The Longest Silence by Thomas McGuane Page B

pony into the clearing, followed by a young man carrying a light meter and a viewing lens hanging around his neck and wielding an enormous Bolex movie camera. He walks right past the girl and heads for us. I can see the huge coated surface of his telephoto lens, blue even at this distance, the shoulder stock of his camera, and the knurled turrets that seem to be all over it. His approach becomes imposing. He looks put out.
    “We’re trying to make a movie,” he says. None of us knows what to reply. “The thing is, we’re trying to make a movie.”
    The man next to me inquires, “Would you like us to get out of the way?”
    “That’s right. I’d like you out of the way.”
    All of the casters get out of the way. They hadn’t known, apparently, that when it’s a movie, you get out of the way.
    At the end of the pool is The Pit. You can climb down into it and you are chest level to the water. This is a very realistic approximation of the actual situation when you are fishing, and any fancy ideas you might develop about your casting on the platforms can be quickly weeded out here. My new rod is very powerful and after a couple of hundred casts the epidermis of my thumb slips and a watery blister forms.
    I return to the bench on which sits one of the club officials. I decide to find out if the Golden Gate outfit is merely exclusive. “It’s funny,” I say disingenuously, “with as many hippies as this city has, that there aren’t any in the club. How’s that?”
    “They don’t ask to join.”
    Inside the clubhouse, I chat with the membership. They’re talking about casting tournaments and fishing—fishing generally and the vanishing fishing of California in particular. They know the problems. These are anglers in an epoch when an American river can be a fire hazard. The older men remember the California fishery when it was the best of them all, the most labyrinthine, the most beautiful. A great river system initiating in purling high-country streams, the whole thing substantiated by an enormous and stable watershed. Now the long, feathery river systems are stubs.
    Many of the men standing here today used to haunt the High Sierra and Cascade ranges, overcoming altitude headaches to catch golden trout in the ultraviolet zone. Probably most of them have been primarily steelhead fishermen, though some fish for stripers in San Francisco Bay.
    In view of the fact that the movement of people to California over the last five decades may be the biggest population shift in the history of the world, it is amazing the fishery held up so long. But in the last ten years it has gone off fast. Ironically, it is the greatness of the fishing lost that probably accounts for the distinction of the Golden Gate Club: it has bred a school of casters who are without any doubt the finest there has ever been.
    Fishing for sport is itself an act of racial memory, and in places like the Golden Gate Club it moves toward the purer symbolism of tournaments. The old river-spawned fish have been replaced by pellet-fedand planted simulacra of themselves. Now even the latter seem to be vanishing in favor of plastic target rings and lines depicting increments of distance. It’s very cerebral.
    There has begun to be a feeling among the membership that, like music without the dance, casting without fishing lacks a certain something. And so they are fanatically concerned with the dubious California Water Plan and the rodent ethics and activities of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. The men sit around a table in the lodge and break out a bottle or two. They seem to be talking about some secret society, and when listening in I discover they mean those who have bought fishing licenses in the state of California. The men propose to rouse this sleeping giant of two million individuals to keep their ocean rivers from being converted into outdoor water-ski pavilions. But an air of anachronism hovers over them. The Now Generation