Wil Downs, though, stuck out. In an obituary by his colleague Thomas Aitken, Downs was described as one of the most accomplished tropical medicine authorities in the world, a malariologist, a virologist, a parasitologist and epidemiologist, an entomologist and an ecologist. From our dinners in New Zealand I knew his sharply focused and intimate views of literature. But his love of rivers and fishing seemed to overarch it all, a music as deep as his love of the world.
I also have in hand Wil Downs’s New Year’s letter for 1991, wherein he begins dispensing various accumulations preparatory to moving into a rest home. Simultaneously, he announces a trip to South America to fish some rivers that have aroused his curiosity. Departure is soon. “This causes immediate stress and a desire to unload. My suspicion is that the Argentine fishermen largely fish with wet-fly, streamer, Matuka flies and when they do the dry-fly, fish a large fly. I hope to make a serious study of the susceptibility of Argentine trout to the small dry-fly.”
Afterward he planned to go to his ranch in Colorado where, aided by his teenaged great-nephew, he meant to fish and to study “the relationship of the abundant Culicoides of the Upper North Platte River Basin, altitude 8000’ or higher with vector-borne viruses infecting livestock, wild animals and birds, and maybe even human beings.” Then on to the Skeena drainage of wonderful steelhead rivers in British Columbia, followed by a visit to a daughter in England. There was a piano to ship, a pool table to ship, books to ship; a chapter to write on yellow fever for an Oxford practitioner’s manual of diagnosis. Splendid fighting cock necks had arrived from Monte in Kauai and must be shared among fellow fly-tyers. At this point, describing the colors of the necks — furnace, ginger, black, cree — Wil conjures fishing friends over the years, a rain of small, generous biographies, amounting to a “pantheon,” he says, “major and minor saints.”
About this time I must introduce my son, Monte Downs. We had a heartwarming experience several years ago when the two of us went to New Zealand and spent the best part of a month together. On one memorable occasion, when we were fishing together on the South Island, with a New Zealand hardy guide, 15 years Mont’s junior, and showing the guide’s usual poorly concealed opinion of his patrons’ prowess, Monte hooked a big trout in Siberia. The trout ran him under a big rock at the top of the pool, in deep water, Mont tried to disengage it, with no success and finally broke it off. Not long afterward, he hooked another large trout in the same pool. This fish also ran upstream and deep and got under that big rock. Mont, from below, walked into the frigid stream, deep, deeper, with tight line on the fish all the time. Deeper still, over his waders, deeper still nearing the rock, and his hat floated off downstream, and Mont’s head disappeared under the water. He was under for half a minute, and then his head reappeared. And wonder of wonders, he was still onto the fish and the fish was free and a few minutes later, Mont, soaking wet and shivering, beached a 26-inch brown trout. The guide murmured, “I’ll be damned!” My heart swelled with pride. Indeed, I had fathered a fisherman.
Wil, considering the rich companionship he had from angling, wondered how could he reconcile it with his love of the solitude of rivers. He hoped to fish with each of his cherished angling companions, “but please, not all at one time.”
ONCE IN A WHILE during fishing season, Craig Fellin gets a day or two off from his guiding business in Montana’s Big Hole and invites me to join him for some low-pressure, semi-exploratory fishing. This summer, when he invited me and our friend Mike right before the mayhem of the salmon fly hatch began, we tried an old tailing pond left behind half a century ago by a mining company. With banks of raw gravel, it’s a lunar place to fish, and the heavy metals — laden trout living there are protected by their carcinogenic flesh. They grow to tremendous size.
I caught only one fish that day but it was a good one, a cutthroat which rose to a size 16 Parachute Adams and weighed between four and five pounds, a short, cold, and animated slab that felt wonderfully substantial in my hands before I released it and saw its golden shape sink into the green depths of this weird fish pond.
Then things got so slow and the air so warm that we took a long snooze on the bank. When we awoke, encouraged by the ants crawling on our faces, we had completely lost track of our original momentum and perhaps couldn’t even remember what brought us to this strange locale in the first place.
We went back to Craig’s camp that night and talked about his winter guiding on the Malleo River, at the base of the Chilean Andes on the Estancia San Huberto. There he’d met a remarkable man, an old man who wanted to fish twelve hours at a stretch, who sometimes had to be carried up the bank at day’s end. Craig had found a man who, once he saw the water, held nothing back. They fished every day for two weeks. As they drove to the river, the old man recited Civil War poems, interpreted the landscape, identified the birds, and rhapsodized about the burgeoning life he saw. He and Craig had once corresponded before they’d ever met, and the man sent him jars in which to catch and transport insects. Craig dutifully stood under his porch light at Wise River, Montana, snatching caddises out of the air to fulfill this request.
“He not only fished hard,” Craig said, “he took everything in, everything. It was just so wonderful being with this guy. You’d get to a run and he was in touch with everything in it. If fish quit feeding, he could wait. He could wait ’til they started again. He was always watching.
“On the last day at the corral pool, he took a nap. There were some big fish on the bank. We crawled up and marked those fish and crossed the river so he could cast to them. He hooked a great big fish and landed it. I guess it was maybe the biggest fish he ever caught in his life. It was only four o’clock. But he said, ‘Let’s call it a day.’ That was so unlike him.” Craig paused. “He flew out the next morning.”
Craig brought out a beautiful collection of necks, enough hackles to last out the millennium. A tributary of the Big Hole River roared just beyond the window. “Maybe we fished too hard,” Craig said. “He admitted that himself. Because when he went home … he didn’t feel well. And, well, he died.” Craig looked at the fly-tying materials. “He sent me this stuff, to remember our trip by, I guess.” Craig was struggling with something. He said, “He was a doctor of tropical medicine.”
Unfounded Opinions
EVERY FLY FISHERMAN has an unreasonable view of fly rods, and I am no different. Generally, we’re united in the belief that all rod design has been progressive and that the thinking about fly rods in the past was so bad as to make it amazing that people were able to fish at all. This is based in good American fashion on the belief that angling is perfectable and chiefly concerned with efficiency. “I stepped into the water,” a fly fisherman was recently heard to say, “and proceeded to empty the pool.” We, his listeners, were bowled over. The trout stream as modern toilet. Now I understand that this sort of hyperbole is part of the fun, but its humor is based on a crackpot idea.
I don’t think bamboo rods, for example, are as efficient as glass and graphite. But I like the smell of varnish when I open the rod tube! I like the human hands that made them. I had a graphite tarpon rod whose hook keeper wouldn’t take anything larger than a number 10 dry-fly hook, an understandable mistake when you realize it wasn’t made by a fisherman but someone who looked with equal interest upon golf shafts, tennis rackets, riding crops, skis, and umbrella handles. Yet I dearly love graphite for helping me put some poetry in my loop and for relieving the tennis elbow I acquired from steer roping.