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" I WAS IN MY OFFICE, staring at the wall, when my editor called to say the magazine wanted to send me on the fishing trip of my dreams.  I knew right away it was a trick question, perhaps dangerous, an offer too good to turn down. &amp;quot;Can I go anywhere?&amp;quot; I asked. &amp;quot;Yeah, within reason,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;With Uma Thurman?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s married and just had a baby. I don&amp;#039;t think she&amp;#039;s available.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Fine,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Then I&amp;#039;ll go alone.&amp;quot; But where would I go?  Someplace wild and beautiful, of course. Someplace for the water. The Sea of Cort\u00E9s. Prince William Sound. Patagonia. Wisdom, Montana. A cold lake in a glacial cirque. A river with huge boulders that you swim out to and deep pools filled with big, dark trout. Someplace where there would be no other fishermen. The next day, as it happened, a friend came by to show me an article about how the Nature Conservancy was trying to establish a national park in the Great Rivers region of Yunnan Province in China. The article had a map of the region, an area bordering Tibet and Burma where four major rivers nearly converge and run parallel through a gap seventy miles wide before spreading out and emptying to all of southeast Asia. The rivers were the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, and the Irrawaddy, and the shape they made on the map was like an hourglass. There was also a photograph showing the director of the Conservancy&amp;#039;s project, Ed Norton, standing with a twenty-thousand-foot mountain in the background. I looked at the mountain and looked at the map and said, &amp;quot;There, where the rivers almost come together, that&amp;#039;s where I&amp;#039;ll go fishing.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Does the article say anything about fish?&amp;quot; my friend wondered. &amp;quot;It says the region is known for its remoteness and biodiversity. There&amp;#039;s probably carp in the main rivers, and I&amp;#039;d guess there are trout up higher in the tributaries, like in the west. They could have migrated up any of these rivers, the same way they migrated up the Missouri and the Colorado. The Chinese are now promoting the area as the actual location of the Shangri-la Valley from James Hilton&amp;#039;s novel Lost Horizon.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I saw the movie,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It wasn&amp;#039;t bad. But you should really check to see if there are fish.&amp;quot; So I did some research. The best thing I found, by far, was Joseph Rock&amp;#039;s 1947 monograph The Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China. Rock was a self-trained botanist who lived in northern Yunnan from 1922 to 1949, working as an explorer for the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the National Geographic Society. His book was a detailed cultural history of the area, but it also included many black-and-white photographs of the terrain and the people who lived there. There were pictures of rivers running through deep gorges separated by mountain ranges with peaks covered in ice and snow, and there were pictures of high valleys, some with large lakes. The text displayed a level of detail that made me think I was looking at the product of a great mind, but, unfortunately, Joseph Rock was no fisherman. In fact, I found only one mention of fish in five hundred pages, in a caption below a photo of four people in a boat. It read: &amp;quot;The lake is alive with fish, some of them poisonous.&amp;quot; It wasn&amp;#039;t much, but I was looking on the bright side. I e-mailed Ed Norton and asked him if he knew anything about the fishing in the area. His reply came a few days later: &amp;quot;There is no fishing in any of these rivers--no sport fishing, anyway.&amp;quot; I wrote back, asking him to be more specific. After two weeks, when nothing had come back, I called Norton&amp;#039;s office in China but was told he had left for the forest and wouldn&amp;#039;t be back for a long time.  I wondered whether he had meant that there were no fish in the rivers or that catching them wasn&amp;#039;t allowed or that people in China don&amp;#039;t do &amp;quot;sport fishing.&amp;quot; I wondered whether I was a sport fisherman. I&amp;#039;d never considered it a sport. For me, it didn&amp;#039;t have anything to do with competition or rules. It was a way to carry my fly rod around and hang out next to water. But then the fly rod was a weapon, and that was why I liked to hold it.  In the end, the question of Norton&amp;#039;s reply came down to the definition of sport, which I didn&amp;#039;t really want to think about. I was going fishing, regardless of definition. I FLEW INTO KUNMING, the capital of Yunnan, a city of skyscrapers and three million people, and got on a bus going north, toward Tibet, toward the mountains where the rivers almost came together, the center of the hourglass. In a day&amp;#039;s ride, I was in Lijiang, on the southern base of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (elevation 18,150 feet). I got off the bus in the late afternoon and there it was, like an entire range unto itself, rising up from out of nowhere, dwarfing the other mountains in the area. The air was cool and dry, and the light was sharp; it had the feel of the basin and range, a feeling of high, open space--a perfect place to fish. The streets of Lijiang were wide and white, with stoplights that gave digital countdowns of the seconds remaining until the change to green. Everything was new, and the air smelled of fresh concrete. I&amp;#039;d read that Lijiang was hit by a huge earthquake in 1996 