Having at various times in my life considered the multitude of alternatives, I am sure there is an argument to be made for the simpler choices. Some space should be made for mystery in this ever perplexing quest for survival, assuming, of course, that survival is still a valid alternative. With such thoughts pressing in upon me, I bought several years ago in Italy a small house on a enchanting river whose name I had never heard prior to reading it in a newspaper advertisement in the Corriere della Sera.

Flyfishing for trout and salmon is a romantic pastime whose infection has been chiefly confined to the British Isles and, in more recent times, to our own United States. However, as in the case of most of mankind’s afflictions, it has proved difficult to arrest the spread of this disease to other parts of our crowded globe. Symptoms include the irresistible desire to persecute the beautiful and innocent denizens of the world’s most lovely brooks, streams and rivers, not with dynamite which would be both swift and merciful, but with long, thin poles used to cast thick lines, much like whips, to the ends of which have been attached nearly invisible monofilament leaders, the purpose of which is to disguise the artificial nature of the feathery creations at their extremities, designed both to hide the fish hook and to imitate one of the boundless forms of aquatic life, insects in particular.

The average victim can often be found, particularly at early morn or towards sunset, wading a stream and whipping the waters in the hopes of deceiving some poor salmonid with his (and nowadays her) interpretation of the insect hatch on which, it is presumed, the trout are feeding at that particular moment. As with most invalids, such people have a tendency to dwell on their illness, boring the uncontaminated with the most minute details of their medical history. It is not unusual for certain of them to become true experts in all aspects of their malady.

Although I had done some flyfishing in Montana and Wyoming in the days when problems were somehow less weighty and the world much more of a blank book in which to write and carefully edit each page, for many years the thought of picking up a flyrod and rediscovering the faded memory had not even entered my mind. To all appearances I was cured.

I knew that some trout were supposed to inhabit the rivers of Northern Italy where I had lived most of the time since those mythical days, but I had never come into contact with anyone who had fished for them (either did Hemmingway), and I wasn't even sure which rivers had trout. I did have vague twitchings every time I passed some small mountain stream tintinnabulating its way down to an Alpine valley, and I must have remembered briefly something of the Beartooth and Absorka mountain ranges of Montana, much like the sensation that what we are seeing we have already seen somewhere else at some other time, a glimpse into an unexplored dimension.

The fatal moment of rebirth happened one day when, convalescing from what had been diagnosed originally as leukemia and only subsequently modified to mononucleosis, I fell irretrievably in love with that small house in a tiny village on the banks of that river, and the river smelled of trout, at least to my uncontrolled and still feverished imagination. Fortunately, my wife shared my enthusiasm, although for different reasons, having nothing to do with the smell of trout. All else followed.

The Trebbia, for that was my river’s name, is both a difficult and interesting challenge, and it was some time before I learned to capture its trout, first with spinning rods and only later with the fly. I had to learn that it was not enough to whip the waters, that the trout would only take my flies when they were presented in a natural fashion. If the fly were designed to float on the surface, no trout would only touch it if it did not fload free of the drag the current tended to exert on the line. If, on the other hand, I was fishing with a sunken fly, it had to swim naturally over its prey. Even at that, most of the trout I was able to deceive were of the younger generation, maybe ten inches, not their elders. So, I continued to wade this rocky river bed, occasionally slipping into the drink, the consolation being drying myself out at one of the local trattoria with a good glass of the local specialty, "…un buon’ bicchiere."

The Trebbia is an interesting river, because in addition to the younger generation of trout it also contained a few of their grandparents, that race of gigantic brown trout which still survive in some areas of Europe and which are rarely taken by sporting means. They don’t get that big by being dumb. The fact that a few of these browns perservere is a testimony to their survival instinct, since the local humanoid populations are most innovative in dreaming up new ways to terminate their earthly tenure. Ponds have been drained and rivers diverted in their pursuit. Once in a while our local poachers would capture one of them in an illegal expedition at night up the two mile underground irrigation tunnel which ran beneath our property, but only very rarely.

One of these trout lived in a large, deep pool only a few hundred yards from our house, almost directly across the river from one of the most beautiful castles in Italy, the Castello di Rivalta. During the summertime as many as one hundred people from Piacenza and further afield would use this pool as the local swimming hole, but apparently this trout felt safety in numbers. A few fishermen had managed to tie up with the fish, but a ten pound trout in his own stomping grounds has little to fear from the light leaders which are the only way to hook him in the first place.

I first encountered this local resident one evening when a large wasp alighted on the water in the eddy of a boulder jutting into the stream and suddenly disappeared amidst much commotion.

"La trota!" said the bait fisherman standing a few yards from me.

"Si! E’ la trota," replied his companion.

I saw this trout again a few times over the next two years, including one time when I dove into his realm properly equipped with fins and a face mask. But the most dramatic encounter occurred early on morning in April as dawn was breaking. As is usual for me at that hour, I was not entirely convinced of what I was up to when about fifty yards downstream a chub leaped frantically into the air pursued by the very vision of the predator, a huge trout, his jaws enclosing in flight his hapless prey. Every trout fisherman has his own particular definition of the sport. My own is that picture indelibly etched on my past; the pure ferocity of a most perfect creature, efficient and lethal and absolutely invincible by fair means and even most of those foul. I understood in that moment that with some trout you may catch them or destroy them, but you never possess them.

The Trebbia is no wilderness river to be discovered by the more adventurous. It is one of those rivers that has always been, already uncovered by generations past. This is no Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego or the Ugashik straights of the Kenai Penisula. In December 218 BC Hanibal defeated the might of the Roman Republic on its banks somewhat to the north of the present city of Piacenza. Some of his troops withdrew for the winter up the Val Trebbia to the Borreca tributary, where certain villages to this day bear such Cartheginian names as Zerba and Tartaso. Centuries later, in the Seventh century, one of my Irish forbearers, Saint Columbian, founded an important monastery at Bobbio, a town today noteworthy for its beauty, its white wine and a renowned gastronomic tradition.

