No other cars sit in the lot. No tracks mark the frosty trail before us. Tall, mossy spruces float in a flat universe of gray. We go down through the muskeg into the forest and finally

emerge onto a misty saltgrass meadow along the river.

SHE and the SILVER TORPEDO

STUART MASON photos by MATTHEW GERRITS

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LISTEN CLOSELY. The calls of geese and cranes echo in the distance like the fleeting remnants of last night’s dream. Hugging the far bank, a squadron of mergansers zooms past us on a mission not unlike our own: to catch fish. And one of us is deter-mined to land her first coho on the fly.

On our third day in Alaska, Joyce and I are the first anglers on the river. As we rig

up, choosing our first flies of the day and tying clumsy knots with numb fingers, we don’t talk. I watch the river out of the cor-ner of my eye. Sometimes a silver salmon will reveal itself with a ripple or a swirl, or one might porpoise like a dolphin, expos-ing only its dorsal to the world above. But now a bright, thick, silvery coho clears the water in a mighty leap and smacks down with a loud splash, shattering the stillness

of the magic hour. Quickly it happens again. And again. Frisky devil. My hands tremble. It takes me forever to tie a size 2/0 Popsicle onto a 10-pound tippet. This should be easy; I’ve done it a hundred times. Another jumper, closer to me this time. Why do they jump? As a friend once pointed out to me, they don’t have a middle finger.

Focus on your knot, I tell myself. I finish rigging and find that I have missed one of the line guides. Again. My wife and I have been fishing together for over 20 years. We share that same tingling fever. Our shared passion gives us an excuse to wander about on remote beaches and rivers when sensible folks are still sawing logs in their warm, dry beds.

Every time we fish together, I’m thankful that she loves to do it with me. Not every spouse wants to get cold, wet, and slimy at zero dark-thirty. When we travel, we sleep on couches or floors. We shop for rods and reels with Buy It Now price tags that hover some-where around $100. We borrow a car or sniff out the local rent-a-wreck. I’ll admit

that I wear a high-end wading jacket—but only because I was able to snag it for 50 percent off retail on the sale rack. It’s a women’s size XL, and it fits this male just perfectly.

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We travel on a tight budget. That’s why we cherish our long friendship with Moses, a lanky lawn care professional from southeast Alaska with wild hair and a massive soup catcher of a beard. Moses welcomes us into his home every year during the peak of the local coho run. For our daily forays to the river, he lends us Tuna Can, his old beater of a Subaru. This year Tuna was happily unregistered, and the rear window on the tailgate had been replaced with plastic and duct tape. Tuna got us from Point A to Point B, though her exhaust system could wake the dead. Whenever we passed the one local cop in town, we tried to be invisible. That’s tough when you’ve got that plastic flap-ping in the wind. Every day, Moses returns from his lawns, covered in grass clippings and deer pebbles. We return from the river with a fish or two, and we pamper Moses with a

dinner that’s heavy on fresh salmon and coho caviar. Our bodies are stiff and sore with aching shoulders, bruised shins, and fingers sliced by razor-sharp coho teeth. For purely medicinal reasons, we sample his herb and he cranks up the songs of Lord Huron on the stereo. He insists that we sleep in his comfy bed while he takes the couch. Each morning, we chug coffee and power bars before dawn. Moses opens one eye long enough to look out and see if the morning light on this day might be friendly to his camera. If he thinks the light will be good, he rises like a big old grumpy bear and rolls himself a smoke. We might run into him later at some point on the river. Moses likes to wander the swamp, his huge beard full of bugs, capturing intimate photos of wildlife. He lives for it, just as I live for the tug of the silver torpedo.

Morning passed in a succession of flies: popsicle, gurgler, clouser, bugger. Salmon swirled out in the pool and two kingfishers zipped low over the water, rattling as they flew. Around midday, Joyce put her faith in an unweighted flash fly, because it was easy to cast with her vintage Fenwick 8-weight. Just tinsel on a hook is all it was, but sometimes it pays to go simple. The loop unfurled and the fly landed. Strip-strip-BOOM, and a solid silver erupted into the air. If you’ve ever hooked a ten-pound sea-run fish on a fly, you know what I’m talking about. In the words of Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice: It’s showtime.

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This time, she remembered the mistakes of her past, the mistakes we all made in the beginning. While carefully maintain-ing a pull on the fish, she reeled in her slack and put the fish on the reel, a classic rebuilt clicker with no drag whatsoever. She gained line when she could. When the fish ran, the reel handle brutally bashed her knuckles like the ace of spades snapping in a kid’s bicycle spokes, but she palmed the spool perfectly. Slowly she worked the fish away from a field of giant fish-stealing boulders and over to a gently sloping gravel bar. When the fish was ready, she beached it as I whooped for joy. Years ago in western Ireland, Joyce caught her first salmon. In a small river running full spate, she hooked an adult fish using an olive woolly bugger, a 5-weight trout rod, and a big dash of beginner’s luck. After an epic battle all over that rushing stream, she was able to bring the fish close and back it up toward the shore. But as she pulled up to land it, the badly outgunned trout rod broke in two and fell apart. I jumped into the river and scooped the spent fish out onto the bank with my hands. The life of an angler is punctuated by milestones. First trout: check. First fish on the fly: check. Atlantic salmon: check. Coho salmon: check. I ask my wife, “What about king salmon? They show up in June, so we would need to come earlier in summer.”

“Nope,” she says. “Those kings are as big as me. I’ve seen pictures.” But I’m patient. It’s just a matter of time until she’s ready.

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