that leveled much of the communist architecture. In its place they seemed to be building hotels, hotels, and more hotels, all in a sort of a brutal fortress look but finished in white tile and done up with banners and flags like desert casinos. I went into one, but there was no one at the front desk who spoke English. I tried a couple more; same thing. They seemed uninterested in Western tourists. I got in a cab and told the driver, &amp;quot;Hotel,&amp;quot; but she didn&amp;#039;t know what that meant, so I threw up my hands, and she took me to the old part of town, the part that was built eight hundred years ago and had withstood the earthquake and was being preserved as a living-history theme park. This was where the Western tourists stayed--or maybe this was where we were put. The streets were narrow and mazelike and paved with large stones that had been worn smooth over the centuries. There were shops selling carved animals, jewelry, and Tibetan clothing, restaurants along a stream with outdoor seating under willow trees and the Eagles on the sound system, guesthouses with Internet connections and signs in English, German, and French. It was a bustling place filled with tourists, only a few of whom were Westerners. The vast majority were middle-class Chinese, on vacation for the first time ever. THE NEXT MORNING, I got in a cab and said, &amp;quot;Wo yao diao yu&amp;quot;--I&amp;#039;m looking for fish--a phrase that I&amp;#039;d learned from a Chinese student in a restaurant the night before. The driver nodded and drove north out of town, toward Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and stopped after twelve to fifteen miles at what looked like a retreat center a little ways up the southern slope. There were a series of large pools, one above another, up to a spring where the water came gushing out of the side of the mountain. There were walkways around the pools with Chinese tourists strolling slowly, some arm in arm, dressed as though they were going to church. In the pools were trout, big trout, hundreds of them.  I hadn&amp;#039;t flown halfway around the world to fish at a trout farm, but I was curious to see what kind they had here. So I asked a woman who worked there if it was okay for me to fish. She pointed to a pool, and I set up my rod, attracting some attention from other employees. My fly box was stained with blood, and opening it was like looking into a living organism, something that had heat and perspired--little killers, little pieces of meat made from silk and deer hair and feathers. I tied on a scud, which looked like a small shrimp--simple, irresistible. I threw out thirty feet of line, and there was an immediate boiling in the water as one fish took the hook and a hundred others swarmed over it, as if they were going to devour the thing before I could pull it to shore. It was a four-pounder, shaped like a rainbow but with none of the color. It was dark-brown and black, with only a little white underneath and no distinct spots, and its fins and tail had been eaten down to nubs--not a pretty sight. I put it back and it swam away. &amp;quot;This fish is dead,&amp;quot; said the woman who worked there. &amp;quot;You pay me 200 yuan.&amp;quot; Which was twenty-five dollars. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not dead,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;It swam away just fine.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;This fish is dead. One hundred yuan per kilo. You pay me 200 yuan.&amp;quot;  She seemed quite sure of herself, and although I took umbrage, she would not back down. I decided to compromise and gave her half of the money and walked away wondering what had just happened. Twenty-five dollars for a fish in a country where the average annual income is $700? This seemed rather excessive. Maybe these were special fish, rare or somehow sacred. Or maybe I had been ripped off. There was no way to say for sure. I walked down the mountain, following the stream through steep pastures and cornfields surrounded by rock walls. The corn was full-grown, and there were people harvesting, cutting the stalks by hand and loading them onto horse-drawn wagons. I would tell them that I was looking for fish, and they would smile and sometimes laugh. They seemed to have no problem with me coming out of nowhere with a fly rod and walking across their land. Back home I would have been shot for such behavior, but these people apparently had a different concept of private property. Perhaps they didn&amp;#039;t mind because there were no fish in the stream to catch. The stream was clear and cold, but there were no plants growing in it. I turned over rocks, looking for bugs and nymphs. Nothing. I looked around in the bushes on the shore and saw a caterpillar. So I tied on a caterpillar fly, the same size and color, and threw it across the stream so that it landed under some bushes along the shore, as if it had fallen from one of the branches. I threw it just above the pools, letting it drift and sink. I threw it on top of a fallen log and let it roll off into the water. Nothing. I tried four or five other flies, dry and wet. There was nothing living in the water. THAT NIGHT, I had dinner beside the stream where it ran through Old Town. The air was a little cold--sweater weather--and it reminded me of Halloween. The willow tree over my head was turning yellow and dropping leaves in just the same way it would on Deer Creek in southern Utah. The other people sitting along the stream looked as if they were from all over the world, East and West, young and old, everyone listening to Joni Mitchell and enjoying the night.  