviving him took a bit of time. I was glad to be back in a realm in which I greedily put green fish on the bank with all their strength intact. One swipe with the hemostat and they were free to go.
BO WANTED ME to see several other rivers in Iceland and took me next to the Selá River in the northeast. There I spent a day with Orri Visguffson who grew up in a family of herring fishermen but now leads the effort to save the North Atlantic salmon. We discussed Halldór Laxness, the great Icelandic novelist, whose Independent People everyone in camp seemed to be reading. “He lived just outside Reykjavik,” said Orri. “We saw him often. At some point, he began to think of himself as something of a gentleman. There was an ascot tie, a house in the country. But we never held this against him. We had no idea why he did these things. Certainly he had his reasons.” In Iceland, a thousand years of freeholding farmers have created a specific culture within what is the world’s oldest democracy. Taking on airs is perceived as fabulously exotic and inventive. In Orri’s patient account, Laxness’s ascot tie floated like an enigmatic object in a surrealist painting.
Orri was helping me to fish a run that was not easily understood. A stream flowed into the main body of the Selá, which flowed from right to left. Orri had me stand in the stream thirty yards above the juncture and cast to the outside of the seam caused by the stream. He continuously adjusted my position with push-pull gestures of his hands and monosyllabic instructions about the cast itself. Then he had me wade across to the inside of the small stream, changing my angle slightly on the drift, then directed me downstream for a cast or two until I had reached the beach, the stream now entering the river to my right and the drift swinging acrosss the seam of the incoming water. Orri watched the drift, indicated that I must move several inches to my left, then returned his hand to its sweater pocket. He nodded solemnly and the salmon struck.