Together again, hunting down the big browns

WE’D COME AS A family to Argentina’s Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego, for our father’s 60th birthday, to catch huge browns and fish as we always have -- to remember old orders while we build and accept new ones, to forget tensions and be together again.

We have blown plenty of paychecks on fishing trips and have traveled more miles for fish than for anything else. This is the farthest we’ve flown, soaring 1,800 miles south of Buenos Aires, over the Strait of Magellan, landing outside the patchwork town of Rio Grande, our plane tires skidding to a smoking stop before the crumbled end of the runway.

By evening, my spay casts are a force, slicing straight through wind gusts to the bank where the browns are lying along the bottom -- though I can’t be certain. I can’t even see my knees. My line lands with a soft slap and I flip upstream loops that sink, drift and trail my wooly bugger deep into river pockets. With jigging pulls, I strip in, gathering coils in my cold, wet fingers.

At 9 p.m., the sun dips, casting champagne light across the river. The clouds flush pink. The wind subsides, as does the river chop. I’m singing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” because the lyrics I remember were overplayed in carpool 20 years ago. “But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete....”

I jig strip and feel a tug. My heart lurches into a thudding gallop as I set the hook hard into what feels like the bottom -- or a not-gonna-budge brown. Tug-tug, the tip of my bowed rod nods, “Yes, yes, a big fish!” It runs. My reel screams down to its green backing, and I’m slipping and splashing downstream. It stops. Michael wades out to help. He always has. Thrash. It surfaces, launching its huge flipping silvery brown body into the air. Michael hoots.

The fish muscles upstream, runs down, tail-walks and holds again. Michael stalks toward it. He stands ready with the net inches above the water. And he plunges it under the fish and up. Unhooking the fly from its jaws, we marvel and measure. A 37-inch, 24-pound hooked-jaw male, fat as a football with brown, pink and yellow-speckled skin. Michael runs for the camera. My earlier competitiveness is so far gone that I find myself wishing he’d caught it. As a professional fishing guide, Michael’s the one who’s made the sport his life.

The fish fins free from my numb fingers. A sigh of awe and gratitude washes away guilt. After all, he had caught four 15-pounders in the morning. Maybe it was my turn. I stand up, woozy from adrenaline. Michael whistles. “Nice Lize,” he says, his face still bright from the biggest brown we’d ever seen. “Luck,” I say. “Nah,” he says, “luck is always in the mix, but so is skill.” Grinning, he shakes my hand. On the way back to our truck he says, “We won today. We definitely got the biggest and I think we got the most.”

I liked that he said “we,” and that the sun had gone down -- it was almost 11 and we were just leaving the river, that warmth would soon needle its way back into our toes, and that we’d eat dinner like hungry wolves, and, in between bites, tell the delicious details.

Later that night, I overhear Michael tell our brother about my fish. They share smiles and shake their heads -- the last time we all fished together I caught the largest fish. This trip, I held our family’s brown record until the last day when my mother, having been skunked for two days, hauled in a 25-pounder, shrieking as it flipped in her arms in front of my father’s camera. Michael caught the most.