I was working on my second beer when a young American introduced himself and asked if he could be of service. His name was Eric Mortensen, and he was a Ph.D. candidate in Inner Asian and Altaic studies at Harvard. He&amp;#039;d been coming to the area for ten years to study raven divination among the shamanist hill tribes. He spoke Chinese and Tibetan and had read everything--absolutely everything--about the area. He said he had a topographic map, but he didn&amp;#039;t want to take it out in public as topo maps were until recently considered state secrets, so we went into the restaurant and up to the second floor, where there were a couple of tables and a 20-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. The map showed an area west of Lijiang, between the Yangtze and the Mekong.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve read that the distance between the four rivers is less than a hundred miles,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Would it be possible to traverse the ranges and see all four?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You would die. Or maybe I should ask, How are your mountaineering skills?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;m not looking to get out on a glacier, but I think I could walk through some snow over a pass.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It would take months,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;The area is huge. How much time do you have?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;A couple weeks. I&amp;#039;m looking for fish.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;ve seen big fish being caught in the Mekong near Laos. Maybe you should go down there.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I&amp;#039;m interested in clear water and high elevation, although not any higher than, say, where a grasshopper would live.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You should go to Haba,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Haba Snow Mountain. It&amp;#039;s just north of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, with Tiger Leaping Gorge running in between. Haba village is on the eastern side of the mountain, at about twelve thousand feet. Up above the village, another two thousand feet, is a small lake they call the Black Sea, and I saw people fishing there.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Do you know what kind of fish are in the lake?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know what they were catching.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It could be trout,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Or it could be nothing,&amp;quot; he said. I WAS AT THE BUS STATION BY 7:00 A.M. Mortensen had told me how to get to Haba: Ride a bus north for a day to Zhongdian, ride another bus southeast for a day to Baishuitai, then walk south for a day to Haba. He&amp;#039;d said I could also get there through Tiger Leaping Gorge but that I should really go to Zhongdian just to see it and to visit the Songzanlin Monastery nearby.  &amp;quot;Before you go into the monastery,&amp;quot; he&amp;#039;d said, &amp;quot;be sure to buy a khata, a white scarf. Then ask the monks to introduce you to the head lama. I think you&amp;#039;d enjoy talking to him. Give the khata to him, formally, by bowing your head as you put it around his neck. That way you&amp;#039;ll show the proper respect.&amp;quot; I didn&amp;#039;t really know what I&amp;#039;d say to a head lama, but I had his name written in Tibetan in my notebook, and I thought that if I had some time I might stop by for some tea and a chat. The first order of business, however, was to get to Zhongdian.  The bus was old and dirty, with a five-foot-high stack of cargo tied on top, and the inside was so packed with people and stuff that you had to crawl over rice sacks and boxes to get in or out. We sat at the station lined up with other buses that were being loaded, all of them idling. Behind the buses was a line of seven women in police uniforms, standing at attention. The air was foggy and thick with diesel exhaust and the stench of shit from the public toilet. The other men on the bus were either smoking or hacking up big globs of phlegm from deep inside their lungs--a violent rendering that was spat out the windows. Eventually, the driver got on board and sat down behind the wheel. He lit a cigarette, put a glove on his right hand, and began a long search through the gearbox for reverse. The bus crept backward and then stopped, as the driver told his assistant to run into the station and waste some more time so that the inside of the bus could fill up with exhaust and all the passengers would be comatose for the ride. It took a long time to get out of there, the seven women still standing at attention as we pulled away. We followed the road up over a low saddle that was part of the southern flank of the Jade Dragon, then dropped fifteen hundred feet to the Yangtze River, which was a couple hundred yards wide, muddy, and flowing fast, boiling up and swirling in whirlpools that opened and closed without warning. The canyon topped out at a high pass that opened up to a long green valley with mountains in the distance, very much like places in Wyoming.  Zhongdian was a cloud of dust rising up off the prairie, and then it was a city under a cloud of dust, and then it was some dirt roads lined with stacks of old boards, disassembled engines, piles of rocks and sand and bricks, and little pigs wandering through the traffic of lizardlike tractors and three-wheeled moto-rickshaws, and then it was the center of a town with a monumental statue of a man racing a horse, running full speed. A street with single-story shops--dark coveys with galvanized buckets and yak-hair dust mops hanging out front, the House of Dog Meat Restaurant, CD kiosks--ran in a circle around the statue, and above the shops was a billboard, dwarfing everything but the statue, of a herd of yak bulls stampeding across a high plateau. It was a rip-off of a Marlboro ad, only the cigarettes were called Honghe. The pack looked just like a Marlboro pack, and yet something was missing. The billboard had the landscape and the bulls, but it did not have the man; there was Honghe Country, but there was no Honghe Man, which seemed like a mistake. Zhongdian was much smaller than Lijiang, and higher, at eleven thousand feet. After we pulled in, I hopped off the bus and bought a map, one with WELCOME TO THE LAND OF SHANGRI-LA on the cover, and made my way to the Long Life Hotel, which catered to Western backpackers. The next morning, I went to the bus station and tried to buy a ticket to Haba, but the woman at the counter said, &amp;quot;Meiyou.