In April of 2016 (autumn in the southern hemisphere), author Michael Altizer was invited to Patagonia to fly fish some of the most famous trout waters in the world—the rivers Collón Curá, Chimehuin, and Rio Malleo.
In the opening section of his book “RAMBLINGS—Tales From Three Hemispheres” Altizer focuses on this grand adventure, from the initial anticipation of the trip and its preparation, to the actual experiences and afterglow of fishing these legendary waters in all their beauty, power, and sometimes even anger.
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Following is the first of two of these chapters that we’ll be sharing with you here on the Sporting Classics DAILY over the next couple of weeks.
— Chapter 2 —
Transition
You have no earthly idea what Patagonia might hold . . . well, no, that’s not entirely accurate.
It’s one thing flying over country you know, country you love, country you peer down upon through the perspective of memory and experience as you soar high above the American Southwest.
The low, slanting, humidity-free light of a clear desert sunrise brings form to all those familiar features miles below—features you know by smell and texture and temperature and touch, and which, with good reason, you suspect may somehow still carry your bootprints.
There, a mile to the north, rolls Interstate 40—the route you always take to New Mexico on your annual autumn run for elk, the one whose four transcontinental lanes scribe the track from your home in the mountains so far behind you to the east, nearly all the way to the Pacific, beyond whose beaches and offshore islands you have no valid point of reference.
You begin to see the highway a few miles west of Amarillo, where it falls from the 4,000-foot tablelands of the Colorado Plateau, off the broad escarpment and out into the high desert of eastern New Mexico, and soon you recognize the cholla cactus-and-sagebrush country around Milagro where you sometimes hunt pronghorns when you are bound to Earth. In a few minutes you’ll spot the junction where two lanes break away perpendicularly from the interstate just east of Moriarity and bear north into Santa Fe before continuing up through Española and Medanales and Abiquiu and Canjilon, then on up to the ranch and the lodge where you know your friends are even now awaiting your arrival and Fernando is setting the rib-eyes out to thaw and where you’ll be sleeping blissfully tonight.
In a few more miles you’ll soar across Red Canyon where you found the herd of elk that summer huddled together in the cruel August heat, desperately seeking what little shade they could find among the withering piñons, their hopes of stumbling across a trickle of water or a decent blade of grass all but gone.
But tonight, it’s another thing entirely as this big Airbus bears you due south over completely foreign country—country you know only from books and film and legend, where there are no ground lights or fires to mark the presence of a people or a culture or even a planet somewhere far below.
So you try to imagine what must be lurking and living and flowing there in the blackness of the broad Amazon forest as it spreads unseen in all directions beneath the dark and moonless sky.
You try to resurrect any fragment of truth or nuance or latent lost fact that long ago might have accidentally lodged in your memory about this part of the planet. But nothing comes readily to mind, except perhaps a few vague impressions of printed pages and long forgotten photos or video images, as remote and inaccessible to you now as this strange and beautiful woman sleeping so soundly at your side.
She’d slipped across your legs and settled into the seat next to you as the plane sat waiting at the gate in Atlanta. You had just opened up the book by Beryl Markham that you’ve read so many times before—one of the few books worthy of bringing on a journey such as this. You were reading about the time she found her pilot friend Woody where he’d been forced to land on the Serengeti Plain just south of Rothchild’s camp. And just as Bishon Singh so unexpectedly appeared to her from the African bush, this lovely lady had appeared to you, dressed in the long loose slacks and soft woolen scarf and cap and the intricately patterned handwoven sweater that spoke so eloquently and definitively of Argentina.
Her hair was long and lush, a rich dark cocoa brown that fell in waves across her shoulders, and she spoke a courteous hello as she settled into the seat beside you.
