The Arctic Detox

Angling as antidote to the digital world.

Our heroic author. Note to self: Suck in gut.

“…their minds were reshaped to the jittery, moody psyche that ruled the digital realm.” — The Every, Dave Eggers

Just a month ago I found myself sitting next to an earnest young man of 35 who passionately made the case for, of all things, emojis. It requires extra effort on the part of a user, he explained, to click on anything beyond a thumbs-up or smiley face. I should therefore take it as high praise when someone uses a laughing emoticon to react. The scariest part: I found myself listening to him.

As a non-digital freelance writer, I’ve tried to remain open minded about social media. I use LinkedIn, though I find it to be a grand celebration of the largely meaningless, full of vacuous stories of personal journeys, corporate blood drives, and team building. To survive the digital world I need to totally escape it, to go where not even a telephone signal can penetrate. For fifteen years now, I’ve gone to the arctic tundra.

Farther faster

It’s a two-day, 1,500-kilometer drive across the entire length of Finland, and we reach the trailhead at three o’clock in the afternoon. The younger anglers in our group of six insist on covering ten kilometers on the tundra. The hills we face are only around 400 meters, but to get to where we want to camp requires going up and down a dozen of them. The sixty-somethings in our party bitch about it but relent, because even we don’t want to spend an evening near water that doesn’t hold fish.

It’s soup for lunch. One pot, four spoons.

In this case we’re after arctic char, a fish as tasty as it is beautiful, and the tundra lakes are its home, deep enough they won’t freeze in a minus 50-degree Celsius winter. My dream is a windless evening, a lake surface like glass, and a two-kilo char caught on the dry fly. These perfect conditions are not out of the question, though it’s even money they’ll happen at all, with windy and wet often the rule.

Five kilometers into our hike we encounter a pool six meters square and a meter deep. In it is a lone char, dashing from one end to the other, gulping down every available insect. He probably came here during high water and won’t be able to reach his home lake without dragging belly over rocks. This one has enough troubles and is left alone. We sit and watch him feed a while and then move on.

The antidote

Depression is at a record high in the community I live. Media reports, as well as anecdotal evidence from both doctor- and patient friends, say that anti-depressants are being prescribed at record rates. Fishermen are hardly exempt. My friend, Jaanus, who’s along on this trip, has come across three suicides while fishing, all of them hanging by the neck from trees by the river.

No boat, no light, no motorcar. A friend says I should dirty up the pack. I’m working on it.

While social media probably can’t be blamed, it’s saddening to see people so overtly obsess over how others perceive them, their public profiles curated to be full of #passion and #commitment, even when their job is total #dogshit. But here, on the Norwegian tundra, there is no desperation, and I attribute that to no phone signal and not a single tree high enough for anyone to hang himself.

The dream

Today the winds are gusting to 15 meters per second and there are white caps on the more exposed lakes. It’s supposed to be four degrees this evening, so it’s a good day to cover ground, to untwist our intestines from 15 hours in an automobile.

We pitch our tents at midnight on a stream between two lakes. It’s so idyllic that I’m hoping these lakes produce fish, because you rarely find a campsite this picturesque. But these lakes aren’t deep enough to hold our dream char, so we move on in the early morning.

Our first camp. About is idyllic as you can get.

It’s a five-kilometer hike to the point Siim, who planned this route, declares that we’ve arrived. Dozens of deep lakes are within a several kilometer radius. It’s three in the afternoon. We crack a beer and pass it around.

The McChar

The spin fishermen immediately catch fish, but this is no surprise. Cast enough times in this environment and you’ll drag up a char or a trout. While I don’t get a thrill catching fish that way, I am not above eating fish caught on a spinning rod. I make a McChar: fresh arctic char between rye bread, garnished with onion and topped with a squirt of lime.

Trout left and char on right.

After dinner, I hook a couple of trout on a small stonefly imitation, but I don’t think the fish are seeing it due to the choppy water. I try a team of three flies, a size-10 foam thing with rubber legs, followed by a size-12 Goddard caddis, and then a size-16 Royal Wulff. At the outflow of a lake I land two trout at the same time on the outside flies and realize a three-fly rig is more trouble than it’s worth.

The spin fishermen seem to pity me. They offer me their spare rods. They don’t understand why anyone would carry only a fly rod. They’re catching more and bigger fish, and it appears I’m just playing around. To say I don’t care about catching fish wouldn’t be accurate. That’s just not why I came. I’m here to gaze at the cloud formations, sip whiskey from a tin cup, and watch fish take insects off the surface.

Mihkel with a pan-sized char. This one hasn’t had time to fatten up on insects yet.

As a fisherman, I don’t need a newspaper, virtual or otherwise, to know what we’re doing to the planet, what we’re doing to ourselves. I come to the tundra to see the natural world as it once was everywhere and never will be again. I know it’s only a matter of time before humans will come for this place, too. I just want to take it all in before it’s gone.

The code

I re-rig with one fly, this time a lightly-weighted hare’s ear nymph. While I like the idea of a dry fly, this almost-dry approach will perhaps be more visible in broken water.

Fly rods aren’t totally useless.

I’m right. I’ve cracked the code. I have a big char on the line and he’s racing back and forth making my reel scream. All this plays out right in front of the camp. “Beautiful fish,” someone remarks as I bring it near shore, the white on its fins bright against the red underbelly. But he thrashes, somehow spits the fly, and returns slowly to the depths.

I swear at the loss and realize I’ve got more detoxing to do. When all is right with the world I will laugh at losing a fish. We’ve got four more days of fishing left. Four more days to become worthy of catching one.

Oldies and youngsters. Gandalf (at left) shows the way.

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This story was originally published in The Mission, issue no. 42.

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