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d never heard the word, but it was clear what it meant: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not going to happen.&amp;quot; I pulled out my map and could tell she understood where I wanted to go, but either the bus had left or there was no bus or there were no tickets or who knows; it just wasn&amp;#039;t going to happen. Meiyou. So I decided to visit the Songzanlin Monastery, as Eric Mortensen had recommended.  IT WAS TWO MILES NORTH OF TOWN, built into the side of a hill, like the Potala in Lhasa, only smaller and not in nearly as good shape, as it had been used for artillery practice by the Red army during the Cultural Revolution. I bought a white silk scarf at the gate and walked up three hundred vertical feet of steps to the temple entrance. I was inside, looking at the statue of a golden Buddha, when they started to blow the big horns and all the monks came running in for a prayer meeting. They sat cross-legged on long, padded benches, the older monks up front close to the golden Buddha, the young boys in the back by the door, where I was. The little monks quickly became bored and began goofing off. An eight-year-old had a plastic bag that was inflated and tied like a balloon, and he was batting it around in the air. The monk next to him, who was maybe ten, grabbed the balloon and bit a hole in it, and the younger kid picked it up and crammed it down the older kid&amp;#039;s mouth, and the older kid acted as if that was okay because now he was a scary monster with a bag in his mouth. And so on, slugging and pushing. Om mani padme hum.  When the prayer was over, I went outside and sat in the courtyard. A young monk came over and pointed to my fly rod on the side of my pack, so I took it out and showed it to him. I put the rod together and got out the reel and line and had a little demonstration. Soon, there were thirty or forty other monks crowded around watching. I opened my fly box and felt all the heads bend forward, looking down at what was inside. I took a black fly I&amp;#039;d made years ago and tied it on and told everyone to give me some room. I tried to teach them the basics--not moving your arm past ten and two o&amp;#039;clock, waiting for the line to straighten out in front and in back, using the flex of the rod to throw the line. Then I gave the rod to one of the monks, and he threw the line around, immediately snapping off the fly. Then he started whipping the other monks, who ran in all directions, laughing. Then they all took turns whipping and running away, while I was trying to get them to stop and learn how to do it correctly, saying, &amp;quot;Wait! Be careful! You&amp;#039;ll put somebody&amp;#039;s eye out!&amp;quot; Finally, I put the rod away and asked one of the monks if I could talk to the head lama. I showed him my notebook where Eric Mortensen had written the man&amp;#039;s name in Tibetan. He nodded and took me to the kitchen next to the temple. It was a dark room with a fire in an open pit on the floor, smoke going up three floors and out through a window on the roof. The walls were black with a soft shine. Two copper vats were on the fire--one with yak-butter tea, the other with yak stew. The cook motioned for me to sit down by the fire and poured me a cup of the tea. There were four or five other monks sitting around the fire, and they all watched to see if I would drink it. So I did. A little sip produced a pucker and a gag reflex that I squelched as best as possible. Boiled rancid butter is boiled rancid butter and not something you easily develop a taste for.  Afraid that the cook would want me to drink some more tea, I pulled out my minidisc recorder, microphone, and earphones and let the monks listen to themselves talking and laughing. This upset one of the older monks, and he told me to put the thing away, which I did. But then he left the room, and the monks begged me to take it out again, so I did, only to have the older monk come back and get even more upset. &amp;quot;Goodbye! Goodbye!&amp;quot; he yelled, pointing to the door. So I got kicked out of the monastery and never met the head lama, which was okay because I didn&amp;#039;t know what to say to him anyway except &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m looking for fish.&amp;quot; My Land of Shangri-la map showed that there was a lake not far from the monastery, so I got in a cab and pointed to the lake, and the driver took off. We went there, but the lake was dry--or, rather, it had receded to about a mile from where the road ended. I grabbed my rod and walked in the direction of the water until the ground became too muddy. The sun was going down behind the mountains, and some big white birds were flying up into the sunlight and then circling back down to the marsh. I took out my binoculars and saw they were black-necked cranes, with long legs and six-foot wingspans, standing five feet tall in the mud. I could see them looking back at me, and it took my breath away. They were not fish, but they were wild and beautiful, and so they counted.  