It reminded you of the time you and Matt and Linda brought the skiff back into the marina in Islamorada that evening after spending the day out on Florida Bay fishing the flats and mangroves around Flamingo and Buchanan Bank and Arsenicker Key, and how, after you’d helped Matt load his boat onto the trailer, you’d all meandered over to the outdoor bar. You had bought well-chilled Stella Artois for the three of you, and when you paid the bartender he mistakenly charged you for the drink that the blonde lady in the white linen sun dress sitting on the bar stool next to you had ordered, and when the bartender apologized and tried to correct his error, you told him “no problem” and paid for her drink as well.
She had thanked you warmly, seemingly embarrassed for the mistake, then struck up a long and interesting conversation with you as the dude to her left regaled the bartender and anyone else within earshot with his vast expertise in whatever, and it turned out she was a tour guide from Arizona here on holiday. Then the self-proclaimed expert stood and staggered past you with a couple of his cronies, and you realized that the pretty blonde tour guide was actually here all alone and not with anyone else at all.
Matt needed to get back and prepare for your next day’s fishing, and Linda had dinner plans and had already left, and it gradually became clear that you were now here alone and free at the bar with this lovely and oh so obviously available lady from Arizona.
It had all been so easy.
But you had a wife back home a few hundred miles to the north who had been the gift from God you’d always needed, and who for years had been as deeply entrenched in your heart and in your soul as you had been in hers.
So this is how it happens, you’d thought. This is how the Innocent becomes the Guilty. This is how the tender becomes the calloused, how a good marriage begins to fail in a welter of guilt and accidental circumstance. This is how a good man goes bad.
And so you’d smiled a friendly enough smile and stood and lightly shook her hand, then bade her adieu and left alone with your fly rods and tackle bag, your soul and your conscience still more or less intact.
And now, here you sat beside another, knowing full well that, unlike with the blonde back in Islamorada, you will indeed spend the night beside her.
But you prefer to spend it alone and not be distracted with idle conversation, and to keep your mind clear and centered on the days and weeks ahead when you will experience and absorb all you can about airlines and altitude and Argentina.
And especially about Patagonia.
You have no earthly idea what Patagonia might hold . . . well, no, that’s not entirely accurate.
For you do have some loose impressions about what might lie ahead, from articles and books and some minimal online research and a few first-and-second hand conversations and emails, vague though they had been.
But you learned long ago not to try to imagine or anticipate too much when venturing into the unknown. For the ultimate reality of where you are going will usually exceed any preconceptions you might have formed on your own. Better to let a new land introduce herself to you, rather than try to force the issue and learn her prematurely.
And so you return to your book and the Serengeti, where Beryl has now found Woody and is flying him back to Nairobi in her twin seat Avian, leaving his crippled Klemm monoplane sitting silent, silver-winged and disabled back on the broad African plain.
Soon, the hostess brings you and the Argentine lady your separate suppers. You and she exchange a few idle words as you dine, and you know you still have the prospects for some amiable conversation as the night passes.
If you want it.
But you do not want it—as pleasant as such conversation might be. And so she has a tiny pink pill for desert and is soon sleeping soundly beside you as onward you soar through the vast equatorial darkness somewhere over Peru, alive and awake and attuned to the long journey still ahead.
The cabin of the plane is cool and getting cooler, and you can feel the warmth emanating from her as she sleeps. You eventually begin to tire. But as always on an airplane, you are having a difficult time sleeping, and you ask the attendant for a pillow and blanket and finally release yourself from your book and the Serengeti and turn to your iPod and headphones and the music of Ástor Piazzolla and Alberto Ginastera and Leonard Cohen and set your imagination free to wander where it will as through the night you fly.
On toward Patagonia.
The author always welcomes and appreciates your comments, questions, critiques, and input. Please keep in touch at Mike@AltizerJournal.com.
In a few days, we will be posting another chapter here on the DAILY from Michael Altizer’s book, “RAMBLINGS—Tales From Three Hemispheres” that will feature his time fly fishing Patagonia’s legendary Rio Malleo, which flows from the snowy slopes of the 12,256-foot volcano “Lanín.”
It has been argued by many that this most intimate river is perhaps the finest trout fishing destination on earth, and we hope you’ll enjoy the story. Click here to order your copy today!