The Trebbia and its affluents reached their trout fishing apex during the period spanning the end of the last century to the early post war era when new accessibility and greed ended its seemingly endless bounties. The Italian royal family of Savoia, and particularly Queen Elena, were accomplished flyfishers to whom the introduction of flyfishing to Italy is generally credited. Various members of the royal family fished the Trebbia at the turn of the century, but as far as I have been able to determine, flyfishing was actually introduced to the region by an English Consul at Genova in the waning years of the last century. The flies he used are still tied and fished by some of the older fishermen of the area that have not surrendered completely to the onslaught of bait and spin fishing. In any event, Queen Elena did fish the Trebbia, and appently she did quite well.

There are a few who fished in this golden period who are still alive and were kind enough to tell an enthusiastic and ingenuous young American what the river was like back then. One of them, Peppino Cantu’, not only recounted these stories but also documented them with photographs. One of these faded memories shows a basket of trout purporting to be the results of a morning outing and which appears to modern eyes as the fruit of an intensive season of fishing. Another shows Peppino with a thirteen pound trout he caught a mile below Bobbio a few days before Italy declared war on France and such happier days faded into the irretrievable past.

Angioli was another of these men. He survives today in Goretto, a village several miles above Bobbio, and nobody seems to remember his first name, if he ever had one. For fifty years he has been simply Angioli. He appeared one day on the banks of the Trebbia and henceforth earned his living sending his catch each morning with the daily bus to be sold in the fish markets of Genova. During the winters he tied flies which are still among the most productive patterns on the river and built his primitive rods of unsplit bamboo. One of these rods found its way into my hands, a prized possession. He built it for Peppino during the war. I sometimes think of it in the hands of its maker, once the undisputed maestro of the Val Trebbia, today a very old man.

I suspect that most trout fishermen know only one river truly intimately, at least so it is in my case. Since the days I spend on the Trebbia, I have fished rivers on four continents, yet everything goes back to those days when I first pondered what it was all about and how to do it. But then, that was a time of disillusionment and I was out of work, a time when the walls of our apartment in Milan were too confining. Over those five months I learned the river.

It was no longer a simple question of catching fish. By that time I had already achieved a degree of competency in that most mediocre aspect of the sport. What changed was my awareness of the river itself, its riffles, its gravel runs, its pools, its delicate spirit. Inexplicably I began to come upon the wild ducks I had never seen before. I spotted the grouse among the thickets and branches. I spotted hares that studied me intently never moving a muscle. I would watch the hawks in all their soaring superiority, the ultimate majesty. I learned where to find the snails after the rains, where the crayfish hid in the river’s beds, what the trout would be doing at any given moment. In short, I became obsessed. In Alaska and Africa I have been overwhelmed by the wilderness, but I could never achieve the intimacy of that other world. On that very old trout stream in a very old country something changed in my soul.

One evening I was casting a fly over a particularly lovely pool just above a stretch of the river being mined by a cement company when suddenly what appeared to be a monster trout rose to the fly and promptly spit it out before I could strike. I spent the next hour beating the waters in the hope of moving this fish again, but to no avail. It showed itself no further that night.

Finally, already hours late, I gave up and returned down river to home to a very chilly reception on the domestic front. A few glasses of the local wine and an after dinner whisky resolved such outstanding problems, at least from my perspective. It was the second whisky that did it. I began to be convinced of my proprietary rights over that reckless fish that I was not about to renounce in favor of some clod with a gob of worms or, even worse, some shiny piece of hardware. By this time, being a slow drinker, I reasoned that dawn was not all that far away, so I drove the thirty miles back upstream, tied on a nameless streamer fly and waited for the obligatory half hour before dawn to begin fishing.

Every once in a while, things go exactly as planned. Employing every bit of stealth in my body (product of the right books), I eased up the gravel bank and made the perfect cast (most rare for me). He was a two pound trout and he took without hesitation. I was trembling by the time I beached him a few minutes later. I wish to this day that I had not clobbered him with the nearest rock rather than gently releasing him to run the future gauntlets of worms and hardware. I have killed few fish since that morning.

Eventually we sold the little house by the river, as we moved first to Turin and then, two years later, to Northern New Jersey.

A few years ago a major flood swept away the hole where the trotra dwelt, filling its entirity with gravel. About the same time the local authorities banned swimming in our part of the river due to sceptic conditions during summer’s low water conditions caused by excessive construction in the Val Trebbia. I have no idea whether the Trota and his stirpe survived, perhaps in another pool further upstream. If there is hope for la trota, there is still some hope for the rest of us.

When I can, I still return to the Val Trebbia to visit friends and sacred places. I haven’t fished the river in years, but I still try to recapture time from its vanishing realm.

Some time ago one one of those visits I stopped over at the California Hotel in Ressoaglio where I had fished many times. After dinner in the restaurant that night I went into the bar for an espresso and post prandial libations, all of which was served me by the owners wife. I had seen her on other occasions, but we had never really spoken to each other. That night, exchanging the usual pleasantries, something in our accents led to the discovery that we were both Americans. She had been born and raised in Buffalo, marrying an Italo American who, after making his money in the States, had returned to his origins. We talked of all manner of things that night, but I remember most when we spoke of the emigrants that had left the poverty of the Val Trebbia for the greeness of America or Australia or Argentina or what.

"They all come back sometime," she said, "if they can."

So do we all, if we can.

 

 

Mahwah, New Jersey