I GOT AN EARLY START the next morning, heading out for the bus station before the sun had come up, the streets empty except for a few moto-rickshaw drivers wearing long coats and fur hats to cut the cold wind. None of them had passengers, but that didn&amp;#039;t stop them from cruising about, perhaps for the heat coming off the engines. Just before the bus station, there was an open-air market, and I went inside and saw big carp for sale. Some were dead, in a basket, and others were alive, swimming around in a wooden box lined with plastic. I asked the guy where they came from, and he said, &amp;quot;Bita Hai.&amp;quot; Bita Lake was only twenty-five kilometers west of Zhongdian, on the way to Haba.  I bought a bus ticket to the Bita Hai Nature Preserve, where I was given a pamphlet. &amp;quot;Among the Shangri-la snow area, Bita Hai is the most beautiful lake that is surrounded by primeval forest at 3,540 meters above the sea level,&amp;quot; it read. &amp;quot;The &amp;#039;Zhongdian double-lip fish&amp;#039; is the only of its kind which is still living on the globe. In spring, when the azaleas are in full bloom, the fishes will eat off the petals dropped from the azaleas and become &amp;#039;drunk&amp;#039; and lie on the surface of the lake. . . .&amp;quot; I was walking from the entrance when an SUV stopped to give me a ride. There were two young Chinese women in the back, dressed for a business lunch in Beijing. They said they worked for the China International Travel Service and had just flown into Zhongdian that morning for a tour of the area. &amp;quot;Where are you going?&amp;quot; one of them asked. &amp;quot;To the lake.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You can call me Shirley,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;and this is my friend Lisa.&amp;quot;  The driver stopped in a parking lot, where a trail led down through a pine forest to the lake. &amp;quot;Most people take horses from here,&amp;quot; Shirley said, &amp;quot;but my friend and I will walk. Would you like to come with us?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sure,&amp;quot; I said, although I quickly regretted it. Shirley and Lisa were wearing high heels, and while there was something strangely appealing in watching their ankles shake and quiver, they couldn&amp;#039;t cover much ground. We were passed by long lines of horses carrying other tourists down to the lake--the men in jackets and ties, the women in business suits and heels, the same as my new friends. They dressed up. They didn&amp;#039;t go alone. And they littered a lot. It was a different way of meeting the wilderness. Lisa wanted to rest, and she sat down on a fallen tree. &amp;quot;We are at the number-one hotel in Zhongdian,&amp;quot; Shirley said. &amp;quot;You can have dinner tonight with us?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sure,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d like that.&amp;quot; But I was really thinking that these two had nothing to do with fishing, and I wanted to ditch them and get down to the lake. &amp;quot;What is that?&amp;quot; Lisa asked, pointing to my fly rod. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a fishing rod. I&amp;#039;m going try to catch a fish in the lake.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;There is no fishing here,&amp;quot; said Shirley. &amp;quot;It is not allowed.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Because of the two-lipped fish? They&amp;#039;re trying to protect it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know the two-lip fish, but there is no fishing here.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Tonight you have our fish soup at hotel,&amp;quot; Lisa said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a nice offer,&amp;quot; I said, but it wasn&amp;#039;t really what I had in mind. I was upset. The guy in the market had been pulling my leg. That night I sat alone in the restaurant at the Long Life Hotel, back in Zhongdian, listening to Karen Carpenter sing that song about her favorite song. The walls of the caf\u00E9 were lined with Tibetan tangka paintings of bodhisattvas floating on lotus blossoms and three-eyed herukas, evil demons, with headdresses of skulls and flames standing on dismembered bodies of tormented souls. The waiter asked me if I liked the music and I lied, saying yes, so he played it over and over and I had to tough it out. Sometimes, I thought, a fisherman needs to be patient. Sitting and waiting was the first thing I&amp;#039;d learned about fishing, from sitting with my grandfather in a boat on the Lake of the Ozarks, not saying a word or catching a fish for an entire morning. Sometimes you just have to sit there and do nothing. I WOKE UP FEELING ANXIOUS and full of self-doubt. I had been in China for one week and I had not found the fish I had come for, and, worse, I seemed to have lost the ability to predict the consequences of my actions. Each morning, I had set off with a plan, and each day I had seen the plan unravel, and each night I ended up eating alone in the restaurant, listening to the Greatest Pop Hits of All Time. Something was wrong, and I decided to spend the day thinking about what it might be.  Perhaps, I thought, Haba is not the place to go. My original goal was to go where the rivers came together, the center of the hourglass. I looked at my map. Zhongdian was close to the center of the hourglass, but the next town north, Deqin, was even closer. Deqin was between the Yangtze and the Mekong, at fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The highest peak in Yunnan Province, at twenty-two thousand feet, was twenty miles west of town. This seemed like the place to go. So with a new resolve, I got on a bus headed for Deqin. We drove uphill for four hours and topped out at a fifteen-thousand-foot pass. At that point, the driver stopped, and everybody got out and lay down on the tundra grass to try to hide from the wind, which was blowing forty miles an hour and cold like winter. Just below the pass was a larch forest, turning orange. Beyond, looking west, was a massive ravine, twice the scale of the Grand Canyon. At the bottom was the Mekong River, which emptied at Saigon. On the other side of the canyon was the Kha-wa-kar-po mountain range, with glaciers hanging from the jagged peaks more than twenty thousand feet high. Beyond the Kha-wa-kar-po was another canyon with the Salween River, which emptied in southern Burma. Turning around, I looked back at the mountains to the east where everything drained into the Yangtze, which ended at Shanghai. