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The eyes have it . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

I can already see your raised eyebrows, your twisted, quizzical expressions, hear you asking, A carp? The biggest fish you ever landed on a fly was a carp? And now you tell me it was not only the biggest, but maybe the most magical? Not a big rainbow, or a hook-jawed brown? Not a Chinook taken from some icy Alaskan coastal river, a quicksilver, mirror-sided steely pulled out of a bear infested stream in the shadow of glaciated peaks, or even a big northern pike, all toothy and savage - looking more like a crocodile than a fish - stalked in the weedy shallows of a local lake, but a carp hooked while your ankles were stuck in the muck of some warm, muddy slough?

Yes. Without question. The biggest. The most magical. A carp. Not that the other fish weren't memorable. But for sheer size and otherworldly magic (forgive me this terrible lapse into something approaching New Age, touchy-feely, tie-dyed mystical weirdness) nothing else comes close.

For readers of Rudolfo Anaya, our wonderful southwestern writer who captures better than anyone else I know what it means to be Chicano in Amerika, this will come as no surprise. In his extraordinary novel, Bless Me Ultima, a boy growing up under the influence of devout Catholicism and the place-rooted influence and wisdom of a generous curandera, the carp looms large. He does not show up often, but every glimpse of the golden carp is a powerful glimpse of the transcendent. The timeless other.

Our trout are the inhabitants of cold water. The cutthroat have been in our mountains for eons. Browns, rainbows and brookies are newcomers to the scene, introduced by fish culturists to expand and enhance our angling experience. Whether, in fact, they have done that is open to question. Carp, likewise, are not natives. They came (like so much mysticism) from the Far East. Nobody knows for sure, but it is believed that the first carp in the southwest were planted as ornamentals in ponds, eventually escaping and proliferating in the warm, silty streams and rivers of the region. Like the brookies and rainbows that now so densely populate our high mountain waters, the browns who inhabit our valley rivers, we have come to accept them as locals. Perhaps accept is too generous a term. In this region, few anglers seek them out. In a pattern that is so common it feels almost foreordained, ingrained, pre-determined by some strange socio-economic imperative, the wealthy angler shuns them. Here, as in Europe, salmonids are the preferred species of well-healed fishermen. Carp are left for the working classes and the poor to ply with dough balls soaked in vanilla, or other stink baits.

Which is fine by me. The day I see some newbie dude decked out in Orvis's finest, slopping through my slough wearing a $600 fedora bedecked with damsel fly larvae questing the noble carp, I'm going to cry. I probably shouldn't even be writing this, but I guess I have an inordinate faith in the ability of mud-sucking slough bottoms, biting gnats and mosquitoes, the power of the threat of black ooze and detritus (the fear of an indelible stain on an oxford broadcloth shirt - or the angler's reputation) to deter that crowd. I'll let them catch their carp on dry flies in a coldwater reservoir somewhere up in Montana. I'll continue to take mine in the mud.

But getting back to the mysticism. The magic. It's in the eyes.

A familiar cliché has been repeated so often it has transcended cliché status, escaped even its passage through kitsch, and become, simply, truth - goes: the eyes are the windows of the soul. Look into the eyes of your soul mate the next time you make love and tell me it isn't so.

Look into the eyes of the next trout you catch. Well, more realistically, look into the eye of the trout. Side-mounted as they are, it's awfully hard to stare into more than one at a time. Look into the eye of your next salmon or steelhead and tell me what you see. I'll tell you what I see. Those eyes are cold.

I'll say it again. The largest and most magical fish I ever landed on a fly was a carp. I had seen the puff he made against the bottom of a shallow slough in northern New Mexico when he was startled. The cloud of silt stirred by his massive tail when he bolted from a notch in the bank was like the turbulent billow of black raised by hurricane force winds crossing the Oklahoma prairie during the worst days of the dust bowl. As awesome. As heart stopping.

I could not see the actual fish through the muck. All I could see was the evidence of His existence. In the same way we believe in the existence of a night blow, sensing its presence in the shudder of our home, we know It is there.

And I knew He'd return to that notch.

So I cast a damsel fly larva well past the notch, and let it sink. I waited some more, for the carp to return, practicing what Ernie Schwiebert once called the poacher's retrieve. Waited until the carp forgot about me, then began a painfully slow hand-twist retrieve. As the fly neared the notch, I gathered line with incredible nervousness. And expectation. (Yes, I know - the last few paragraphs are littered with muddy theological undercurrents. The very definition of faith. Capitalized pronouns. The unquenched existence of hope. The very fear of . . . Carp. Cut me some slack - didn't you read the opening paragraphs?)

And yes, He took it.

And yes, I landed Him.

It took both of my arms thrown under His girth, two dripping, stink-black detritus soaked arms to lift him from the water and place him in the tall grass of the bank. Captured and hauled from his world of peace and serenity, into mine of, what? Desperate difference? Possible death?

His great eye rolled. It did not stay still, staring blankly, coldly, like a trout's eye. It turned toward me, huge and questioning. And it asked me, Why?

I did not know the answer, so I placed Him back in the water and I have not disturbed Him since.

I estimate His weight at something on the order of thirty pounds. I'd say he weighed even more but you'd never believe me. At the time, I'd been doing a lot of work for a book publisher in Denver, and some of that work involved heaving loaded boxes of books onto a dolly. The boxes weighed 40 pounds. The carp felt about as heavy. Sliding back into theological tropes - I cannot know for sure, but I know what I know.

And I know this, too. You've all read enough fish stories over the years to want to take this one with a grain of salt. I ask you to take it, instead, with a grain of mustard seed.

I fished that day with a buddy. And he took a picture. It's hanging in the shop I guide out of. Like so much evidence of the other, it's there in plain sight to see.

Or to feel, like the shudder of your home on a gusty night.