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine all of southeast Asia, but I couldn&amp;#039;t. I tried to imagine the Tibetan plateau to the north, where all the rivers began. Water. The crashing of continental plates. It was all too much. I stood up, surrounded by my fellow passengers, and with outstretched fly rod scanning the horizon said, &amp;quot;I hereby claim these rivers and the land they drain as the rightful property of God and the king of Spain.&amp;quot; My small audience was silent for a second and then burst into laughter--the only appropriate response. From the pass, the road ran north along the eastern slope of the canyon. The terrain was steep in every direction, and I realized that there would be no rivers or lakes to fish here, only waterfalls. The town of Deqin was built in a long, steep gully, like an avalanche chute, so I decided to keep going and try to find someplace with level ground. There were three roads heading out of town. One ran north along the Mekong into Tibet, but this was not an option, as I didn&amp;#039;t have the proper visa and there would be a guard station at the border. Another ran south along the Mekong, but this was closed due to a landslide. Which meant I&amp;#039;d have to wait and go back the way I&amp;#039;d come, to Zhongdian, in the morning. It rained off and on through the night, and at sunrise I could smell snow. Deqin had just been dusted, but there were eight inches going back over the pass. I was lucky to get out at all. I SPENT THE EVENING next to the woodburning stove in the caf\u00E9 at the Long Life Hotel, listening to Karen Carpenter sing that song about her favorite song, wondering if I had fallen into a twilight zone. Perhaps my plane had crashed over the Pacific and I was dead. Or perhaps I was just fucking up in a major way here. Either way, the herukas on the wall seemed ready to pounce.  Then, as if on cue, a Tibetan man, about thirty-five, walked into the caf\u00E9 and sat down next to me. He was short, with long hair that hadn&amp;#039;t been washed in a while and a face that broke into thirty pieces when he smiled. It was the smile of a man who&amp;#039;d spent a long time in the mountains. He was wearing a large windbreaker, but his left sleeve was pulled up, and I could see that his arm was shrunken, his hand mangled and upside down.  &amp;quot;Where do you come from?&amp;quot; he asked me in good English.  &amp;quot;Utah, in America.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Arches?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Exactly.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I saw photos. Very beautiful.&amp;quot;  His name was Xia Shanquan, but he went by Sean. He was a guide and owned a guesthouse in Tiger Leaping Gorge. He&amp;#039;d come to Zhongdian for a meeting about tourism but was going back home in the morning. I told him I was trying to get to Haba, and he said I could go with him to his house in the gorge, which was only a day&amp;#039;s walk from Haba.  &amp;quot;Are there fish near Haba?&amp;quot; I asked him. &amp;quot;There are fish in the Yangtze. People catch them with dynamite,&amp;quot; he said, laughing so hard he almost fell over in his chair. &amp;quot;But how about up on the mountain, in the lake called the Black Sea?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think maybe there are snow fish in the lake. People catch them with insects.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Grasshoppers?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I will show you. I don&amp;#039;t know the name in English.&amp;quot; I couldn&amp;#039;t believe my good fortune.  Tiger Leaping Gorge had the shape of a very narrow and deep V. At the top of the V were two peaks, Haba Snow Mountain (sixteen thousand feet) and Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (eighteen thousand feet), and at the bottom was the Yangtze River (eight thousand feet), which seemed to go out of its way, turning almost 180 degrees, to run between the mountains. The name Tiger Leaping Gorge came from the canyon being so narrow that a tiger was said to have once leapt across it.  Sean&amp;#039;s guesthouse was twenty-two kilometers into the gorge along a road that had been cut into the wall of the canyon. We rode there in a toylike pickup truck, Sean sitting up front in the cab with the driver and four other men. I sat in the bed with bags of rice and corn, five-gallon cans of gasoline, and five other people. The road was muddy, as there had been three straight days of rain, and the truck&amp;#039;s little engine struggled mightily, the rear wheels spinning and fishtailing. Sometimes we all got out to push and pull with a rope, sometimes we moved boulders that had fallen in the road, and sometimes we stood and watched while the driver crept between spaces just inches wider than the four-foot wheelbase of the truck.  The road had been slowly gaining elevation above the river, so looking down at it produced an instant rush of vertigo. The river was monstrous, exploding through canyon walls that were only twenty-five yards apart. I&amp;#039;d never seen anything so powerful, and it yanked hard on my heart. I could not see the edge of the road because we were so close to it. I could hear a stream of water running under the truck, and I could hear a stream of water falling on top of the truck, and there was no road that I could see. If the truck were to slide over the edge, the fall line would start as a series of tumbles and pirouettes--a flinging of bodies and bags of rice--and end in the crashing of water that would pound everyone and everything into miscellaneous bits of unrecognizable pulp and flattened metal.  I was deeply scared, but I was also happy, even overjoyed. It was wild and beautiful, and so it counted. It was what I&amp;#039;d come for.  AFTER TWENTY KILOMETERS, the truck stopped at a guesthouse and everybody got out. &amp;quot;My place is two kilometers from here,&amp;quot; Sean said, &amp;quot;but the road is gone up ahead. We need to look at it.&amp;quot; We walked up the road, lifting fallen boulders out of the way. It was getting dark, hard to see, but up ahead there was no road. The side of the mountain had slid away. I wanted to get closer, but Sean stopped me. &amp;quot;You see, it&amp;#039;s still dripping,&amp;quot; he said, pointing to a patch of mud sliding down the slope. &amp;quot;Not good. It rains for three days and this is what happens.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What do you want to do?&amp;quot; I asked. &amp;quot;We can run across it, very quickly.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Run?&amp;quot; I said. My pack weighed fifty pounds. It was almost dark. The slope was slippery and steep. &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Unless you want to stay here or ride back to town in the truck.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll go,&amp;quot; I said.  &amp;quot;Then follow me.&amp;quot; And he took off running. It was a mad dash for three hundred yards, some of which was out on the muddy slope, completely exposed, so that a slip would mean a long slide to some cliffs and then a longer fall to the river. I ran with my fly rod in my hand for balance, following Sean&amp;#039;s steps as closely as possible. He ran fast, without stopping, and I thought I heard him laughing. And then I realized I was laughing. It seemed impossible to run across that slope in the dark, and yet it also seemed as if all I had to do was keep up with Sean and everything would be all right. It was like skiing right behind a friend. It was like following someone off a cliff. It was as much fun as I&amp;#039;ve ever had in my life. We stopped at a waterfall where the road started again. I was saying something like &amp;quot;That-was-unfucking-believable-you&amp;#039;re-completely-out-of-your-mind-I&amp;#039;ve-never-done-anything--&amp;quot; when a boulder as big as a house came crashing down the slope and rolled across where we had just passed, launching itself into thin air and disappearing into the darkness before being smashed into a million pieces. &amp;quot;You like this?&amp;quot; Sean asked.  &amp;quot;I love this,&amp;quot; I said, and we both laughed and ran down the road toward his house. Sean&amp;#039;s guesthouse was two stories high, framed in post and beam, with big windows looking out over the canyon. Standing on the patio out in front, I could see four or five lights from other houses across the hillside. I could see the dark outline of the mountain on the other side of the canyon. I could hear the roar of the river a thousand feet below.  We ate in the kitchen next to the wood stove. It was there where he told me what happened to his arm. He was born healthy in 1964, but when he was two and a half years old, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red army came looking for his father. His father wasn&amp;#039;t home, so they grabbed Sean and threw him in the fire, and then they grabbed his sister and threw her off a cliff. Sean said it was not just his arm but the entire left side of his body that had been burned. &amp;quot;They called me &amp;#039;flower pig&amp;#039; because my skin was like a flower pig--many colors,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;There was no hospital?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;There was no road, no bicycle, nothing. They would have had to carry me.&amp;quot; As a kid, he went to grade school, but the Communist party wouldn&amp;#039;t allow handicapped kids in middle school or high school. So he educated himself. When the communists allowed small-scale capitalism in the late eighties, Sean started the first store in the village. When they opened the area to tourism in 1993, he built the first guesthouse. He learned six languages.  &amp;quot;Do you hate the Chinese for what they did to you?&amp;quot; I asked.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not a very good culture,&amp;quot; he said. And then he smiled and his face broke up. That night, before I went to sleep, I realized that in order to catch my flight out of Kunming in five days, I would have to walk all the way to the Black Sea lake and back to Sean&amp;#039;s guesthouse in two days, which seemed like it might be impossible. Walnut Grove, where Sean lived, was on the south side of Haba Mountain, at about nine thousand feet. Haba village was on the east side of the mountain, at about twelve thousand feet. The lake was two thousand feet above the village. I would be able to do it only if I could see well enough to walk at night. I turned off the light in my room and looked out the window and saw nothing but black. The next morning I told Sean that I was going to try to get to the lake and back in two days, and he said he didn&amp;#039;t think I could do it.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very far, and there is snow up high, around the lake.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Snow is okay,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;A little bit, anyway.&amp;quot; I told him I&amp;#039;d pay him to come as my guide, but he said he had clients who were flying into Zhongdian and he had to go back up there and meet them. &amp;quot;Today,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;you can go to Haba. Tomorrow go to the lake. But, I&amp;#039;m thinking, maybe there are no snow fish now. They are very expensive, more than eighty yuan [ten dollars] per pound.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You mean the lake has been fished out?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They take the film off the skin and sell it as medicine. It is a wild fish, so it is a medicine.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;All wild fish have medicinal value?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes, for the Chinese. So maybe there are no snow fish left.&amp;quot; That was kind of a letdown, but I still wanted to go to the lake. Sean gave me some directions to Haba that included a shortcut that would take three hours off an eight-hour walk. I said goodbye and thanks, and I left feeling sad that I&amp;#039;d never see him again. At 4:00 P.M. I walked into Haba village along a path that wound through the terraced fields. The air smelled sweet, like expensive perfume, and then I realized it was from the marijuana plants, which were seven feet tall and lined the edges of the fields. They had buds longer and thicker than my forearm, buds that sparkled with tiny beads of oil but were full of seeds. The plants were grown for their fiber.  There was a stream running through the village, fed, perhaps, by the lake up above. It was a stream that could easily have held trout, so I turned over some rocks and looked carefully for anything living, but there was nothing there--just clear, cold water running over orange and silver stones. Still, I sat down and put my rod together and tied on a grasshopper. I wanted to fish. I asked myself, What is the motive of the grasshopper? Why does it try to jump over the stream, only to fall into the water? Perhaps, I thought, it sees the reflection of the sky in the water and thinks it&amp;#039;s jumping into thin air. What a surprise, then, when it hits the water, sort of stunned, and then struggles to fly away while being swept downstream. I made my grasshopper commit this mistake over and over again, putting it through many slow deaths, watching as it was swallowed by whirlpools and it tumbled over stones. An insect in peril is a tantalizing thing to a fish, and my grasshopper fly gave a fine performance.  Then I noticed there were others watching. There was an old woman not more than twenty feet away, standing motionless, staring at me. And two young boys, one on a bicycle, on the road. When they saw me, they started waving their arms and yelling at me, like maybe I shouldn&amp;#039;t be fishing there. Fine, I thought, there are no fish in the stream anyway. I walked on a bit farther and then took my pack off and sat down on a stack of logs. I pulled out my binoculars and looked up at the top of Haba Mountain, studying the slope for ways I could ski up and down, as if the opportunity might sometime arise. A man came walking along and stopped to watch me looking through the binoculars, so I let him look for a while, which he seemed to like a lot. I showed him my rod and flies and then asked him, in Chinese, if there were fish in the lake, pointing up the mountain. He shook his head--meiyou--and pointed down toward the Yangtze. I wanted to tell him I wasn&amp;#039;t interested in fishing in muddy water, but I couldn&amp;#039;t. I checked into a guesthouse and sat in my room smoking a wet joint and pondering, once again, my situation. The room had one lightbulb that stayed on for a minute and then went off for thirty seconds, and then came on for ten seconds and went off for three seconds, and then it was on for a minute. I had a choice: I could stay and go to the lake and miss my plane out of Kunming and worry about a new reservation later, or I could turn around in the morning and start back. It would take two days to get to Lijiang, and then at least another two days to get to the airport in Kunming. I&amp;#039;d been gone for more than two weeks, and back home my wife had been working days and nights, choreographing the dance scenes for Oliver!, the school play. I&amp;#039;d called her from Zhongdian, and she said things were fine but that she was tired and wanted to know if I would be back in time for opening night. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s kind of important,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;We could all go together.&amp;quot;  If I missed my plane, I&amp;#039;d miss the play. I&amp;#039;d finally made it to the place where I&amp;#039;d been trying to go, and perhaps the man with the binoculars had been wrong. Maybe there were snow fish in the Black Sea. It would take only about six hours to walk there and check it out. It was either this or leave in order to sit in a high school auditorium watching kids sing, in bad British accents, about the boy who asked for more. It seemed a cruel choice. Finally, the light went out and didn&amp;#039;t come back on, and I fell asleep. In the morning, I got up and went outside to look at the mountain. Storm clouds had come in and were hanging around the peak as though they wanted to live there for a while. I sat down on the stack of logs and decided I&amp;#039;d had a good trip and that it was time for me to go home. That way, I could take my time and not worry, time enough to get lost walking back and enjoy it. That way, the fish would never be caught. They would remain in my dreams--a lake high in the mountains, an inch of snow around the shore, little blue-and-yellow flowers poking up from the tundra grass, and a fish looking up at a grasshopper on the surface of the water, wondering whether to jump. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a1570/greatest-fishing-story-0301/>